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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 8 February 2012 10:58 am Last week, Daniel Murphy told reporters at the Thurman Munson Awards Dinner that, “Expectations for us this year are like any other. We expect to go to the playoffs.”
Good for him. If I expected the Mets to go the playoffs, I’d mark myself as delusional, but if he didn’t expect the Mets to go to the playoffs before Spring Training commences (or couldn’t muster the self-confidence to declare he does), I’d be rather despondent.
David Wright tried the same line a couple of Februarys ago, very dutifully delivering some variation on “we expect…” and it actually bummed me out. The Mets were sliding in the wrong direction then and it felt like David (no matter how he might have believed what he was saying) was acting as Minister of Propaganda for a corrupt regime. The Mets are no closer to contending status now than they were then, but these days only the delusional among the non-uniformed personnel believe it, so when Murphy says it in that Murphy way of his, it’s almost a psychological shot in the arm.
Doesn’t particularly matter what anybody says in winter. It’s early fall when a statement regarding going to the playoffs has some merit. The Cardinals were able to say it at the end of September, and look where it got them. If we use the football calendar, summer talk is just talk. January and especially February talk truly tells the tale, sometimes as ticker-tape settles gently over the tale’s final postscript.
The 2011 St. Louis Cardinals needed 188 games — 162 of theirs, 26 of the incredible, disappearing Braves — to make the playoffs with a 90-72 record. It was the least best record of teams in the playoffs, but the key phrase there is “in the playoffs”. The Cardinals were just that, and after a few weeks, they were the champions of their sport.
The 2011 New York Football Giants won and lost regular-season games in almost the same proportion: 9-7. It was just good enough to edge them into a division title, which entitled them to one ticket to one playoff game. From there, they earned another…then another…then another…then the trophy everybody else wanted. You gotta be in it to win it. The Giants were. And they did.
It doesn’t always work that way. It can’t. For most of the postseason tournament entrants, the ticket doesn’t get punched successfully clear to the end of the line. Seven baseball teams played in October but did not achieve what the Cardinals achieved. Players representing eleven very recently active members of the NFL weren’t brushing confetti from their shoulder pads Sunday night. But those teams and their runner-up brethren in other top professional leagues at least had a conceivable shot at the so-called brass ring — a better shot than those who didn’t make the playoffs.
So if Murph wants to say that’s where the Mets are headed in 2012, more power to him. Because saying it may be as close as we get. It’s as close as we’ve gotten since 2006.
How long ago was that, by the way? Consider that there hasn’t been a top-level professional sports team based in the New York Metropolitan Area since Called Strike Three to have not made the playoffs in whatever league they’ve played. Some of these teams and leagues have come and gone; some of them, to be honest, I barely knew or didn’t know existed. But they each made it to a championship tourney more recently than the Mets have been in one.
Seriously…
• Last New York Giants (NFL) playoff game:
February 5, 2012
• Last New York Red Bulls (MLS) playoff game:
November 3, 2011
• Last New York Yankees (MLB) playoff game:
October 6, 2011
• Last New York Liberty (WNBA) playoff game:
September 19, 2011
• Last New York Knicks (NBA) playoff game:
April 24, 2011
• Last New York Rangers (NHL) playoff game:
April 23, 2011
• Last New York Jets (NFL) playoff game:
January 23, 2011
• Last Long Island Lizards (Major League Lacrosse) playoff game:
August 21, 2010
• Last New Jersey Devils (NHL) playoff game:
April 22, 2010
• Last New York Titans (National Lacrosse League) playoff game:
May 15, 2009
• Last New York Dragons (Arena Football League) playoff game:
July 5, 2008
• Last New Jersey Ironmen (Major Indoor Soccer League) playoff game:
April 12, 2008
• Last New Jersey Nets (NBA) playoff game:
May 18, 2007
• Last New York Islanders (NHL) playoff game:
April 20, 2007
• Last New York Mets (MLB) playoff game:
October 19, 2006
This doesn’t count minor league locals like the Long Island Ducks, but the Ducks were in the playoffs more recently — October 2, 2011 — too.
The Giants were the only New York-area team whose very last playoff appearance was a victory. Everybody else stood by and watched various bands of Tigers, Celtics, Steelers and so forth celebrate. The defunct Dragons, I just learned, lost a heartbreaker to the Philadelphia Soul. That’s the chance that is taken when the playoffs are made. The Mets have avoided that kind of crushing final scene for more than five years now.
Further, it’s the way it goes that some teams don’t make playoffs for quite a while. Check with the Kansas City Royals (1985), the Pittsburgh Pirates (1992), the Toronto Blue Jays (1993) and the handful of teams who’ve waited longer than the Mets to return — or, in the Washington Nationals’ after-Expo case, debut — in Major League Baseball’s postseason. Also, the Mets can take solace in remaining a going concern, unlike, say, the unironically named New Jersey Ironmen, who didn’t have the endurance to keep playing beyond 2009, when they migrated to the Xtreme Soccer League…which also doesn’t exist anymore. And they can rationalize that MLB is more selective than the NFL, NBA and NHL in choosing its playoff participants. Even when Selig & Co. get around to shoehorning a second Wild Card into each league, baseball will take only ten teams in thirty to its postseason dance.
Still, the Mets are the fifteenth-most recent New York-area major league professional team to play a playoff game. Don’t tell Daniel Murphy. I don’t want him to know.
by Greg Prince on 7 February 2012 8:15 am “OK, settle down everybody. We’ve got Spring Training coming up in a couple of weeks, so this meeting is important as it allows us as an organization to address the issues that might be holding us back from succeeding in 2012. First on the agenda is deciding how to replace Jose Reyes’s output at the top of the order. Any suggestions?”
“Deny Howard Megdal’s press credentials.”
“Good idea. Now what about helping Ruben Tejada break in as the starting shortstop. That’s a big job.”
“Deny Howard Megadal’s press credentials.”
“All right. Ike Davis and Johan Santana are each coming back from injuries and we’re going to need them to return to form. How do we do that?”
“Deny Howard Megdal’s press credentials.”
“This is going better than planned. We have high hopes for Lucas Duda’s bat, but his glove might be a project. What’s the best way to bring him along in right?”
“Deny Howard Megdal’s press credentials.”
