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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Emily Dickinson long ago wrote a poem about a thing with feathers.
She didn’t mean Mike Pelfrey, which was for the best, as Mike Pelfrey with feathers would be horrifying in a Big Bird Turned Primal Nightmare way, sticking his tongue out and clomping around the mound on scaly clawed feet. Shudder.
She meant hope — which manifests itself frequently among baseball fans, less often among Mets fans in this current benighted era, and far less often among Mets fans in this current benighted era when they think about Pelfrey. He’s replaced Luis Castillo as my personal Mets scapegoat. Greg ably summed him up as the Human Pelfing Bag. Patrick Flood, in a great post of his own, compared him to a rock neurotically licking itself. (That’s an oversimplification, but he did.) As Flood notes, Pelfrey’s somehow managed to become the second longest-tenured Met, behind the stalwart, star-crossed David Wright, and has climbed the ranks of the Mets career leaders, coming into sight of the franchise’s top 10 list for starts and wins. With a lot of players, you’d hear that and look forward to seeing the milestone on the scoreboard. With Pelfrey, you hear that and get depressed, thinking that our baseball team sucks even more than you thought.
Mike Pelfrey. Goodness we’re sick of being sick of him.
So where’s the frigging hope already? Jesus, Fry, we know all this bad stuff. Show us the thing with the feathers.
It’s here, in this Anthony DiComo article for MLB.com, and this Times article by Andrew Keh and this Applesauce by Amazin’ Avenue. At the suggestion of Dan Warthen, Pelfrey started raising his glove high to start his windup, as he did in his college days. The results against the Cardinals were pretty horrible yesterday, but Big Pelf didn’t walk anybody and his fastball was sitting between 92 and 94, at least on an always-suspect spring-training gun.
That’s something, right?
A couple of years ago, the Mets had Big Pelf’s college coach on during an inning for the usual pleasantries, which featured Gary Cohen asking about Pelfrey as a college pitcher. His coach, apparently unaware he was supposed to be following a predictably bland script, expressed bafflement at what had happened to his once-prized pupil: Pelfrey didn’t throw hard any more, had scrapped his most successful pitches, and didn’t seem to know what he was doing. The interview ended on an awkward note, with the pretty clear impression that as far as Pelf’s old coach was concerned, the Mets had screwed him up. (Here’s more along those lines from John Sickels last winter.)
I was inclined to believe it then, because what hadn’t the Mets screwed up? I don’t know what to think now, but it’s pretty obvious that Big Pelf is a mess — constantly adding and subtracting pitches, altering his mechanics and rethinking his approach, until he seems baffled by what to do with himself out there. His consistently inconsistent results might be more acceptable to Mets fans if we didn’t constantly have the feeling — perhaps justified, perhaps not — that one of the key problems isn’t in Pelfrey’s arm or his defense, but between his ears.
From that point of view, maybe Pelf and Dan Warthen tinkering in the bullpen isn’t good news. Maybe there are no feathers on this particular bird.
But Pelf isn’t that old. He’s never had a significant injury. The kid who was a star At Wichita State has to still be in there somewhere. Maybe, after all the false starts, a silly thing like lifting his hands can bring that prospect out again.
Maybe not. Probably not. He still hasn’t had a decent start this spring.
But what the heck. It’s March. Isn’t March the time for hope? Even when it involves Mike Pelfrey?
The Holy Books have their share of oddities, from Lost Mets to weirdo minor league cards to guys with one career at-bat. But the oddest card of all comes in the section reserved for the 1961 Expansion Draft. That section includes the 22 players chosen by the Mets to stock their inaugural roster from the collection of has-beens and never-weres made available by the other clubs. (Confronting the motley goods available to him and Mets GM George Weiss, Colt .45s GM Paul Richards announced, “Gentlemen, we’re fucked.”)
The first player in the THB Expansion Draft lineup is Hobie Landrith, the ur-Met. So it runs from there — immortal names such as Elio Chacon, Ed Bouchee, Choo Choo Coleman, Sherman “Roadblock” Jones, Jay Hook — until you get to the 22nd and final player, Lee Walls.
Who?
Ray Lee Walls, of course.
