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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 15 May 2012 2:40 pm  After re-editing the 1985 highlight video in such a manner to reignite the whole Roe v. Wade controversy (because it was such an abortion), SNY tries to make it up to us by presenting Mets Yearbook: 1962. It debuts Thursday night at 8:00 and reairs at 10:00, in concert with the channel’s 50 Greatest Mets show (which is on at 7:00 and 9:00).
Assuming there is no musical licensing they’re trying to work their way around, this journey to the Mets’ origins figures to be a trip worth taking. Hell, it’s a big enough deal to have caught the notice of Ken Belson in the New York Times, who advises, ” To Mets fans who bleed Orange and Blue, the video […] is a precious time capsule. Filmed before the Mets had played an exhibition game, the Mets were still undefeated and fans could dream that George Weiss, the team’s stuffy president, had a plan to produce a contender.”
If that isn’t Metnip, I don’t know what is.
Also encouraging from Belson is the word from SNY that the remaining holes in its promised 1962-1988 Mets Yearbook library will be filled his year, albeit with one glaring exception. We will see the films from 1964, 1974, 1983 and 1987. No mention was made of 1986, but honestly, that’s sort of OK with me, since A Year to Remember, like 1985’s No Surrender, is chockful of MTV-style musical montages set to recognizable songs. They so shredded and sullied the 1985 version with inexpensive generic production music that I don’t want to see 1986 watered down. Give me “Like A Rock” or give me dearth, you might say.
Oh, and Citi Field’s hosting of the 2013 All-Star Game is finally going to be announced as official Wednesday, according to Ken Davidoff in the Post. That’s nice, too. But Mets Yearbook: 1962 is truly stellar news.
Image courtesy of kcmets.com.
by Greg Prince on 15 May 2012 12:29 am Seven scoreless from Jamie Moyer’s spiritual younger brother from another mother Miguel Batista…spectacular.
Daniel Murphy skipping a ball between Kirk Nieuwenhuis’s strides and through the shortstop hole Gary Cohen had detected a moment earlier…delicious.
Terry Collins ordering a squeeze bunt and Ronny Cedeño executing it to two-nothing perfection…wunderbar!
David Wright…superlatives implied.
So many marvelous morsels to chew on for eight innings of reasonably robust New York Mets baseball, yet the whole night felt like one of those overlong prerace shows with which NBC fills two hours in advance of the Kentucky Derby, a.k.a. “the most exciting two minutes in sports”. Except we weren’t sipping mint juleps. More likely we were questioning our decision to not install a home oxygen bar as the ninth approached.
Make way for the most stressful three outs in baseball. Make way for this year’s model of the Mets closer whom none of us trusts, even if none of us can come up with a definitively better long-term solution besides “closers are overrated” and/or “FUCK!”
Make way for Frank Francisco, one day after The Weekend That Was for the latest in an endless line of recriminations and misgivings where short Met leads and long ninth innings are concerned. While in Miami, Francisco undid whatever goodwill he rustled up from saving three consecutive games a week earlier…which in turn helped us forget how bad he looked a couple of times in the middle of April…which blotted out the image of him registering three saves in the Mets’ first three wins of the year.
Somebody’s a little streaky here. It could be Frank or it could be us as fans. Whichever, the race was on in the top of the ninth to get the Mets’ 3-0 lead safely in the paddock. Who would cross the finish line first? The Mets? The Brewers? Our and Collins’s trust in Francisco? The closer’s reputation, or at least the one that earned him his lucrative contract?
Enough prerace yak. The ninth inning gate is lifted…and he’s off!
Per usual.
Ryan Braun singles to start the ninth. It isn’t the most encouraging of indicators, but it was Braun, who almost won a batting title in 2011 (but didn’t). Not the end of the world.
All right, deep breath, settle down, it’s just one baserunner.
Braun takes off for second essentially unimpeded. Safe.
That’s not good, either, but that’s what that insurance run in the eighth was for. Breathe.
Aramis Ramirez grounds out uneventfully. Good man, I can’t believe I’m saying — about Ramirez, I mean. He gives Frank a breather, just like he gave us that insurance run by dropping the ball in the rundown that didn’t run down Wright. I’m still mad at Ramirez for working a critical leadoff walk versus Dave Mlicki in 1998 when he was an 0-for-19 rookie, but his grounder to short is helpful in the here and now.
Another breath. Not as deep. Not as stressed out.
Corey Hart singles Braun home. Oh, that’s not good. Earlier Hart looked more pissed about a called strike three than even Francisco could have gesticulated when he didn’t get his strikes called on Sunday. So now it’s 3-1, and sating Hart isn’t doing any good for my heart.
Tying run up. Just ’cause bad things happened Friday and yesterday doesn’t mean they’re predestined. Prince Fielder’s not with this Crew anymore. Just breathe.
Taylor Green, whose existence is news to me this night, introduces himself a little better with a walk on a three-two pitch. Tying run on first, go-ahead run coming to the plate.
WHERE’D THEY GET THIS GUY FROM? FRANK FRANCISCO, I MEAN! I KNOW WHERE THEY GOT HIM FROM, BUT “FREE AGENT MARKET AFTER RELATIVELY SUCCESSFUL AMERICAN LEAGUE CAREER” WON’T DO IT RHETORICALLY! WHERE’D THEY GET THIS GUY FROM?
Brooks Conrad, notorious for his hands of stone as a Brave, is up. He manages to hold on to his bat as strike three is called for the second out. It might upset Corey Hart standing over there on second, but all we care abut is soothing Frank Francisco. And ourselves.
Breathe, man. Make like Faith Hill and just breathe.
George Kottaras is the next batter, and on a two-one count, he lifts a fly ball to what appears no man’s land.
FUCK! FUCKING FRANCISCO! FUCK! I CAN’T PUT IT ANY MORE PLAINLY THAN THAT!
I should note it appears that way because I have the TV in my office set up at such angle that if I’m sitting at my desk, as I was, I can’t see the right third of the screen. It’s not a good way to judge fly balls that weren’t really heading for no man’s land — just Lucas Duda’s able glove after a brief trot.
So the Mets won and Francisco saved, placed, showed and didn’t spit the bit whatsoever. Our confidence in our closer, renewable via a perpetual series of 24-hour options, is bolstered for literally another day.
Normal breathing may resume.
by Greg Prince on 14 May 2012 3:55 pm That darn Giancarlo Stanton really did it to us Sunday. What a bastard.
The walkoff grand slam that added a fashionable dent to the fishy Home Run Sculpture? No, not that (though that sucked, too). I’m talking about Stanton’s first hit, the single to center that opened the bottom of the second, which was the Marlins’ first hit of the game. That’s the one that did the historical damage to the Mets.
Stanton’s single extended the most ignominious regular-season streak going in baseball, a streak built upon the work of 1,524 baseball players in all, including…
Honestly, it would probably be easier to start listing players who hadn’t preceded Giancarlo Stanton (who did it once before, back when he was Mike Stanton), but I don’t have that list. I have this other list. And this other list includes, in addition to Stanton/the Stantons…
• Julian Javier first, chronologically.
• Pete Rose first, cumulatively.
• Dick Groat, four times almost immediately, and fourteen times besides.
• Jimmy Rollins and Juan Pierre, early, often and lately.
• Gary Carter 18 times, Lenny Dykstra 15 times, Keith Hernandez 14 times, Ray Knight and Wally Backman three times each and Darryl Strawberry twice.
• Bill Buckner 25 times.
• Jose Reyes just once — very, very recently, though.
• Leron Lee four times, though he’s known best for this one time; Joe Wallis just the one time you would guess; and Jimmy Qualls not once but twice!
