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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 2 July 2024 11:39 pm This recap’s headline is a term we’ve heard a lot in the sabermetric age, as front offices search for previously overlooked and/or undervalued traits in players. The last two nights, I’ve found a new market inefficiency as a fan: You don’t need to watch the part of the game that doesn’t matter.
I don’t recommend this strategy, because a) it’s hard to pull off consistently; and b) the fun of baseball is the journey and not just the destination. But for two nights in a row I have to admit it’s worked.
On Monday night I arrived for duty in the sixth; once I had the Mets drew even, blew the Nationals’ doors off in extra innings, and then survived a harrowing bullpen meltdown to win. (Whoops, sorry, I meant to type “another harrowing bullpen meltdown.”)
Tonight a dinner out in Brunswick kept me away from my station, save for a couple of under-the-table glances at Gameday. (I kept getting caught because Face ID doesn’t work that way.) I saw the Mets were down 1-0 and then down 2-0 — the stuff of resigned sighs back in May, but not quite so worrisome now.
I saw that, but I missed the Mets drawing even on a Francisco Lindor homer and an RBI single from Brandon Nimmo, apparently recovered from the scare he got fainting and gashing his head in a D.C. hotel room, and in the game because of a scare Harrison Bader got crashing into the outfield fence. (Stay tuned.) I figured out those details later; when I turned MLB Audio on for the drive back up the coast all I knew and all I needed to know was it was 2-2.
Which it stayed until the top of the 10th, thanks in large part to Francisco Alvarez gunning down speedy rookie James Wood. That meant the Mets were looking to drive in their Manfred man, suddenly a nightly occurrence in these parts.
(I know you’re expecting the giddy part of the recap, but nope, I’m climbing up on this here soapbox.)
One of the things I dislike about the free runner — besides the fact that I enjoyed baseball pretty thoroughly before all the impatient tinkering — is that it spotlights failure rather than success. With nobody on and nobody out, you’re hoping for a series of successes to put your team in the lead — say two singles sandwiched around a steal, or a pair of guys-swap-places doubles, or one of many other winning formulas.
But with a free runner on second and nobody out, you don’t need much in the way of success to grab the lead. A grounder to the right side and a medium-distance fly ball will suffice, with the same equation holding for the other team. And because the odds favor that run scoring, rather than hope for two or three good things in close proximity, you’re dreading that your team will fail. A run coming home isn’t a success to savor, but a disaster avoided. It usually takes a lot less time, which MLB’s committees of MBAs consider a plus, but it’s an upside-down, faintly sour experience, one that isn’t going to make anyone yell, “Free baseball!”
That was running through my mind in the 10th: I exulted behind the wheel as Jose Iglesias drove in Tyrone Taylor and replaced him at second, then despaired when Jeff McNeil popped up a bunt — because, again, the assumption is the other team will cash its own gimme run, meaning anything less than a two-run inning is perilous. Lindor grounded out, and there was that dread again, despite the Mets being up by a run.
Fortunately the roof was about to cave in on Robert Garcia and the Nats. Boom! Nimmo doubled in Iglesias. Pow! Mark Vientos brought in Nimmo. Zip! Pinch-runner Ben Gamel stole second. SOCK! Pete Alonso drove one over the fence.
The Mets had scored five runs, though of course being Mets fans we were all thinking that the night before they’d scored six and before that one ended we were all wondering if scoring 60 would have been enough. But this time there was no meltdown: Dedniel Nunez (whose arm has got to be feeling a little dedniel by now) set the Nats down 1-2-3, with their Manfred man left standing useless and disconsolate at third.
It was fun — a half-inning that features your team and goes on for 15 minutes or so is almost always fun. But I kept thinking that innings like that used to be more fun, back in the days before everything got fixed.
by Jason Fry on 1 July 2024 11:05 pm The Mets and the Nats, sheesh. I guess it proves that for every Nieuwenhuis there’s a Suzuki. And for the critical stretches of Monday night’s mildly bonkers game, it wasn’t clear whether the compass was going to wind up pointing to N or S.
And I missed the first five innings! I mean, so sue me — we were eating lobsters on the dock with Emily’s parents (actually I was eating fish and chips, due to a shellfish allergy) and I’d forgotten it was a 6:45pm start. Not to deflect attention from my lack of said, but isn’t that a little early to start a game anyway? 7:05, 7:10, even 7:40 I get … but 6:45 is just weird.
Fortunately, all I’d missed was the Mets being frustrated by MacKenzie Gore. I’d just gotten the TV on (accompanied by a gorgeous Maine sunset) when the Mets rose up in indignation, with Mark Vientos singling in Harrison Bader to bring the Mets within one, Tyrone Taylor reaching on a CJ Abrams error and Francisco Alvarez lashing a Derek Law cutter that didn’t cut into the gap for a 3-2 Mets lead.
It looked like the Mets might hold that lead, with Dedniel Nunez taking over for David Peterson and collecting four outs, leaving the Mets with four to get. But then Nunez walked Jesse Winker and Joey Meneses smacked a single to right field that took a strange bounce, startling a perhaps not completely attentive Taylor. Just like that, the Nats had tied it, and the ghosts of the last two days were suddenly romping around, cackling predictions of doom.