Lee Walls was indeed a Met in October 1961. But he wasn’t one by April 1962: In December Weiss traded him, along with $100,000 of the Mets’ money, to the Dodgers for Charley Neal and Willard Hunter. Walls, by the way, had cost the Mets $125,000 to select, so it cost the Mets $225,000 in 1962 dollars (about $1.7 million today) to watch Charley Neal hit 11 home runs and boot several zillion balls.
In THB terms, Walls’s legacy is a 1961 Topps card in which he’s wearing a Phillies uniform and his trademark spectacles — the only player enshrined in The Holy Books who never played for the Mets. It’s an interesting distinction, but I wondered what other Mets traces Walls might have left. And I wondered about him.
First up, his cardboard legacy.
Walls wound up with two 1962 Dodgers cards — one in which he’s looking to his left and a variant in which he’s looking to his right. He’s hatless in both — standard Topps procedure as insurance against players changing teams. (This was also the era of horrific repaints of hats and uniforms by Topps to transfer late acquisitions into new uniforms, with little regard for players in the background — or sometimes the laws of physics.) The shot of Walls looking to his left has him in pinstripes that look a lot to me like Phillies’ pinstripes tinted gray. This, probably, was going to be Lee Walls’s 1962 Mets card, then replaced by a pinstripe-less shot. (I’m not going to swear on it — ’62 Topps is full of odd variations in photos, tint, etc.)
But Walls did make the Mets in one Topps line — Topps Stamps. He’s No. 140, right between Bob L. Miller and Don Zimmer (who appears in a Mets hat on his ’62 Cincinnati Reds card, but that’s another story). I’d never heard of Topps Stamps, but I couldn’t resist the pull of Lee Walls identified as a New York Met. When the stamp came around on eBay, I bid on it, steeled myself not to go too crazy over a niche product featuring a guy who’d never actually worn orange and blue — and won it for the grand total of 99 cents.
Perfect condition, too.
So much for Lee Walls and Topps. But what about the man himself?
Lee Walls’s trade to the Dodgers was a blessing for him — he was a California kid, a renowned schoolboy athlete who’d thrown four no-hitters at Pasadena High. That was enough for Branch Rickey to give him a $12,000 bonus and a contract with the Pirates in 1951. Rickey saw Walls could pitch, but he also saw that he could hit, and a few spring-training home runs led the Mahatma to turn his new acquisition into an outfielder. Walls hit .342 for Modesto in 1951, then .308 for Waco the next year, which earned him a call-up to the Pirates as a 19-year-old. He hit .188 and wouldn’t be seen in the big leagues again until 1956.
Most of my heroes ain’t found on no stamps…
Walls spent three years playing for the Hollywood Stars of the Pacific Coast League. With the Dodgers and Giants still in New York, that was by no means a bad life — and Walls seems to have a ball supplementing it. He played gunfighters in Westerns and was a maitre d’ in a Palm Springs restaurant, where one day Miss Palm Springs and some friends came in to sell buttons promoting a rodeo. Walls parlayed the button into a date, and the date into a marriage. (Later teammates remarked that Walls had a gift of gab and loved charming his way into fancy restaurants where he and his companions had to stick to the cheap end of the menu.)
The Pirates brought Walls back to the big leagues in 1957, but soon traded him to the Cubs. In 1958, he’d become a folk hero — and a bit player in a baseball drama. The relocated Dodgers were playing in the Los Angeles Coliseum, where the left-field foul pole was just 257 feet away — an arrangement that prompted dire warnings that baseball’s home-run records would be besieged.
Those warnings seemed prescient on April 24, in the Dodgers’ fifth home game. In the first inning, Walls hit a two-run homer off Don Drysdale. In the fifth, he hit a three-run shot off Roger Craig. In the seventh, he hit another three-run homer off Ron Negray. Scribes howled, but Walls defended himself: All three homers had gone over the fence by a comfortable margin (just ask Walter Alston, he insisted), and he’d spent the off-season lifting weights to strengthen his wrists and forearms — heretical advice at the time, but touted by no less than Ted Williams.
Walls continued his home run barrage and became an All-Star during his finest season: a .304 average, 24 homers and 72 RBI. His unlikely heroics and horn-rimmed dark glasses earned him a pretty fantastic nickname from Cubs fans — “Captain Midnight.” His few months as a slugger would also intrigue a Kansas kid who wondered about ballplayers’ brief streaks of stardom, their explanations for such sudden success, and whether those explanations were sound or Just So Stories about statistical noise. That kid was named Bill James, destined to revolutionize the game.