“We are really rolling. Listen, we all love Murph, but his defense is going to be a tough fit at any position. Can we improve his pivot on the double play so he can be at second every day — anybody?”
“Deny Howard Megdal’s press credentials.”
“Beautiful! We have a whole new bullpen this year, with everybody moving into new roles. Any suggestions so the late innings aren’t a nightmare?”
“Deny Howard Megdal’s press credentials.”
“Nice going. Catching’s a little thin. Is there a way to enhance what we have between Thole and Nickeas?”
“Deny Howard Megdal’s press credentials.”
“That’s some real forward thinking there. The walls are coming in, but Jason Bay may need more than that. Do we tinker with his stance, get him counseling or what?”
“Deny Howard Megdal’s press credentials.”
“I’m writing that one down. Next on the agenda is Pelfrey…need I say more?”
“Deny Howard Megdal’s press credentials.”
“Nail on the head! On the off-field issues, what about attendance? It’s been down the last couple of years and the lack of any big acquisitions isn’t necessarily going to fire anybody up. What to do?”
“Deny Howard Megdal’s press credentials.”
“Taken care of. Finally, the ownership thing…that’s a mess you’d need a whole book to explain fairly and clearly. We need an out-of-the-box solution. The floor is open…”
“Deny Howard Megdal’s press credentials.”
“Splendid! Apparently we’ve solved all our problems. Somehow we just knew it was all Howard Megdal’s fault.”
by Greg Prince on 6 February 2012 6:29 am The first time the Giants won the Super Bowl, I was shocked — not because the Giants of 1986 weren’t a very fine team but because the Giants of 1969 and 1971 and 1973 and 1974 and clear through to the Giants of 1980 were so darn awful.
The Giants to whom I established diversionary ties as a six-year-old seemed to exist so I wouldn’t take sports team success for granted. When I fell into them in the autumn of ’69, the Mets had just completed their Miracle and the Knicks were making a high art of hitting the open man. The Giants, as introduced to me by my father, were any given Sunday’s bad news, grounding me in how sports fan reality actually worked.
It worked like this: The Mets won the World Series…then the Giants lost seven games in the seven weeks that followed. When they finished their 1969 by raising their record from 3-8 to 6-8, I swear I was beaming. Six and eight, I calculated, was extremely close to 7-7. Seven and seven, I then reasoned, was the essence of not bad.
My baseball team was a champion. My basketball team was en route to being a champion. I could live with my football team striving to be not bad.
Took a long, long time for the Giants to attain that standard on a going basis. After a couple of modestly encouraging campaigns in which wins slightly outnumbered losses, the Giants avoided spreading further encouragement as if vaccinated against it. From 1973 through 1980, they played every week and lost in most of them, compiling a record of 33-84-1. As diversions went, the Giants were not a fulfilling one.
But I hung with them in the non-Met months and was finally rewarded with all I ever thought to dream of: a playoff appearance, in 1981. I didn’t expect them to do anything with it. I didn’t expect them to repeat it annually. I was just happy that for one weekend after the end of a football season, there’d be another Giants game.
Standards changed. The Giants managed to improve themselves enough to transcend not bad by the mid-’80s and ultimately attain excellence in the form of that first Super Bowl victory, January 25, 1987. They had gotten so good that it was actually disappointing when they didn’t achieve a second immediately.
But they did get a second eventually, January 27, 1991. A third arrived almost out of nowhere, February 3, 2008. And last night, February 5, 2012, a fourth materialized in brilliant fashion.
I swear I was beaming each time.
The Giants are four-time Super Bowl champs. They’ve won the biggest game there is to win in four different decades in four different time zones* on four different networks. They’ve won more Super Bowls than all but three franchises, yet nobody has won more in the span that began with the Giants winning their first. For as long as I’ve been following them with a tangible measure of heartfelt allegiance, they’ve never been a dynasty and never been positioned as one of their league’s glamour teams, yet by the ultimate measure, they’ve risen to stand among what some would call the elite in their sport.
Which is all well and good, but all I ever wanted out of the Giants was enough Sundays when they’d be not bad and a few years that weren’t part of a 33-84-1. I got that and I got it again…and again…and now again.
Trust me: My appreciation for it is boundless.
And until further notice, it’s the Mets who keep me grounded.
*Indianapolis apparently runs on Eastern time nowadays, so there goes that one. Giants will need to win Super Bowl XLVII in New Orleans to restore this factoid to factual.
by Greg Prince on 5 February 2012 11:11 am February 5: Super Bowl XLVI, as you have no doubt heard. As you may have also heard, Go New York Football Giants (specificity never hurts).
April 5: Opening Day, Braves at Mets. Only two months away suddenly.
Win or lose on February 5, April 5 sounds mighty good right about now.
Let’s Go Mets, as you’ve also no doubt heard if not lately. If they start now, they’ll have a mighty long leg up on the competition.
by Greg Prince on 4 February 2012 8:35 am Since it seems to come up every couple of years (as it did here), Billy Crystal wore the Mets cap in the 1991 film City Slickers not because he was an unprincipled high-profile frontrunner in the Spike Lee vein, but because the Mets promoted and pledged a large sum of money to Comic Relief in 1990. I’m not fully certain whether the Mets made the cap a condition of their support of the charity Crystal helped spearhead or if it was Crystal’s way of acknowledging their contribution. As celebrity Yankees fans go, he was always pretty steady in his public allegiance to the dark side, even during the period when it wasn’t quite so fashionable. (His insistence on doing Phil Rizzuto impressions during his visit to the Channel 9 booth on May 11, 1990 — Comic Relief Night at Shea — was his Francesa-like tell that he couldn’t behave himself properly on somebody else’s psychic or actual turf for the five minutes if it wasn’t all about his team.)
Though I always enjoy spotting a Mets cap in a major motion picture, no matter how cloying the major motion picture, I can’t help but note that shortly after City Slickers came out, the Mets’ longtime winning ways dissipated almost immediately. #blamebillycrystal
Also, Ken Burns’s Baseball may have been the only time since the “Fernando” bit began getting on my nerves that I’ve been able to tolerate Billy Crystal whatsoever, even in the mourning of the Giant-Dodger departure. He seemed to be speaking from the heart as a baseball fan as opposed to reminding you how funny and wonderful he is (lest those watching him not infer that he’s funny and wonderful on their own).