Nunez survived when Ildemaro Vargas inexplicably tried to bunt for a hit (seriously, WTF?); Jake Diekman came in for the ninth and immediately put the Mets in harm’s way when he threw away a ball, allowing newcomer James Wood to reach second with nobody out. The Mets survived when Taylor just barely corralled a drive by Jacob Young and we were on to extras, with Francisco Lindor once again the Manfred man.
This time, the Mets unloaded: Down 0-2 against Hunter Harvey and mired in an 0 for 12 funk, J.D. Martinez got a splitter that hung in the middle of the plate and drove it over the fence for a three-run homer. Alvarez brought in Taylor with a triple, and Jose Iglesias followed with a two-run blast. The Mets had driven in six runs, and Gary Cohen was exulting about putting the hammer down and cappers.
To be fair to Gary, so was I and quite possibly so were you. But Tyler Jay gave up a pair of walks and a pair of doubles and looked like he couldn’t get enough air out there, despite Alvarez trying to cajole, entreat and bully him across the finish line. (Alvarez is must-see TV, whether he’s show-ponying his way around the bases after another big hit or behind the plate tending to a reliever who’s become a spooked horse.) Jay was excused further duty in favor of Reed Garrett, who hasn’t been scintillating of late and was facing the tying run in Keibert Ruiz.
Ruiz singled in a run and the Nats were a drive down the line away from tying it and a home run away from showing the Mets the Full Suzuki, and if you were confident, well, I want to have what you were having. So of course Garrett made short work of Luis Garcia Jr., erasing him on a splitter to secure the victory. The lesson, as always: Never try to outguess baseball. The Mets had won despite playing reliever roulette with four or five rounds chambered; they’ll now undoubtedly make a slew of new moves in hopes that a few more of those chambers come up empty around 8pm Tuesday.
We won. Was it fun? It was at times. Were there times when I thought the best course of action was to slip into the other room and turn my stomach inside out? Yes there were. And that was not fun.
Let’s just say it … was a lot.
by Jason Fry on 30 June 2024 10:20 pm Since we’re Mets fans, we all knew the bullpen had issues. Since we’re adults, we all know progress isn’t always or even usually a smooth arc — it comes with fits and starts.
A day after blowing a big lead because of a nightmarish inning of relief, the Mets endured a bunch of bad luck, came back to tie it, had the game gift-wrapped for them, failed to capitalize on it, and saw another nightmarish inning of relief.
Oof.
I’m up in Maine, and the first half of the game was glimpsed during and between chores — which meant lots and lots of shots of Luis Severino looking perturbed and trudging around after yet another Houston hit felled in. I was at my station when the Mets launched a furious comeback, with Brandon Nimmo’s swing and a drive the exclamation mark.
And then? Weather delay. A very long weather delay — a whole game’s worth, in fact. The game came back while we were in the car seeking dinner, and proceeded as an animated Gameday rectangle in the pub we like a few towns over.
We shrugged when the Astros cashed in their Manfred man, then exulted when Nimmo immediately switched places with Francisco Lindor. A bunt and a sac fly, a grounder to the right side and a contact play … there were so many ways to emerge with a victory, and yet none of them materialized. J.D. Martinez’s bat has cooled from incandescent, as will happen; he struck out. The Astros walked Pete Alonso. Harrison Bader grounded out, moving up the runners for Mark Vientos. Vientos has had a helluva month, but this is baseball, where even the hottest hitter fails more often than not.
Vientos grounded out and the Mets had missed a layup. They brought in Matt Festa, whom I’d never heard of before today and learned was a Met around 4 pm. The roof caved in on Festa: three singles, a pair of lineouts, a double. Gameday’s version of this was a steady drumbeat of IN PLAY, RUN(S).
The Mets lost. They fell back below .500. A sour note to end one of the best months in franchise history, but in stoppering our ears lets not forget that last part. The conversation’s different. Summer baseball need not be pointless and obligatory. And the arc of the season may yet point skyward.
by Greg Prince on 30 June 2024 7:52 am In this new upbeat era of Mets baseball in which we only grimace ironically, let’s catalogue our positives.
Ty Adcock not only made his Met debut, but sparkled in it. Mark Vientos went about as deep as one can to dead center at Citi Field. Before Mark hit his mark, the Mets made the most of their luck in one particular inning (the second) and posted five somewhat improbable runs. The organization found space on its uniform sleeves for patches honoring the memories of Jerry Grote and Willie Mays as they continue to remember Buddy Harrelson the same way. And “OMG” continues to worm poppily in the ear of those who can’t help but be charmed by the Jose Iglesias experience.
So it’s not like Saturday was totally unpleasant.
I don’t know that I’d watched a game in 2024 brimming with expectations the way I did this middle contest Saturday. I expected the Mets to win. I expected the Mets to hold their 6-1 lead. I expected the Mets to push back on the Astros’ aspirations of catching up and going ahead. I thought about the standings and expected the Mets to gain ground.
Then I tempered my expectations bit by bit until I accepted that not every day is our day, even when for weeks almost every day has been.