Walls was never that good again, but memories of his 1958 campaign kept him afloat as a useful journeyman, one who could play any outfield position competently, and not embarrass himself as a corner infielder. He could pinch-hit — in ’62, he collected 13 hits in 27 at-bats for L.A. — and newspaper accounts from the early 60s hint that he’d become a wise old hand, respected by Alston and a reliable quote for reporters. But for all that, he was done in 1964, at 31. He played for the Hankyu Braves in 1965 (they’re now the Orix Buffaloes), but would never return to the majors. At least not as a player — he did make it back as a coach, one of Billy Martin’s confidantes with the A’s and then the Yankees, where he earned the derisive nickname “Echo” for supposedly repeating whatever Martin said.
Walls died in 1993. He was only 60. No, he was never a Met. But he lived a pretty interesting baseball life nonetheless.
It used to be a March ritual around here, or in our email exchanges: I’d ask Greg about some non-roster player or prospect in camp, his reply would be oddly noncommittal, I’d ask what was up, and he’d admit — with ill-disguised anguish — that this year he just wasn’t feeling it, that he wasn’t getting excited the way he usually was, and maybe this was the year his attachment to all things Mets withered or even broke.
It never happened, and eventually I came to treat Greg’s annual moment of doubt as part of the spring-training calendar, typically coming about at the midpoint between dopey stories about all the guys In The Best Shape of Their Lives and dopey stories hashing out roster spots 24 and 25, as if there isn’t going to be a last-minute waiver-wire transaction or dog-and-cat trade that turns the whole thing into an academic exercise. It’s as much part of the run-up to Opening Day as the first daffodils.
This year has been weird, though. It’s like our positions have been reversed. I haven’t heard a peep from my blog brother about not feeling it, but I’ve been busy or traveling, and have found myself popping my head up to note with shock that spring training is hurling by and the season is somehow nearly upon us. I’m the one who feels out of sorts and ill-prepared.
Throw in the oddity of the weather — tonight you’d think it was June in New York City — and I’ve really been thrown for a loop. Sure, unseasonable warm periods happen — 14 years ago, Greg and I spent 14 innings sprawled in our seats at Shea on a 88-degree Opening Day, exchanging disbelieving personal weather reports until Bambi Castillo beat the Phillies — but this year fall went out for a smoke break and spring came back. I’m not complaining: It was damn nice walking across Brooklyn today listening to R.A. Dickey throttle the Astros (whose 50th anniversary season doesn’t sound full of promise either) with the sun shining down and people beaming at each other from behind their shades. The flowers are up, the grass is turning green, the trees are budding — so what if the calendar seems to be a month off?
When I joined the broadcast (it was the Astros team, and they ain’t world-beaters) Dickey hadn’t given up a hit. That held true as I strolled from Flatbush to Downtown Brooklyn to Brooklyn Heights. The weather suggested T@m Gl@v!n# should be laboring to make Mets history with Kit Pellow waiting in ambush; out in the bright sunshine it was easy to think for a moment that what Dickey was doing really, really mattered, that if he got through that 27th out you’d see people paused with a hand to an earbud, stopping those in blue and orange hats, and that you’d be part of the slow spread of the amazin’ amazin’ amazin’ news. But no, Dickey couldn’t make history and didn’t make Grapefruit League history either. Which was good — jerks would have just made fun of us for it anyway.
(By the way, I love that the Mets PR department said there had been two Grapefruit League no-hitters by the Mets and Adam Rubin could only find one — a position apparently backed up by Howie Rose. It’s nice that there’s some part of baseball where stats and record-keeping is of the shrug-your-shoulders and what-the-hell persuasion.)
I’m not particularly worried about my out-of-body experiences, though they do seem to be adding up — for instance, I was in New Orleans when word of the Madoff settlement came, and so extracted analysis from my cellphone between gorging myself. The season will come and I’ll snap into focus, recording new Mets for The Holy Books and overanalyzing every move by David Wright and Jason Bay to divine if they’re rejuvenated and appraising the new walls and cheering for the resurrected Johan Santana and Ike Davis and hoping for the continuing development of Jon Niese and Dillon Gee and Ruben Tejada and Daniel Murphy and Lucas Duda and of course spinning goofy scenarios in which everything goes right and we pull a Norfolk State on the powers that be.
