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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 Greg Prince on 2 May 2012 12:56 am We can all agree Niese didn’t have it and the Mets did little against Happ and missing the Astros is something that sounds good in theory, but at this moment they can’t move to the American League soon enough for our tastes. The Mets, a pretty good club in April, started May by losing again in Houston, home of a pretty lousy club…or so we thought.
 From Saturday's Mets Communication panel at Hofstra, left to right: Kerel Cooper, yours truly and Ray Stilwell. (Photo courtesy of Jason Bornstein.) Giving Tuesday’s game the perfunctory treatment it deserves, I’d now like to turn the agenda back to Saturday and share with you the paper I presented at the Hofstra Mets 50th Anniversary Conference, which I thank you for attending if you did (and wish you had if you didn’t). The topic is “The Shared Mets Fan Language: How Mets Fans Speak to One Another”. It was delivered as part of a panel that included On The Black’s Kerel Cooper’s examination of the Met social media landscape and Metphistopheles’s Ray Stilwell’s history tracing the decline of the Mets Radio Network. I hope you enjoy.
(And a more detailed appraisal of the conference will be coming by week’s end.)
***
You may not have heard this one before, but if you’ve been a New York Mets fan for very long, you’ve probably been involved in something like it.
Three Mets fans walk into a ballpark…separately, but their respective tickets have them sitting in the same row during a game in which the Mets are momentarily behind. A pitch is thrown to a Mets batter recently promoted from the minor leagues in a game taking place toward the end of the season. The batter produces the latest in a series of several recently clustered base hits. The first Mets fan says to the others, “Mike Vail.” The second replies, “Gregg Jefferies.” The third chimes in, “Victor Diaz.”
All three nod and wait for the next pitch.
The above is a brief, hypothetical exchange, but dialogue like this transpires regularly, whether spoken, e-mailed, texted, posted, Facebooked or Tweeted. Wherever Mets fans gather physically or interact virtually, there is a shorthand of shared language that eliminates barriers of unfamiliarity and facilitates instant communication among nominal strangers.
Mets fans speak Mets to one another almost without realizing they’re doing so. Their common tongue is cultivated via a layer of sources and influences, some dating back to their earliest exposure to Mets baseball, all regularly reinforced via continued exposure to Mets baseball.
Take our example of the rookie batter and the base hit. For a Mets fan, little is more satisfying than seeing a young player fill the first lines of his heretofore blank career slate with immediate success. The Mets fan senses promise and reflexively harks back to when he felt that sensation before. Depending on the fan’s tenure, he might reach back to August and September of 1975, when an unheralded rookie named Mike Vail emerged to hit in 23 consecutive games, which tied a team record. He might remember highly touted Gregg Jefferies coming up from Tidewater at a similar time of year in 1988 and making such a sudden impact that he drew Rookie of the Year votes based on five weeks of hot hitting. Or he might recall Victor Diaz, a minor leaguer of little notice, rising to prominence late in the otherwise desolate 2004 season by hitting a two-out, three-run home run in the bottom of the ninth inning, tying a game and ultimately helping to spoil the playoff plans of that day’s opponent, the Chicago Cubs.
The Mets fan doesn’t need to elaborate on what those ballplayers’ names imply. Vail, Jefferies and Diaz each gave his team a boost in fortunes from almost out of the blue. Each imbued Mets fans with a surge of optimism that a future star had landed in their orbit. Yet not long after Vail, Jefferies and Diaz made their initial impressions, each proved a short-term proposition. For the record, Vail’s progress was permanently sidetracked by an injury, Jefferies’ temperament was a poor long-term match for New York and Diaz’s passing resemblance to Red Sox slugger Manny Ramirez — remarked upon when he was raising hopes at Shea Stadium — was no more than physique-deep.
Thus, when the members of our Mets fan trio forge consensus by mention of players who briefly excited but eventually disappointed, they all understand one another completely. They are saying, in Mets fan shorthand, “This kid could really be something for us, but he probably isn’t going to amount to much.”
Whether they realize it or not, these fans are leaning on RECURRING PRECEDENT to inform their conversation. They’ve seen it before, they sense they’ll see it again. It is their badge of honor, a sign to each other that they’ve been around and they know their Mets. To every situation, the Mets fan brings a knowledge base that regularly regenerates upon another example of something startlingly similar to something that’s already happened. Events like the frenzy and fizzling attached to phenoms plant themselves in a million individual subconsciouses and, when excavated, provide an element of collective memory.
“Mike Vail,” “Gregg Jefferies” and “Victor Diaz” are code. So, in a different climate, are “Tom Seaver” and “Dwight Gooden” as regards less fatalistic forecasts for top hard-throwing, right-handed pitching prospects. Sometimes having seen it before is a reason to gather hope rather than lose it.
Having relied on recurring precedent to determine the young hitter our hypothetical trio has just seen is more likely to let them down than lift them up — it’s not that it’s happened once before, it’s that it’s happened over and over and over again — one of our Mets fans might suggest what they could really use right now is a beer. If the topic of beer leads anywhere besides the nearest beer vendor, it is almost a mortal lock that the discussion among these Mets fans will head in one direction: toward Rheingold the dry beer.
Rheingold was the official beer of the New York Mets from the club’s founding in 1962 to 1973, or until its parent company, Liebmann Breweries, was on the verge of shutting down its plant for good. Yet the brand equity of Rheingold, as it applies to Mets baseball, is seemingly eternal. For generations of Mets fans — even those born long after the brewery in Brooklyn was shuttered — the name Rheingold is inextricably linked to the Mets, no matter what beer is advertised or sold at Citi Field.
Say “Rheingold” to a Mets fan, and you stand a very good chance to turn that Mets fan into a karaoke jingle singer, reeling off the words burned into their brains from the television and radio commercials of the Mets’ first dozen seasons:
My beer is Rheingold the dry beer
Think of Rheingold whenever you buy beer
It’s refreshing, not sweet
It’s the extra dry treat
Won’t you try extra dry Rheingold beer?
Save for a brief late-1990s revival when the brand held limited radio sponsorship rights, Rheingold has been absent from Mets baseball for nearly four decades. Budweiser, meanwhile, plastered a billboard square in the middle of Shea Stadium’s scoreboard in the early 1980s and didn’t cede the space until Shea came down in 2008. The brand remains a prominent advertiser at Citi Field.
But no Mets fan is compelled to sing old (or recent) Budweiser jingles. Budweiser sponsored many teams; Rheingold was identified with the Mets, allowing it to feed a sense of PROPRIETARY NOSTALGIA. Mets fans yearn to celebrate what they feel belongs to them — and toast into perpetuity those who made them feel catered to. Its almost total absence from the modern marketplace (let alone the Mets’ ballpark) hasn’t curbed the brand’s psychic appeal to Mets fans. “Rheingold” needs no explanation among Mets fans. It is shorthand for more than “beer.” It is shorthand for “ours.”
As for our Mets fan trio, they don’t necessarily have to drown their sorrows for very long, for baseball, as Bob Murphy said, is a game of redeeming features. Murphy said many things in his 42 seasons as play-by-play announcer, and though his words were intended as on-the-spot reportage, some of them couldn’t help but form the foundation of the shared Mets fan language. Phrases such as “baseball is a game of redeeming features,” “that’s why they put erasers on pencils” and, most famously, “we’ll be back with the happy recap” were repeated regularly and thus became the lexicon by which Mets fans absorbed their favorite team and understood their favorite sport.
Murphy — along with his broadcast partner of 17 years, Lindsey Nelson, and Ralph Kiner, who is now in his 51st year as a Mets announcer (mostly in cameos these days) — took the lead in establishing much of the Mets fan vocabulary. Among the countless Mets fans whose perception of baseball they colored were two who grew up in Queens in the 1960s, Gary Cohen and Howie Rose, the Mets’ primary announcers today (Cohen on television, Rose on radio).
The long Mets broadcasting careers of Murphy and Kiner overlapped with those of Cohen and Rose, each on the air since the late 1980s, forming what has amounted to an UNBROKEN FAMILY TRADITION. The stories of the fathers became, to a significant extent, the stories of the sons. The fans, in turn, functioning in the role of Mets extended family, pick up on not just the phrases each announcer has used (for example, Rose’s exhortation to “put it in the books!” when the Mets seal a victory) but the myths and legends each regularly revisits. Stories reported by Murphy and Kiner when they were fresh became, over time, well-told tales.