If we’re looking for root causes, I suppose Edwin Diaz’s gunky hand and glove and the way the suspension they wrought brought about a reduced/diminished pitching staff sticks most. It’s a miniature 2023 out there in the bullpen, with everybody moving up a notch to compensate for Edwin’s absence, except we’re not allowed to fill in at the far back end of the relief corps, which is an issue when your starters throw a surfeit of pitches early and practically none by the sixth inning’s end. You really miss those marginal Syracuse arms when you are reminded they are better than nothing.
So, in the realm of faint praise, is Tylor Megill, who spells his first name with an ‘o,’ vowels his last name with an ‘e’ and an ‘i,’ and continues to have a career best described as Quadruple-A. As part of my newfound optimism, I thought Megill would shine against Houston if just to compensate for the cloud his previous performance cast over Chicago. I stand corrected. Megill gutted out five-and-a-third. The fourth was the discouraging one, with three painful Astro runs cutting the Mets lead to 6-4, and a sense emerging that, nope, this one wasn’t going to be as easy as everything to that point had looked.
Once Tylor was lifted after 101 stressful pitches, the bullpen shorts were showing. In the latter part of the twentieth century, where I lived until the millennial odometer turned, a seven-man pen was a luxury. Mostly it was unnecessary. Today I’m still shocked at how high and dry it can leave a team, especially if, god forbid, enough of the relievers in captivity have pitched lately. This one is unavailable. That one is unavailable. The safety net feels preemptively shredded. Even if you get an Adcock to come in out of nowhere and preserve order (we did), you still have innings to go before you can sleep.
And it becomes a nightmare.
I was under the impression Jake Diekman was one of those veteran lefties who would be über-dependable à la Brooks Raley. Alas, not all southpaws who’ve been in circulation forever are created equal. We miss the contributions of Raley. We’re still waiting for some on a consistent basis from Diekman, who was characteristically wild before giving way to Reid Garrett. Garrett faced three batters. It felt like three-thousand. Before Jake and Reed were done missing the strike zone, the Astros were ahead and I was missing more than ever Raley, Sean Reid-Foley and the likely Tommy John-bound Drew Smith. Goodness knows I’ve tensed up at the sight of Drew across his up-and-down tenure since he alighted in Flushing in 2018, but whoever isn’t coming in in the seventh typically looms as the much better option than whoever did enter, especially on a day like Saturday.
In the end, the Mets lost, 9-6, to a quality opponent, much as the Astros lost the night before to a quality opponent, which was us. We’re in that league now, safely removed from the ranks of Rockies and Marlins and anybody judged chanceless, but we haven’t ascended to the circuit where we never lose. We’re not yet that good. Nobody is, though I was at the precipice of believing our June ascent would proceed without pause clear to July. We were gong to win our fifth in a row in a fifth different jersey (I was even getting used to the City Connects). We were going to slip ahead of the Cardinals by a percentage point or two and hold the third Wild Card spot, for whatever that was worth. We were going to start breathing in the vicinity of the Braves’ necks, even. Didn’t happen. Or it hasn’t yet.
This taking the Mets seriously as a good ballclub is different from how I was expecting the balance of the season to play out. It’s more fun than what I figured we’d be relegated to. But it doesn’t preclude angst and disappointment on a given day when expectations aren’t shall we say Met. I vaguely recalling seasons working this way. Thanks for the emphatic reminder?
by Jason Fry on 29 June 2024 10:04 am I won’t claim it’s high on my lengthy list of Selig/Manfred era outrages, but it annoys me that the Astros are in the American League. They’re our expansion siblings, after all, arriving along with us in 1962 as the Colt .45s.
We began as a novelty act to salve the still-fresh wounds of Dodgers and Giants fans, fielding an Old Timers’ Day lineup complete with taking the Polo Grounds out of mothballs; they started life as the Colt .45s, a mildly shameless bid for a business tie-in that would lead to a more shameless (and more enduring) rebranding based around Houston’s ties to the astronaut program. In our first go-round we finished 10th and became synonymous with baseball futility; they were merely bad and finished eighth.
(Side note: Holy cats were the ’62 Cubs horrible.)
Rusty Staub and Jerry Grote were early Colts/Astros. Later, the likes of Ray Knight and Mike Hampton passed through the Astrodome before becoming Met heroes. John Franco and Dwight Gooden played in Houston at the tail end of their careers, cameos that would make you go “oh yeah that’s right” when looking up their stats years later. Donn Clendenon didn’t want to play for the Astros at all, a drama that eventually led to his becoming a critical ’69 Met. We faced them in ’86, when their rotation was anchored by scuffballing former Met Mike Scott and ’69 hero Nolan Ryan, and prevailed in an exhausting sixseven-game Gotterdammerung.
All that has become so long ago that I feel like I just put an onion on my belt and gave a stemwinder about bees and quarters. The Astros have been in the American League for more than a decade now and become synonymous with cheating; opposing fans will be making jokes about trash cans decades after Jose Altuve is a white-haired Hall of Famer visiting a suite to glad-hand with oil executives. These days, sadly, I hardly think of our ’62 siblings at all — they’re far away and play in that jumped-up arriviste beer league, so why would I?