Or at least that’s what I assume will happen — my internal clock has been Mets-based for so long that the rhythms of being orange and blue have got to be encoded in my DNA by now. (Yeah, I know it doesn’t work that way. Hush.) Still, it’s funny — you spend the winter staring out the window waiting for it to be (officially) spring, and then March surprises you by hurrying along, at neck-snapping speed, to where you were waiting to be.
A confession: since the first week of December, I’ve been window-shopping at marlins.com. I’ve eyed, ogled and contemplated Item No. 12551066: Miami Marlins Jose Reyes Name and Number T-Shirt by Majestic Athletic. Out of curiosity after Reyes made his free agent decision, I looked to see if such a garment existed. It did, and it was back-ordered, so I forgot about it. Then in the depths of winter, I checked again. It was in stock and promised to ship within one to two business days, which gave me pause but then I rejected what I was thinking. Yet I kept checking back, never making a move, but never completely deciding against it. Then, today, I received an MLB e-mail alerting me there was a discount on just about everything they sell, including Item No. 12551066. The 25% Off brought it down to a reasonable-sounding price. All I had to do to was order it by four o’clock this afternoon.
That and lose my mind…which I almost did.
I came close. My browser was already in Secure Shopping Cart mode and my wallet was on my desk. Enter my info and it would be mine. I would own my seventh variation a REYES 7 t-shirt.
But I entered nothing. I couldn’t do it. No matter how much I wish Jose Reyes was still a Met. No matter how much I resent Mets ownership for finding a way to not have the resources to re-sign him or at least truly pursue him. No matter how I saw the shirt mainly as a statement of protest that one of the two or three best position players the Mets have ever developed was allowed to dash to sunnier, more lucrative climes. No matter that in this season celebrating the Mets’ 50th birthday, their all-time shortstop will be conspicuously absent from all festivities and montages as if he never existed.
I wanted REYES 7 on my back once more, but there was no way I could handle MIAMI on my front. Wrong affiliation for him, wrong affiliation for me. This despite deciding I had precedent in the potential purchase’s favor since I once owned a CINCINNATI 41 t-shirt (discovered at Shea Stadium, no less) and my deep-seated hope that Jose stays healthy and succeeds wildly, albeit in a vacuum of team non-competitiveness, for the next six years.
I will root against his employers and colleagues but I will not root against him.
I’m already permanently disgusted a hated division rival was suddenly so well-positioned to lure away my favorite player of the past decade. My giving them an additional $18.76, or whatever cut Jeffrey Loria would grab of the discounted t-shirt price, wouldn’t make me feel any better about the turn of events that leaves me Reyesless except in memory. It was too logical to not realize before I clicked off marlins.com once and for all. It was even emotionally resonant. My hatred for the franchise that pulled the rug out from under the last two final weekends that absolutely mattered in Mets history burns a bright teal…or orange…or black…or yellow…or whatever colors they now feature.
So I wound up making a pro-Mets statement, which is what I usually make, by not making an implied anti-Mets ownership statement, which was never intended to have been a pro-Marlins statement but couldn’t help but be perceived that way if I actually wore something bearing their stupid crest.
This, I suppose, is how the Wilpons get ya every time.
Lily Tomlin once wondered “what it would be like if we all became what we wanted to be when we grew up. I mean, imagine a world filled with nothing but firemen, cowboys, nurses and ballerinas.” In that fanciful spirit, imagine a world based entirely on the things we’ve seen in Spring Training.
The Mets hardly ever win.
The Mets hardly ever hit.
The Mets hardly ever heal.
With childlike wonder, we believe these trends — manifesting themselves in games that have never counted, don’t count now and will never count — represent the reality we are certain will always exist. We’ve been watching this particular spring’s baseball for a little more than two weeks, thus making it the only baseball we know.
It does quite the number on our highly impressionable psyches.