The utterances of Casey Stengel, for example, lived on for Mets fans who never saw Stengel manage between 1962 and 1965, because Murphy and Kiner invoked him on a regular basis. Cohen and Rose, in turn, keep alive the name, the quotations and the image of the Mets’ first manager, albeit with less frequency than Murphy did or Kiner does given that those original announcers were present at the creation of the Mets. Murphy and Kiner shared amusing anecdotes about what Stengel used to say about Marv Throneberry or Greg Goossen, two of the many lesser lights who flickered through the Mets’ early years. Their eventual successors remembered them and repeated them. Mets fans who missed an entire era of Mets baseball are nevertheless made to feel as if they’ve been witness to the entire Amazin’ epoch.
Rose and Cohen also take the lead in serving as MEDIA GRIOTS. By dint of their respective places in front of the WFAN and SNY microphones, and aided by the sport’s built-in pauses and predilection for clinging to its own history, the lead voices of a ballclub are often its de facto oral storytellers. Announcers less engaged in Met lore would likely ignore this facet of their jobs (which hints at why “out-of-town” voices with no Met connection sound so foreign to the Mets fan ear), but Rose and Cohen, Mets fans before they were Mets announcers, embrace it thoroughly.
In 2011, a press note revealed the Mets had achieved two consecutive late-inning comebacks matching a set of statistical hurdles that hadn’t been overcome since 1965. One of the batters responsible for the Mets good fortune 46 years earlier was a utility player named Danny Napoleon. Rose immediately cut to the gist of the 1965 event, namely that Stengel exclaimed for reporters in the victorious Mets clubhouse, in his inimitable way of approving the worlds this Napoleon had just conquered, “Vive la France!” Rose knew the story so he shared it. Thousands of listeners who had never heard the tale now knew it, too, and were deputized to pass it along on their own.
In the spirit of the western African musician-entertainers whose performances include tribal histories and genealogies, the media griot keeps vital that which might otherwise die off. Rose and Cohen extend the Met story, and thus the shared Mets fan language, orally. Others have been essential media griots via the written word. Most prominently, there have been longtime Mets beat writers reaching back from Adam Rubin, producing copious amounts of copy every day for espn.com and before that the Daily News since 2003; through Marty Noble, today a columnist for mlb.com and earlier a steady presence around the Mets for Newsday and other newspapers from 1974 forward; to Jack Lang, who covered the Mets for the Long Island Press and the Daily News for more than a quarter-century after their 1962 inception. Each writer imbues or imbued his articles with references to what he has or had seen in his endless travels with the Mets.
When Gary Carter died in February 2012, Noble was uniquely qualified to recall the Hall of Famer catcher’s quirks, including his near-obsession with his uniform number, 8. Noble shared with his readers a story about renting Carter’s condominium one Spring Training. To enter the condo, he needed a five-digit security combination to unlock the entrance. The realtor accompanying Noble didn’t know the code. Noble, knowing Carter well, took a guess. He pressed 8-8-7-8-8. The door opened.
Most Mets fans know Carter wore No. 8 for the Mets. The voracious Mets fan now knows how much the number meant to him, thanks to Noble. Those fans, in turn, can pass that along orally or in writing (often in historically minded Mets blogs of their own). Visually, there is a segment of Mets fans who can’t look at an “8” without picturing Carter wearing it. With stories like Noble’s, the connection grows that much stronger.
The grandest Mets oral tradition of them all is one that does not require a microphone, a press card or even a blog. It is brief, it is loud and it is hopeful. At the first spark of a potential rally, our hypothetical Mets fan trio — the ones whose fatalistic conversation wandered off into failed phenoms and whose nostalgic thirsts could be slaked only by the Rheingold theme song — is capable of delivering it as if by instinct. There is no other single sentence in the shared language of Mets fans that has been shared as much or by as many across fifty years of the Mets experience.
The Mets weren’t two months old when one of their forebears, the former Brooklyn Dodgers, returned to New York to play National League baseball against their Metropolitan successors. As Roger Angell related in his first baseball essay in the New Yorker, in 1962, the Mets trailed Los Angeles, 10-0, in the fourth inning when Gil Hodges — formerly of Flatbush, now ensconced in the Polo Grounds — led off the bottom of the fourth with a home run, cutting the home team’s deficit to 10-1.
“Gil’s homer,” Angell wrote, “pulled the cork, and now there arose from all over the park a full furious, happy shout of ‘Let’s Go, Mets! Let’s Go, Mets!”
With that reduction of their team’s deficit to a mere nine runs, Mets fans created their own shorthand, and they did so without any prompting from precedent or quasi-authority figures. “Let’s Go Mets” wasn’t advertised or suggested by team management. It was a pure reaction to the action a sellout crowd witnessed in the first game of that Memorial Day doubleheader, May 30, 1962, and the relative handful of days before it. The Mets, who had lost the first nine games they ever played that April, were in the midst of an eight-game losing streak; by the time the twinbill was over, the streak would reach ten, en route to an eventual 17 — still (thankfully) the longest in Mets history. The Mets were a bad team getting worse. Yet the Mets fans took matters into their own hands and together they crafted a POSITIVE SELF-IMAGE that has defined the heart of the shared Mets fan language ever since.
This team may not be very good, “Let’s Go Mets” tacitly declared, but those who chant on its behalf are absolutely indefatigable.
“Let’s Go Mets” may not have led the Mets to top 40 victories in 1962, but its impact would resonate long beyond that first tough year of competition. Evidence that it translated as something more than a standard-issue rallying cry appeared in a most unexpected place, according to early beat writer Leonard Koppett, who noted that in 1963, “when President Kennedy landed at Frankfurt, West Germany, and in the crowd at the airport someone held up a ‘Let’s Go Mets’ sign, it was effective indeed.”
John F. Kennedy didn’t go so far as to punctuate his planned speech with “Ich bin ein Mets fan,” but Mets fans didn’t need the validation. They provided it themselves, no matter how bleak the circumstances. Consider the scene described by author Stanley Cohen in his 1988 tribute to the 1969 season, A Magic Summer:
“During one game in 1963 (the team’s last season at the old Polo Grounds), with the Mets trailing by thirteen runs in the bottom of the ninth, two out and no one on base, the New Breed sent up a chant of ‘Let’s go, Mets.’ With each new strike on the batter, the cry grew louder and more insistent. It was a battle cry that needed no battle; it betrayed neither a glimmer of hope nor the sneer of derision. It was a simple and joyous act of defiance, the declaration of a will that would not surrender to the inevitable.”
“Let’s Go Mets” endured, self-generated, as the Mets moved from the Polo Grounds to Shea Stadium, from the second division to first place, from the 1969 world championship to the dire late ’70s days ahead and on through a second world championship in 1986. That autumn, New York radio stations featured on their playlists a bouncy tune entitled, “Let’s Go Mets.”
We’ve got the teamwork
To make the dream work
Let’s Go
Let’s Go Mets!
Over time, Mets management co-opted the simple, fan-invented affirmation, perhaps sapping it of a bit of its organic strength as the seasons rolled by. In the 1990s, recorded exhortations of “Let’s Go Mets,” accompanied by DiamondVision graphics and ear-splitting drumbeats at the first sight of a Mets baserunner, detracted from the pleasure the crowd felt of starting the chant themselves. “Let’s Go Mets” tended to emanate on its own a little less often every year, but it still rises from the stands to this day, and not just at Citi Field (where the three words, sans exclamation point, stare out from the scoreboard as if by some silent statist decree).
“Let’s Go Mets” — or LGM, in common shorthand of the shorthand — simply works better when it is of the Mets fans, by the Mets fans, for the Mets fans. In 2007’s Mets Fan, Hofstra’s own Dana Brand offered an endorsement of “how Mets fans use ‘Lets [sic] Go Mets!’ to end letters and cards and e-mails, or even to say goodbye […] It is like Ciao! or Sholom Aleichem! or Cheers! It ends things with a statement of shared hope, of happy fellowship. It is only half-serious. But it’s serious enough.”
The positive self-image, as encapsulated and communicated in “Let’s Go Mets” and its spiritual sibling, “You Gotta Believe” (disseminated by emotional relief pitcher Tug McGraw during the unlikely 1973 pennant race and enduring in the collective Mets fan consciousness ever since), is essential in compelling Mets fans to be Mets fans and enables Mets fans to enthusiastically speak to one another as Mets fans. The language, as much as a blue cap or an orange t-shirt, provides a most critical thread of identity for individuals coalescing as a group. The identity woven by the shared Mets fan language transcends division standings and roster composition. And like the 7 Train, it unites Mets fans as a people while banding them together on a common journey.