But 2024 has offered more parallels.
The Astros have exhausted their fans with a season of stops and starts and ups and downs, navigating injuries and tough personnel decisions, but they’d heated up of late and arrived for Friday night’s game with a record of .500 — not exactly world-beating stuff, but cause for celebration given where they’d been.
That’s our 2024 bio as well.
Baseball specializes in these something’s gotta give meetings, and momentum favored the Astros immediately: Five seconds into the game, Altuve had whacked a Jose Quintana sinker that didn’t sink into the stands for a 1-0 lead. But as has been a Mets hallmark of late, Quintana staggered out of the first inning weary but whole, giving up only the one run. The Mets loaded the bases with nobody out in their half of the first against Ronel Blanco and came away with only one run, but hey, that did tie it.
Houston took the lead again in the third, lost it in the fourth on a Tyrone Taylor solo shot, and then the roof caved in on Blanco in the sixth: Pete Alonso‘s overly aggressive first-inning AB had not exactly been a highlight, but now he hit a no-doubter to left to give the Mets the lead; four batters later Jeff McNeil golfed a ball into the right-field corner for a three-run homer and the Mets were up by four, on their way to winning by five.
McNeil would wind up three for four on the night, continuing a run during which he’s looked at least a little like his old self. Maybe that’s too little too late; maybe the knowledge that Brett Baty is playing second in AAA and tearing it up has concentrated the mind wonderfully. If nothing else, McNeil can look around and see plenty of teammates who’ve extracted themselves from the fan scrap heap and revitalized their seasons.
The Mets, at least for the moment, look thoroughly revitalized: After the game, Jose Iglesias AKA Candelita offered the Pride Night crowd a mini-set formally unveiling “OMG.” Watching a backup infielder perform his latest single in his stadium accompanied by adoring teammates is a new one for me, but it’s this week’s second never-seen-that-before video to have me laughing happily: During Wednesday night’s monsoon delay, fan video caught Grimace on the Shea Bridge, up on people’s shoulders shotgunning a beer before a cheering throng; as I stated on former Twitter, if that doesn’t lead the 2024 World Series Champions video, we riot.
That’s getting ahead of ourselves, of course, which leads me back to what exactly, this smidge-over-.500 team is.
Two perspectives may be at least mildly helpful.
The first comes from Joe Sheehan, to whom you should absolutely subscribe: “[T]he 2024 Mets are this year’s best argument for one of my guiding principles: Let the season breathe. This is what baseball teams do, they look good for a while, look bad for a while. The in-season variance of a baseball team’s performance is bigger than whatever you think it is. The Royals backed up 34-19 with 8-18. The A’s went 17-17, then 12-37. The Yankees have dropped ten of 13 after a 49-21 start and bodies are piling up in the Harlem River. Breathe. It’s not football.”
That’s excellent advice. And yet I’ve also thought back to something Greg said a few years ago. At the time I’d decided I needed to be better at analysis and was unhappy with how many of our recaps were essentially reactions. Greg heard me out quietly, then said: “We’re fans. That’s what we do. We react.”
Indeed we are, and indeed we do. There’s a value to understanding that a night’s bullpen meltdown doesn’t foretell doom just as a walkoff, come-from-behind three-run homer doesn’t print its own playoff tickets. But in the moment that’s not going to be anyone’s reaction. Nor should it be.
We’re fans. We react. Right now we get to react to rain-delay Grimace appearances and postgame concerts. That’s extraordinary; let’s just enjoy it.
by Greg Prince on 27 June 2024 10:10 am They’re probably not this good, are they? How could they be? Fifteen wins in nineteen games seems to give us all the answer we need, a stretch that’s unfurled since their last pairing of consecutive losses, not to mention the active streak of three victories during which the most recent ascension or explosion feels it can’t be topped, yet the next day it is. The odds say sooner or later the Mets who are making a science out of finding ways to win will accidentally lose a game, and from there a few balls will bounce in their opponents’ favor, and suddenly…
Welcome to the inversion. The above paragraph was written just over a month ago, except on Opposite Day, when every positive about the Mets now was a negative about the Mets then, meaning we used words like “bad” and “lose,” if you can remember back that far. There were a lot of Opposite Days for the 2024 Mets, who once relentlessly depressed us, which seems impossible, since we now know them only for relentlessly uplifting us. You know how the temperatures have been in New York lately. The Mets are playing at a crisp 180 degrees from where they were in May when we decided they were going to stay ice cold for the duration.
Instead, they’ve burned a path through June. From a nadir of 24-35, they have risen to 39-39. It’s a plateau that looked like Everest when they gathered at base camp to make this particular climb. Surely .500 wasn’t their goal. It was too high. Yet here they are, planting a flag for the moment atop Mount Break Even.
How did we get here? Why ask how? Team meetings, licensed characters, progression to the mean…take your pick. I choose to process what’s happening without questioning it too much. When the Mets were dreadful, that looked like what the Mets were. Now that the Mets are marvelous, I think I’ll just marvel at them.