Otherwise, sure: most days’ Worst Person…in the World!
by Jason Fry on 3 February 2012 4:58 am It hasn’t been the greatest offseason for following Mets’ news in our family — Joshua’s REYES jersey is gone, though I can’t bear to dismantle the diptych of Reyes and Wright above his bed — but the beat does go on. This winter, Joshua and I (often with Emily alongside) watched all of Ken Burns’s Baseball, starting with Cap Anson and King Kelly and John Thorn as guide and working our way through to Bill Lee and Carlton Fisk and Bob Costas discussing his quick retreat from the visiting clubhouse at Shea. And then we did The Tenth Inning, with Barry Bonds and Ichiro and Tom Verducci.
It was a lot — a lot of hours, a lot of John Chancellor, a lot of photographs zoomed in on — but we both loved it. And I loved that now Joshua has his baseball education, the sense of history I hope will cement him to the game beyond the doings at Citi Field, and cause him to appreciate those doings even more, seeing them as new threads in something far older and much larger.
Burns’s extravaganza gets its share of mockery — even sometimes from me — for its myth-making and relentless air of elegy, to say nothing of its sheer immensity. Sure, sometimes things get a little slow going, with Donald Hall drifting off into the soliloquous ether or the economics of the Federal League refusing to yield screen time. But watching it again, I sunk happily into it much as I did in September 1994, when tragically it was the only baseball available to us. It was immensely moving then and it was this time, too — and made more so because this time it was my kid’s introduction to Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson and Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth and Josh Gibson and Jackie Robinson. Besides, if I were going to poke fun at Burns, I’d also have to aim the needle at myself: At around the midpoint, Emily rightly took me to task for treating our viewing as if it were 22+ hours of church, with resident nine-year-olds expected to watch reverently without ever interrupting or wriggling. (“YOU WILL PAY ATTENTION WHILE JOHN CHANCELLOR SUMMARIZES THE BOYHOOD OF VIRGIL TRUCKS!”)
No, everything isn’t perfect in Baseball. I love Shelby Foote but was never quite sure what he was doing there (that goes double for Mario Cuomo), and letting the smarmy Billy Crystal weigh in on the pain of losing the Dodgers and Giants made me sputter with rage. But so much about it is perfect, or at least pretty close to it. The better commenters are marvelous in conjuring baseball’s timelessness and joy, and even better when you see their own childhoods returning to them in remembering their first beloved teams, players or games. Roger Angell is a terrific guide, as is Robert Creamer, and Tom Boswell and Bob Costas and Doris Kearns Goodwin and so many others. (The same goes for Keith Olbermann, Marcus Breton, Howard Bryant, Chris Rock and Mike Barnicle in The Tenth Inning — plus we get to see Goodwin finally enjoying a Red Sox title.)
The treatment of race and discrimination in Baseball is absolutely right and proper, whether it’s a young Branch Rickey confronting a wrong he will one day help put right, the unimaginable burden and indomitable will of Jackie Robinson, or hearing Curt Flood still raw with hurt and disbelief over his inhumane treatment in the minors. Smaller moments strike you down, too — Bobby Bragan explaining that he came to Rickey’s funeral because the Mahatma “made me a better man,” or the little detail that after John McGraw’s death, a list was found of all the black players he’d wanted to sign. At the same time, it isn’t all dour — Burns captures the barnstorming glee of the Negro Leagues in full flight, Count Basie’s strutting “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?” feels like triumph, and Buck O’Neil is riveting and marvelous no matter what tale he’s telling.
Most of all, though, what I love about Baseball is the way it brings long-gone players to life, in all their majesty or ignominy. When I was a kid, I steeped myself in baseball history by reading Roger Angell’s collections and poring over the Baseball Encyclopedia, all of which I hope Joshua will do as well. But Burns let him also see the players: the death-in-the-eyes glare of Cobb, an impossibly young Mickey Mantle, an impossibly old Grover Cleveland Alexander, Christy Mathewson looking carved from marble, Robinson and Ted Williams seeking refuge in the dugout, Lou Gehrig’s bemusement in the background of photo after photo of Babe Ruth hamming it up, and Satchel Paige looking like he knows the secrets of the universe. (One suspects he did.)
The portrait of Cobb is wonderful, appreciating his feral talent while capturing him as a damaged, ultimately pitiable figure. Ruth explodes off the screen in all his beautiful brawling glory. Williams comes to life not just through footage but also in interviews, his arrogance obvious, infuriating and somehow utterly justifiable. Bill Lee is hilarious, smart and fascinating. (“… so then you go to a cross-seam fastball, which I don’t have.”) The Tenth Inning also has its star turns — Pedro Martinez flashes the Williams arrogance and charm discussing baseball as psychological war, while Joe Torre gets what even I must admit is his due — but no figure comes to life like Barry Bonds, compelling and horrifying and finally as pitiable, in his own way, as Cobb. The first episode ends by setting up Bonds’s fall, furious at finding himself forgotten and overshadowed by the ludicrously inflated Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, and in the second episode Burns captures Bonds’s deeply weird, joyless pursuit of Hank Aaron before the quietly devastating coda of Bonds breaking the record, finishing with 28 homers (and a .480 OBP) and never playing again.
Joshua now has his grounding: He knows Christy Mathewson and Honus Wagner and Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente and Bob Gibson. He understands that the pain of being a Mets fan in a Yankees town pales in comparison with the annual horror our Brooklyn forebears went through — and that one triumph can erase all of that. He knows Casey Stengel isn’t just a name from the ancient Mets past, but the embodiment of New York baseball. He gets that Barry Bonds isn’t a hero or a villain, but a lot of things at the same time.
And I think he understands — to the extent that a nine-year-old can — that the triumph and joy of baseball wouldn’t exist without failure and loss. The best batters make outs most of the time. Every year begins with the near-certainty that your team’s season will end not in champagne, but with an agonizing loss or sad irrelevance. Today’s giddy young star is fated to become ordinary or get hurt or be traded or go somewhere else, and even if he avoids all that, he will not escape getting old and vanishing, because nobody does. Ken Burns didn’t inject an elemental sadness into baseball with white letters on black screens or sepia photos or quiet piano accompaniment — it’s woven into the game itself, and no one who loves baseball deeply can avoid it.