***
NOTES FOR “THE SHARED METS FAN LANGUAGE”
The spirit of this paper is informed by an extensive series I wrote on Faith and Fear in Flushing (the blog I co-author) between March 11 and April 3, 2007, entitled “March Metness.” Meant to mimic the NCAA basketball tournament, “March Metness” set out 64 quintessential Met sayings, events and historical cues, spanning 1962 through 2006, exploring each of them as the “tournament” went along until a winner was determined. The entire series was happily recapped on December 23, 2007 and can be referenced here:
http://www.faithandfearinflushing.com/2007/12/23/march-metness-in-december/
The section on RECURRING PRECEDENT is based largely on experiential observation. As a Mets fan since 1969 and a Mets blogger since 2005, I’ve been party to multiple conversations in which late-season minor league callups quick to achieve have been written off as flashes in the pan on the order of Vail, Jefferies and Diaz, to name the three most prominent examples. It has always struck me what little introduction those players — particularly Vail and Diaz, whose careers were far more fleeting than Jefferies’s — require as Mets fans discuss the next would-be prospect’s chances of sticking and succeeding.
Similarly, PROPRIETARY NOSTALGIA is a phenomenon I’ve observed arise time and again, with Rheingold providing the most prominent example (the same principle could be applied to Jane Jarvis, the Shea Stadium organist from 1964 to 1979 who nonetheless remains, in the popular Mets fan imagination, the Mets’ organist for all time). On at least three occasions since 1994, I’ve witnessed the Rheingold jingle break out spontaneously at the drop of the brand’s name.
The UNBROKEN FAMILY TRADITION is apparent to anyone who grew up listening to Bob Murphy, Lindsey Nelson and Ralph Kiner serve as the Mets’ primary television and radio voices from 1962 into the 21st century (Nelson left the Mets after 1978; Murphy worked radio only from 1982 until 2003; Kiner has been exclusive to television since 1982). I examine their impact on passing down the Mets legacy in the foreword to the 2012 re-release of Tales From the 1962 New York Mets Dugout by Janet Paskin. The enduring place in the Mets soul of “the happy recap” is attested to by the online radio show of the same name, accessible at:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/thehappyrecap
“Put it in the books!” or simply “Books!” is repeated in unison on Twitter every time the Mets (or #Mets) win a ballgame, testifying to how Howie Rose’s catchphrase has caught on since he introduced it as a television broadcaster in 1996.
I touched on the Murphy-Rose connection in appreciation of Murphy’s career for the New York Times shortly after his passing in 2004:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/nyregion/city-people-mr-met.html
MEDIA GRIOTS’ role in perpetuating the Met language has shone through not just via some of the examples cited above but, conversely, when there was a lack of such well-versed storytelling emanating from the places where a fan might expect it. The four-year Met broadcasting career of Wayne Hagin (2008-2011) washed up on the same rocks that crushed Lorn Brown’s almost thirty years earlier (1982). In each case, two respected, experienced major league voices alienated Mets listeners and viewers because they were unable to “speak Mets” on the air. One extreme manifestation of anti-Hagin sentiment could be found in ESPN uniform critic (and Mets fan) Paul Lukas’s 2011 blog, Fire Wayne Hagin Already!
http://firewaynehagin.blogspot.com/
By contrast, the Mets’ latest full-time broadcasting hire, Josh Lewin, vigorously made clear during spring training 2012 that he grew up a Mets fan and could talk about Mets players, games and seasons with the kind of ease his partner, Rose, brings to the task. I noted the early indications that Lewin was warming to his new assignment on Faith and Fear in March 2012:
http://www.faithandfearinflushing.com/2012/03/08/rescue-from-radio-nowhere/
Rose’s sharing of the Danny Napoleon anecdote was appreciated in my Faith and Fear partner Jason Fry’s assessment of the Mets-Padres game of August 10, 2011:
http://www.faithandfearinflushing.com/2011/08/11/stupid-reality/
Adam Rubin’s role as Media Griot was exemplified in January 2012 when he drew from his nearly ten seasons on the Mets beat and took to Twitter to delineate nearly a decade of Mets’ injury woes, matching fact with insight. The entire run of his Tweets was captured by Mets Police:
http://metspolice.com/2012/01/18/adam-rubin-tweets-at-length-about-mets-injuries-of-past-few-tears/
Mets fans can be grateful Media Griot Jack Lang chose to outline the first quarter-century of Mets history, peppered greatly by what he personally experienced, in 1986’s New York Mets: Twenty-Five Years of Baseball Magic. Marty Noble has thus far not opted to write a similar history or memoir, but he freely shared a string of reminiscences with Mets By The Numbers in 2008:
http://mbtn.net/flip-side-45-marty-noble-interview-part-i
http://mbtn.net/97-baseball-marty-noble-interview-part-2
http://mbtn.net/marty-noble-interview-part-3-lightning-round
The aforementioned article regarding Gary Carter’s love of the number 8 is illustrative of Noble’s Media Griot tendencies. It’s likely no veteran baseball writer tells better Met stories on a consistent basis:
http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20120224&content_id=26841890&vkey=news_mlb&c_id=mlb
It is tempting to say “Let’s Go Mets” and what it says on behalf of POSITIVE SELF-IMAGE speaks for itself, and in a way, it really does. But as noted in the text, four essential books that tell the Mets story delved into the topic: The Summer Game by Roger Angell (the first collection of Angell’s New Yorker baseball essays); The New York Mets: The Whole Story by Leonard Koppett; A Magic Summer by Stanley Cohen; and Mets Fan by Dana Brand. These authors’ assessments of “Let’s Go Mets” were written, respectively, in 1962, 1970, 1988 and 2007, demonstrating that unlike Vail, Jefferies and Diaz, these are three words that cannot be mistaken for flashes in the pan. As recently as the outset of the 2012 baseball season, this past April 1, George Vecsey — who covered the Original Mets — advised Mets fans in the New York Times, “Just for sanity’s sake, it is time to revive the wonder of that spring, 50 years ago, when the chant first soared toward the heavens: Let’s go, Mets. What else is there?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/sports/baseball/for-mets-a-golden-anniversary-alchemists-needed.html
My comments on how Mets management has perhaps overreached by getting out in front of the “Let’s Go Mets” parade via excessive electronic cheerleading are based on the more than 500 home games I have attended at Shea Stadium and Citi Field since 1973. I would contend the use of “Let’s Go Mets” in commercials ostensibly for Mets baseball, sponsored by Citi, contributes further to the feeling that a classic fan-generated sensation today exists as yet another corporate marketing tool. Fortunately, as Professor Brand noted, it is the fans who own “Let’s Go Mets”. I personally have been signing e-mails to fellow Mets fans with “LGM” since 1995 and have been receiving responses in kind for just as long. It is, blessedly, a Met language tic that requires no explanation among the true believers.
by Jason Fry on 1 May 2012 12:14 am As I was heading down to tuck the kid into bed, Jose Altuve hit a little squibber in front of the plate, a play that ended with me looking back from the stairs to see Josh Thole and R.A. Dickey standing in annoyed proximity and Altuve far away on first.
Another day without a no-hitter, I thought reflexively, allowing myself the tiniest of sighs.
But no — I returned to discover it had been an error. The no-hit bid was still alive, and between Dickey’s knuckler and the Astros fielding a lineup of junior auxiliaries, why not dare to dream? And to my surprise, Twitter was full of Mets fans on no-hit patrol very, very early. Greg — no stranger to superstition — was noting innings pitched without hits allowed. The blogerati and digitally minded fans were tweeting and retweeting no-hit possibilities. Even Adam Rubin was marking milestones that were too early to be milestones.
You’ve all gone insane, I thought to myself — and then happily plunged in.
The Mets have been no-hit-free for 50 seasons, so it’s not like any of us can claim our carefully held superstitions have been the least bit effective — whatever we do to keep no-hit bids alive ought to be collected and passed around to other teams’ fans as what never to do when your pitcher has a zero in the relevant column.
For a while, it looked like this collective decision to spit in the eye of the baseball gods might actually work. Perhaps our merry thumbing of noses at karma would carry Dickey past the perils of bleeders and bloopers and things that go plunk into right, and wouldn’t that be something? He was 15 batters away, which in my experience is when Mets fans start to fantasize, and then he was within 12, which is when the rest of the world becomes at least minorly curious. On the Houston side, journeyman Bud Norris was making the most of a diving slider and the somewhat elastic edges of Gary Cederstrom’s strike zone, but that was cause for no particular alarm: The Mets were playing well, showing resilience, and who would be so uncouth as to stand between R.A. Dickey and history?
And then, pfft. With the speed of a plunging elevator, the game became a tragedy and then a goofy farce.