• And if you think that rates an exclamation point, consider Tom Seaver did it once, too.
I mean, Tom Seaver did it once, too!
As soon as you saw the name “Qualls,” you probably figured out this list has something to do with breaking up Met no-hitters. Actually, this list has everything to do with breaking up Met no-hitters, which goes a long way in explaining why the Mets have no no-hitters.
Why? Because somebody’s always getting the first hit of a game against Mets pitchers.
When we think of Met no-hitters being broken up, we tend to veer instinctively to the heartbreakers, like the only three times one of them was carried into a ninth inning, all by Tom Seaver. Those were ruined with one out by Jimmy Qualls in 1969, with one out by Leron Lee in 1972 and with two out (albeit in the bottom of the ninth in a scoreless game) by Tarzan Joe Wallis in 1975. We also tend to think of near-misses that inched almost as close, those spoiled by the likes of Paul Hoover against John Maine in 2007 or Chris Burke against Pedro Martinez in 2005 or Wade Boggs against Rick Reed in 1998 or Ernie Banks against Gary Gentry in 1970, to name four that left marks as deep as Stanton’s homer did within the infrastructure of Red Grooms’s conversation piece.
We never think about something as pedestrian as M/G Stanton singling off Jon Niese in the second inning, but the second inning is where nearly 24% of all Met no-hitters are taken from us. That’s the second-most common inning for the death of our dreams, behind only — you got it — the first inning, where just about 58% of Met no-hitters meet their untimely end. It may not be as dramatic as Chin-Hui Tsao or Kit Pellow or Cole Hamels or the rest of those schlubs breaking things up just as we’re beginning to believe this is the one, but the bottom line is just as definitive.
Met no-hitters are broken up at all junctures by all kinds of batters — famous and obscure, cozily familiar and utterly nefarious, from 1962 to 2012, until whenever a Met no-hitter finally isn’t broken up at all.
That date is purely TBD, and it’s about the only fact the guy who put together the data from which I quote can’t tell me. For this treasure trove of perversely entertaining statistical goodies (as Tex Antoine might have ill-advisedly quipped had he done sports instead of weather, if the breaking up of a Met no-hitter is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it), I have absolutely committed Mets fan and FAFIF reader — is there any other kind of either? — JoeNunz to thank. Without a Web site of his own or any cause greater than loitering at the corner of obsession and curiosity, Joe has dug into Retrosheet and discerned the initial hit-getting killjoys in every one of the Mets’ first 8,002 regular-season games.
Joe’s explanation of why this list exists? “Somebody cares about this stuff, I suppose.”
Talk about selling one’s creation short. His so-called “data dump” is found art, beautiful in its lack of judgment. For 8,002 games, a Met no-hitter has failed to ignite. Joe tabbed the 1,524 culprits and spread them out across an amazing Excel spreadsheet. “WANTED” posters couldn’t do a better job of illustrating what a rich tapestry of baseball villains remain unavenged after 50+ years.
The tally starts on April 11, 1962, when it was Julian Javier singling to left off Roger Craig in the bottom of the first inning at the original Busch Stadium in St. Louis, unleashing the original “there goes the no-hitter!” cry from Mets fans. Say this for Craig: he waited until the second batter to allow the breaking up to commence, having retired Curt Flood on a fly to center before Javier did his extremely imitable thing. Longtime Cardinal Julian Javier would go on to break up 17 Met no-hitters in all — and a generation later, his son, Stan Javier, broke up seven more.
Breaking up Met no-hitters: It’s a family affair.
You can’t help but notice how present Dick Groat is almost right off the bat, probably because he was the second Pirate hitter Met pitchers saw every time the Mets played Pittsburgh in April 1962, which was a lot. As the Mets were going 0-for-9 in their first nine games, Groat was establishing a sizable lead among breaker-uppers, eventually becoming the cad responsible for ruining 18 potential Met no-hitters in his career. By comparison, the leadoff hitter he hit behind, Bill Virdon, put the kibosh on only a dozen Met no-hitters.
To really etch a lasting place on a list that encompasses everybody from Hank Aaron (24) to Paul Zuvela (2), you have to stick around. That would explain why baseball gods in the twilight of their careers when the Mets began their existence in a haze of futility don’t necessarily dominate these ranks. Stan Musial, for example, collected a mere three first hits against the Mets, meaning The Man did no more such damage than passing fancies/intermittent Met killers like Cody Ross, Mark Whiten, Raul Ibañez and Joe Randa — who, in turn can claim as many first hits as accumulated by Ricky Ledee, Joe McEwing, Ken Boyer and David Segui, to name four Mets from when they weren’t Mets. That’s the non-judgmental nature of JoeNunz’s list. The names fall where they fall when they fall, not unlike those darn base hits.
Leading off a game against any Met starter from Juan Acevedo to Victor Zambrano would figure to give a batter a leg up on shooting the clown, as they say, and indeed roughly a quarter of all Met no-hitters are taken out of commission by the first rival batter in any contest. Thus, it’s not surprising that leadoff hitters who stuck around forever are the ones who tend to stick it to the Mets forever.
You thought we hated Pete Rose because he took out his frustrations on Buddy Harrelson? Maybe it’s really because he there-wented the no-hitter a staggering 86 times (plus once in the 1973 playoffs, with a fourth-inning single the day after he got physical with our beloved shortstop). Charlie Hustle’s category leadership is an inevitable symptom of being a nagging National League top-of-the-order pest across almost half of the Mets’ existence to date. Rose dashed Met no-hit aspirations for the first time on June 15, 1963, at Crosley Field against Tracey Stallard and for the last time (as a second-place hitter) against Rick Aguilera at Shea Stadium on July 24, 1985.
You can bet nobody’s close to Rose on this list, but a couple of those who are remotely nearby have been getting on base and our nerves throughout the last decade. Jimmy Rollins increased his total to 52 Met no-hit breakups last week, which puts him one behind Rose runner-up Ryne Sandberg. Fellow Phillie and erstwhile Marlin Juan Pierre did the deed twice in the same series at Citizens Bank Park, giving him 36 clown-shootings, thus winning him sole possession of ninth place just ahead of ancient tormentors Andre Dawson, Ozzie Smith and Guy For Whom Ozzie Smith Was Traded Garry Templeton.
Templeton, in case you zoned out for a few months in 1991, tried to make up for his bad behavior by donning a Mets uniform prior to retiring. It didn’t begin to compensate for wrecking 35 potential Met no-hitters, but it did provide Garry an additional fragment of Met notoriety as he was starting to depart from active duty. Nobody who ever played for the Mets broke up more Met no-hitters than Templeton.
Garry leads the likes of Larry Bowa (30), Brett Butler (30), Joe Torre (30), Rusty Staub (26), Tim Foli (26), Willie Mays (24, natch), Ron Hunt (24), Luis Castillo (24) and Gary Sheffield (24) in earning varying degrees of cognitive Met no-hit dissonance. If you’re a Met completist, you have to blink twice before realizing guys you rooted for — like Carter, Hernandez and a passel of 1986 Mets — helped keep the ignominy alive.
Bowa’s Met tenure was brief and ineffectual, plus he was a Phillie; no wonder he’d screw with our no-hitters. Mays was great for a pre-Met eternity; surely he ruined everybody’s no-hitters. But Le Grand Orange being such a royal pain in this regard is a little surprising until you acknowledge that for all his essential two-term Metness, he did play a lot of seasons for Houston and Montreal. And Luis Castillo? The guy who was shy about using two hands found the time to strangle two-dozen no-hitters from our grasp (most notably in a one-hitter improbably tossed by Aaron Heilman)? Makes sense if you think about it: He batted high in the Marlins’ lineup for many a year, and the Mets play a hundred games annually against the Marlins.
