The blog for Mets fans
who like to read
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.
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.)
Need our RSS feed? It's here.
Visit our Facebook page, or drop by the personal pages for Greg and Jason.
Or follow us on Twitter: Here's Greg, and here's Jason.
|
by Greg Prince on 15 February 2012 10:49 am The bobbles are coming! The bobbles are coming! And, no, that’s not a fielding forecast for Daniel Murphy playing second base.
The historical bobbleheads we’ve been asking for are really coming to Citi Field this season, marking the Mets’ 50th anniversary like it oughta be.
The lineup:
Tom Seaver: Pretty fair country pitcher, representing the 1960s (and eternity), Sunday, April 22, 1:10 PM, versus the Giants.
Rusty Staub: He could hit some and play some right from 1972 through 1975 (and later), Saturday, May 26, 1:10 PM, versus the Padres.
Keith Hernandez: Mex! From when the world’s most fun analyst was the world’s clutchest player, and the Mets were the 1980s’ best show, Sunday, June 17, 1:10 PM, versus the Reds.
Edgardo Alfonzo: FONZIE! Yeah, I used all upper-case. Didn’t you from 1995 to 2002? Saturday, July 21, 1:10 PM, versus the Dodgers.
Mike Piazza: Cue Hendrix and remember the first part of the 21st century, Saturday, August 25, 1:10 PM, versus the Astros.
Let us not forget the not so Slight Return of Banner Day, Sunday, May 27, prior to the Mets-Padres game at 1:10 PM, and the induction of the New York Mets Hall of Fame‘s 26th member, John Franco, Sunday, June 3, ahead of the 1:10 PM game against the Cardinals. That’s seven well-conceived nods to true Mets fandom, seven promotions that don’t pass off plastic cups as premiums, seven days to support your local baseball team.
The other 74 dates on the home schedule will include Mets baseball, so that’s something to consider, too.
And if you can’t make it out to the ballpark, all games will be broadcast on the New York Mets Radio Network, primarily by Howie Rose and Josh Lewin. We know and love the former. We wish the latter, newly named to his post, all the best with his mic and our ears.
Hey, most of us yearned to be deHaginated, and Wayne has taken leave of Flushing after four seasons of well-intentioned if terminally miscast Met announcing. So the Mets do come around on many things eventually. I’m willing to wager consistent winning will be one of them again someday.
by Greg Prince on 14 February 2012 9:24 am Not everybody who’s born to be a Mets fan reaches his destiny immediately. Take Sam Maxwell, who went through a harrowing transitional period between birth and his Mets fandom. He mistakenly rooted for some other team through his youth but then saw the light (no matter how dimly it flickers some years) and embraced Metsishness with the zeal (or Zeile) of the converted. Thus he welcomes us to his new blog, Converted Mets Fan, with an opening opus he’d like to share with his fellow congregants, “Dumping the Navy Pinstripes for the Orange and Blue”. Check it out here.
For all the worms who slithered off in the other direction, circa 1977 or 1996 or whenever, it’s good to know we get a fine, upstanding young person ultimately rejecting the unseemly and joining our ranks now and again.
by Greg Prince on 11 February 2012 6:37 am Monday night, nine o’clock, MLB Network: Bobby Valentine, former Mets manager, joins Bob Costas on Studio 42. His erstwhile identity may be incidental to why he’s on — I hear he has a new gig — but a couple of clips (here and here) indicate his lively 1996-2002 tenure in the blue, orange, black and white will come up in conversation.
What better way to spend the night before Valentine’s Day?
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!
|
|