The tragedy was personified by Jordan Schafer, who opened the sixth by serving a soft single into left, untouchable. After a sacrifice, Jed Lowrie plopped one between an uncertain Kirk Nieuwenhuis and a scrambling Ruben Tejada for a single that shouldn’t have landed. Travis Buck spun Daniel Murphy around with a hard grounder that Murphy got one out on, but the run came home. And then Dickey threw his only bad pitch of the night, one Matt Downs slammed into the Crawford boxes for a sudden, shocking 3-0 Astros lead.
The Mets fought back, helped by some addlebrained Houston play. With two on and one out, Downs scrambled in front of his second baseman to give the Mets a gift runner and run. Lucas Duda, ill with the flu and looking sleepy and unhappy, somehow worked a walk. Houston manager Brad Mills remained glued to the dugout bench, convinced Norris could persevere. He couldn’t — Nieuwenhuis smacked a single into right to tie the score.
With Norris finally out of the game a little too late, Mills went into managing overdrive, using six relievers to face the next six batters. (Hey, when you average things out, he stuck with each pitcher for a reasonable amount of time.) Terry Collins, meanwhile, got an impressive seventh inning out of Manny Acosta, then a less-than-impressive inning out of Manny Acosta, which is about what one expects from that particular reliever. It was 4-3 Houston, magic seeping out of the night. The goateed, felonious Brett Myers arrived where he wasn’t wanted, and smothered the Mets on two groundouts and a fly ball. Having gone in rapid succession from half-convinced R.A. Dickey would throw a no-hitter to bummed to amused by the horrible baseball on display, I started at the TV in mild disbelief, out of things to feel. Game over; good guys lose.
I was honestly surprised they’d lost. Aside from that mess at Coors Field (what’s an 11-run inning between friends?), the Mets have been playing well of late. I was bummed but not particularly worried when Todd Helton buried one in the stands to erase a 4-0 lead, and so I was bummed but not particularly worried when Dickey’s masterpiece fell off the wall. It’s fun when your ballclub’s playing that way, when missteps and reversals seem like plot devices instead of fatal flaws. Of course, one game’s surprise can turn into two games’ disquiet and three games’ despair, but that’s life as a fan. Here’s hoping this one’s a bump — and that we’re all on Twitter tomorrow, gleefully noting that hey, Jon Niese only has 24 batters to get. Ya gotta believe, right?
If you’d like to second-screen it with us during games (which sounds vaguely dirty but isn’t), you can follow me at jasoncfry and Greg at greg_prince. Seriously, it’s fun.
by Greg Prince on 30 April 2012 11:48 am The first thing we do, let’s kill all the Moyers.
Not literally, of course. If we didn’t have Jamie Moyer pitching in the major leagues at the age of 49 years, 5 months and 12 days, what would those of us who clock in at a mere 49 years and 4 months have to feel relatively young about? When Jamie Moyer calls it a career, the last vestige of my faded boyishness officially falls away. Hence, I rooted like hell for Jamie Moyer to rehab from Tommy John surgery, for Jamie Moyer to make the Colorado Rockies in Spring Training, for Jamie Moyer to become the oldest pitcher to ever win a Major League Baseball game. I root like hell for Jamie Moyer every time he steps on a mound.
Except Sunday, obviously. That’s when I rooted for his temporary demise; live to pitch another day, Jamie, but live down to the “he’s so old…” jibes, snarks and factoids. There were oodles to go around, but the one that summed it up best from my perspective — besides “he’s so old, he’s older than me” — was when I turned to my wife and told her that guy pitching for the Rockies was pitching in the majors before we met.
We met 25 years ago next month.
The most commonly cited factoid illustrating the length of Jamie Moyer’s career is that his first start, on June 16, 1986, came against Steve Carlton, the lock Hall of Fame lefty whose own storied big league tenure extended back to 1965. Carlton plus Moyer equals a slightly overlapping approximate half-century’s worth of baseball. The last year neither of them was working to get paid as a professional pitcher — including Carlton’s signing as a Cardinal minor leaguer and Moyer rehabbing his left elbow — was 1962, the year Moyer, the Mets and I were born.
Yeah, he’s that old, et al, but never mind that for a sec. Consider Carlton, whose brilliance the Mets regularly and memorably punctured (no pitcher ever lost more games to our team and no team beat him more often than ours), was barely Carlton when Moyer matched his 23-year-old left arm against Silent Steve’s 41-year-old portside wing. 1986 was a great year for us, a gruesome one for Carlton. An ageless artist for so long, with four Cy Youngs joining the countless demons in his closet, Carlton was losing it quickly as titular Phillie ace. He entered his matchup with Moyer toting an ERA of 5.69. It was 5.88 after Moyer beat him, 7-5. It rose to 6.18 one start later…his last start for Philadelphia after 15 seasons of heading their rotation.
I never liked Carlton given his job description as Met opponent and demeanor as mute interview subject, but per Wes Mantooth’s acknowledgement of Ron Burgundy, damn, did I respect him. The classic arms of my National League childhood were on their last legs by 1986. Tom Seaver hung in there in two shades of socks. Phil Niekro was squeezing the last dances from his knuckleball. Bob Gibson and Juan Marichal were long gone. Ferguson Jenkins and Gaylord Perry were more recently gone but just as gone. To my way of mid-1980s thinking, Bert Blyleven was a journeyman, Don Sutton was always a No. 2 and Nolan Ryan was more phenomenon than classic, and besides, he didn’t begin to put it together until I reached the ripe old age of nine and he was in some other league, well after my initial impressions were made. My initial impressions had Steve Carlton — 17-11 in 1969, 20-9 in 1971, a drop-dead 27-10 for 59-97 Philadelphia in 1972 — in the pantheon of pitching.
In 1986, Carlton exited Olympus. The Phillies let him go and he began the hanging-on phase of his career, like some kind of Steve Miller/Terry Mulholland hybrid: 6 starts in San Francisco; 10 on the South Side of Chicago; 14 by the shores of Lake Erie for Cleveland; a final 8 for the Minnesota Twins, the team with whom Carlton ended his 24-season, 329-win career in April of 1988.
I’m all for athletes hanging in and hanging on if that’s what they choose, pitchers more than anybody. Notice it’s mostly hitters who announce retirements in advance and take definitive farewell tours. Few starting pitchers, especially top starting pitchers, say they’re going to be done and stay done without a fuss, a non-roster invite to a warm climate or a key limb falling off. Roger Clemens accepted gifts aplenty in 2003 (and managed to magically haul them back to his Hummer in one trip…such unusual strength!) as the one exception to the farewell rule, yet he kept returning for more. David Cone quit and then unquit. Andy Pettitte did the same. Mike Mussina, who won his first 20th game on Shea Stadium’s final day, may have been the only one of his kind to willingly go out on top and remain out on top.
Pitchers have to be hit over the head — and hit to all fields — to finally know when it’s time for them to go. Carlton was the premier example of this recurring pattern. Stoic, stuck-up, paranoid, whatever, Steve Carlton suddenly humbled himself and joined the rest of us on this planet (at least for a little while) when he wanted to hang on. Suddenly he spoke to the press. Suddenly he smiled. Suddenly his desire to pitch wasn’t matched by his ability to pitch. I won’t call it sad, because eff the guy who tried to beat the Mets in 76 starts as a Cardinal and Phillie, but there was something dispiriting about it nonetheless.
Jamie Moyer was never Steve Carlton, except for being lefthanded, a Phillie and almost ageless. He was never an artist. He was mostly a craftsman. I remember Jamie Moyer from 1986, from his three starts against the juggernaut Mets. I remember him as an opposing pitcher, anyway. I can’t say he say he made a distinct impression on me other than as one of those specks of dust I expected our guys to effortlessly wipe away on their march to bigger and better tasks. His Cubs beat us twice, which was annoying but inconsequential to the National League East standings. When we prevailed in one of his starts “at last,” in the post-clinch half of September, it was notable mostly because Kevin Mitchell hit the home run that broke the franchise record for most team homers in a season (the old number was 139, set in, of all years, 1962) and the Mets raised their record to 100-53, tying the 1969 Mets’ standard for most wins…a mark 1% ensured when Ron Swoboda ruined Steve Carlton’s 19-strikeout masterpiece with two two-run homers, as every schoolchild ought to know.
Moyer was an American Leaguer by 1989. I didn’t much notice. He landed in Seattle in 1996. I wasn’t paying attention. He was garnering Cy Young votes by 1999. Didn’t pierce my consciousness. He won 20 games in 2001 and 21 in 2003. Had other things on my mind. If you mentioned Jamie Moyer to me much after 1986, my initial reaction would have been, “That guy from the Cubs? Whatever happened to him?”
