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.
Got something to say? Leave a comment, or email us at faithandfear@gmail.com. (Sorry, but we have no interest in ads, sponsored content or guest posts.)
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.
Mike Pelfrey’s still here, isn’t he? And if he’s still here, he’s going to be Mike Pelfrey, isn’t he?
It’s a fact of life. Pelf’s gonna go out there and drive us nuts. He’s gonna put somebody on the twelfth pitch of a 3-2 count that he started ahead 0-2, he’s gonna balk him over to second, he’s gonna wander around behind the mound wondering if he left the stove on, he’s gonna contemplate the dryness of his fingers and…
That’s the thing. You just don’t know. Pelf is very capable of building himself a mess yet attaching a secret exit we can’t believe he had the sense to include in the blueprints. He might throw thirty pitches in that inning, yet escape relatively unscathed. Or he might remain in that inning long enough so that it swallows the entire game whole. He might kill us or he might save us. It’s rarely neat and it can be as agita-inducing as any Met closer’s ninth, except with Pelf, it can come in the first as easily as the third or the fifth.
If he sees the seventh, it usually means he’s left trouble behind him. Or it didn’t seem worth the trouble of getting Elmer Dessens up a third time.
We’re talking about 2011’s Opening Day starter here, a guy who flirted with All-Stardom in 2010 and seemed practically corner-turned as far back as 2008. Mike Pelfrey is not unskilled, untalented or wholly unsuccessful. But boy can he suck the life out of a day or night at the ballpark.
He doesn’t even need to wait for the season to start. Just a couple of days ago he was eminently uninspiring in one of those games that doesn’t count. I heard it dissected by two gentlemen of advanced age as I stood in the checkout line at Waldbaum’s that very night.
“Didja see it today?”
“No. What happened?”
“They lost. Pelfrey was terrible.”
“Uch.”
“If it wasn’t for Pelfrey in the first inning, they would’ve won.”
As enamored as I am of the concept of being allowed to cancel out the inning of our choice so as to promote better results for your team (as long as others can’t do it to us), I was more impressed that Mets fans aren’t waiting for the regular season to be discouraged by Mike Pelfrey. And it ain’t just Waldbaum’s talking. Promenade Reserved groans as Pelfrey struggles. Twitter shifts into oversnark. Eyes everywhere roll.
At age 28, Big Pelf has found his niche. He’s our pitching scapegoat, our figurative punching bag, our default reason (besides ownership) why things aren’t better around here. Jason Bay, too, I suppose, but they’re lowering and bringing in the fences for Bay, so reasonable judgment must be reserved at least another couple of months on his behalf. Plus he runs hard and once took on a wall with his face.
Pelfrey? His thoroughfare to rational forgiveness is closed to emotional traffic every fifth day. For example, consider those shorter and closer fences. Batters in non-Mets uniforms get to swing at them, too. Theoretically it shouldn’t matter that much to a sinkerballer like Pelf, but wait for the one grounder that eludes the combined efforts of Tejada and Murphy. Experience as empathetically as possible the spiritual journey that unfurls as the pitcher tries to come to grips with the unideal situation at hand. Watch him with digits tensed (yours, his) until he gets one up to Hunter Pence or some other divisional irritant.
Yeah, the fences’ll matter. Everything’ll matter. And unless Pelfrey has harnessed his command while quelling his his doubts, he will make us all nuts.
Pelf’s blame niche is not one to take lightly. It’s different from being simply reviled the way Oliver Perez was or derided as Steve Trachsel was or wearing out his welcome as John Maine did. The critical mass for Pelfrey is different, befitting someone who has come up through the system, carried large hopes on his broad shoulders and largely left them unredeemed. It’s not that Pelfrey is an object of hatred. He’s too likable to inspire genuine vitriol. But he does demonstrate a knack for inviting blame.
When strikes aren’t thrown and outs aren’t collected, who ya gonna blame? Before ya start throwing bodies from the bullpen, I mean?