But the joy is there too. Baseball’s fun, of course — fun to talk about and worry over and watch intently and also just keep a friendly eye on. Burns brings that to life as well, in so many ways. But a tiny one stands out to me.
After a home run, my favorite shot is the one from the first- or third-base side, when you see the batter connect and then watch the flight of the ball, and in the background the fans get out of their seats, in ones and twos and then groups until even the casual fans or those not paying attention know the ball is gone and can exult.
In the early 1990s I lived outside D.C., in a group house where we watched the Mets or the Braves most every night, and when we saw that shot my friend Allan and I made a ritual of yelling, “Get UP, you damn fans! GET UP!” In Baseball, there’s a shot from that angle of Ruth connecting, probably sometime in the 1930s. The fans in the background are men in suits and hats, and the grandstand is held up by steel beams. But the reaction is exactly the same. In 1994, seeing that shot, Allan and I exchanged a glance and then were both yelling at the TV: “Get UP, you damn fans! GET UP!” Watching with us was a friend of ours, a woman who tolerated baseball more than she liked it. When Allan and I went into our ritual, she let out a kind of nervous, stunned laugh — because that little moment had just shown that baseball really was as timeless and enduring as we claimed it was.
Joshua is familiar with this ritual, too. When Ruth hit his shot, 80 years ago, I was ready. “Get UP, you damn fans!” I yelped. “GET UP!” And he turned and looked at me in surprise, then looked back at the screen, and laughed. And so on we go.
by Greg Prince on 1 February 2012 5:28 pm It was a win, which made it much better than a loss, but for a Mets fan, it was mostly uneasy. The Mets were making their second Sunday Night Baseball appearance of 1998 on ESPN, their twentieth overall. The previous nineteen — beginning with the very first SNB telecast in 1990 and running through early June of ’98 — were ballgames, except they took place on a night when the Mets didn’t usually play, on a channel where you didn’t usually think to look for them.
The twentieth game was something else. It was life and death, to put it mildly. And it was there for every baseball fan seeking baseball to see. It was the Mets and Yankees completing the first Shea Stadium Subway Series. It felt bizarre that it was in the broadcast hands of total strangers.
The Mets had lost to the Yankees Friday night. They lost again on Saturday afternoon. The 1998 Mets were a good but flawed team. The 1998 Yankees were overwhelming. It was not a favorable confluence of circumstances. Now ask announcers who were not necessarily attuned to the nuances of those Mets, let alone to the sensitivities of Mets fans, to call the game.
The Mets won, 2-1. They escaped a sweep and retained their dignity. It took an unnecessarily strange sacrifice fly to nail it down, so strange — Brian McRae appeared to get caught off first while Carlos Baerga was scoring — that it briefly flummoxed the likes of Jon Miller and Joe Morgan. The truck wasn’t too clear on the action, either, because for an instant, ESPN’s graphic that had changed the score from NYY 1 NYM 1 to NYY 1 NYM 2 changed back to NYY 1 NYM 1.
Suddenly SportsCenter came on the air without getting NYY 1 NYM 2 in order. The Mets did win, didn’t they?
Yes, they did. But this game, from June 28, 1998, represents the turning point for the narrative where the Mets and Sunday Night Baseball are concerned. Over the subsequent dozen seasons, 1999 through 2011, the Mets would appear forty times. Almost 40% of those occasions were given over to the Subway Series. ESPN loved the Yankees-Mets storyline.
They never seemed too keen on Mets-Yankees, however. The Mets have won eight of eighteen Sunday Night showdowns versus their neighbors. Those are the endings, which can’t be dictated in advance. It’s the story the broadcast tells over and over as prelude to the endings, about the mighty pinstripers and their attendant drama, that irks blue and orange ears. The Yankee theme rarely accounts for only half the story during those games. It usually obfuscates whatever the Mets have going on. Granted, some years the Mets don’t have a lot going on, but the Sunday Night Baseball epoch covers two highly competitive Met eras when we were justifiably proud to share our team with the nation…no matter how it inconvenienced us.
Yet we were regularly relegated to something less than a co-starring role in these New York-New York productions. That treatment, at least as much as the flexible scheduling that came to be in the 2000s (wherein 1:10 starts floated clear past 8 o’clock until the ticket-printers wised up and went with “TBD” on potential flex dates), is probably why so few Metsopotamians mourn the Mets absence from 2012’s initial Sunday Night Baseball schedule. Miller and Morgan gave way to a much more enjoyable booth in 2011 — Dan Shulman, Orel Hershiser and future Red Sox skipper Bobby Valentine — but the perception is stubborn that They’re All Against Us. Particularly when we play the Yankees.
Fortunately, there have been some delightful endings for the scrapbook, starting with the Baerga dash home in 1998 and extending through seven other classics of the genre.
• June 6, 1999: The Mets break the eight-game losing streak that cost three coaches their posts. They also break long personal winning and on-base streaks belonging to Roger Clemens and Derek Jeter, respectively. It’s their first Yankee Stadium win since Dave Mlicki broke the seal on the Subway Series, June 16, 1997 — a Monday night game aired nationally on FX and locally on the Mets’ and Yankees’ respective outlets. The first Subway Series was the only one that occurred “during the week,” when neither Fox nor ESPN was involved. (The 7-2 win also augured well for the Mets’ overall Sunday Night Baseball record in 1999, a crisp 4-0.)
• July 9, 2000: Another episode of face-saving as the Mets lightly avenge the day-night debacle from 24 hours earlier. Mike Hampton and Armando Benitez strike out eleven Yankees in a 2-0 shutout (and Steve Philips orders a couple of Yankee players the hell out of the Shea weight room). Only so much face was saved that Sunday given Saturday’s criminal beaning of Mike Piazza by Clemens in a makeup game at Yankee Stadium whose existence was attributable to a Sunday Night rainout in June. If the Mets and Yankees had played a day game on June 11, 2000, the Saturday night disgrace of July 8 never happens because Clemens never gets the DH-protected opportunity to “avenge” Piazza’s grand slam of June 9. Though if there’s no rain delay at Yankee Stadium on June 11, the world never witnesses Robin Ventura’s time-killing rendition of Mike Piazza rounding the tarp-covered bases.