2006 was the first time since the late 1980s that I had reason to actively take note of Jamie Moyer’s whereabouts on a going basis. He was traded to the Wild Card-aspiring Phillies and, at what seemed like the relatively if not impossibly old age of 43 (remember, we still had Julio Franco back then), pitched against rookie John Maine in a Monday afternoon makeup game at Shea that I remember well for two reasons: 1) there was a really weird Solomonic umpire’s ruling; and 2) I was confident enough after we beat Jamie and the second-place Phillies — placing us 15½ ahead with 33 to play — to usher in the only successful Magic Number countdown in Faith and Fear history.
2007 was the year Jamie Moyer’s perseverance became a most unpleasant fact of my life. His ERA was late-period Carlton bad, but in this era, especially in Citizens Bank Park, 5.01 didn’t seem so unforgivably brutal. That September, when the Mets seemed prepared for another crack at bigger and better tasks, the Phillies visited Shea for three games intended to put them permanently in our rearview mirror. Alas, objects 6½ lengths behind were closer than they appeared. On Friday night, September 14, Moyer faced a lefty who’d been around almost as long as he’d been, someone with more sterling credentials as the kind of lefthander you’d want going for you with something on the line…an artist in his prime, a craftsman by then. As it happened, both lefties pitched well that night. Moyer went seven innings and gave up only two runs. His opponent, a fellow whose name I was a little more than two weeks from permanently spelling “T#m Gl@v!ne,” gave up the same number of runs while pitching until there were two out in the eighth. The 44-year-old Moyer and the 41-year-old Gl@v!ne were evenly matched.
And then they weren’t. The Mets lost that game (with an assist from a crummy home plate ump named Paul Emmel) and their losing ways became a cold they couldn’t shake. The Phillies swept the weekend set and went on what amounted to an uninterrupted five-year winning streak. As important as anybody to Philadelphia’s fortunes was the man to whom they entrusted their do-or-die 162nd game. With everything on the line, Jamie Moyer allowed one run to the Washington Nationals in 5⅓ innings as the Phillies won the game they absolutely had to have. At Shea that same Sunday…ah, you know what happened. Tim Marchman of the late New York Sun put it best among those who didn’t resort to profanity:
“Weeks away from turning 45, Phillies pitcher Jamie Moyer, the off-brand T#m Gl@v!ne, did what the Mets’ Hall of Famer couldn’t do and set down a young lineup with nothing but guile.”
I may have come to overwhelmingly hate all things Phillie by September 30, 2007, but now that I truly knew who Jamie Moyer was, I have to confess I rather liked him. Julio Franco was retired. Jamie Moyer was the oldest player in baseball. Jamie Moyer was the last player in baseball older than me. I was one guileful lefty removed from having no more baseball players to chronologically look up to, so I wanted him to hang in there as gracefully as possible for as long as possible. I rooted for the Rays to beat the Phillies in the 2008 World Series (duh) but I wasn’t sorry Jamie Moyer was a world champion for the team he grew up rooting for in Pennsylvania. All I wanted was for the team I grew up rooting for in New York to be a world champion, and I didn’t have to be on it. I had to admire that my fellow 1962 baby had helped make happen what he wanted when he was a kid.
When Moyer went out with an injury in the summer of 2010 and it was reported he would require surgery and a long road back to ever pitch again, I rooted for the surgery and the journey. I rooted for Jamie Moyer, the concept as well as the person, to be a 49-year-old pitcher when I was a 49-year-old fan. His mission to make the Rockies became my mission. His start against the Padres in which he became the oldest pitcher to earn a W became my start and, sort of, my W. He did all the work and deserves all the glory. I’ll take the most infinitesimal sliver of empathetic afterglow.
Then, Sunday, Jamie Moyer was pitching against the Mets for the first time since May 25, 2010, the series that we might remember as producing the Goose Egg Sweep. We spanked Moyer pretty good that night, which was swell, since Moyer’s Phillies uniform was still visible from the Promenade and, admiration or not, screw the Phillies. Sunday was the first time since stray Interleague matchups against the Mariners in 2003 and 2005 that Moyer approached us as something less loathsome than a Phillie, and otherwise it was the first time since 1988 that he wasn’t an A.L. novelty or part of a detested rival.
It was the first time he was fully the Jamie Moyer of my middle age admiration. He’s 49 while I’m 49. We 49-year-olds have to stick together in endeavors where 49 is considered ancient, I figure…most of the time, anyway. My age-related empathy for Moyer was necessarily blacked out Sunday because the only lefty starter I could wholeheartedly root for was Johan Santana, who if not yet ageless is certainly timeless and surely an artist in the Seaver/Carlton mode. He’s a Met lefty for the ages, and it had been ages since the Mets scored for him.
Until Sunday, that is. The Mets jumped on Jamie in the first, with Kirk Nieuwenhuis, Ruben Tejada and David Wright each crossing the plate, and it was as satisfying as Gary Carter and Rafael Santana scoring the first two runs of September 25, 1986. The 2012 Mets compiled five hits in the first inning, two hits in the second, two more in the third and another in the fourth. That’s ten hits in four innings. Yet it wasn’t until Josh Thole’s solo home run in the fifth that the Mets padded the lead for Santana (6 IP, 0 R, 2 H, 3 BB, 5 SO), who didn’t appear to need much help but experience (0-2, 2.25) shows could always use more.
The Mets should have knocked Jamie Moyer out of the box in the first. Or the second. Or the third. But at a stage of his life when guile is his best pitch, Moyer lasted through five and kept the Rockies in a game in which — Coors Field or no Coors Field — they had no business remaining. Jamie Moyer’s final line wound up being 5 innings, 4 runs, 11 hits, 2 walks, 7 strikeouts and 8 Mets left on base. We had him, and we led him, but between Rockie glovework and Met baserunning blunders, we couldn’t quite finish him or his teammates off.
Which is why I say the first thing we do, let’s kill all the Moyers. Let’s step on the throats and kick the spit out of the replaced ligaments of crafty lefthanders when it seems they’re begging us to. Let’s not permit them to stick around and leave games within the reach of mile-high air, Paul Emmel’s mysterious strike zone and Todd Helton’s heretofore rarely tapped pinch-hitting prowess. Let’s not let Johan Santana take a seat with a 4-0 lead and make him shower and dress amid a 4-4 tie. Let’s not hold the breath the thin atmosphere demands we lose in Denver and let a game like this go into a tenth, then an eleventh inning. Let’s not let a storyline like Johan Santana versus Jamie Moyer devolve into Ramon Ramirez versus Matt Belisle. It was statistical shame enough last week that Santana versus Josh Johnson went into the books as Jon Rauch trumping Edward Mujica.
Oh, by all means, celebrate that we overcame missed offensive opportunity after missed offensive opportunity — and Emmel — and won in ultimately heartening fashion (Ike! Kirk! Ruben!), 6-5 in eleven innings, but if we can do anything about it, let’s not make it any more difficult on ourselves than it has to be.
Let’s stick it to Jamie Moyer next time, assuming there is a next time against the last pitcher active who’s older than I am and keep it stuck on Jamie Moyer. We built a lead on him on September 25, 1986, but let him escape with a no-decision. The Cubs got the winning run on base against Jesse Orosco 26 years ago before we could win that record-tying 100th game. On April 29, 2012, Marco Scutaro came within a couple of feet of sending this one to a twelfth and maybe a twentieth inning the way things were going. That, I suppose, is why they refer to crafty lefthanders as they do. They really know how to ply their craft.
The craftsman may not be an artist, but damn I respect Jamie Moyer.
by Greg Prince on 29 April 2012 7:52 am With his second-inning two-run homer and fifth-inning two-RBI base hit, Lucas Duda raised his Saturday totals for this season — covering four games, through Saturday night in Denver — to the following:
• .500 batting average
• .500 on-base percentage
• 1.429 slugging percentage
• 1.929 OPS
• 4 home runs
• 8 runs batted in
• 5 runs scored
In games played on the other six days of the week, encompassing 17 games thus far, Lucas Duda’s 2012 looks like this:
• .203 batting average
• .284 on-base percentage
• .220 slugging percentage
• .504 OPS
• 0 home runs
• 5 runs batted in
• 5 runs scored
The Mets are 4-0 on Saturdays this year, including their most recent 7-5 victory at Coors Field; Lucas has now driven in 38.1% of all his team’s runs on that day to date. The Mets are 8-9 the rest of the time, when Duda — presciently dubbed “Saturday’s Child” by Josh Lewin on the season’s second Saturday — is doing not so much.