You can’t blame Santana. He was Santana before he got here, and whatever’s gone wrong is presumably more the fault of the Mets being the Mets than Johan ceasing to be Johan.
You can’t blame Dickey. Dickey’s entire Met oeuvre is thick, fascinating gravy, and it comes accompanied by a half-dozen beguiling biscuits besides.
You can’t blame Niese, because Niese is a lad of 25 and lefthanded and maybe has been held back only by not being able to breathe correctly, a situation to which he’s apparently tended (with an assist from an old teammate).
You can’t blame Gee, because honestly, you barely knew who Gee was before September 2010 and you only noticed Gee was faltering by late summer 2011. Give the kid a chance! He won’t be 26 until April! It’s not like he’s Pelfrey and 28!
Somebody’s inevitably gotta blame somebody. It’s the nature of the fan-beast. And Pelfrey’s perfect for the assignment. He’s taller than almost everybody. He was drafted higher than almost everybody. He’s been here longer than almost everybody. He’s almost broken through to the point of consistency but keeps backsliding to the point of madness. Not a few of his outings have shared the Seaver quality of “you’re gonna get to him, you’ve gotta get to him early,” yet they never feel the least bit Terrific, even those you look up from during and realize it’s the sixth, he’s still in there and he’s not losing or at least it’s not over.
Pelfrey’s career trajectory reminds me a bit of the last homegrown righty of extended tenure, Bobby Jones’s, except Jones was dependable when nobody expected much out of him, a fright to watch when we assumed he had taken the next step and then delightfully surprising just after we gave up on him altogether. Jones also had the good sense to get out of town two starts after his signature 2000 playoff one-hitter. If Bobby Jones comes up among Mets fans a dozen years later, it’s to be toasted for shutting down the Giants and instigating a celebration. It’s not to mention what a frigging disappointment he had been for most of the previous three-and-a-half years when not falling apart might have meant at least one more playoff spot, possibly two.
There has been no defining great start in Mike Pelfrey’s career. He beat the Braves in Turner Field at the dawn of September 2007 but was otherwise implosive the rest of that accursed month. He was outpitched by Brett Myers in one of his must-have games in early September 2008 and made like Mike Paltry the final weekend of the season versus his unyielding Marlin nemeses. There haven’t been many occasions to which to rise since, and Pelfrey’s made the least of those, too.
If you’ve gotten used to blaming Pelfrey, you may have to go in another direction soon. Slated to be the fourth-highest paid Met on the 2012 roster, he’s signed to a one-year deal worth not quite $5.7 million, about 44% more than he was paid for 2011. If he makes it through another year making his starts and piling up his innings (a compensable skill set unto itself these days, regardless of the caliber of the innings), he’ll be up for a substantial raise heading into 2013. Free agency looms beyond that, as do — it is hoped — Matt Harvey, Jeurys Familia, Zack Wheeler and the second coming of Jenrry Mejia. Even if Big Pelf rekindles his 2008 or 2010 best, he might be on track for the Big Squeeze in terms of payroll.
There’s always the chance that the man makes himself indispensable this year. It’s March, so that’s perennially a pleasing conclusion to broach before a season has yet to commence. But we’ve been here with Big Pelf a whole lot since 2006. If the revelatory grip or arm angle or boost of confidence comes and sticks (instead of comes and goes), then swell, of course.
I haven’t had the opportunity to open a freshly waxed pack of 2012 Topps baseball cards yet (it won’t truly be spring until I do), but I got to do something just about as good, probably better, a couple of weeks ago when my friend Sharon and I visited the Met.
Not the Mets, the Met.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art dipped into its legendary Burdick Collection and set up an exhibit devoted to those ballplayers responsible for Breaking the Color Barrier in Major League Baseball. It takes up but a veritable speck of space inside an immense cathedral, but what it features is larger than life: Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Jackie Robinson, Satchel Paige and dozens of other greats in their late 1940s Bowman and early 1950s Topps best, streaming ahead in time to future Met Pumpsie Green, pictured as a 1961 Red Sock. (Boston was the last team to integrate, in 1959, thus his inclusion among the immortals.)