• June 17, 2001: The Mets again avert a weekend sweep, this time with a six-run eighth to bring them back from 7-2 to 8-7 at Shea Stadium. The crowning blow was delivered by Mike Piazza with a deep home run crushed off Carlos Almanzar while Joe Torre rested Mariano Rivera and hid Roger Clemens.
• June 16, 2002: The Mets take one of these series for a change when Mo Vaughn’s massive three-run, eighth-inning homer off David Wells make the Mets 3-2 winners at Shea. Mo didn’t often resemble the American League MVP he had once been, but show him Wells and he would make like Cher and turn back time. Vaughn versus Wells lifetime: 9 homers, 18 RBIs and a .455 average in 66 at-bats.
• May 21, 2006: This Shea rubber game bounced the Mets’ way when Carlos Delgado (with two on) and David Wright pounded Aaron Small with back-to-back homers in the fourth inning en route to a 4-3 victory. Billy Wagner slithered out of a ninth-inning jam for the save one night after blowing a 4-0 lead. The euphoria was so thick that Omar Minaya assured the closer after the game, “Congratulations. You just won us the pennant.”
• May 18, 2008: A lovely 11-2 blowout was obscured by two events not detectable in the box score. Off the field there was reeling manager Willie Randolph telling one of his newspaper buddies before the game — when there was more time to talk than there would have been for an afternoon start — that he thought the heat on him for the Mets’ poor start (and lousy finish the year before) had a racial component to it. Soon enough, because of the black-and-white standings that dictated his fate, Randolph would be replaced by Jerry Manuel. Manuel had his moment in the Sunday Night spotlight when the bench coach sprang from his seat to argue a dubious “foul” call with home plate umpire Bob Davidson. Davidson robbed Carlos Delgado of a fourth-inning home run, the cameras would show. Jerry got ejected from the game but had his profile raised to heroic proportions, appearing far more animated in defense of Delgado’s swing than the laconic Randolph. Davidson later admitted he blew the call, which helped spur the movement to add home run replay to the rules, a court of appeal from which the Mets would benefit several times in 2009.
• May 23, 2010: A solid home team, it’s no surprise the 2010 Mets beat the Yankees on Sunday Night Baseball, 6-4. It’s also no surprise the Mets win a Subway Series at Citi Field despite being swept out of one in ugly fashion a year earlier. Nor is it surprising how effective Johan Santana was in outpitching CC Sabathia. But Jason Bay hitting two home runs at Citi Field before anybody made any adjustments to the outfield fences? As Billy Wagner might have said, shocker!
From 1998 through 2003 (including the 2000 Ventura-as-Piazza rainout), the Worldwide Leader availed itself of every opportunity but one to show a Mets-Yankees (or Yankees-Mets) game. They became more selective starting in 2004, perhaps in deference to the Mets’ horrendous 0-6 Subway Series mark in 2003 and bleak prospects overall. ESPN skipped the Shea showdowns in ’04 and ’05, leaving the Mets to host Sunday afternoon intracity games. The final Subway Series game at Shea in 2008 was also left for daytime. In 2011, neither Sunday NY-NY game made it into prime time. ESPN was likely saving its Yankee slots for games late in the season (while Fox suddenly decided Saturday night would be a splendid time period for these contests).
The Mets have proven they don’t need to stay local to play to a national Sunday night audience. ESPN pitted them against their rivals the Braves four times from 1999 to 2003 (2-2) and the Phillies seven times between 2006 and 2011 (3-4). The Mets’ near-championship aura from 2006 helped earn their 2007 season-opener against the Cardinals Sunday Night spotlight status as literally the only game on the schedule to get that year going (on an upbeat 6-1 note). And despite coming off a miserable 2009 (when they went 70-92 overall and 0-4 on Sunday Nights), ESPN rolled the Mets out for three consecutive weeks in April and May of 2010, once each versus the three aforementioned teams (resulting in two losses sandwiching one rain-shortened win).
And then there are the Cubs, the Mets’ long-ago rivals. They’ve made for a fascinating foil in this particular time slot in this particular century. The Mets set their record for most runs in an inning (11) on Sunday night, July 16, 2006, at Wrigley Field in a 13-7 win. They provided the opposition for the 300th win for some lefthanded pitcher or another on Sunday night, August 5, 2007, also at Wrigley Field. Of less historical consequence but trivially swell, Victor Zambrano defeated Carlos Zambrano, 6-1, at Shea Stadium, Sunday night, August 7, 2005.
The toughest Sunday night loss to swallow, perhaps, came against the Cubs on September 11, 2011, at Citi Field. The date pretty much says it all. The stirring tenth-anniversary ceremonies of 9/11/11 were overshadowed by the cap debacle that saw the Mets’ heads get slapped by the likes of Joe Torre acting as front hack for MLB. But the pregame tribute to the fallen couldn’t have been more moving and almost made the 10-6 loss in eleven innings an afterthought. Besides, if you seek to read symbolism into your baseball games, you couldn’t do any better than the Mets prevailing, 2-1, in fourteen innings at Citizens Bank Park on May 1, 2011, the night Bin Laden was at last vanquished in Pakistan.
The Mets preceded Billy Joel’s The Last Play At Shea concerts of July 16 and 18, 2008, by playing the last game before Shea’s last All-Star break against the Rockies on Sunday night, July 13, 2008 (a satisfying 7-0 shutout powered by Carloses Delgado and Beltran). If that was a “last,” what about the next? The next Sunday Night Baseball for the Mets, whether at Citi Field or on the road, remains a mystery. It could come on one of those dates To Be Determined in 2012 or it could wait until whichever season the Mets strike the powers that be as more of a surefire television attraction.
Selfishly, we’re fine with Sunday afternoons, particularly if kids and kid-themed promotions are involved (the most recent Helmet Day was moved to Sunday night, June 5, 2011; Johan Santana Bobblehead Day was shifted to Sunday night, September 7, 2008). But Mets fans are too generous to not want to share the Mets with all of America now and then.
Y’know what? Making the playoffs would take care of that instinct without disturbing our natural Sunday afternoon rhythms…which were explored in Part I of this two-part FAFIF series.