First we grow restless from the lack of winning, the lack of hitting and the lack of healing. Then we grow discontented, filling our minds with every conceivable form of Met anxiety. Then we grow a bumper crop of dubious assumptions (such as only Scott Hairston can replace Andres Torres and nobody can truly replace Scott Hairston, ergo we are irreversibly screwed) in the space where our long-term memory of previous springs’ chimeras ought to go. We forget that in other years when Met Marches were clunky, it didn’t much matter…and that in other years when Met Marches were smooth, it didn’t much matter, either.
Then we grow out of it, generally at a point between the last approving mention of “the berm” and the moment the Shea family presents our manager with a floral horseshoe of good tidings for what lies ahead. What lies immediately behind will be forgotten so completely that when next spring rolls around, we won’t remember any of it and we’ll go through the same mental machinations all over again.
Which, of course, is why fans need Spring Training just as much as the players.
If the Wilpons are still running this team for years to come and the Mets have been restored to some semblance of vitality because the organization is no longer distracted by an issue bigger than baseball, today’s settlement of the case concerning their involvement in the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme before it could go to trial was a good thing. If the Wilpons eventually have to sell anyway in light of all the zeroes that continue to follow them around and the Mets franchise is reinvigorated for the long term by new ownership, today’s settlement should be marked down as, at the very least, not a bad thing.
If the Mets continue to operate as if they’ve taken up residence in Kansas City because the Wilpons and all their presence implies are still here, then the settlement is lousy news. If the Wilpons still have to sell and the new buyers are worse owners than this crew has been — which is certainly a possibility despite the two bitter, barren periods (2002-2004, 2009-present) over which current ownership has presided in the past decade — then it’s not good.
That’s the least sophisticated analysis I can offer, perhaps the least sophisticated analysis you will read in the wake of the Wilpons apparently getting off cheap. At the risk of not taking into account whether justice was or wasn’t done, I’m going to take the provincial view and concentrate on whether this was good for the Mets…and by “the Mets,” I mean us, the Mets fans. Will we, when the current dust settles, have a team that year in, year out has a chance to compete and make us more proud than disgusted?
I don’t know. But that’s what will tell me if any good came out of this settlement today.
It’s relatively big news to us when former Mets show up in the majors in non-Mets uniforms. It’s huge news in Japan when somebody from their leagues show up in the majors (our majors, I guess they’d say). Yu Darvish as a Texas Ranger is the latest example of a Japanese star causing a Japanese stir simply by playing in America. What’s rarely more than a line or two in the agate type, however, is when former Mets become current Swallows or Lions or what have you. Yet it’s happened far more often than any of us who doesn’t track these things probably realizes.
Eric Hillman, for example, was an enormous New York Met of little renown in the first half of the early 1990s. Then he seemed to just disappear, which of course didn’t happen because you can’t make a 6’ 10” pitcher disappear, no matter how hard he is hit. Hillman went to Japan after the whole Mets thing didn’t work out and had a great time pitching for a former Met who never played in Japan but became its most famous manager (to us, anyway), Bobby V.
“I busted my butt and played well for him in Norfolk, in Tidewater, and he says, ‘you wanna go?’ and I said ‘yeah, I’d love to.’”
In a rollicking, must-listen interview with SportsTalkNY — mesmerizing less for his throwing former teammates under the bus than standing up and pointing out to the driver which of the erstwhile passengers were causing the ruckus that made the bus fly off the cliff — Hillman reflects for a few minutes on his time in the Land of the Rising Sun. Well, “reflects” may not be the right word, considering the first thing he talks about his height relative to the size of the standard Japanese toilet (Hillman never pitched for St. Louis but he sure is a card), but the remembrances are definitely fun and insightful.
Eric went to Japan and received “fight money,” significant bonuses of several thousand dollars doled out for winning efforts. “Luckily, I won a lot over there,” Hillman said, marveling that “the wild thing about Japan is they just leave it on your stool.”
“When you come in the next day, your money would just be in an envelope, in cash, on your stool, and they never 1099’d me for that stuff or anything.”
I have to admit I had no idea until Metstradamus mentioned the interview that Eric Hillman had pitched in Japan. With a couple of exceptions, I had no idea until looking it up that dozens of players who spent time as Mets found themselves playing baseball half a world away when the Mets and the rest of MLB were through with them.