Implicit in the display is respect for these pioneering players and a reminder that baseball, like America, sure took its time getting on the right track when it came to justice for all. But let us not undersell what beautiful work these baseball cards were and are. There’s no mistaking why they have a home in a place like the Met. They are art. Those 1953 Topps above, in particular, drew me in to a point where I think I could have produced a few raindrops of my own on a misty day.
Man, I thought after being disgusted all over again that the most wonderful sport ever invented blocked its doors to gifted athletes based not on fielding, hitting or throwing but on skin tone, can you imagine getting a pack of these in 1953? Can you imagine being a kid and opening one? Topps had just gotten into the baseball card business in 1951, had produced its first legitimate set in 1952. By 1953, wow, did they nail it.
Say Hey, still the stuff of imagination.
Oh, and Willie Mays, New York Giant then, New York Met eventually, Say Hey Kid always. Imagine having him drop out of your pack in 1954, the year he returned from the army and ascended to the top of his game, where he’d stay for the rest of eternity. Imagine Willie and Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson — each represented at the Met — composing the Giant outfield in the first game of the 1951 World Series at Yankee Stadium, the first time three black players manned left, center and right in any “big league” ballgame, let alone in the Fall Classic. Imagine how many people saw a trio of African-Americans on such a grand stage and, a moment later, realized it never should have been any bigger a deal than three white men playing the same positions. Imagine if the Giants were still in Manhattan, and the next time I was heading uptown, it wouldn’t be to a museum on Fifth Avenue but to a ballpark at 157th Street and Eighth Avenue.
I did a lot of imagining during my brief visit. I guess that’s what art is supposed to make you do. Share in the imagining and visit this brilliant exhibition honoring our national pastime. You can find it, fittingly, in the American Wing of the Met through June 17; information here.
Photos (and gallery admission) kindly provided by Sharon Chapman.
***
Jason and I didn’t have to imagine too hard to come up with The 10 Best Things About Being a Mets Fan. The real challenge was limiting ourselves to 10. See for yourself at Yahoo! Sports Big League Stew.
Monday night I did something I’m certain I hadn’t done since the twilight of Fran Healy. I turned down the sound on a Mets-generated telecast so I could listen to the game on radio. GKR heresy, I know, but I gave Gary, Keith & Ron part of the exhibition season opener off so I could get a taste of Josh Lewin’s debut.
WFAN became a revelation for those innings, though not for the reason one might intuit. It’s not that I fell in love with Lewin all at once on his own merits, though he certainly did nothing to make me want to tune him out (which is a victory unto itself given what’s transpired in that booth since Gary Cohen vacated it). It was that I fell in love all over again with Howie Rose because of how he meshed with Josh Lewin. I’d go as far to say I might fall in love all over again with the Mets on the radio again given the simpatico these two seemed to have right off the bat.
At some point between pitches, Josh invoked the 2002 Mets as an example of when things don’t go very well in Flushing. A little later, he brought up the 1984 Mets as evidence that sometimes things go better than expected. Howie warmed to both subjects instantly. Of course he did. He’s Howie Rose. He’s every Mets fan’s rabbi, disseminating our Old Testament — the Book of Stengel, the Book of Hodges, the Book of Frank Howard even — when not tending to balls and strikes.
Think Wayne Hagin ever played to Howie’s strengths? Oh good lord, Wayne Hagin…I so wanted to not detest him if only to push against the popular tide of anti-Haginism that developed as soon as he opened his mouth in these parts in 2008. In four seasons, I never met a single Mets fan who told me, “Y’know who I like? Wayne Hagin.” The nicest thing I ever heard anybody say about Wayne was when I would hear myself say, “At least he’s better than Tom McCarthy.” The second-nicest thing was my characterization of Hagin as someone who knew his baseball and brought a useful outsider’s perspective to this thing of ours. We already know what Howie knows because Howie has been knowing it since 1962 and has been telling it to us in various capacities since 1987. Howie knows what we all know, but at a depth the rest of us could never hope to attain in this lifetime. So, I reasoned at the outset of Hagin’s tenure, let’s hear what somebody who knows other stuff has to say.