But if you don’t think about it, you’re better off, because it’s Luis Castillo.
You are also well off to not dwell on one more reason to not want to bid Chipper Jones a fond adieu, just an adieu (25 first hits); should never feel bad about changing the course of Bill Buckner’s future from Game Six onward (25 first hits, plus Games Five and Seven of the 1986 World Series); and even you “ya gotta respect what a great player he is” apologists will shudder to learn there’s one player here who has never spent a day in the National League yet has notched as much Met no-hitter wreckage as Mays, Hunt, Castillo, Aaron, Davey Lopes, Barry Bonds, Dave Parker…yes, Derek Jeter has snuffed out our hypothetical hopes in their larval stages a staggering 24 Interleague times.
That’s not counting his leadoff home run off Bobby Jones in Game Four of the 2000 World Series. ’Cause to do that would just be mean.
The idea informing the mining of JoeNunz’s data is not cruelty but capriciousness. It’s celebrating the weird unpredictability of how our no-hitters haven’t come to be. Granted, the upper tier is not that unpredictable. Really, who wouldn’t have assumed Rollins, Jones and Jeter had embedded into their souls an extra layer of evil devoted to ensuring so many Met pitchers wouldn’t pitch no-hitters? And JoeNunz had no problem predicting weeks in advance of this past Friday that milestone Met game without a no-hitter No. 8,000 would be the product of a Jose Reyes leadoff triple — because, let’s face it, how could it not have been?
To steer this thing in a more lighthearted direction, let us consider Jimmy Qualls, whom even the most slightly prepared student of Mets history recognizes as the one-hit wonder who stabbed Tom Seaver’s bid for a perfect game in the back with a vile clean single to left-center at Shea Stadium on July 9, 1969, when Tom was a mere two outs from keeping the lack of Met no-hitters from being a thing. What only Jimmy Qualls would know is Qualls did it again the very next week. Granted, the circumstances weren’t nearly as epic, but it was still the Mets and Cubs, it was still a battle to gain footing in a pennant race and it was still Qualls with the first hit, this one off Gary Gentry on July 15, 1969: leadoff single, bottom of the third at Wrigley Field. As happened six days earlier, Qualls’s devilishness wasn’t enough to puncture the Met balloon, as Gentry led the upstarts from New York to a 5-4 victory.
Gary gave up 121 first hits in his four seasons with us, or seventeenth-most among Met starting pitchers, wedging him between Jack Fisher (133) and Pat Zachry (112). The leader on this side of the non-no-hitters is, as you’d suspect, Tom Seaver, with 394 games started and zero no-hitters accomplished. That’s despite being Tom Seaver and all that implies. You know about Qualls. You probably (I would hope) have heard that Lee of the Padres and Wallis of the Cubs also got in the way of the Franchise burnishing his legacy that much more. And no doubt you know Seaver finally threw the no-hitter he deserved in 1978, even though the color scheme of his uniform that day was a sad shade of Cincinnati red.
But who knew…I mean WHO KNEW…that Tom Seaver has a place in the grab bag of no-hitter breaker-uppers alongside a jumble of Pat Borques, Colby Rasmuses, Alex Cintrons, John Tamargos and too many to sanely name with ONE Met no-hitter broken up to his credit. Or discredit, if you’re scoring at home.
At Shea Stadium on August 28, 1981, after his catcher, Mike O’Berry, had walked with one out in the top of the third inning, Seaver the Red beat out a sacrifice bunt attempt against Ed Lynch. It was scored the first Cincinnati hit of the evening. Therefore, when he landed on first, Tom had made sure his name would carry a touch of bizarre infamy within the broader, already bizarre discussion of Met no-hit attempts gone bad.
Which, of course, would be every Met no-hit attempt ever. At least until tonight.
by Jason Fry on 13 May 2012 10:42 pm Oh, your 2012 Mets. They bite and claw and fight and come back, so you can never ever give up on them. It’s an endearing quality in a team, particularly one pegged as a second-division outfit.
Oh, your 2012 Mets. The second you get giddy, they crash and burn, leaving you in the fetal position. It’s an aggravating quality in a team, particularly one you desperately want to believe in.
Some games are ones you’d like to immediate flush out of memory, never to be spoken of again. This afternoon’s debacle would be a prime example.
Unfortunately, part of being a daily blogger is having to write with posterity in mind. So bear with me for a minute, while we go back into the abyss and look down.
The horror, the horror….
I don’t know if this is better or worse, but we saw this game on tape delay, TiVoing it so we could go to Mother’s Day brunch and making our leisurely way across lower Manhattan before heading home, with a web/social-media blackout strictly enforced. Usually I find that tape delay robs a game of its tension — knowing what I’m seeing isn’t live makes things sag in my mind — but today’s game was good enough that I was riveted. There was the weirdly jovial Carlos Zambrano, smiling genially at anyone and everyone even after falling behind 2-0. There was David Wright snagging a heat-seeking missile from Hanley Ramirez, which almost tore off his arm and turned him around nearly 180 degrees. Wright coolly waited for physics to fail to hurl him into short left field and threw Hanley out. There was Jon Niese, pitching gamely around occasional trouble and winning a terrific matchup with Giancarlo Stanton, from whom more was unfortunately to be heard. And there was Justin Turner, once again turning in a terrific at-bat against Heath Bell. This one wasn’t quite Dunstonesque, but it was still pretty good: Turner knew Bell’s curve ball could be more or less safely ignored, and worked Heath to a full count, got his pitch and rifled a double to right for a 4-2 Mets lead.
Bedlam! Excitement! Why, just three outs from Frank Francisco, and we’ll be headed merrily home….
Nope. The bottom of the ninth was a slow-motion train wreck, ended definitively and by then somewhat mercifully by something very loud and very fast.
When did you know we were screwed? When Emilio Bonifacio hit third? When Todd Tichenor decided John Buck deserved a couple of extra strikes for an afternoon’s worth of warm companionship and witty repartee behind home plate? When you saw Greg Dobbs fit his custom-designed helmet over his horns? When Manny Acosta came in? When Hanley Ramirez walked? When Austin Kearns got hit? When Stanton dug in with the big Red Grooms Pachinko thing whispering to him a la Todd Hundley and the Coors Field upper deck?
I can’t remember exactly when I saw Doom waiting at the door. All I know is that as the ninth cratered, I started scrubbing dishes, neatening piles of magazines and returning household objects to their proper places. That’s my instinct once the DEBACLE warning light is lit — perhaps to extract something positive from a bunch of negatives, or because long ago having cleaned up the apartment made me less likely to throw things in a fury.
I thought Frank Frank deserved an asterisk for Friday night’s failure: Stanton hit a ball so hard that Ronny Cedeno felt lucky not to have been in front of it, Francisco got Sanchez to fly out, Bonifacio smacked a hit through a drawn-in infield, Francisco struck out Buck, and Dobbs’s game-winner came on a broken bat. That’s a fair amount of buzzard’s luck there.
Not so this afternoon — he was awful, with Tichenor’s magically shrinking strike zone unfortunate but not an excuse. Frank Frank’s ERA is now 8.56. In 2012, that just means he’s a member of the endangered species known as “closer” (Bell’s ERA is 10.03), but that’s little comfort right now.