And the reason for this dichotomy between Lucas’s Saturdays and Lucas’s Sundays through Fridays is…
Well, I have no idea. I’m guessing Lucas has no idea. A Mets fan would wish for Saturday Lucas to be everyday Lucas, but a baseball fan would have to be satisfied that in an age when there’s a solid statistical explanation for almost everything, there is no earthly reason for this phenomenon to be occurring.
If our right fielder doesn’t pull out of his six-day-a-week funk, it will be alarming in the long run if it isn’t already. But for now, once a week, when we win and he hits as if by appointment no matter what might go wrong along the way (or, for that matter, the night before), isn’t it — at least in the abstract — mystifyingly beautiful the way Lucas Duda is in bloom on Saturdays and only Saturdays?
On Sunday morning, it is.
***
The preceding three days at Hofstra were much like a Lucas Duda Saturday: powerful, productive and a Met joy to behold. I’ll share further thoughts soon when I’m again as alert as I felt from the first pitch to the last out of the conference. But for the moment, if you were there, please know you have my deepest appreciation for being an intrinsic part of the teamwork that made the dream work.
by Jason Fry on 28 April 2012 4:18 am I’ve had a ball helping my co-blogger moderating panels at Hofstra’s New York Mets Conference over the last day and a half, as well as sitting and listening to smart Mets fans, former players and baseball historians amateur and professional discuss all things blue and orange. On Friday, for instance, I a) heard a great Craig Glaser presentation breaking down the odds of the Mets’ having no no-hitters; b) had fun shooting the bull at a lunchtime panel with blog colleagues and Mets fans; c) posed for pictures with Mr. Met; d) heard Art Shamsky, Bud Harrelson, and Ed Kranepool discuss their time in blue and orange; and e) chatted with John Thorn. That’s a pretty good day, and I had to go home before the evening sessions and the banquet.
But my favorite moment from the conference wasn’t academic at all — it was the roar from a nearby lounge as Kirk Nieuwenhuis drove the ball over Giancarlo Stanton’s head, sweeping the Marlins out of Citi Field. While I’d been sitting at a table with one earphone on, feeling simultaneously bad that I was listening to the game instead of chatting with some very interesting folks and insisting to myself that one could and should keep apprised of Mets doings at a Mets conference, other attendees had found a big HD set and tuned it to SNY, with the Mets obliging us by providing a scrappy classic. I like my Mets discourse academic and analytical and historically minded and literary and delivered in innumerable other high-falutin’ ways, but this was simple and transcendent: Mets win, that was awesome, we’re happy.
As for tonight, well … did anyone mention how great Nieuwenhuis’s hit was? Greg did? And then I just did again?
Oh. Well then.
Tonight’s game wound up being one of those spottily attended to semi-West Coast messes, seen in fragmented glimpses so that it seems halfway to a dream.
I watched the first few innings on Gameday while attending a gala raising money for my kid’s school, during which I drank blue martinis, the exact number of which can now only be approximated. (This is known in storytelling as foreshadowing.) Those innings were mildly worrisome but not the stuff of disaster: The Mets trailed the Rockies, and Gameday hinted pretty strongly that Lucas Duda was doing ill-advised things in the outfield, but it was only 2-1.
Emily and I got home, relieved the babysitter, and took in the next couple of innings from the couch. These were terrific. Scott Hairston clubbed a home run to tie the game, while fill-in starter Chris Schwinden — the lumpy pitcher with the graceless mechanics whom I’ve struggled to abide — seemed to have settled in. Then the Mets ambushed the Rockies in rousing fashion: Hairston tripled to pull within a double of the cycle, and the Mets strung together four more singles (including Zach Lutz’s first big-league hit and Schwinden’s second) for a 6-2 lead. It looked like a rout was in the offing, one I was thoroughly prepared to enjoy.
Well, I got the rout part right.
Emily went to bed; within a few minutes the Mets were playing like they were half-asleep. It began so innocently, as it always does. Schwinden fielded an Eric Young Jr. comebacker, lollipopped it to Lutz at first, Young slid in headfirst, Lutz didn’t bend down quite far enough to tag him. Then Young stole second, taking third on a high Mike Nickeas throw that Daniel Murphy muffed. Then Marco Scutaro walked and Jonathan Herrera singled to make it 6-3.
Not good, but I figured Schwinden would gather himself and escape the inning at 6-4 or so. Instead, he promptly served up a Carlos Gonzalez homer to tie the score. Exit Schwinden, enter Manny Acosta … and somewhere between Acosta leaving the bullpen and toeing the rubber against Troy Tulowitzki those martinis had their say and closing my eyes seemed like an excellent idea.
When I woke up Scott Hairston was being roundly congratulated and Gary Cohen sounded excited. Ah, I realized: He’d hit for the cycle, becoming the 10th Met to do so. This is what we do instead of throwing no-hitters — how weird is it that the Padres have never done either? That was great, but there were other things to process, and I was having trouble. The Mets had nine runs, but the Rockies had … 13?
What the hell?
Such evidence of Acostalyptic doings proved too much for my foggy brain; I hit my own personal snooze alarm, during which time passed and events occurred. When I came to again, Ruben Tejada was at the plate, the Mets still had nine runs, and that number by COL was still large and dramatic.
Still 13, though.
No, wait. It looked like a 13, but it was … an 18?
Jesus.
Tejada struck out, the ballgame was over, and of course I was awake.
by Greg Prince on 27 April 2012 12:35 am Thursday in Hempstead was incredibly outstanding, if not quite as incredibly outstanding as Thursday in Flushing, thus some last-minute changes to Friday’s program have been implemented.
HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK METS
50TH ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE
PROGRAM ADDENDA
FRIDAY, APRIL 27, 9:00 AM
THE NIEUWENHUIS EFFECT:
When Rookies Represent An Experience
FRIDAY, APRIL 27, 10:30 AM
KEEP THE HOME FIRES BURNING:
Sustainability Issues Related To Growing Nine Players
FRIDAY, APRIL 27, NOON
THEY WALKED THE WALK:
Mets Batters Who Stood And Delivered
FRIDAY, APRIL 27, 1:30 PM
46 PITCHES THAT CHANGED AMERICA:
The Downward Spiral Of An Overpaid Closer
FRIDAY, APRIL 27, 3:00 PM
AQUATIC TRAUMA:
Marlin Peril In Queens Waters
FRIDAY, APRIL 27, 4:30 PM
METS FAN CONFESSION:
“I Skipped An Entire Afternoon Session Of A Wonderful Mets Conference To Listen To The Last Few Innings Of A Wonderful Mets Game And I Can’t Say I’m Sorry That I Did.”
NOTE: Mets don’t play until 8:40 Friday night. So come to the wonderful conference!
by Jason Fry on 26 April 2012 12:13 am OK, the game. It was another beaut — it really was. Mark Buehrle and R.A. Dickey faced off in a corker of a pitcher’s duel, with Buehrle’s deadly sinking change evenly matched against Dickey’s fluttering knucklers. Omar Infante hit a home run that would have gone out of old Yankee Stadium to give the Marlins a 1-0 lead. Yet the Mets would fight back, with old friend Jose Reyes’s throwing error giving them an extra at-bat — which David Wright used to launch a home run of his own that carried over the new wall and carried David over Darryl Strawberry for the club mark in RBIs. The rest was cosmetic but satisfying, with Lucas Duda hitting a line drive that nearly killed an outfielder, Mike Baxter chipping in a you-can-exhale-now double and even Ike Davis looking better. Mets 5, Marlins 1. Very nice.
Now let’s get on to the real subject — my strange, slow-building fury at the Marlins for having the temerity to exist.
Let’s be clear about this: I’ve never liked the Marlins, except that one October against the Yankees, and that was more of a highly temporary shotgun wedding. It’s more that I never hated them, the way I hated the Cubs when I was a kid and the Braves when I was a young adult and the Yankees since basically forever.
Which, ultimately, was a measure of my real contempt for them. Hating the Marlins would have been giving them too much credit; it would have been acknowledging them as a real baseball team deserving of notice, which I never wanted to admit they were.
I’m not proud of this — it’s a little too classist, a little too refusing to talk to the neighbors who keep the garage door open so we all have to see the mess inside. But screw it, it’s only baseball — part of sports is that you can let your inner demons run free, or if not free then loose within a reasonably fenced yard. So I’m a baseball snob — I always thought the Marlins were too fundamentally tacky to deserve my hatred, the way the Braves and the Cubs and the Yankees deserved it.
To review, the Marlins were born tacky and awful.
Those colors, ugh. Silver and teal, like an overpriced Cuban place in a half-empty mall, the kind of place you’d go to against your better judgment, where you’d order the fish and wind up heaving and drooling over the toilet for the better part of two days.