Because Bobby V was so high-profile in his second term with the Chiba Lotte Marines, I knew Matt Franco and Benny Agbayani followed him to Japan and helped him win a championship. I was vaguely aware of a few other names that had gone West to East over the decades, such as Wayne Garrett (a Chunichi Dragon when his 1969 Met teammates were celebrating the tenth anniversary of their miracle), Tom O’Malley (who pinch-hit one memorable homer as a Met in 1990 and later won an MVP award for the Swallows) and Mike Hessman (whose sole Met home run in 2010 fascinated me enough to notice the agate type mentioning he’d signed with the Orix Buffaloes).
According to my exhaustive research — consisting of a thought-provoking e-mail thread with some friends, skimming a Wikipedia page listing expatriate American players and cross-referencing that with Baseball-Reference — I count about forty former Mets who continued their careers in Japan (as opposed to American players who boomeranged back from Japan to careers in America, such as Pat Mahomes, Brandon Knight, Julio Franco and current currency-waster D.J. Carrasco).
You know which ex-Mets go to Japan to keep playing baseball? Not great ones, to be perfectly frank. Probably the biggest name in the bunch, if it’s not Agbayani or Garrett, belongs to Kevin Mitchell, The man who scored the tying run in Game Six spent part of a season as a Fukuoka Daiei Hawk in 1995, after leaving the Reds and before realighting as a Red Sock. This was six years after he was Most Valuable Player of the National League and nine years after his crucial World Series base hit.
That figures. You don’t go from America to Japan at the top of your game. You go when you don’t have a better American option. You go when you’re Mike Marshall — the first baseman, not the pitcher — and it’s 1992 and you haven’t been an All-Star since 1984 and you were utterly ineffectual as a Met in 1990 so you give being a Nippon Ham Fighter a shot. You go when you’re Gary Rajsich, the great Tide hope whose impending brilliance gave us something to look forward to during the strike of 1981 but whose ensuing Met tenure in 1982 and 1983 didn’t quite measure up to his Triple-A notices; he extended his livelihood as a Chunichi Dragon from 1986 to 1988. You go when you’re Don Zimmer, the first failed 1962 Met third baseman, determined to hang on as a Toei Flyer in 1966.
You go if you enjoy a stockpile of cult cachet among Mets fans (Bruce Boisclair, 1980 Hanshin Tigers) or just a hint of it (Kelvin Torve, 1992-1993 Orix BlueWave). You go if your “future star” status from the back of the Mets yearbook never quite came to fruition (Ike Hampton, Kinetsu Buffaloes, 1981). You go if you were a few tools short of what the Mets swore you were packing (Alex Ochoa, Chunichi Dragons, 2003 to 2006). You go if you enjoyed a solid, unspectacular stretch in orange and blue (Mark Carreon, Chiba Lotte Marines, 1997-1998). You go if your extra-inning homer spoiled somebody else’s playoff hopes but you never homered again (Craig Brazell, Sataima Seibu Lions, 2008).
Even if you didn’t know who went before you looked it up, you’re not surprised that their ranks include a slew of Mike Fyhiries, Shawn Gilberts and Jon Nunnallys. It’s not surprising, either, that Lastings Milledge, a top draft pick who famously didn’t pan out, and Chris Carter, a pinch-hitter judged quickly by a new regime as fatally one-dimensional, are preparing to join the ranks of Met gaijin. You’re only surprised when you hear a former bit Met who lengthened his career in Asia might be coming back…as C.J. Nitkowskimight be.
The least surprising aspect of any of this? That baseball players will attempt to immerse themselves in a completely foreign culture nearly 7,000 miles from Flushing (or at least put up with it) to keep playing baseball. Baseball is what they do and, I think we’d all agree, baseball is just that great, no matter where it is played.
Plus those envelopes filled with fight money sound pretty sweet.
(NOTE: Readers have pointed out Edgardo Alfonzo and Felix Millan were pretty fair Mets who extended their careers in Japan, Fonzie as a Yomiuri Giant and Millan as a Taiyo Whale. I’d say they move to the front of this particular class.)
If you can handle a brief diversion from achy players and tetchy managers (not to mention defendant owners), it overjoys me to report that in a rare March game that counted and got my attention, it was USF 65 Cal 54Wednesday night in Dayton. Really, it was more like Silent Cal, as they trailed your University of South Florida Bulls by as many as thirty, thus reminding me of the lady who told notoriously taciturn President Coolidge that she’d made a bet that she could get him to say more than two words. His response?