Honestly, it was a kindness that Stanton brought the game crashing down in regulation. It was obvious the Mets weren’t going to win this one, that the Ghost of Soilmaster had them by the neck again. The only question was how they would lose. On a Jose Reyes bleeder that rolled away from the fingertips of a sprawled Jordany Valdespin in 10? On a HBP by Bobby Parnell with the bases loaded in the 11th? On a fielder’s choice with Bonifacio beating the relay throw to Daniel Murphy by an eyelash in the 12th? It was going to be something soul-shriveling and awful, as any Mets fan who’s watched innumerable Miami horrors knew. Given that, it might as well have been Giancarlo Stanton, in the ninth with the wound still fresh.
And now posterity has been satisfied, and we shall never speak of this one again.
by Greg Prince on 12 May 2012 7:21 pm  Spiritual predecessors of your 2012 Mets? Listening to Terry Collins in his postgame media sessions makes me think he is the model for a dozen “manager” characters from a dozen underwhelming baseball movies: focused, straightforward, likes fine what he does for a living, only dabbles in nuance if so compelled by reporter’s interrogation. But watching Terry Collins’s team play to its fullest capabilities under his direction makes me think of the best manager character in any baseball movie, Coach Morris Buttermaker from The Bad News Bears. I’m just sorry Collins doesn’t sound very much like Walter Matthau, because I can just hear it now…
“Nieuwenhuis, you’re playing left.
“Torres, you’re in center, don’t gimme any guff about it.
“Nickeas, go get the big mitt, you’re catching Dickey — and everybody quit smirking about R.A.’s last name. He can’t do anything about where his parents came from.
“Murphy, go stand near second base and for crissake don’t get yourself hurt, you’re batting this inning.
“Davis…don’t tell me Davis is hiding in the tree again. Goddammit, somebody go get Davis down from the tree.
“Baxter — sit tight, Baxter, we might need you later.
“And Turner, quit fooling around with the sunflower seeds! Those are for the ballplayers.”
The Bears were only grudgingly admitted to the North Valley League, while the Mets’ inclusion in the National League East this year was supposed to be no more than a technicality. Four other, stronger teams were going to need somebody else to practice against when not beating up on one another.
Script’s changed from the initial treatment, hasn’t it?
David Wright, the temperamental opposite of Kelly Leak, collected four hits, R.A. Dickey pitched through as much pain as Amanda Whurlizer could handle and the Miami Marlins were once again reminded that two-four-six-eight, the Mets are not a team you should underestimate.
A sunny Saturday afternoon inside the Marlins’ green-screen sound stage was the perfect antidote for the production that went awry Friday night (and so many nights nearby), especially when viewed through the prism of the third baseman’s performance. David was starry, starry Wright — surpassing the Four-Hundred mark as late into a Mets season as I can recall any Mets hitter doing (Cleon Jones dipped below the Williams Line after 31 games in 1969), plus showing enough range to throw out Austin Kearns from Big Never Mind Little Havana. Fox’s emergency fill-in announcer made a huge deal over Wright’s general torture of Ricky Nolasco, but David didn’t play favorites. Three hits came off the starter and then he shelled Cishek by the seashore for another.
Did I mention .402? That’s not a batting average. That’s Marlins Park’s short porch.
Here’s where a Mets fan predictably jumps in and bashes Magic City’s latest landmark because it belongs to the legitimately hateful Loria Marlins, but honestly, I like it on TV thus far. I see its absurdities — is Bud Light With Lime subliminally sponsoring the fences? — and it probably tries too hard to overwhelm, but I say go for it. Baseball didn’t need an eighteenth knockoff of Camden Yards (that’s probably more accurate count than hyperbole) and anything that isn’t Your Name Here Stadium from up the Florida Turnpike should be given a wide berth to repel as well as impress.
Besides, I like the fishies swimming around behind home plate, especially when a school of Mets is crossing in front of them.
Anyway, David is scalding, R.A. and his wrist are built Ford tough, Kirk Nieuwenhuis would have fared better in a Bad News Bears remake than Greg Kinnear did, Mike Baxter is ready for anything (he pinch-hits a double that’s called foul and then pinch-hits another one that’s undeniably fair) and, well, this is fun. These Mets are fun. They’re fun until they’re not. The Mets rolled out a stretch of 39-24 baseball in 2010 and one measuring 50-38 in 2011. Both editions were quite a bit of fun for quite a while. Then, like the Clevelander at last call, the music stopped. I guess what I’m saying is I haven’t read the entire 2012 script yet, mostly because it hasn’t been fully written, but there’s a decent chance David Wright won’t hit .402, and the 19-14 Mets might…might…not maintain their death grip on the second Wild Card spot from here through October 3.
But they have it in hand on May 12. Fun, I tell you. Fun.
***
 Sharon Chapman represents FAFIF and Tug in Nashville. And now for a few links…
• I was a guest on The 5 Tool Show the other night, hosted by Kerel Cooper of On The Black and Tanya Mercado of Citi Field of Dreams. Had fun there, too, talking Mets history and so forth. Have a listen here.
• Taryn “Coop” Cooper of A Gal For All Seasons (and other worthy precincts) is off and running toward the New York Marathon in the footsteps of Team McGraw’s Sharon Chapman, raising funds for the Tug McGraw Foundation in memory of Gary Carter. Look into helping a terrific blogger, Mets fan and humanitarian here.
• Heading to Savannah for a Sand Gnats game? If you are, Stadium Journey has the scoop on historic Grayson Stadium, home of the Mets’ South Atlantic League affiliate. Check it out here.
by Jason Fry on 11 May 2012 11:59 pm The high-flying, temporarily much-beloved, pitch-count-focused, never-say-die Mets arrived in Miami to find the Marlins in the home version of their horrible new uniforms and ensconced in their horrible new park before a somewhat larger number of their horrible non-fans than we’re used to seeing.
There was a lot new there, on both sides, but one thing was very familiar: The Mets lost in a fashion that was, well, horrible.
Does it sound familiar that Johan Santana pitched well in Miami but was victimized by his defense? Yes, he looked shaky early — Austin Kearns’s home run was a no-doubter out of a big park, sending Jeffrey Loria’s idiotic giant Pachinko machine into spastic motion. But Andres Torres should have caught Jose Reyes’s leadoff drive — it wasn’t an error or a misplay, just a ball you expect a good center fielder to run down. Which was bad enough. I’d been waiting six months to see Reyes come skidding into third wearing the wrong uniform while David Wright stood forlornly to one side, but seeing it was still depressing. Omar Infante then followed Reyes’s hit with a little parachute into no-man’s land for a very speedy Marlins lead. Set Torres on a slightly better route and it’s 2-0 Marlins after an inning instead of 3-0 — or perhaps Johan pitches differently to Kearns and much else changes, too.
Does it sound familiar that the Mets clawed back in thrilling fashion, only to spit the bit defensively and be undone by a Marlins rally? I don’t want to go back and look at how many times this has happened before, because it will just make me mad. But if memory serves I remember about 53,299 games at Soilmaster that ended with the Mets undone by little bloops, or infield hits, or HBPs, or any other variety of wretchedness that in retrospect seemed inevitable. With the bottom of the 9th nigh, I tweeted out a warning that the Marlins were sending up an insane slugger, a Met killer and an anything-that-happen speedster. My advice: Believe, but buckle up.
Being a prophet is no fun sometimes.
None of this is to discard the Mets’ latest thrilling comeback, which tonight was keyed by not one but two pinch-hit doubles, courtesy of Kirk Nieuwenhuis and Mike Baxter. None of this is to discount that Ike Davis looks like he’s finding his way, that David Wright remains awesome, or that from top to bottom Mets hitters seem to have absorbed the lessons of Dave Hudgens: working counts, making pitchers throw strikes, tiring starters out, getting into bullpens, waiting for mistakes and then clubbing them. When the likes of Ronny Cedeno and Andres Torres are drawing walks, you know the students are paying attention in class.