Wednesday night, the only thing the Mets did wrong was get rained on. Shocking to realize they can’t overwhelm the weather as they do their opposition, but give them time. The 87-minute precipitation pause probably cost callup Ty Adcock his Met debut (he was warming in the pen when the tarp rolled out at Citi Field) and it made staying awake a challenge for some watching from home (I snoozed through the seventh), but the club’s momentum never dampened. Up 4-0 on the Yankees in the bottom of the fifth in what was already an official game, the Mets came back once the grass was sufficiently dry and ground their municipal rivals into the dirt. Eventually, it became an official ass-kicking, with a final of Mets 12 Judge 2.
Sean Manaea walked a few too many of the nettlesome neighbors, but that’s what double plays are for. Sean threw three pitches that each turned into a pair of outs. “Just the Two of Us,” indeed. With the lead up to 7-0 following the weather delay, Danny Young did what pitchers everywhere do: he gave up a home run to Aaron Judge with Juan Soto on base. As long as Judge couldn’t hit an eight-run homer — and not even he can do that — we were gonna be OK. We’d already had a long ball from Francisco Alvarez and were going to get one apiece from Tyrone Taylor and Harrison Bader, although I napped as the latter flew. There were all kinds of other runs and runs batted in, and there was Adrian Houser, once upon a time the internal bane of our existence, now closing out a three-inning save and a Subway Series sweep.
Could a person want more than a ten-run throttling of the so-called Bronx Bombers, described to us by the best booth in town? Well, I always want to add to the all-time Met roster, and though I was deprived of typing in the name “Ty Adcock,” I did get to expand the mothership of lists to include outfielder Ben Gamel, who checked in for defense in the ninth to become Met No. 1,240 overall. And will ya look at that: a “24” right in the middle of Gamel’s chronological ranking, apropos of Michael Mays, amid a group of dignitaries (including Cleon Jones) wearing Mets No. 24 jerseys, throwing out the first pitch Wednesday evening in memory of his father Willie. Isn’t it beautiful how the Mets’ institutional amnesia that the Greatest Ballplayer Ever played for them has lifted and stayed lifted?
Isn’t everything beautiful about the Mets as we speak? Is it baffling that such sentences are being composed? From the perspective of earlier in the season, absolutely. But the season went on and the Mets did, too, becoming something wholly different from what we were sure they were. Emotional cost certainty is in flux as a result. That’s the potential downside of any surge from nowhere to somewhere. I read something in April about fans of really good teams and fans of really bad teams being able to deal with losses better than fans of .500 teams, because if your team is really good, one loss is a veritable little fish within a great big pond of wins, while if your team is really bad, one loss is just one more loss that doesn’t surprise you in the least. The fan of the .500 team, however, sees any given loss as a referendum on the course of the season. Are we really this bad? Are we really this good? We don’t know. The finding out suddenly has stakes.
Which, we are beginning to be reminded, is why they play the games. The Mets’ arrival at .500 coincides with the recognition that there are definitely teams in this league and, for that matter, the other league who appear not quite as good as them, but very few who seem all that much better. The Yankees are the latest powerhouse we’ve faced that is obviously headed to the postseason, yet clearly isn’t impervious to injury or imperfection. All among the Braves, Phillies and Dodgers have struck me the same way. Incredible talent at the core, but if they’re dinged up enough, they have depth issues like anybody else. Of teams against whom the Mets have gone head-to-head to date, only the Brewers, who we played so long ago it was March, and the Guardians have come across (to me, anyway) as in a league of their own. Teams get hot, teams cool down. We’re about to welcome in the steaming Astros, who were twelve under .500 in this very season, ebbing lower than even us. They’re now where we are.
Can our .500 club, having passed a passel of NL wheel-spinners to become what would have to be objectively considered a playoff contender, actually continue to be, you know, this good? We are not impervious to injury or imperfection. We are still without our closer. We are also without two other bullpen mainstays in Sean Reid-Foley and Drew Smith, the latter having gone on the IL Wednesday, which explains why somebody like me is closely monitoring the movements of Ty Adcock. Ben Gamel is here because Starling Marte isn’t. Yet we’re not really missing anybody the way we’ve been playing as a whole. No Edwin Diaz amounted to no problem for two nights as we constructed leads so tall not even Hammerin’ Yank Aaron could completely cut them down to size. Everybody but Jeff McNeil is hitting consistently, and McNeil’s bat, as evidenced by the deep lineout that brought home a run in the New York-New York finale, is showing a bit of a pulse, too. Yet the collective sizzle will at some point fizzle. That’s not glass half-empty fatalism talking. It’s simply what happens in every season. The collective fizzle turned to sizzle. It was bound to happen, regardless that there was no sign it would.
Every season it’s like this, if not necessarily in a fashion as extreme as 0-5 followed by 12-3 followed by 12-27 followed by 15-4 to get to 39-39. Downs. Ups. Frustration. Elation. Not knowing exactly what comes next. Not knowing exactly how we’ll handle it. Not knowing if we’re really as bad or as good as we’re certain we are or if we’re just prone to taking a wildly divergent route to middling. Again, that’s why they play the games.
by Jason Fry on 26 June 2024 8:09 am I stopped attending Subway Series games years ago because they’re like Thanksgiving dinners where every single uncle and cousin you dislike RSVPs that they’ll show up drunk and eager to talk politics. No thanks — I’ll catch these from my couch, where any woofing mookdom can be addressed as an internal affair.