It was occasionally enlightening, but mostly it was slow. I’m pretty sure there are galaxies that Hagin’s description of a double play ball from 2010 is just now reaching. And as for that dandy outsider’s perspective, after a while hearing stories about what Dante Bichette or Jim Edmonds would do in this situation lost its charm. By last year, I was as awash in the popular anti-Hagin tide as anybody: get Hagin out of here, I insisted to my radio.
What I disliked most about him was he sapped the sparkle out of Howie’s voice. Half the time, it seemed Howie was explaining the Met way to Wayne, reminiscent of Ralph Kiner drawing Lorn Brown a verbal diagram of Banner Day because Lorn had never heard of perhaps our most beloved tradition (which wouldn’t have disqualified the late Mr. Brown from working in the Mets marketing department over the past decade, I’m guessing). The other half of the time, Howie edged into kvetchiness. Not uncalled for kvetchiness — to the contrary, it was often righteous kvetching (the black uniforms, the Sunday night start times). But it was taking a toll. Between McCarthy for two seasons reminding me he was no Gary Cohen and Hagin disturbing Howie Rose’s chemistry, I grew to consider my hours away from SNY as some kind of Radio Nowhere purgatory.
Which bummed me out no end. Put aside the sublime GKR trinity and how you’d never want to skip their nightly baseball buffet if you didn’t have to (it was so cute listening to them catch up with each other Monday night like they were eighth-graders returning for the first day of school). Mets games on the radio were a cherished way of life for me from the moment I discovered they existed. I almost never felt like I was missing anything if I couldn’t be by a TV, not in the Original Three days, not when Bob Murphy became exclusively audio in the company of Steve Lamar and then Gary Thorne, certainly not in the long and amazing heyday of Murph and Cohen. When Murph retired and Howie Rose was named his successor, and we were granted 162 audiences with Howie and Gary…honestly, I’m not sure why I kept paying my cable bill.
Then our world changed, all for the better where television was concerned, generally for the worst on WFAN. McCarthy was not a worthy partner to Howie. Hagin was not a worthy partner to Howie. It had gotten so bad that I almost didn’t mind Ed Coleman subbing…and every time Ed Coleman says “cut on and missed,” an angel tears out his wings.
Monday night, though, I was living in a double-dream world. There were five announcers on two media (along with amiable roving reporter Kevin Burkhardt) who totally got the Mets thing. Gary and Howie are lifelong Mets fans. Keith and Ron are all-time Mets idols. Josh, we’ve learned, grew up a Mets fan way the hell upstate, choosing Willie Montañez as his favorite hitter, Nino Espinosa as his favorite pitcher and Nino’s afro as his favorite hairstyle. If we didn’t know that about Lewin before Monday night, it was there to pick up on throughout that maiden broadcast.
It was only a few innings of a spring game, so nothing was at stake, but geez he and Howie sounded at ease, and when you get right down to it, that’s what I want. I want two guys with whom I relish spending an evening; the business of home run calls and hit-and-run analysis tends to take care of itself. Howie was the Howie who spent those five-hour shifts edifying and entertaining me when the FAN was new and sports talk could be intelligent. He was the Howie who thrived in 2004 and 2005, when he and Gary broadcast on a special high-pitched frequency only true Mets fans could really hear. He was Howie Rose in full revival, a little like Bob Murphy was when Gary Thorne (and the 1985-1988 Mets) showed up to nudge him back to total Murphness, a state of being every Mets fan intrinsically understands as transcendent.