Nor did Frank Francisco’s trudge off the mound in defeat mean the rest of the bullpen didn’t continue to shine. Ramon Ramirez struck out two in his inning of work, Bobby Parnell gets a pass because he was victimized by Ike’s awkward attempted ole of what should have been a Reyes groundout, and Tim Byrdak was superb. And look, Francisco will blow saves; a starter can have one bad inning and survive, while a closer wears the resulting headline around his neck until the next time he succeeds.
Marlins Park turned out to be something of a non-factor for me, perhaps because I’d seen it on ESPN at the beginning of April and had my chance to gape at it in horror then. Yes, it’s terrible: The lime-green walls make the eyes spasm, the Red Grooms thing is ghastly, the letters set in the pavement are stupid, and the throb of bass from the outfield nightclub (???!!!) is distracting. (Speaking of which, Mr. Loria, since you have a nightclub out there whose bass rattles teeth throughout the stadium, why play square old-timey organ fare? In for a dime, in for a dollar.) Maybe it’s just that I already thoroughly hate the Marlins and everything about them, but my reaction to three hours of Marlins Park was more supercilious eye-rolling than active disgust.
Weirdly, the new park reminds me a lot of Joe Robbie, or whatever the hell the old football stadium was called at the end there. The walls are randomly tall, the outfield grass looks unhealthy and abused, and lots of good seats are either empty or filled with visiting fans. I even spotted sacks of Soilmaster out in the bullpen, instead of in a storeroom where they belong. Perhaps the storerooms are still filled with office supplies Loria robbed from the Expos’ grave.
(The fish tanks are cool, though. And the bobblehead museum is an amusing idea. Which means Loria and his architects are batting about .020.)
We all knew the Mets weren’t going to win every game the rest of the way out. Still, they almost pulled off another one, a 12th come-from-behind victory in what’s still a very young season. I wasn’t worried when they were down 3-0 to Mark Buerhle. I expected them to come back, to tie up the game and then to take the lead. Which is nice, but not normal. When baseball teams are leading charmed lives, it’s your duty as a fan to remember these times are fleeting. Soak in as much as you can, because before you know it there will be a stretch where absolutely everything goes wrong and you’ll spend a week gaping at the TV in horror like Alex in A Clockwork Orange.
And even when your team is leading a charmed life, remember the baseball proverbs.
A run unscored is a run regretted.
Give no extra outs as gifts, lest more precious things be taken from you.
Yes, that eighth inning was fun. But it would have been more fun if Rob Johnson had bunted the ball fair with Cedeno coming down the line, making the score Mets 6, Marlins 3. Just as it would have been highly preferable for Torres to corral Reyes’s leadoff hit, and for Ike to play a step back on his little grounder. Taken together, that’s three runs against us, in what turned out to be a one-run loss.
Oh, and one last baseball proverb before I say goodnight.
Beware Greg Dobbs, in whatever raiment he cloaks himself, for his allegiance is to Satan.
by Greg Prince on 11 May 2012 10:32 am If you’re a Mets fan who likes to read, read George Vecsey recounting his recent visit with 1962-1964 Met pitcher Craig Anderson, who finished his career on an 18-game losing streak but not before he crammed two wins into one day, fifty years ago tomorrow. For a man whose name became statistically synonymous with “loss,” Anderson sure sounds like one of life’s winners.
As Vecsey puts it in typically eloquent terms, “Craig Anderson is much more than a has-been. In this milepost season, he is part of the DNA of every fan who agonizes over the Mets.” A hearty Let’s Go Mets! to that sentiment and to all the 1962 Mets who are still with us…and deserve to be with us en masse at Citi Field (and us with them) sometime this season. Vecsey again:
Fifty years is a perfect time for gauging this franchise, built on hope and dreams and irrationality and humor — the veritable human condition, one could say. Those first weird days flavor everything fans feel about these current Amazing Mets, who are somehow over .500 under their pepper-pot manager Terry Collins.
The current Mets are 18-13. The Original Mets didn’t notch an 18th win until they’d already piled up 47 defeats. Their 18th win, on June 22, 1962, came as Anderson’s final two wins did: in a doubleheader. It was pitched by Al Jackson and happened to be the franchise’s first one-hitter. You may have heard we’re about to turn the odometer over on our No Games With Fewer Than One Hit Allowed journey. We play our 8,000th game tonight, with the roundest of numbers, 0, describing just how many no-hitters Mets pitchers have thrown. The same round number can be used to total all the wins Craig Anderson racked up over his final 47 major league appearances, every one of them as a Met, the last of them in a game the Mets required 23 innings to lose…also in a doubleheader.
What’s it all mean? It means read George Vecsey’s article; consider reading David Bagdade’s devotedly researched book about 1962, A Year In Mudville; appreciate Craig Anderson and all those early Mets who did the hard work of getting us off the ground floor (if not out of the basement for five years); and if Johan Santana pitches a 1-2-3 first tonight in Miami, don’t hold your breath.
Or hold it. It’s not like anything else has worked where all those zeroes are concerned.
by Greg Prince on 10 May 2012 3:30 am Sweeping the Phillies in Philadelphia sure is fun, isn’t it? Sweeping anybody anywhere is a fine half-week’s work, but taking it to this bunch — the portion of it presently standing, at any rate — in that place?
Sublime!
The Phillies aren’t quite what they’ve been in the era encompassing August 2007 and everything after. That, of course, is not our problem. Utley out? Howard out? Lee on a pitch count? The sound you hear in the distant southeastern sky, where the Mets charter has winged its way to its next date with potential destiny, is an orchestra comprised of our regular shortstop, our regular catcher, our regular left fielder and one-fifth of our starting rotation playing the world’s tiniest violins.
Boo-bleeping-hoo, in other well-chosen words. The schedule demands you show your depth. We showed Rob Johnson behind the plate, Vinny Rottino manning left, Scott Hairston around in right and second baseman Justin Turner playing short. We showed Ike Davis and the side of the barn he’d been toting around in perfectly pristine condition from not being able to hit it. Terry Collins presented to Ron Kulpa a lineup card as if it had been cobbled together on the bus trip to Clearwater.
We won anyway. We won despite Lee being Lee as long as he was medically permitted to be. We won despite a 4-2 deficit after six, not unlike how we won the night before despite trailing 4-1 after six and the night before that when we won after being down 2-0 through five.
The Mets are proving the season isn’t played by expectation or reputation. The Mets are proving themselves on the field of National League East play, sweeping three divisional rivals thus far, insinuating themselves a half-game from first place and at the head of the class for that perfectly viable if insultingly gimmicky second Wild Card berth. More proving remains ahead if this sublime sweep isn’t to be consigned to the broom closet of trivia (on the off chance the Mets wait another six years before they make like Dirt Devils at Citizens Bank Park). The 31-game season has been a smashing success, but those final 131 will count, too.
Maybe even a lot more.
But that’s OK. I love that the Mets approach every day — every inning, really — as another chance to prove they can play with anybody. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes they lose a doubleheader to the Giants or get swept themselves by Houston. Those unpleasant events occurred in the very same 31-game season we’re generally so giddy about, yet they haven’t defined it. Sweeps of the Braves and the Marlins and now the Phillies feel like a truer barometer of what the Mets have been and can be in 2012. Especially this Phillies series, probably a little because it was the Phillies, probably more because of all the coming from behind.