Banner news regarding Sunday afternoon, May 27, here!
by Greg Prince on 30 January 2012 12:01 pm Coming this Sunday night: The favorite football team of many (if not all) Mets fans, playing for the championship of its sport.
Coming NO Sunday night in 2012, as far as we know right now: The favorite baseball team of all Mets fans, playing for anything…not even to get us closer to 2013.
ESPN released its preliminary Sunday Night Baseball schedule a couple of weeks ago, and the Mets were conspicuous — to Mets fans, anyway — by their absence: ten dates, no Mets. Mind you, the Mets could still easily pop onto the slate since there are still fifteen Sunday nights unaccounted for by The Worldwide Leader and the Mets were, at last check, one of thirty MLB teams. Anybody who’s held a ticket for 1:10 PM and magically discovered the first pitch would be fired seven hours later knows how that works.
Until then, however, the Mets are officially an afterthought where Major League Baseball’s theoretical premier showcase is concerned. The Phillies are assured a spotlight game. The Braves are listed for a Sunday night, too. So are the Nationals. The Marlins aren’t, but the debut of Not Joe Robbie Stadium will serve as ESPN’s Opening Night presentation on Wednesday, April 4. Everybody in the N.L. East looms as a national cablecast big deal…everybody but us.
Except for what that implies about prospective competitiveness, I don’t sense a lot of mourning in Metsopotamia.
The natural rhythms of baseball fandom make the sport less of a fit for prime time programming than football. The Super Bowl used to kick off on Sunday afternoon (the first eleven of them), but it’s not at all odd that after the first XI, it started coming on after six. It’s football. It’s spectacle. It doesn’t even have to be championship football. Monday Night Football was once upon a time a sensation. It’s still an institution. Sunday Night Football is a huge ratings hit week in and week out. Put a pigskin under the lights and it shines brighter.
Stick a horsehide under the lights, however, and we tend to whimper. The World Series hasn’t been an all-matinee affair since 1970 — further back than the last daytime Super Bowl in 1977 — and yet a critical mass of traditionalists still yearn longingly every October for the way it used to be, as if that was the way it was always going to be. In the regular season, five or six days of the week we put up with night baseball, but the spirit of the “nineteenth-century pastoral game” (as George Carlin winked at it) seems to demand at least one contest a week be played in the glow of the sun. I suppose if you live away from New York and you don’t partake of the packages that provide every game any time on any device, the Mets on Sunday Night Baseball is a boon, meaning the lack of it is kind of a blow to your access. For those of us with easier access to SNY and ’FAN, we can watch the Mets when they’re “supposed” to be on any given Sunday and cope with the scoreboard consequences by sunset.
Win or lose on a Sunday afternoon, Sunday night is cleared away. You can watch two other teams whose results don’t matter to you, secure in going to bed without a final. Or you can put baseball aside for The Simpsons or AMC or, if you’re really crazy, no TV at all. Your Sunday night rhythms wouldn’t necessarily notice. It’s different when the Mets are playing. When the Mets are playing, you have a whole other set of rhythms let alone priorities.
In case you’re wondering, the Mets playing on Sunday night at the behest of ESPN hasn’t impeded their periodic winning ways since the series known as Sunday Night Baseball was inaugurated in 1990. Nor has it gotten in the way of their periodic losing ways. According to proprietary Faith and Fear in Flushing research (consisting of multiple trips to Baseball-Reference and Retrosheet, helped along by Google News Archive, a stack of Mets pocket schedules and an uncommonly sticky memory), the Mets have played on ESPN’s SNB 69 times, losing 34 and winning 35. That’s been good for a .493 winning percentage, pretty much in step with the Mets’ overall .497 mark from the past 22 seasons.
It only seems like the Mets lose to Tyler Clippard every time they play in that time slot on that channel. In reality, though the inconvenience factor can be irritating and doing without GKR is unquestionably akin to sensory deprivation, the Mets acquit themselves no worse in veritable Games of the Week than they do the rest of the week.
Is that why ESPN reserved them a spot every year since 1990? Was it because the Mets had that certain something that made them a coast-to-coast coaxial attraction? Was it because the Mets are from the largest of markets and had just spent a half-dozen years finishing first or second when Sunday night became a baseball night? Or was it because Sunday Night Baseball’s mandate, when it first started, was to do one game from every ballpark every season?
The last part was definitely true. Otherwise, the chances seem remote that (with an assist from that spring’s season-delaying lockout) the first-ever Sunday Night Baseball would have emanated from that baseball hotbed known as Olympic Stadium in Montreal. The Big O hosted the Expos and the Mets on Easter Sunday night in 1990. The Mets did not rise to the occasion, losing 3-1 before 10,187 French Canadian souls.
But when Sunday Night Baseball made its Shea debut on July 29, 1990 — the Mets’ first scheduled Sunday night home game since historically dreaded Game Four of the 1988 NLCS (Scioscia) — the home team was ready for its closeup. Mackey Sasser blasted a grand slam off Jose DeLeon, Doc Gooden threw seven shutout innings and the Mets clipped the Redbirds’ wings, 6-0. With the Mets in first place and attendance still reported by gate as opposed to tickets sold, we know nearly 42,000 looked past the nontraditional starting time to enjoy the result. Three weeks later, on August 19, Doc would notch another W, but this one wasn’t nearly as easy. Gooden had the Giants down, 10-2, at Candlestick in the sixth. An Ernest Riles grand slam halved the margin and the bullpen — rotation demotee Bobby Ojeda, Alejandro Peña and future Mets Hall of Famer John Franco — barely hung on as the Mets escaped with a 10-9 win.
Even as the Mets began to slip in real life after 1990, they were still reasonably hot stuff on Sunday Night Baseball, appearing three times apiece in 1991 and 1992 and splitting the sextet. One of the Mets’ few spectacular triumphs of the era occurred on Sunday night, August 30, 1992, when Bobby Bonilla — in probably his finest hour on the active payroll — ripped the first pitch he saw from Rob Dibble with two out in the ninth for a two-out, three-run homer that served to snatch a 4-3 win from the jaws of 3-1 defeat. The kicker was the Mets and Reds were wearing 1962 throwback uniforms and Dibble, as frustrated as Bonilla was elated, tore his old-timey Reds vest to the ground, never to retrieve it.