That part’s predictable; the rest of a Subway Series game isn’t. I certainly didn’t have David Peterson pulling a Houdini after facing bases loaded and nobody out, a sequence that started with a first-pitch single to Anthony Volpe and a pitch-clock violation, meaning Peterson was somehow stuck with a runner on first and an 1-0 count to Juan Soto after one pitch thrown. Though calling what Peterson did a Houdini act misses the important lesson: Peterson trusted his stuff and so struck out Gleyber Torres, Alex Verdugo and old friend J.D. Davis.
Another thing I hadn’t predicted was Gerrit Cole reporting for duty first without his location and then without his velocity. The location issues led to a trio of first-inning walks, with Francisco Alvarez coming back from 0-2 in another cool and collected AB, and a run when Tyrone Taylor punched a ball through the hole, though Pete Alonso was thrown out from you to me at home to short-circuit further celebrations. Cole had been touching 98 in that inning but came out for the second with his fastball much reduced, and he paid for it: Mark Vientos and Harrison Bader took him deep, with Vientos and Brandon Nimmo unloading on him in the fourth. It’s not our problem, but Cole is either not ready or not right.
Vientos, on the other hand, is turning into a monster, losing balls with a bat in his hands and not losing as many balls as we’d feared while wearing a glove. His growing confidence has been great fun to watch, to say nothing of how his more formidable bat has made the lineup deeper and more dangerous. (I’ll spoil that a little by admitting there’s probably an April recap in which I say something similar about Brett Baty.)
Peterson started leaking oil in the fifth and was excused two outs from the long side of a 6-1 decision — Carlos Mendoza has never shown the slightest interest in making moves based on the win rule. Dedniel Nunez needed just one pitch to coax a double-play grounder from the Solar Bear, and when the Mets added three more runs against momentary Met Phil Bickford it looked like we’d enjoy the rest of a laugher, with SNY doing its part by offering loving montages of Yankee fans slumped at Citi Field looking variously sullen and stoic.
(Speaking of which, it’s remarkable how intertwined the 2024 rosters are. Mendoza was Aaron Boone‘s bench coach, of course, but the Yankees roster includes former Mets Davis, Bickford, Michael Tonkin and Marcus Stroman, while the Mets employ former Yankees Bader, Adam Ottavino, Ben Gamel and Luis Severino, with Luis Torrens having arrived from their minor-league system.)
The laugher dissolved as everything fell apart in the eighth. Ottavino didn’t have it, Danny Young didn’t have it either, and with the bases loaded Reed Garrett was summoned to face Judge. Garrett immediately got to 0-2, albeit on a pair of cutters that sat in the middle of the plate, and Alvarez called for a fastball up and in, a waste pitch intended to push Judge off the plate and change his eyelines, setting up a cutter low and away.
That’s been a solid plan since the ball got lively a century ago, but Garrett missed his catcher’s up-and-in target by two feet, leaving a fastball in the middle of the plate; I’m pretty sure I let out an eeep! even before Judge swung. It looked like Bader would corral it deep, though he wasn’t doing his foot-crossing backwards prance, a play dripping with mustard that always makes me laugh. That was a sign of trouble; so, it goes without saying, was the ball plopping over the fence for a grand slam that cut the Mets’ lead to a definitely eeep!-worthy 9-7. The Yankees are a billion games over .500 for a reason, and any lead that will be contested by Soto and Judge should come with that rearview-mirror warning made famous by Jurassic Park: OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.
Garrett spent the top of the ninth stomping around in the dugout, no doubt thinking about what he’d done; I’d have preferred watching him exhale after the Mets put up, oh, six or seven more runs, but ’twas not to be. Also not to be, fortunately for him and for us: a Yankees lineup with Giancarlo Stanton and Anthony Rizzo. Garrett retired Verdugo on a first-pitch liner to Alonso, got a grounder from Ben Rice, and fanned DJ LeMahieu to secure the win.
Exhalations on the couch! High-fives all around! Though mostly I was just tired — the Subway Series will do that to you, regardless of your vantage point.
by Greg Prince on 24 June 2024 11:08 am The part where the Mets hit three home runs; receive a practically flawless performance from their starter; and win is the best part from Sunday night at Wrigley Field. Sadly, it’s not the main part. The main part is the part where the umpires inspect the Mets’ closer’s glove and pitching hand and tell him, nope, you can’t come in, you’re out of the game, and you’ll find you’re about to be suspended for ten more games on top of this one when you didn’t even get to pitch as planned.
That’ll take the edge off a good night, eh?