Wednesday night’s proof of the pudding, ladled out in the top of the seventh like a generous portion of Kozy Shack, took its place alongside the Nickeas-Valdespin Festival of the Unforeseen from Monday and the free skate portion of Tuesday’s competition, in which Pete Orr and Jimmy Rollins impressed judges with their daring interpretation of The Rundown. Let’s see, one minute it was 4-2, Phillies, the next minute, there was…
• One of those patented Met 97-pitch walks, this time worked by rookie Kirk Nieuwenhuis appearing in a leadoff pinch-hitting role;
• Turner lining an apparent single to center that Shane Victorino’s Gold Glove judgment — which advised him to dive in front of the ball at such an angle so as to courteously ensure it a glide path to the expansive grass behind him — transformed into an RBI double, cutting the Phils’ lead to 4-3;
• Davis stroking a mighty fly to the base of the right field wall that fooled Hunter Pence a little and Turner a little more, providing Ike a desperately needed confidence-building double and Justin an absolutely unfathomable spot on third instead of a brisk trip across the plate;
• callup journeyman Johnson knowing enough not to swing at any of the four non-strikes Kyle Kendrick was dealing so he could load the bases;
• and Lucas Duda, another pinch-hitter, not getting out of the way even if he wanted to of yet another inaccurate Kendrick delivery, taking an RBI HBP in what Cole Hamels would laughably call the old-school way.
The Mets had just tied the game at four. It felt like they were ahead. They’d be in an instant, when incredibly valuable Andres Torres (sorry for kind of forgetting about you while you were out, amigo) made with the perfectly struck infield grounder to push the Mets ahead, 5-4. From there, it was a mix of competent relief pitching — envy it, crimson hordes — and cleverly tacked-on tallies (Ike and Andres each muscling up) en route to the 10-6 final.
It would be daft to declare I knew it was only a matter of time before the Mets broke through. While Lee was maintaining order, I was resigned to giving my team one of those reluctant dispensations a fan sometimes is forced to admit is due. You know, “well, they won the first two games in dramatic fashion and they’re up against a tough pitcher, and to go into that ballpark and just win the series is good enough — a sweep would have been asking an awful lot.” Reasonable, right?
Not to these Mets, baby.
by Jason Fry on 9 May 2012 1:49 am To understand that headline, go back a day and read my partner’s rather awesome post about Monday night’s instant Mets Classic.
Monday night’s game — forever to be recalled fondly, except in the Papelbon household, as the Jordany Valdespin Game — was a tense, taut affair, about as beautiful as a baseball game can be. Confronted by the formidable Roy Halladay, the Mets were patient and hung in there, with Jon Niese surviving, the Mets bullpen somehow traversing Hell in a gasoline suit, Shane Victorino being actually called out instead of rewarded for grabbing for every edge within reach, Josh Thole being cruelly felled but recording the out and then, marvelous to see, Ike Davis working a walk and Mike Nickeas lashing a double and then Jordany Valdespin golfing a Papelbon splitter deep into the right-field stands. Somewhere in Toledo, you liked to think, Omir Santos looked up at SportsCenter and smiled.
Tuesday night’s game was not taut, beautiful or a classic. It was Lampshade on the Head baseball. It was Coach Is So Mad He Won’t Take Us to the Tastee-Freez baseball. Its highlights called for shelving the Ken Burns instrumentals and cueing up Yakety Sax. It was messy and goofy and a whole lot of fun.
And yet, weirdly, it was like a funhouse mirror of Monday night’s game — a satirical take, maybe, or an unauthorized parody.
First off, there was the pitching matchup. Once again a Phillies starter was dominant while a Mets starter scrapped and scrambled to avoid total ruin. Except Doc Halladay is a classic pitcher out of a century’s worth of storybooks, with a gunfighter squint and evil arsenal, while Joe Blanton is built like a fireplug and has the electrical-socket hair and ill-advised chin fuzz usually sported by the guy who drops chlorine in the pool. Jon Niese is an up-and-coming power pitcher, even if he hasn’t quite arrived yet; Miguel Batista is ancient, unassuming-looking and a few bad starts from drawing his pension.
Yet the early going was much the same: Blanton was untouchable, while Batista practically spun like a top while Phillies rifled hits all around him. It looked ugly — at one point I was reduced to writing sarcastic poetry about Batista and Chris Schwinden on Twitter — but as Niese had, somehow Batista kept things from cratering utterly. He found his rhythm and kept the Mets … well, not close, but within four.
Valdespin was a factor too — but as befits a parody, he was playing a different and rather less heroic role. On Tuesday afternoon, Adam Rubin showed up to play skunk at the Mets’ impromptu garden party, noting that Jordany had racked up a rather amazing 75 errors in 146 minor-league games at shortstop (that’s a .922 fielding percentage, which is grounds for unemployment), doesn’t steal successfully enough to make his running game worth it; and borders on incapable of drawing a walk. I thought that was borderline mean, but then Jordany went out to shortstop and put on a frightful exhibition. He air-mailed Ike for a two-base error, turned a pickoff into a waste of time by dropping a throw, and was terrifying to watch even on routine plays. Jordany Valdespin plays shortstop the way 15-year-olds smoke outside 7-Elevens, his wild gesticulations and unnecessary motion unable to obscure that he has no idea what he’s doing. (Though hey, he did draw a walk.)
Tuesday also saw the Mets’ bullpen hold the line in unlikely ways before a rather routine, the-writers-ran-out-of-plot-twists ninth. Manny Acosta was wonderful, working out of a second-and-third, one-out jam before exiting in favor of Ramon Ramirez, whose plan was to throw wild pitches and have Phillies hit bullets near David Wright and Daniel Murphy. That’s not generally a blueprint for Mets success, but Wright and Murphy made terrific plays, and Ramirez struck out Pete Orr in a big spot before giving way to Tim Byrdak, who got Ty Wigginton to fly to Andres Torres and not concuss anyone between home and his own dugout. (Though after the third out was recorded, Torres and Murphy nearly collided anyway. It was, I tweeted, the most 2012 Mets half-inning I could imagine.)
As for the heroic blast that brought about a Mets victory, it was more of a lunatic farce. In the seventh, with two out and Valdespin on first, Torres singled and then Kirk Nieuwenhuis — whom Blanton had eaten alive in his previous at-bat — rifled a single to right to cut the Phillies’ lead to 4-2. Up came Wright with the tying run on first; in came Chad Qualls. David delivered a sharp single to right, and then all hell broke lose. Hunter Pence — whose long legs and high socks make him look like a maroon grasshopper — fired the ball back in. John Mayberry Jr. didn’t cut it off and it went to Carlos Ruiz, who caught Wright halfway between first and second. But Jimmy Rollins and Orr screwed up the rundown, letting Wright scramble around between them while Keith Hernandez began to moan in agitation. Orr got worried about Nieuwenhuis over there off third and fired the ball past Placido Polanco, allowing Kirk to score. Meanwhile, Pence had somehow traveled a good 300 feet during the play, dashing from right field to cover second after Rollins and Orr left it unguarded, then winding up at third next to Wright, both of them presumably surprised to have wound up so far from their starting points.
It was the kind of play you’re used to seeing end with Mets fielders unable to look at each other, Shane Victorino strutting around with his bug-eyed grin and Phillies fans braying in the stands. Except this time it was Phillies kicking at the dirt and their fans were either booing, leaving or both. As for Pence, perhaps he should have ended his Family Circus dotted line on the mound: Antonio Bastardo replaced Qualls and promptly gave up a single to Lucas Duda, which proved fatal.