Part of me still feels a bit bad that we couldn’t hack it with Hagin. It almost seems the easy way out, hiring a Mets fan who sprinkles just the right amount of Metnip in Howie’s vicinity. So many who didn’t have to sit through Hagin’s labored play-by-play or his alien intonations swore he was a sweetheart. I have no reason to doubt it. For all I know, Howie loved him. But I didn’t and we didn’t. Yet I wonder if we as Mets fans have gotten to the point where we have to be spoonfed with blue and orange flatware. Everybody who announces to us comes at us with a Met pedigree. Is that what it takes to satisfy us? If young Bob Murphy arrived here from Oklahoma on a flight with Tennessee’s Lindsey Nelson and Pittsburgh Pirate great Ralph Kiner in tow, would we snarl because we’d assume they don’t get us?
I don’t think it’s geography. Ted Robinson and Tom McCarthy had grown up as Mets fans, and it didn’t buy them much goodwill. Maybe their mistake was shoving that part of their identity deep within their souls in the name of some bland, nebulous quality labeled professionalism. We want professionalism, of course, but we want people, too. Rose and Cohen are people — Met people, as it happens. Murph was people. Tim McCarver, with no Met connection whatsoever prior to joining us in 1983, was more people than younger viewers could probably fathom now. I suppose there are matters of taste and perception involved with cottoning to announcers. But we the consumers deserve to cotton to whom our ears and our brains are attracted. I probably won’t be turning down the sound on SNY this season as I once did routinely with MSG and the defunct Fox Sports Net New York (Healy…there’s another all-time mystery), but I will no longer be cringing when left to my Mets radio devices.
Johan Santana lives! I saw it for myself via two innings of televised encouragement Tuesday. He pitched to the Cardinals, he emerged with his left arm attached to his left shoulder and he wasn’t diagnosed with a rare tropical disease on his way to the clubhouse.
Talk about a super Tuesday. Everything else pales in comparison to the news that your ace is still in a position to be your ace after a year-plus of surgery, shelf and setback. If it wasn’t the Mets and I wasn’t conditioned to expect the worst, I’d swear this is good news.
Meanwhile, here’s some news I recognized as excellent as soon as I came upon it Tuesday: the return to regular blogging from one of the best in our business, Mike Steffanos. Make (or remake) Mike’s Mets one of your regular reads. You won’t be sorry.
Tonight shortly after six, when Dillon Gee faces the Nationals’ Roger Bernadina with the first pitch that pretends to matter in 2012, strike one would be most preferable. Shortly thereafter, when Long Beach’s own John Lannan returns the favor sixty feet and six inches from Andres Torres, our new center fielder is advised to take it and work studiously from there.
That’s Terry Collins’s short-term dream scenario for what we commonly call a meaningless exhibition game, so it’s mine, too. Terry wants fundamentals attended to tonight. I know that because he told me during last week’s blogger conference call (kindly transcribed by Chris McShane at Amazin’ Avenue). Granted one question to ask the Mets’ manager, I asked what he looks for from his players during the early fake games versus the later fake games. Terry, who had a good answer for every good question, said pitchers need to “pound the strike zone” and hitters have to make sure “we’re seeing pitches”. Start executing the fundamentals that have been the focus of drills thus far. In a couple of weeks, velocity for the pitchers and bat speed for the hitters come into play.
As I thanked him for his insight and he moved on to another inquiry, I was buoyed that Collins had injected meaning into these supposedly meaningless games. Command the strike zone now, throw hard later; work the count now, swing hard later.
Something like that.
I’ll try to keep that in mind as SNY’s signal transforms from filler to vital. I might forget by the second inning, given that the mere presence of something very much approximating baseball appears on the old not-so-flat screen downstairs. As with what managers look for from their players, the needs of fans change as Spring Training gets going and gets old. Thirty-five years ago, I was so excited the Mets’ first Saturday game of March, versus the Cardinals, was being broadcast from Al Lang Stadium over WNEW-AM that I devoted two pages of loose leaf paper to scoring it, inking (inking!) in every substitution Joe Frazier and Vern Rapp made. I never did it again, not that spring, not in any game since. I satisfied myself in March 1977 with the sounds and occasional sights of baseball activity. It’s probably what I’ll wind up doing tonight after Terry’s guidance wears off.