“You lose.”
Enough about the Golden Bears. It’s the Golden Brahmans — as my alma mater’s teams were long ago known — who are moving on in the NCAA Tournament for the very first time. USF was previously party to March Madness in 1990 and 1992, one and done on both occasions. This year, we seeped into truTV’s prime time lineup as one-eighth of what they call the First Four. Some said we didn’t belong, not even on the outskirts of the Big Dance. But the First Four represented a foot in the door, and now we’re fully inside the gymnasium.
Next up for the Bulls is Temple on Friday night. I don’t think I’ve been so excited by such a prospect since I was nine and briefly entranced by what they were telling us in Hebrew school.
Tim Byrdak is slated to miss six weeks because of knee surgery. While we wish him well, what’s six weeks when compared to 72 years? And what’s torn meniscus cartilage next to a wet schmaltz sandwich?
A wet schmaltz sandwich isn’t yet another injury for which Mets doctors have no known cure. Rather, it was a symptom of why Cousin Milton went on baseball’s inactive list in 1940 and came off it only last week.
Cousin Milton isn’t my cousin, but my friend Jeff’s. Jeff planned a March trip to visit family in Florida, which made for a convenient excuse to take in a Mets-Marlins game at Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter (or it might have been the other way around). Cousin Milton joined Jeff, his son, Dylan, and his dad, Murray, at the ballpark, which wouldn’t be terribly noteworthy except it was Milton’s first live, professional action in 72 years.
That’s even longer than it’s taking David Wright to resume baseball activities.
Why the gap? As Milton explained to Jeff, he was a lad in Brooklyn before the war when he got his first chance to attend Ebbets Field. It was, he recalled, the Dodgers and…well, he had to think about it. Maybe it was “a team that isn’t playing anymore; maybe the Pittsburgh Pirates” (Dear Pirates: your profile could use raising). The important thing was there was a ballpark; and there was Milton and his cousin Murray; and there were the schmaltz sandwiches they brought from home; and, most vividly, there was a revelation once the kid got to his seat:
“He said that he never saw grass that green.”
You hear that a lot from adults remembering their first baseball experience, but in this case it’s no default cliché. “You have to remember,” Milton reminded his relatives in 2012, “there was no TV.” To know a lawn grew in Brooklyn, you had to see it for yourself.
Alas, Milton saw the grass, but he didn’t see a game. He saw rain. Great for the grass. Not so great for baseball. “The sandwiches were ruined,” Jeff relays from Milton, leaving one to contemplate how a sandwich featuring rendered chicken fat wasn’t already a precarious proposition. On top of that, Milton caught a cold “and his mother yelled at him for going.”
And he never went again, until last week.
A few things to consider, beyond how someone left the schmaltz out in the rain:
1) Seven decades and change later, much has come, much has gone, but baseball remains. If ever you require additional evidence to back up the “one constant” speech from Field Of Dreams, I’m sure the trustee won’t mind if you call Cousin Milton to the stand.
2) Though Milton caught hell as well as that cold and maybe let baseball slip away from his daily concerns, when the family got together for dinner after the game in Jupiter, he could still rattle off every National League lineup of the era from when he was a boy and he really cared about such things. Says Jeff, “My father never heard him talk about baseball before.” (The one constant through all the years, Ray…the one constant through all the years.)
3) While nobody would dispute Milton’s characterization of the verdant Ebbets outfield, what he might have witnessed before the weather got the best of him, Murray and their lunch can’t help but be a little hazy 72 years after the fact. Milton said the game was rained out in the second inning and Paul Waner, the Pittsburgh Hall of Famer who allegedly received his “Big Poison” nickname from the Brooklyn fans (so as to distinguish him from his brother, Lloyd, the little person — or “poison” in Flatbushspeak), homered. Except when you comb the Sporting News and New York Times archives, you learn it rained through batting practice and fielding drills on Thursday afternoon, May 23, 1940 — the date of the only Pittsburgh at Brooklyn rainout of that season — and the Bucs and Bums never actually got started. Depending on how wet our guys allowed themselves and their sandwiches to get, they might have seen a pretty good show anyway. According to the Times, Pee Wee Reese (then a rookie), Cookie Lavagetto (later a Met coach under Casey Stengel) and Vito Tamulis (a lefty pitcher) took the field after the game was called and had coach Charlie Dressen “slash” grounders at them “while a handful of incorrigible fans who were still in the stands applauded vigorously”. Maybe Milton and Murray were part of that crowd. Maybe that’s how you catch a cold.