The Mets look loose and lively, grinding out patient at-bats and getting breaks, while over there in the other dugout the Phillies have that haunted gaze of a bunch that’s taken a few anvils to the head and is wondering what the hell can go wrong next. That doesn’t say anything significant about either team, so let’s not get overconfident. The Mets and Phils will meet 13 more times, beginning with tomorrow night’s Gee vs. Lee encounter. That pitching staff is awesome. And previous dismal years have seen us singing the praises of scrappy Mets clubs in May, only to wind up grousing and muttering in July.
But still. Four Citizens Bank wins against one defeat? A thrilling classic followed by a merry farce? If the plan is to exorcise this particular chamber of Met horrors, it’s off to a pretty good start.
by Greg Prince on 8 May 2012 10:17 am But, Marge, that little guy hasn’t done anything yet. Look at him. He’s going to do something and you know it’s going to be good.
—Homer Simpson, “The Twisted World of Marge Simpson”
Mets fans of a certain age…essentially my age…have been giving themselves over to repeated cases of the goose bumps for the last couple of weeks, thanks to the wonders of YouTube and the archival sharing of a fellow traveler named MrMetsfan41 (with a name like that, he has to be good). Their presentation of “1970’s New York Mets WOR-T.V. Channel 9 Game Broadcast Intro,” as aired in 1973 from the looks of it, is setting geese abump and hearts aflutter because it encapsulates everything great about being a Mets fan from when we were allowing the Mets to tighten their grip on our psyches and their hold on our souls.
What I like about it now is the pure nostalgia of it, but what I liked about it then was how contemporary it seemed, especially when the Mets would make a major player move and update the reel. Because the same guys stayed Mets for years at a time in those days, you got used to Jones and Koosman and Harrelson entering to their cues — swear to Gil, I knew exactly when Buddy was going to leap to snare that liner despite not having seen it or much thought about it for decades. The bonus excitement came when the Mets got a Rusty Staub or a Willie Mays (as if there were more than one of each) and inserted a clip of the new star Met doing wondrous Met things. It brought the montage up to date and convinced me our newly reconfigured team was going to be more exciting than ever.
To the hypothetical introductory highlight package of today, please add footage from last night.
Please add Jordany Valdespin socking it to Jonathan Papelbon. Please follow that ball into the right field stands, its flight both instant and eternal. Please evoke the shock that a minor league callup who was a minor league senddown rescued only by physical setback to another Met chose this moment for his first major league hit, a pinch-hit three-run home run that broke a 2-2 tie with two out in the ninth inning in a ballpark where very little good has occurred over the past five years. Please don’t cut away until we see Jordany Valdespin round first base and shake with delight, one innocent fist briefly raised, because for all the standard jockish admonitions to act like you’ve been there before, Jordany Valdespin hadn’t.
Jordany Valdespin was called up to the Mets on April 23, meaning that the Channel 9 clip had been on YouTube longer than he’d been in the big leagues. His presence to date had been noteworthy mostly for his having composed, on April 26, one-ninth of the Mets’ first all-homegrown lineup since 1971. His impact in left field was underwhelming enough so that he was removed from the game before its incredible, unbelievable ninth-inning rally, the one in which Heath Bell threw 46 pitches (13 to Justin Turner alone) in defense of a one-run Marlin lead destined to melt in a steady drizzle of Met patience. Valdespin batted three times that day and one time each on three other days. Nothing good happened in any of those at-bats. When a sequence of events that had nothing to do with any of the several positions he occasionally plays unfolded — Pelfrey out, Schwinden down, Batista shifted, Carrasco required — his preliminary audition seemed to end with a whimper and a demotion Saturday.
But in baseball, things aren’t necessarily as they seem, you might have noticed again and again and again in your life. Ruben Tejada took a great fall on Sunday, landing on the uncomfortably crowded DL, and the Mets needed another infielder pronto. Valdespin was recalled to provide bench depth if not what one would have projected as bench strength in time for Monday night in Philadelphia. The Mets’ strengths are scattered, and their depth as measured by conventional means appears shallow, but in whatever advanced statistic you can rustle up to measure depth of character, I’m beginning to believe they are among the league leaders.
They withstood a revitalized Roy Halladay, for starters. Halladay’s status among the most elite starting pitchers going had come up for examination of late, his velocity not what it once was, his previous outing, against Atlanta, the stuff of the merest of mortals (5.1 IP, 8 ER). Doc Halladay found his cure in the visitors’ dugout. He hadn’t lost to the Mets since…had he ever lost to the Mets? He had, but not for a whole lot of starts. When Howie Rose is invoking Larry Jackson to illustrate an opposing pitcher’s longstanding domination of the Mets, you’re not wrong to assume it will be a quick, painful night. Throw in that wealthy young Jonathon Niese — pitching sometimes like he has to instantly justify his lucrative contract extension — was searching for command and seemed more than a little lost, and you’re pretty sure that if you want to be satisfied by watching the Mets this Monday night, you’re going to have to lean pretty heavily on YouTube.
Yet with Halladay on top of his game and Niese struggling for a while to find his, the Mets weren’t out of it. They were down by two, which can be an enormous deficit for a lineup on Halladay, but these Mets don’t easily submit to the insurmountable. Sometimes all it takes is one perfectly placed hit…say a double just inside the third base line, like the one David Wright snuck into fair territory in the sixth (two batters after Andres Torres worked Doc for his only walk of the night), and you have not a 2-0 blowout but a 2-2 tie.
By then, Niese was done, but honorably so, having not given the Phillies any more than single runs in the first and second. Now, though, it was the Mets’ bullpen’s turn, a unit so strapped for success that it was decided D.J. Carrasco would improve it. Nevertheless, Manny Acosta pitched an easy sixth and Bobby Parnell…
Well, nothing would be easy for Bobby Parnell, who always has this look about him that he’s waiting for something to inevitably go wrong. Maybe it comes from having a dad who’s a firefighter. You know an alarm is going to sound, you know there’s going to be trouble and you grow used to a faint whiff of smoke in the air.
There was trouble. Juan Pierre, a spark to Met flames for a generation, walked to lead off the seventh. Jimmy Rollins, long the personification of Hades, singled. After an out, damnation himself, Shane Victorino, was safe at first on an infield hit. The bases were loaded with three of the least appealing Phillies to ever draw breath (though to be fair, Pierre’s been a turnoff since he was a Marlin).
Parnell gets an irritatingly slow grounder to second out of Hunter Pence. Murphy (c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, get it over there) flips to Turner (I know you’re not really a shortstop, but c’mon, relay it already) who flings to Davis and…
SAFE?
Pence is safe?
No way!
Uh-uh!
I don’t think so, at any rate.
Maybe he was safe, but let’s see that again.
The newfangled, intuitively confusing SNY score box is understandable enough at this moment to post the state of things as 3-2, Phillies. Terry is coming out to argue, though I don’t know what that will do. I really do think Pence beat the play by a distressing hair. Now we’re behind and the bases are still loaded and…
Oh, never mind. It’s a double play, not because Turner’s throw nipped Pence (it didn’t) but because human canker sore Victorino barreled into Turner in the car pool lane of the Ben Franklin Bridge, or nowhere near second base. Interference…lovely interference was called on the Wailuku Pest and all I can say, in the name of Marlon Anderson being thumbed out when sliding much closer to second base in 2007, is fuck you, Shane Victorino, and enjoy it.