There’s no getting around the impending absence of Edwin Diaz for something that had nothing to do with jumping around on a WBC mound or a shoulder impingement. Just as Sugar seemed to be rounding back into Narcoesque form, the cops come and get him for having a little too much stick-to-it-iveness on his person. Per the pool report (required for simple communication with the media and therefore the fans because umpires are more imperious than the bleeping Supreme Court of the United States), crew chief Vic Carapazza reasoned, “It definitely wasn’t rosin and sweat. We’ve checked thousands of these. I know what the feeling is.” Well, that’s ample enough evidence to bleep over a team just finding its footing, ain’t it? Whatever the umps told Edwin, “go wash your hands and we’ll try this again” apparently wasn’t one of their suggestions.
Diaz, like Max Scherzer and Drew Smith before him, said the sticky-substance ejection followed him doing absolutely nothing different from usual in his routine. Smith, who substituted on no notice for Edwin in the ninth, said that after his 2023 ejection and suspension, he changed absolutely nothing about his preparation. Drew hasn’t been ejected since. He, like every pitcher, gets checked every time he goes to the mound. One time he got nabbed, as if the umps had a quota to fill before the end of whatever month. In this era when “accountability” is so valued by this ballclub, maybe one of the Mets’ umpteen coaches should be responsible for a glove & hand inspection of each pitcher prior to every inning before the umps get their gander, just as a precaution. Pretend it’s a new base hit celebration and the whole team will be into it.
Barring an unlikely successful appeal of the sticky-stuff ruling, the Mets will be sans Diaz for ten games and won’t be permitted to replace him on the roster. No time is ever good to be shorthanded, let alone without your ninth-inning man, especially when the team is playing well enough to be nursing leads of three runs or fewer as games near conclusions. The fireman’s role figures to be up for grabs this week and next. Drew didn’t exactly lay down a marker versus the Cubs, getting pulled with two out and a runner on first, shaking his right arm a bit during his surprise outing. Lefty Jake Diekman came on to finish, and he did. We’ll see who gets the ball when the need arises again.
Too bad about all this from multiple angles, including that it makes a Mets fan forget what a good game we saw Sunday, despite ESPN’s involvement in telecasting it. Back-to-back homers from Francisco Lindor and Brandon Nimmo in the third made the score 3-0, and we never trailed from there. J.D. Martinez produced the most useful of groundouts to extend the lead in the fifth. When Luis Severino sat down after six shutout innings (10 Ks), the Cubs were so energized, they nicked Dedniel Nuñez for a pair of runs. Mark Vientos sapped half that life out of them by responding with a ball hit so far that it was out of the reach of any bleacherite wishing to fling it toward the grass.
We didn’t even pay a karmic price for two terrific defensive plays by 2020 Mets first-round draft choice Pete Crow-Armstrong, who, you’re probably aware, was traded to the Cubs in one those Win Now moves that didn’t result in winning then. The most impressive of the PC-A gems was a throw that nailed Francisco Alvarez going from second to third on a single, which is something a baserunner usually does with zero hassle. Earlier in the season, you could picture that sort of basepath blunder blowing up in our collective face. Sunday it was simply isolated fodder for The George Michael Sports Machine of the mind’s eye.
Yeah, good game (5-2), good series (two of three), good road trip, (four of six), good place in the shall we say fluid Wild Card standings (one out of a playoff spot, not behind too many combatants). Not a good development with Diaz, however. Maybe we shouldn’t sweat it too much. If we do, we, too, might get thrown out.
by Jason Fry on 23 June 2024 9:19 am By the time Saturday afternoon rolled around our 2024 beach vacation was at an end: house cleaned, last Long Beach Island breakfast consumed, farewells said, and car filled for the trip back to Brooklyn, the heat wave we’d been happy to miss, and normal life.
Heading up the Garden State Parkway, your correspondent was frankly weary. You’ve been there: thoughts wandering, eyelids heavy, brain feeling full of static so that bearing down on the task at hand is faintly painful. I was weary and it was going to get worse before the obvious remedy made it better.
I should stop, I thought. Which was good advice and the responsible thing to do. But we weren’t that far from home. We had things to do. And there wasn’t a good alternative. Emily was asleep in the passenger seat, head bent at an angle she’d complain about once fully awake again. The kid doesn’t know how to drive yet, and I doubted a helicopter zooming overhead would drop down a learner’s permit and an instructor. Nope, this one was on me.
I decided I’d stop at the Jon Bon Jovi rest area (yes it’s a real thing) if I wasn’t more awake by the time I approached it, and flipped over from a Spotify playlist to MLB Audio, as the Mets and Cubs were preparing to resume hostilities at Wrigley.
Ten minutes later, I was sharp and alert. The JBJ rest area went by without us, perhaps awaiting Tommy and Gina at the end of their long days spent at docks and/or diners. To them and all other weary prayer-livers, whoo wah oo wah oo wahooga.
What had changed? I was laser-focused on my irritation with Tylor Megill, who’d given us the full Tylor Megill Experience in a nightmarish first inning: nibbling and missing, nibbling and missing, until five runs were home and I wanted to jam a spork — made in whatever country — in my eye. Just like that, we’d gone from a laugher so nice we had to recap it twice to being the laughee and looking to Sunday for redemption.