That park, Gawd. A football stadium whose dimensions perpetually went too far in one direction and not far enough in another, where everything was subtly the wrong color and the dugouts were full of Soilmaster, as if the owners were too slipshod and cheapjack to tell somebody to put it in a storage room somewhere. Which they undoubtedly were.
Those players, yakk. Bobby Bonilla and Gary Sheffield and Kevin Brown and Armando Benitez and Brad Penny and Cody Ross and Luis Castillo. Plus the Marlins would specialize in employing the Worst Great Player in the Majors, a supremely talented ballplayer whose God-given gifts were only equalled by his sleepy disdain for the game that had made him millions. Miguel Cabrera, meet Hanley Ramirez.
Those owners, technicolor yawn. It’s really quite a distinction to have been owned by Wayne Huizenga and Jeffrey Loria. Huizenga, a garbageman by trade, dismantled the team and left it on the curb after its 1997 World Series title, one of the more amazing screwings of a fanbase ever perpetuated by an owner. Loria is a garbageman in spirit if not actual vocation, having aided and abetted Bud Selig’s shameful disemboweling of the Montreal Expos, for which bloody business he was awarded the Marlins in a shady three-way swap of franchises with the Red Sox and the commissioner’s office. Loria promptly decamped for south Florida, even taking the Expos’ computer equipment with him. Because the universe is malign, Loria got a World Championship in 2003, after which he screwed Miami’s handful of fans by getting rid of Derrek Lee in a salary dump and letting Ugie Urbina and Ivan Rodriguez walk.
To review, the Marlins can’t even win a World Series without immediately reminding any sentient fan that they are run by cynical, awful human beings. In fact, they’ve done it twice.
Marlins fans? It’s only a slight oversimplification to say they don’t exist — though after two post-title screwings, a certain lack of commitment is understandable as a defense mechanism. Soilmaster Stadium was always a home game of sorts for opponents, and after a good showing on Opening Night in the new park, the fans have mostly attended disguised as empty seats.
Tacky, tasteless, awful. For nearly two decades, those were your Florida Marlins. I could never bring myself to hate them so much as I simply wanted them to go away — to San Antonio or Portland or Contraction, whatever was available first. No, I’m not missing the fact that they were also a constant, gigantic thorn in the Mets’ side. They finished ahead of us in their inaugural season. They sat on our casket in 2007 and then again in 2008. Lots and lots of Marlins I loathed became Mets I loathed just as much if not more. They have as many World Series titles as we do. I am not blind to any of this.
So why do I finally hate them instead of just trying to make my contempt as withering as possible? Why, by the third inning tonight, was I tweeting misanthropic things that I kept misspelling in spastic anger?
I’m not sure. It’s probably a combination of things:
- They “took” Jose Reyes away from us;
- they have, improbably, so amplified their bedrock tackiness that they may be the most tasteless franchise ever; and
- they are temporarily rich while we are temporarily poor.
The first charge is, of course, nonsense. Nobody took Jose Reyes away from us because we let him go. Properly so, given the absurd number of years the Marlins gave a wonderful but fragile player, but it still rankles that he had to go there. I was hoping Jose would go somewhere far away, to be an occasional ache in the memory — Anaheim would have been ideal. Instead we have to see him 18 times a year, grinning next to the loathsome Hanley Ramirez. And while making Jose very rich (for which I begrudge him not a penny), the Marlins have also tried to neuter him, insisting he shed his Predator dreads. What on earth for? Because Hanley might develop a bad attitude? Because those uniforms cry out for clean-cut players?
The second complaint is thoroughly earned. The Marlins’ new uniforms are just stupendously, jaw-droppingly, apocalyptically awful. The everything-on-black color scheme looks like what you’d get after a teen barfed up Kool-Aid and a rainbow of pills on a formal dress. The new insignia looks like it was concocted by a neon artist on an ether binge. They have SIX team colors, for pity’s sake. And the unis suck in little ways, too — look at the back, at the contrast between the font used for the numbers and the font used for the names. I don’t have the vocabulary for what’s wrong there, other than to say something obviously is. And I haven’t even seen their stadium yet, with the fish tanks behind home plate and whatever the Mother of Holy Jesus is up with that giant Pachinko thing that celebrates home runs behind the center-field wall. I’m sure I’ll be very calm the first time Hanley Ramirez hits a home run and takes the better part of a global epoch to go around the bases while fake dolphins cavort beyond the fence.
But wait, you say, the Marlins’ unis aren’t that bad, Jace. They aren’t as bad as the Astros’ Tequila sunrises, or the Padres’ Taco togs, or the White Sox’x’x’s various disasters.
But that’s where you’re wrong, my well-meaning friend. (And stop trying to talk me down.) All of those uniforms were born in the mid to late 1970s. Look at snapshots from that era, and you’ll see everyone on Earth — hippies, office drones, doctors, White House officials — wearing horrifying things that they’ll cringe to recall today. The difference between what your hapless Padre middle infielder of 1976 was wearing and the clothes of the people in the stands wasn’t so enormous. Today’s mainstream style is essentially bland and inoffensive, stuck in a middlebrow amber — compared with someone in the stands at Citi tonight, poor Mark Buehrle looked like a rodeo clown. You have to judge baseball uniforms by their times, and by that standard, the Marlins’ 2012 uniform may well be the worst anything in the history of everything.
And now our final point — that the Marlins are up while we are down.
Weirdly, I think it’s the temporariness of this that’s grating. Of course it’s while the Mets are Madoff’d that the Marlins wind up throwing around free-agent cash like they’re on a coke binge. Of course they wind up with our beloved shortstop, dressing him in motley and making him cut his dreads. (Again — what the hell? Given the sartorial chaos of Marlin-land, wouldn’t it have made more sense to insist everybody else grow them?) Of course they are the talk of baseball while everyone snickers that the Mets’ biggest offseason move involved a wall. Who better than the Marlins to occupy that role?
The Marlins may even win a third title like this. But we all know it won’t matter. They still won’t have fans. Even if they win, they won’t make enough money to satisfy Jeffrey Loria. Soon enough, he will sell off his players, Reyes among them. The Pachinko thing will break and sit mute and gigantic behind the fence. Someone will get confused and pour Soilmaster in the fish tanks, leaving them cloudy and dead. The stomach-pumped-coed color scheme will get replaced by something dull but still awful. The park will once again be left to expats and Billy Marlin. The Marlins will be hapless again — divided into “over the hill,” “wet behind the ears” and “good enough to be dumped for prospects.” At best we’ll still only go 8-10 against them, with most of those losses infuriating.
Things will be back as they were, and perhaps my hatred of the Marlins will ebb, to be replaced by the old nausea and vague pity. Which will be better, yet at the same time worse.
I look forward to the day; for now, I’m just tired, and a bit surprised by how much bile the Marlins have stirred up. As well as frightened by a related question: How would I have felt if the Mets had lost?
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We hope to see you at Hofstra tomorrow. Details are here. I promise to be calmer.
by Greg Prince on 25 April 2012 3:18 pm Hope you’re making plans to join us at Hofstra for the 50th Anniversary Mets conference, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. All of it will be worthy of your consideration and aims to do Dana Brand’s vision for it proud. But on a personal note, it occurs to me I might as well tell you where to find Faith and Fear while you’re there.
• Each day, I’ll be moderating the lunchtime “Bullpen” panel, composed of some of your favorite bloggers batting around some of the great issues of life as a Mets fan. Jason will be enhancing the proceedings Thursday and Friday. Others from whom you’ll be hearing across the Bullpen sessions include representatives from The Happy Recap, A Gal For All Seasons, ESPN New York, Optimistic Mets Fan, On The Black, LoHud Mets, Amazin’ Avenue and Mets Police as well as — special treat! — longtime FAFIF commenter (and original New Breeder) Joe Dubin.
• Thursday at 8 PM, I’m scheduled to introduce the filmmaker Kathy Foronjy and her terrific Mets fan documentary Mathematically Alive. If you haven’t seen it, you’ll love it a lot since you are, by proxy, probably in it.
• Copies of Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets will made available for sale on Thursday at 2 PM, with author autograph if you’re so inclined. And if you already have a copy and want it signed at any time during the conference, I’d be most honored to do so.
• On Saturday at 11:15 AM, I will take part in a panel devoted to Mets communication. My topic is “The Shared Mets Fan Language: How Mets Fans Speak to One Another”. Also on that panel will be Kerel Cooper of On The Black, discussing the Mets and social media, and Ray Stilwell of Metphistopheles, exploring “The Decline and Loss of the New York Mets Radio Network”. WINS sports anchor Marc Ernay moderates.