After a hardcore group discussion of fundamentals, et al, with the Mets manager, it was intoxicating to think about pitchers hitting their spots and hitters waiting for their pitches, but in the days that have passed since that conference call, David Wright’s got a rib cage issue, Scott Hairston’s oblique is acting up, Zach Lutz has been plunked and what isn’t wrong with Ike Davis? Ike’s valley fever (a damn poor substitute for pennant fever) isn’t supposed to be a big deal, but this is the same strapping young man who fell down in Colorado last May and didn’t get up for the rest of the season. Plus a judge says the Mets’ owners owe a trustee roughly the equivalent of their 2012 payroll and thus –pending appeals, of course — provisionally cleared the way for a jury to add a whole lot more to their tab. One could be left to wonder if there’ll be enough left in the kitty by June to cover REO Speedwagon’s expenses.
Injuries. Madoff. Whatever. Throw strikes, take balls, and if any Met reaches base, take it on the run. For one night the rest will take care of itself.
Thanks again to Amazin’ Avenue for transcribing the aforementioned blogger conference call. Read the entire enlightening Q&A session here.
Think of one’s attitude about the 2012 Mets as a scale. Let’s say the stuff that’s bad, depressing, worrisome, etc. goes on the left, and the good, happy, optimistic stuff goes on the right.
BAD STUFF
The team is broke
Bud Selig is going to keep looking the other way instead of doing anything about it
How quickly and thoroughly the team gets un-broke will be determined by lawyers
Those lawyerly determinations will probably take a long, long time
We finally have a smart GM — and he doesn’t have any money
Help from the farm system is probably at least a year away
The Mets play in a division with a very good team, a pretty good team, and two improving teams
Even if everything breaks right, forget about obtaining pricey veteran help
The Yankees are an aggravating, omnipresent point of media comparison
The starting pitching is in all likelihood going to be somewhere between mediocre and bad
Key players are coming off injuries
Other key players are trying to reverse scary declines
Smart Mets fans reflexively assume anything said by ownership or the business side is untrue
Did I mention the team is broke?
GOOD STUFF
The Mets are playing spring-training games next week
But hang on. Let me put that the way it came to me, lying in bed this morning:
OH MY GOD YOU GUYS THE METS ARE PLAYING SPRING-TRAINING GAMES NEXT WEEK! YOU CAN SEE IT RIGHT ON THE SCHEDULE AND EVERYTHING! WE CAN WATCH THEM! THERE WILL BE GREEN GRASS AND INFIELD DIRT AND SUNNY SKIES AND THE POP OF CATCHERS’ MITTS AND THE CRACK OF BATS AND RUNNERS TAKING LEADS AND GUYS WORKING COUNTS AND DUDES IN THE DUGOUT SPITTING SUNFLOWER SEEDS AND UMPS BRAYING BALLS AND STRIKES AND FANS YELLING HUM BATTER AND MANAGERS AND COACHES CLAPPING AND SAYING SILLY THINGS! THERE WILL BE METS! THERE WILL BE GAMES! THERE WILL BE METS GAMES!
And all of a sudden the scales are all the way over there on the right — CLANG! — on the good side. And somehow, at least for now, none of that stuff that fell off the bad side of the scales matters.
Right away you get Keith Hernandez’s final Mets plate appearance. At 2:24, Gary Carter catches for the final time at Shea. And seconds later, Kid is swinging in Flushing for the last time. Watch the at-bat and listen to how Steve Zabriskie describes him. Pretty much sums him up.
And so this doesn’t leave you as blue as all those classic Starter jackets crammed into the Mets dugout, stay tuned for how the game ends. Ah, Jefferies, we hardly knew ye, apparently. In any event, fantastic 1989 Shea Stadium time capsule. Many thanks to Larry for tipping us off.
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.