But when the Mets lost on Sunday night in this period, it was not pretty. Two of their three setbacks came at Wrigley Field, where Sunday Night Baseball doubled down against nature by not just skipping afternoon baseball but doing in the one place night games were still novelties. The first of those losses, on August 11, 1991, proved particularly furshlugginer (to use the technical term). The Mets and Cubs dragged each other deep into the night, not ending their mutual defiling of the Friendly Confines until George Bell’s sent Pete Schourek’s second pitch of the fourteenth inning over the ivy for a 3-2 gutkick. It was the third consecutive loss of a road trip that would plummet to 0-10 before the Mets were allowed to go home and lose an eleventh straight.
On September 13, 1992, the Mets made another Sunday Night Baseball appearance in Montreal, their third in three years. This one was the worst of them. Oh, it looked good for a while, with Dick Schofield engineering a double play so sparkling it was nominated for an ESPY the first year they had ESPYs. But the slick fielding as well as the 5-2 lead Gooden carried through seven became forgotten when the Expos trimmed the Mets’ lead to 5-4 in the eighth and erased that temporary disadvantage with Larry Walker’s three-run walkoff blast off ad hoc closer Anthony Young.
And as miserable as that plot twist was, it would become a footnote to the real legacy of that Sunday night in Quebec: the postgame snit rookie Jeff Kent fashioned when the Mets’ vets hid his street clothes in favor of a pimp suit. Even as 7-5 losers long banished from contention, the Mets somehow still found time to haze — and even that they couldn’t do seamlessly in 1992.
Or as Jeff Torborg reportedly fumed, “Give the kid his fuckin’ clothes back.”
Despite the franchise’s downward trajectory, ESPN believed in the Mets’ drawing power enough to pencil them in three times in 1993. The Mets went 0-3, which figured since the Mets spiritually went 0-162 that year (59-103 in actuality).
The Mets gave viewers a good show on June 20 at Three Rivers Stadium when Bret Saberhagen stifled the post-Bonds Bucs, 2-1, through eight innings. Ah, but the ninth: a couple of base hits; future Mets Hall of Famer John Franco replaces Sabes; a bunt; an intentional walk; an unintentional bases-loaded walk to tie it; and another single to lose it, 3-2. With the loss, the Mets fell 27½ back with 95 to play.
The Mets — and the then-ubiquitous Gooden — played above their heads on July 11 at Shea as they battled the Dodgers to a 1-1 tie for seven innings. Alas, the game turned on L.A. rookie Pedro Martinez’s 2⅓ sharp innings of relief and Eric Davis’s eighth-inning homer off Doc. The Mets lost 2-1. They’d make it a Turkey-for-’93 on September 19 when what must have looked to programming executives like a fabulous matchup months earlier — the two-time N.L. West champion Braves hosting the conceivably dangerous N.L. East Mets — went completely awry. Atlanta thumped New York, 11-2. T#m Gl@v!ne was touched for nine hits in six innings, yet the Mets couldn’t plate more than two runs off him…and none off Bobby Cox’s bullpen.
ESPN’s Mets fever broke in 1994. The network scheduled them the mandatory once and maybe counted itself lucky that the game — against the similarly downtrodden Cubs at Shea on August 21 — was never played. A strike wiped it and everything else out for the season. Nevertheless, the Mets were on tap to be the first team anybody saw bat when 1995 opened…but that came with an asterisk that was just dying to be denoted.
On April 2, 1995, ESPN was preparing to look at us live from Joe Robbie Stadium in Miami with 50 fill-ins wearing Mets and Marlins uniforms. MLB, with the sole exception of the Orioles, was thumbing its nose at its striking players (and its fans), preparing to start the year with replacement players. And they got real close to playing games that counted until the owners agreed to abide by Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s injunction against replacement games. The 1995 Mets — the real ones — would have to settle for opening their season late on a Wednesday afternoon as the first visitors to Coors Field a few weeks later (a crushing defeat televised by ESPN) and two Sunday Night losses of no historical note.
When the Mets dropped a 2-1 decision at Shea to Cincinnati on June 23, 1996, their second loss in two SNB appearances that year, Sunday Night Baseball was feeling less like a treat and more like torture. Dating back to Jeff Kent’s tantrum (though to be fair, rookie hazing is moronic), the Mets had lost seven in a row in the spotlight and had two appearances paved over by labor pains. Between the rutted track record and their six consecutive losing seasons, you wouldn’t think ESPN would exactly be seeking the Mets out come 1997. Yet Shea was chosen as site for what passed as a special occasion: the first Sunday Night Baseball matchup between Interleague opponents.
It was a rematch of the 1986 World Series, the Red Sox visiting the resurgent Mets. The last time the Red Sox alighted on a Sunday night in Queens, Boston rode high, taking Game Two of the ’86 Fall Classic, 9-3, blistering an unsteady Dwight Gooden in the process. Eleven years later, on June 15, 1997 — Dave Mlicki’s Eve, if you will — the Red Sox earned small revenge for 1986, taking that initial Interleague series two games to one on the strength of a Sunday night 10-1 rout.
Surely the only Met who could have been remotely satisfied with the forced festivities was Kevin Morgan, a seven-year minor leaguer who was called up to fill in amid myriad infield injuries. Morgan pinch-hit in the seventh, popped out, stayed in to play third…and ended his big league career the very same night. But don’t cry for this Moonlight Graham Met. Kevin Morgan has worked in the Met front office in various capacities since 1998.
Sunday Night deliverance wasn’t far off for the 1997 Mets, either. They snapped their eight-game losing streak in what would someday seem a most unlikely venue, but as of July 13, 1997, it was just another ballpark.
In their inaugural series at brand new Turner Field in Atlanta, the Mets fell behind, 6-0, in the first when the Braves jumped on the recently stellar Bobby Jones (he struck out Ken Griffey and Mark McGwire back-to-back in the All-Star Game five days earlier). Jones dug the Mets a hole, but Butch Huskey dug them right out of it with a two-run homer in the second and a three-run dinger in the fourth, both off Brave starter Denny Neagle. Bobby Valentine left Jones in to fend for himself after his horrific first and the manager’s confidence was rewarded with six shutout innings that left the Mets tied, 6-6. In the tenth, Alex Ochoa put the Mets up, 7-6, by homering off Mike Bielecki. That became the final score and the Mets’ Sunday Night slumpbuster. Better yet, the Mets took their first series at the Ted, three games to one. (Gosh, what a friendly place!)