4) Oh, Milton’s mom…how could you snuff the candle on your boy’s baseball fandom so early in life? Because he got sick? He got well again. The Dodgers would only be in Brooklyn another seventeen years. What a shame Milton never got another look at that green grass. What a shame he wasn’t of a baseball mind to have his passion reignited when the Mets came along five years after the Dodgers vamoosed. At least that’s the view of someone whose first game at Shea Stadium was missed because he had a cold. If I’d caught it there instead of a few days earlier in September 1972, perhaps my mother would have attempted to have brought the hammer down my budding baseball affections when I was just a lad. It wouldn’t have worked (we had TV by then) but it could have gotten ugly. On the other hand, what would have been just another Spring Training game last week wouldn’t have become a connection to all that once was good, and all that could be again.
5) If you eat schmaltz sandwiches when you’re a kid (except for the ones that are soaked through), there’s apparently a decent chance you’ll live into your eighties. Who knew?
You’ve all seen it: The fan who draws back from the bar or the TV with a look somewhere between shock and disbelief on his or her face, then gets it together and manages to mutter, “Oh man … THIS TEAM.”
If you’re true to the orange and blue, you’ve probably muttered that yourself a few thousand times in the last few years. You’ve probably also noticed the media and fans of other teams behaving like vultures, all too eager to broadcast the latest Mets-related disaster. You’ve probably gotten pissed off about this. And perhaps you’ve sworn that you’ll be less quick with the groaning and the muttering, determined to starve this particular narrative. Heck, it’s not like the Mets haven’t had company in their recent misery: The Yankees and Phillies saw playoff series end with sluggers taking called third strikes, while the Braves and Red Sox rolled into this year’s spring training not wanting to talk about stunning collapses. No other team’s financial foundation has been damaged by a white-collar criminal in quite the same way as Bernie Madoff, but the Rangers and Dodgers have been roiled by balance-sheet woes and ownership crises.
So no, we aren’t unique or alone.
But for all that, “Oh man … THIS TEAM.”
Johan Santana’s looked pretty healthy (though slow on radar guns) and Ike Davis seems to be both mobile and unaffected by Valley Fever, but everybody else seems ready for the knacker’s yard. Say temporary farewell to Scott Hairston, who’d been in Port St. Lucie about five seconds before succumbing to last year’s oblique injury. Say goodbye for now to Tim Byrdak, reduced to photobombing Facebook snaps of pissed-off people in hospital waiting rooms, as his torn meniscus will keep him out of action for four to six weeks. David Wright is in New York, getting an MRI for a rib-cage injury. Lucas Duda’s battled back problems. So has Danny Herrera. I can’t spell Kirk Neuwenhuis’s name without cheating, but “oblique” rattles off my keyboard thanks to long practice. I couldn’t pick Robert Carson out of a police lineup, but I know he’s been held back by an intercostal muscle, which I’ve never heard of and assume is one of those parts of the body that exists just to sideline baseball players. (See also: hamate bone.) And of course Reese Havens has shed a part or two somewhere along the way.
I know, it’s not yet St. Patrick’s Day. Injuries heal, the bad luck of March can be long forgotten by May, and the Mets likely won’t be as bad as all the hyenas out there seem to think. (Which isn’t the same as saying they’ll be good.) And soon we’ll have regular-season baseball back, which will be a boon and a blessing even if the DL’s more crowded than we’d like.
But guys in MRI tubes and under the knife and not on the bus … it’s an old, unwelcome refrain, and at this point I can’t blame my fellow Mets fans who look up and assume they’ll find a little black cloud sitting right overhead.
Piazza: Catcher, Slugger, Icon, Star by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers.
Amazin' Again: How the 2015 New York Mets Brought the Magic Back to Queens by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers.
Volume I of The Happiest Recap: 50+ Years of the New York Mets As Told in 500+ Amazin' Wins by Greg Prince is available in print and for Kindle on Amazon.
Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History by Greg Prince (foreword by Jason Fry), is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers.