So it was 2-2 again. The Mets had a little action in the top of the eighth, but 26-year-old Lucas Duda proved to have feet of lead and hit into a 5-3 double play that a younger man might have beaten out. Thus it was back to Parnell and the visage of dread — his as well as mine. Ty Wigginton singles and augurs the worst if only because Ty Wigginton’s survival as the lone remaining major leaguer to have been a 2002, 2003 and 2004 New York Met proves there is something frighteningly unkillable about this guy. Sure enough, Carlos Ruiz bunts and Parnell practically falls on his face in a futile attempt to make a play. Two on. Placido Polanco bunts and it’s less dangerous but still effective. The same two are on and advanced to second and third. And now it’s Freddy Galvis with another ball that travels a distance calculated as easily in inches as it is in feet.
Parnell pounces. Wigginton approaches. Thole braces.
Parnell releases. Wigginton thunders. Thole snares.
Wigginton…Thole…Wigginton…Thole…
Wigginton is out.
Thole is down.
But Wigginton is out.
Clean play. Clean, hard play. I watched the replay probably a dozen times and looked for a reason to snarl at that Phillie bastard Wigginton, but no, good ol’ Wiggy slides like he does everything: at 100% and a little clumsily. He wasn’t trying to hurt anybody, just beat somebody fair and square. He is the anti-Hamels as a person and a player. Thole’s head was collateral damage amid the tag Josh applied to Ty. Thole plopped to the ground, sort of like Tejada did Sunday, sort of like Parnell did in the seventh. Regardless of the episode, Terry Collins’s people are spending as much time sprawled out on the floor this season as Matt Weiner’s.
Josh, no tender cookie, looked crumbled and had to exit, but he didn’t give up the ball until after the play was over. Wiggy was out, the Mets were closing in on escaping another fine mess. Parnell, having absorbed as much stress as one fatalistic-looking Met reliever could take, exited for Tim Byrdak, who’s sensational when not facing Todd Helton. He fanned Eric Kratz to end the inning.
Wow! So much intriguing stuff! And it was all only prelude to the really big moments.
That’s “moments” plural, because before Jordany Valdespin floated around the bases on a puffy, cumulus cloud of sheer joy, there was the matter of withstanding Papelbon, who inveterate Mets Classics viewers will recognize for his role as the foiled villain in 2009’s “The Omir Santos Game” (as if there was more than one of them). The Red Sock I found hardest to root for, even when the Red Sox were doing things of which I approved, is now a Phillie, which makes him prohibitive to root for…except to fail.
And I gotta tell ya, as soon as Daniel Murphy wasn’t out after three or four pitches, I got a very good feeling about this ninth inning. The Mets are sometimes too shy about swinging, but when their core competency of running long, industrious counts is played to, it takes a ton out of the opposing pitcher. Murphy saw nine pitches. Six of them he fouled off. The last of them he swung through. Yet if there could be said to be such a thing as a productive leadoff strikeout in the ninth inning of a tie game, this was it. Papelbon had worked his ass off. He wasn’t going to be his usual 2012 smooth self out there.
Therefore I wasn’t surprised when Ike Davis and his — what, .032 average? — were walked on six pitches. Ike remains in a state where he begs to be retired, so when you hand him a base, you’re handing yourself a gratuitous heap of trouble. Besides, it was the perfect setup for Justin Turner, who is an ordinary batter except when you really need him. He’s the guy who drove Bell into the ground by refusing to go gentle into that good ninth. He was the guy I wanted up there more than anybody.
But because you can’t immediately get what you want from your baseball instincts, Justin Turner struck out on three pitches. Sometimes you’re sure you know the game, and the game informs you you’re no more the seer than Sgt. Schultz; you know nooothiiing!
Unless you knew that losing lefty-swinging Thole for however long he is out wasn’t going to hurt the Mets as soon as his turn in the order came up. If you knew that, brother/sister, why are you reading this? Why don’t you pick up a MegaMillions as soon as you log off from E-Trade? You have fabulous, fortuitous forecasting ability if you knew righty Mike Nickeas was the man we wanted up there against righty Jonathan Papelbon with two outs. Yet, damn, Nickeas was doing a mini-Murphy, falling behind one-and-two, fouling off a couple until getting something less than Papelbon’s “A” material and belting it to as deep a left as Nickeas is capable of reaching.
“GET ON YOUR HORSE!” I screamed at Ike, forgetting the poor, barely ambulatory lad has no horse, settling for the sight of our two-legged first baseman chugging into third on Nickeas’s surprise double. Man, it would have been nice to have had a pinch-runner for Davis, I thought before remembering we don’t have the horses for that, either. In this 2-2 game, with Thole having taken that blow from Wigginton and Terry having removed Niese a wee bit early for Mike Baxter, our bench was down to…
Jordany Valdespin and Vinny Rottino. Valdespin might have been an excellent choice for pinch-running duties, but he had to be saved as the last lefty bat (“how about Santana here?” I genuinely wondered) to face Papelbon should it come to that.
It came to that. The big-time closer — rattled and put through the wringer some, but still certifiably big-time — versus the kid who experienced Bison interruptus only because of Tejada’s quad strain. Jordany was below the Mendoza Line. He was below the Davis Line. He was stalled at the .000 starting line of a big league career whose content was yet to be published.
But now he has a helluva first chapter.
I’d love to tell you I saw it coming, but my first spoken reaction to seeing Jordany Valdespin stride to the plate was “nothing good can come of this.” Valdespin would tap out weakly and Rollins would lead off the bottom of the ninth and wreak havoc, Victorino would make us eat our satisfaction from the interference call and Citizens Bank Park would smirk like it always does. My countervailing reaction, though, was to think it would be a sensational story if the callup who was a senddown got the big hit, not totally unlike Mike Jacobs at Shea in 2005 (who homered in his first at-bat, albeit in a losing cause, just before a return to Norfolk that never came) or Benny Agbayani in Tokyo in 2000 (whose post-dawn grand slam saved him from a roster numbers game ostensibly stacked against him). And then I reminded myself it’s when you decide something unexpected is going to happen that you’ve screwed everything up.
Or have you? Let’s ask Gary Cohen.
“He hasn’t given up a hit with a runner in scoring position yet this year. VALDESPIN HITS IT TO DEEP RIGHT FIELD! BACK GOES PENCE, AND IT’S OUTTA HERE! JORDANY VALDESPIN’S FIRST BIG LEAGUE HIT IS A THREE-RUN HOMER, AND THE METS TAKE A FIVE-TWO LEAD IN THE NINTH! A bolt from the blue, Valdespin, back from the minors, and a huge hit, gives the Mets the lead!
“Now THAT’S how you get your first big league hit.”
As if the night needed a coda, Frank Francisco and Ike Davis teamed to forge an improbable putout of Rollins in the bottom of the ninth, and that louse Victorino grounded to Murphy to end it. The Mets of Mike Nickeas and Jordany Valdespin were winners; the Phillies of Roy Halladay and Jonathan Papelbon resembled nothing of the kind.
It’s tempting to read waaaaaaaaay too much into this kind of Monday night baseball. After a little more than a sixth of a season, the Mets hold the new and ridiculous second Wild Card position in the National League. The Phillies — avenged for Marlon Anderson for an evening — are dead last. The first-place Nats just lost their Phillie, Jayson Werth, for quite a while. One can feel the N.L. East scrunching up a bit. It’s only one-sixth of a season, but still it’s something. The Mets haven’t fallen apart. And Jordany Valdespin just made himself part of this franchise’s highlight montage, if just a fraction of it.
When Channel 9 was showing Buddy leaping and Cleon sliding and all that good 1970s stuff as a matter of course, I would have processed a win like this as opening all kinds of competitive possibilities. But I’m older now, more mature, more experienced. I see a game like last night’s and…
…and man, am I excited!
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