In 1998, ESPN went to the Mets-Red Sox well again, broadcasting another tepid Boston win (5-0, on June 7 at Fenway Park) before availing itself of a new toy that would redefine the Mets’ Sunday Night Baseball presence forever more.
Here came the Subway Series. It and the Mets’ topsy-turvy Sunday Night history from 1998 forward will be FAFIFed in Part II.
by Greg Prince on 26 January 2012 12:56 pm There was Cleon and Tommie…
“I’ll track that thing down for ya.”
And Tom Terrific, who they also called The Franchise…
“Throw strikes.”
And Little Buddy…
“Let ’em hit it on the ground.”
Jerry the Kooz and Jerry the Catcher…
“Keep the ball down, would ya guy?”
Rusty the Orange…
“Hey, call me in a pinch.”
And his guy Mex who wasn’t even Mexican…
“A little tardy on that swing.”
And William the Mook…
“Gotta run.”
And then there was Hank McGraw’s high-strung brother Tug…
“Ya gotta believe!”
Eddie the Krane…
“What took ya so long?”
Gary the Kid…
“Don’t give up yet.”
Big Straw…
“We’re goin’ deep tonight, be ready.”
And Doc, who liked to operate alone but sometimes needed some help to finish the job.
“I’ll get it to ya later.”
And now there’s the fifteenth player in the club, Johnny Three Times, who got that nickname ‘cause he always loaded the bases.
“I’m gonna go put a guy on, put a guy on, put a guy on.”
Johnny drove us crazy, but he usually got us outta hot water. That’s why he’s made it in the crew now. See, it’s the highest honor they can give you, especially if you’re a kid from Bensonhurst.
Wise choice.
by Greg Prince on 24 January 2012 2:46 pm Gary Carter Stadium in Port St. Lucie…has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Won’t happen, though, because Gary Carter was a catcher and isn’t a corporation. Some company few Mets fans had ever heard of before 2010 or have any idea what exactly it does owns the rights to the name of the Mets’ primary Spring Training facility, and the Mets aren’t about to revoke those rights. Somebody wants to pay the Mets, the Mets are in no position to scale high moral ground and return the money.
So how about the Gary Carter New York Mets Spring Training and Minor League Complex? It’s a little bulky, but it covers all the bases. Since there’s more to the Mets’ operation in St. Lucie than just the field where the Mets sell naming rights and play exhibition games — and since the umbrella operation doesn’t seem to have an official name — there’s an opportunity there. There’s a chance to call it something. Something appropriate.
The Gary Carter Complex…when it’s mentioned as a matter of course on SNY or WFAN, will it sound like something for which they advise you to seek counsel if you’re prone to taking frequent curtain calls? Oh hell, that’s all right. Curtain calls imply you just did something worth pumping your fist and waving your helmet over.
Carter certainly did his share of that on our behalf from 1985 to 1989.
On the other side of Florida, in St. Petersburg, Mets minor leaguers once trained at the Payson Complex, named for the lady who owned the team. So there’s precedent here. Give Mets minor leaguers the privilege of learning their craft at the Carter Complex, named for the man who owned the town.
Two towns, actually. There was New York, circa 1986, and there was Port St. Lucie in 2006. Gary Carter managed the St. Lucie Mets to the Florida State League championship six years ago. That was a one-season deal (on the heels of winning a division title at the helm of the 2005 Gulf Coast Mets), as Carter followed his managerial muse elsewhere, but the Kid has been an undeniable fixture in the Treasure Coast region: as a longtime citizen of Palm Beach Gardens; as a benefactor of Palm Beach County schools through the Gary Carter Foundation; and as baseball coach at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Honoring Gary Carter where he lives (approximately 40 miles north of his home) would recognize his contributions to his community and give the Carter family a chance to relish the recognition on a going basis.
Aside from the geography, there is the irresistible symbolism of Gary Carter’s name gracing the site where New York Mets baseball experiences its rebirth every spring. Gary Carter arriving in Mets camp in the spring of 1985 represented hope and anticipation as perhaps no new Met before him had. Gary Carter was there to lead us toward the promised land. The journey began that first Carter spring. It reached its completion just two autumns later.
He was a helluva hitter and catcher for all seasons, but when I think of spring and the Mets, I think of Gary Carter and 1985.
The Carter Complex is my simple response, I suppose, to the recurring question about what to do, if anything, with No. 8. You can fill in all the possible answers yourself, whether you’re in favor of immediately retiring it because of Gary Carter’s battle to keep going, respectful but reticent to make that grandest of historical gestures given the franchise’s ideal numerical hierarchy, or of the belief that the best way to pay proper homage to the uniform number of a Mets Hall of Famer is to circulate it among his worthiest successors.
I don’t feel like getting into an argument about it, not even with myself. I see all the angles on this, I think, and given the right spin, I can agree with any of them. It’s a sports fan tic to require a final score on every issue. That, I believe, is why we are drawn to Hall of Fame evaluations, “all-time” rankings and why a number should or shouldn’t be retired. And as people who stand by while the physical condition of an athlete who contributed so mightily to our happiness grows dire, we are overtaken by a desire to do something about it…to push another run across the plate, as it were. Again, the sports fan instinct at work.
Gary Carter’s number on the left field wall at Citi Field wouldn’t diminish the inherent honor attached to placing it there, but it also isn’t the first number I would have thought to affix there had we not been compelled to contemplate Gary Carter right now. That’s why retiring No. 8 doesn’t seem at all wrong, yet neither does it seem perfectly right. To my Met mind, the Gary Carter New York Mets Spring Training and Minor League Complex in Port St. Lucie, Fla., seems unquestionably fitting in terms of tribute and taste.
So do it, Mets. Do it now. Do it so Gary Carter’s name is on the door when the Mets return for their annual rebirth in a few weeks. There’s no earthly reason to wait.
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