• On Saturday at 3:15 PM, the “Passion of the Bloggers” will be on display as Steve Keane of The Eddie Kranepool Society, John Coppinger of Metstradamus, Taryn Cooper of The Gal For All Seasons and I delve deep into the wonderful world of fan blogging…Mets fan blogging, to be specific.
• Thursday afternoon (weather permitting) and Friday night (if you’re attending the Amazin’ Mets Gala Banquet), I’ll be frequently checking the score of the ongoing Mets games against the Marlins and Rockies, respectively.
I hope to see you at Hofstra, even if means removing the buds from my ears to say hi.
Read more about the conference from ESPN New York, New York Magazine, MLB.com and the New York Times.
by Greg Prince on 25 April 2012 4:27 am Between one of Tuesday night’s half-innings when nobody was touching either starting pitcher, Citi Field’s bounty of video screens posted a trivia question answered by a random face in the crowd. Engrossed in conversation, I didn’t catch the question, but when I heard the answer, I knew what would happen next: the answer would walk on camera, in the flesh, and present the winner with a prize.
Dave Kingman — the answer — appeared and received a warm ovation from history-minded Mets fans appreciative of his contributions to their team…as he should have.
Yet during both of Kingman’s Met tenures, from 1975 to 1977 and 1981 to 1983, fan relations with the slugger turned sour enough to make Sky King a go-to target for relentless ire, particularly as the Mets struggled for respectability. When he returned in other uniforms, he wasn’t welcomed back to Shea heartily, unless you count the hearty booing. But nobody remembers that now. He’s Dave Kingman, old Met hero. Give him another nice round of applause.
Hence, I believe there’s hope yet for an unalloyed happy return down the line for Jose Reyes. Waaay down the line, perhaps, but if he hangs in there another 30 or so years, he’ll be golden.
I wouldn’t have thought Jose would be on the clock in this regard. I wouldn’t have thought a lot of things where Jose Reyes, all-time New York Met great, was concerned. I wouldn’t have thought Jose Reyes would ever be anything but a New York Met. I wouldn’t have thought Jose Reyes could attract sustained boos from a New York Mets gathering. I wouldn’t have thought nine zesty years between a catalyst and those he fired up could be so casually written off in the name of intradivision competition.
Maybe I just think differently from the vocal plurality of the 20,000 or so who shared Citi Field with me Tuesday but don’t come close to sharing my sensibilities as a Mets fan. They booed their heads (or whatever they use to balance their caps) off when they saw Jose Reyes of the Miami Marlins. I cheered him. I cheered the brief, classy video montage of Jose’s Met years. I cheered his name when it was read to lead off the lineups. I cheered when he came to bat to lead off the game. I cheered him a little less on each of his subsequent trips to the plate, but I never booed him. And I never will.
I don’t root for Marlins, whether they be stamped Florida or Miami, but I sure as hell cheer great Mets. Jose Reyes was a great Met, which means he is a Great Met for good. His greatness in the context of his Met years is established. If it’s not present-tense in a practical sense at this time, its truth nevertheless marches on…or races from home to third on a ball in the gap, unless Kirk Nieuwenhuis tracks it down first.
The owners of the New York Mets, to paraphrase from former Texas Agricultural Commissioner Jim Hightower, were born on third base and think they hit a triple vis-à-vis what the Mets mean to Mets fans. Except for opening the gates, they have nothing to do with why our passion spreads out so far and wide when it comes to the Mets. We fall in love with a baseball team, not a baseball organization. Just the word “Mets” contains such power and goodwill based on deep and abiding passion that when confronted by the sight of somebody who embodied “Mets” as much as any individual has in the past decade, yet recently ceased doing so when compelled by a clash of long-term economic agendas, those who love “Mets” pivoted breezily to change that individual’s status from friend to enemy.
Not opponent, but enemy.
That’s “Mets” pride at work, I suppose, letting our old raw flame and live wire know he’s no longer welcome in the neighborhood. Jose Reyes (who sleeps on a bed made of money, so don’t cry for him, Flushing Meadows) opted for Marlinhood, which is distasteful, to be sure, but also, I’ve decided, the way it goes sometimes. There’s a gray area between the childlike innocence that absorbs us in picking a side for fun and games and the adult realization that it’s a livelihood for the players providing us the fun and a business for the barons who host the games. Somewhere in there, we make tradeoffs that might not pass a cognitive dissonance test between the emotion in which we choose to immerse ourselves and the reality that engulfs us.
• Jose Reyes was the perfect Met to match my emotional needs for nine years — a rechargeable battery that jolted me from my seat night after night. You just don’t get that kind of jump or feel quite that kind of emotion in the parts of life that aren’t sports.
• Jose Reyes made a decision bathed in reality, the place where he wasn’t childlike and electric, but a cool, calm professional seeking a financial windfall in exchange for his services on the open market.
What do I do with that dissonance once I am reminded that no athlete who is compensated for his abilities is explicitly plying them for me? He represents “Mets” as long as his contract says he has to. Then he’s without a contract and it’s another component of the major league monopoly that offers him a package to his liking. Then he no longer represents “Mets,” no matter that my emotional gratification in the realm of the sport I prefer above all others (all other sports and almost all other things) was so strongly linked to the intangible bond I felt with the way he played for me.
Jose Reyes played for me for nine years. Yet he plays for himself always. Same as Johan Santana. Same as Kirk Nieuwenhuis. Same as Lucas Duda and all of the Mets responsible for winning Tuesday night’s edgy 2-1 affair. Jose Reyes’s new teammates play for themselves as well. I know that. I’ve always known that. The brusque tap on the shoulder that free agency provides every winter should be enough to make that a matter of constant awareness not recurring surprise.
But if we walked around fully aware that baseball players are just people looking to make the best living possible and baseball teams are just businesses looking to make the most profit possible, we’d want nothing to do with either faction. So we forget, and we revel in the word “Mets” and we revel in those who represent the word “Mets” and, in my case, I deal with the dissonance by grudgingly accepting it. I accept that Jose Reyes eventually did what Jose Reyes perceived as ideal for Jose Reyes, even if it meant fitting himself into an identity every Mets fan finds anathematic to our values.
It may ultimately be “just a business” to players like Jose Reyes, yet it’s anything but to fans like me. Thus, when I cheer Jose Reyes as he materializes in a Miami Marlins uniform, I don’t offer my approval of the business decisions (the Mets’ as well as his) that led him into that unfortunate set of garments. What I’m doing is acknowledging all that happened before, back when I could convince myself Jose — like Tom Seaver, like Dwight Gooden, like Edgardo Alfonzo, like so many — was playing for me.
In my judgment, those whose actions embroider the actual meaning into “Mets” deserve that strata of acknowledgement, no matter that in a strict reading of the respective situations of the players who preceded Reyes as “my favorite Met,” Seaver demanded a trade while under contract to the Mets; Gooden’s repeated substance abuse violation earned him a suspension that ended his active Mets association; Alfonzo sought a better contract as a free agent than the Mets were prepared to tender him; and few who aren’t Ed Kranepool or Ron Hodges didn’t find a way to be at practical odds with the best interests of we the Mets fans. Almost everybody has left us, benignly or bitterly, whether of free will or not, and if they played against us as opponents, they sure as hell weren’t playing for us.
Still, there are enough enemies in this world without weaving together specious reasons (bunt! pinch-runner! injuries! no rings!) to create more of them. What were mostly good times don’t suddenly go bad because the individual responsible for them won’t be generating any more of them in our name, and now it’s his job to help prevent them.
Meanwhile, there are precious few continua whose relentless flow over the course of our lifetimes completely captivate us. My continuum of choice is the New York Mets, historically since 1962, personally since 1969. When somebody rises above that continuum and grabs my attention and ignites my passion, that guy is irreversibly golden to me.
Whether he signed with the stupid Marlins or not.
by Greg Prince on 24 April 2012 3:28 pm  May Fish tank at Citi tonight. The newly Miami’d and unfortunately Jose’d Marlins come to Citi Field tonight, but at least a few Mets fans have already inspected new Marlins Park, and at least one has done it in style. FAFIF reader and Team McGraw runner Sharon Chapman (pictured with son Ross) shows off The Numbers to the fan base that is presumably just discovering baseball for the very first time in South Florida. Not pictured: bus Ozzie Guillen had recently been thrown under…or threw himself under.
You can get yourself a shirt just like the one celebrating 37, 14, 41 and 42 here. And you can do a little mitzvah and support Sharon’s run for the Tug McGraw Foundation, coming up this weekend in Nashville, here.
By the way, their home run apple looks really weird.
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