Still, by the time it was mercifully over I was home and alive, people and automobile intact. Thanks for that, Tylor, even if you can keep the rest.
by Greg Prince on 22 June 2024 6:58 am “Solstice schmolstice,” they might say in the bleachers at Wrigley Field, where the exact position of the sun doesn’t matter as long as it’s out somewhere. They have their new tradition of building a cup snake that wends all the way to Lake Michigan, perhaps Michigan itself, and they have their old tradition of throwing back the baseballs hit at them by Cub opponents. Both traditions got a workout on Friday. Hope you had some version of summer hours and got to take it in in all its Metsian glory.
 The Mets enjoying themselves in the visitors’ clubhouse is the best of Wrigley Field traditions. In the ballpark where Willie Mays dressed for the final time as a regular-season active player — he was a dugout spectator on October 1, 1973, as his Met teammates completed fighting for themselves en route to an NL East title, then a teetotaler taking a cold champagne shower in the jubilant visitors’ clubhouse — the Mets threw a first full day of summer cookout, grilling phenom Shota Imanaga for ten runs in three-plus innings. Given that Imanaga had the Mets roasting on a spit at Citi Field several weeks earlier, the main course was quite satisfying. Runs in each of the first four innings. Multiple runs in three of them. Souvenirs for reluctant recipients in those far away seats via the good graces of J.D. Martinez, Francisco Alvarez and Brandon Nimmo. Between the stacking of empty beer cups, each baseball the Mets deposited was marked RETURN TO SENDER. Sure, whatever. The runs the homers represented stayed glued to the scoreboard.
Four RBIs for Martinez. Three for Jose Iglesias, who recorded four hits and the ditty teammates love to blast when they’re done blasting the likes of Imanaga. Six-and-a-third innings of cool, calm professionalism from Jose Quintana, who allowed just one run and struck out eight. Competent relief from both Adam Ottavino and Drew Smith, putting the kibosh on any idea that this was going to be one of those Wrigley days when no window on Waveland Avenue is considered safe. Nope, only the Mets found the wind blowing out, gusting to an 11-1 romp. The end result was never in doubt. The last of the lingering intrigue, beyond whether Steve Gelbs would abandon his play-by-play post and race to cover his beloved cupathon (focus, Steve, focus), was whether we’d see two catchers in particular.
And we did. We saw Joe Hudson, a career journeyman on a weekend pass to the majors because Luis Torrens took a couple of days of paternity leave. Hudson caught the Mets’ final defensive half-inning, action enough to qualify him as Lifetime Met No. 1,239. Joe didn’t get to bat in what might be his only Mets game, temporarily placing him in the company of another Joe H. who crouched behind the plate without getting to stand beside it, the immortal Joe Hietpas amid the last wisps of 2004, a decidedly less jubilant season-ending occasion than the one that soaked Mays in 1973 (though Hietpas can probably still taste the cup of coffee and consider it champagne). Hudson bounced into the Met organization in April courtesy of the Cubs when the Cubs signed Silent Generation expatriate Ali Sanchez, our 2020 cameo catcher who has since been sent from Chicago to Miami, which in turn created Cubbie-hole space for none other than Tomás Nido, the other catcher we wondered if we were going to get to see on Friday. We did when he pinch-hit with two out in the bottom of the ninth. Nido didn’t respond to the sight of the only team for whom he’d ever played the way Mays did when he homered for the Mets against the Giants in 1972, but three strikes before he ended the game, I gave him a quick Old Friend™ series of claps from my couch. He probably didn’t hear them.
Tomás is an ex-Met after eight seasons of being true blue and orange (his MLB debut came on the wrong end of a 17-5 blowout at Wrigley in September of ’17) because Torrens, when not off taking care of emerging daddy duties, usurped any need for the Met lifer who always did his best, which was, you know, Nido-level. Luis and Tomás shared catching duties for a brief interregnum before Alvarez was pronounced fit as a fiddle and in fine fettle. Francisco returned to daily catching and by some Amazin’ coincidence, the Mets have won practically every day with him fully present. Who knew one of the key players on whom we were relying at the outset of the season being out for an extended period would have a deleterious effect on the ballclub as a whole? God, it’s hilarious how we keep overlooking stuff like that. We didn’t have Alvarez, and we were a worse team. Martinez wasn’t quite ready to swing to his standards, and we didn’t look like we had much of a lineup. Iglesias? Wasn’t he a glove-first, singing-second guy? Now he, like Torrens, is quality depth; Alvarez is shepherding every starter; and Martinez lines the ball everywhere. Better components will do wonders for the collective unit.
It’s the second full day of a summer when we’re one of nine (!) teams within two games of a playoff spot. We’ve got time to figure out plenty. We probably won’t, but we’ll try.
Tom Seaver sought out Willie Mays as the Mets went suitably nuts at the winning of their demi-flag on the final afternoon of ’73. As captured by Mays biographer James Hirsch, Tom asked, “Where’s Willie?” Someone told him, “He took two sips of champagne and he passed out.” No, Willie wouldn’t have been much help draining beer cups in the Wrigley bleachers, but he could do everything else in a ballpark. Jeff Hysen and I reflect on his briliance in the new episode of National League Town, which you can listen to here or wherever you drink in your podcasts.
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