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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 12 January 2012 9:38 am It’s scary that as fans, any team’s fans, we get hooked on new players and young players and changes of direction and we’re sure we’re going to benefit — if it’s March — this year or — if it’s September — next year. Yet we just don’t know. It’s the ultimate blind trust.
Theoretically, the future has never been more foreseeably agreeable for the Mets. If the three young pitchers who now seem to have assured themselves of rotation slots each succeed, our 2007 fortunes would figure to do no worse than shadow our 2006 accomplishments. That trio could easily go quartet by April 2008. The outfield would be rehabilitated next, with two of three fast-rising kids patrolling corners currently occupied by short-term elders. Not as publicized but just as tantalizing this spring is an eventual first base candidate who got some good swings in before being sent down. Thus, in a blink, we could be swimming in a plethora of prime: Maine, Pelfrey, Perez, Humber, Gomez, Martinez, Milledge, Carp joining Reyes, Wright and Beltran. Throw in two or three strategically signed free agents by our nonpenurious ownership and we’re looking at a nucleus that rivals our not-so-wild dreams from the crest of 1988. If you’re inclined to take it a step further, there’s the TV network and the new ballpark and the vast resources contemporary sports success seems to yield in staggering amounts every time you turn around. The foundation for this organization shapes up as solid as the accumulated brickage that will define Citi Field.
And you know what it all guarantees for our Mets and our Mets-related happiness? Absolutely nothing. It never did and it never will. Per the in-sickness-and-in-health vows each of us took when we betrothed ourselves to our team, the reality that everything’s a year-in, year-out crapshoot shouldn’t matter one little bit.
But it’s something to keep in mind.
—“Nothing to Foresee Here,” Faith and Fear in Flushing, March 18, 2007
I’ve never been simultaneously more right and more wrong as I was in the above four paragraphs I wrote nearly five years ago. The future, as judged by me, was so bright we’d have to wear shades…yet it could just as easily turn very dark very fast, I advised. We more or less know what happened from there.
I believed both scenarios as I attempted to cobble them together into a coherent worldview. The Mets looked messy in the middle of March 2007, which I tried to forget in the face of the prevailing reality of our burgeoning dynasty. It was just Spring Training, for gosh sake. The fact that the Mets were losing meaningless exhibition games was supposed to be meaningless. It probably was. On the other hand, here was all this unproven youthful talent poised to attach itself to the established youthful talent that had taken the National League by storm in 2006. Set against a tableau of progressive Met ownership and management, it was all going to combine into delightful hurricane-force ascendancy for years to come.
So wrong. Yet so right in that deep down I didn’t really trust what I was trying to convince myself (and anybody who was reading) of that weekend. Oh, I thought the franchise was in good hands but I had a hard time being sure that the stream of promise on display at St. Lucie was really going to amount to anything when the large contracts of the imported veterans ran their course. And if you couldn’t believe the Mets knew what they were doing in the wake of 2006, when could you believe in them and what could you believe in?
Basically, my problem — or perhaps my reluctant strength — as a baseball fan is I don’t really and truly believe in prospects, or more precisely, I only believe in them as far as I can throw their accomplishments onto paper. And if they have enough accomplishments to print out, they’re really not prospects anymore anyway.
Wright, 24, and Reyes, 23, had proven themselves by March 2007. Beltran, 29, had proven himself in other uniforms long before. Those other guys I listed? They were all supposed to be what was going to make the Mets formidable and then some well beyond that spring. In one sense or another, they were all coming. That’s what makes a good team great. Sure, acquiring the likes of Delgado, Lo Duca and Wagner solidified the Mets so they were able to make their successful run through the regular season in 2006, but it was going to be a self-regenerating organization that would keep the music playing. The Mets were going to stay good and get better because of John Maine, Mike Pelfrey, Oliver Perez, Philip Humber, Carlos Gomez, Fernando Martinez, Lastings Milledge and Mike Carp, to name eight. None of them was older than 25 in the spring of 2007. None except Perez had spent as much as a full season in the big leagues through 2006. All of them gave us reason to believe they’d be Met stalwarts before long.
Five years later, only one of them, Pelfrey, remains, and save for a couple of season-fragments, he’s been more stall and wart than stalwart.
They’re all different cases and each had his own story, maybe even his own concentrated period of Met competence. Hard to remember now, for example, that Maine and Perez were actually solid major league starters for all of 2007. Milledge had a few big hits that season as he competed with Gomez and Shawn Green for playing time. As grudgingly noted, Pelf was big for a while in 2008 and again in 2010. Far from Flushing, speedy Gomez keeps alighting with playoff teams, while Humber (White Sox) and Carp (Mariners) have found themselves, a little, in the American League.
But collectively, they never did a damn thing to advance the cause we thought we were onto on the cusp of 2007, and to date, nobody has done less in the major leagues than the young fellow we were led to believe might do more than any of them, Fernando Martinez.
Which will happen. Prospects don’t always pan out. Hell, they mostly don’t pan out, and not just Met prospects. Simple math says they can’t. There are 750 jobs available on MLB rosters from Opening Day until September 1. Every one of them is filled by somebody who at some point was a prospect. Relatively few of them are manned by players who can be or have been considered stars. The minors, on the other hand, are lousy with guys who aren’t going to shine at the top level of their profession. Odds are set tabbing this guy or that as a pick to click. One of those guys was Fernando Martinez. He was going to be a star. So we kept an eye on him.
We never saw much when exposed to him. Amid myriad injuries, Martinez came up for a while in 2009 and reappeared briefly in 2010 and 2011. With little exception, he didn’t hit, he didn’t get on base, he displayed almost no power, he showed little outfield instinct and very early on he didn’t run out a popup that was dropped and thus was out when he should have been safe. F-Mart was 20 at the time, and it was my desire to see his F-pas as a misjudgment born of inexperience…but those things are usually manifested by kids playing too hard, not hard enough, so it was probably mostly a very bad warning sign as regarded Fernando Martinez’s reportedly high ceiling.
The Mets’ leading outfield prospect from 2007 never became a Mets star and, as of now, he is no longer a Mets prospect or a shimmering possibility on anybody’s horizon. The Mets have waived him and the Astros have picked him up as a low-risk proposition. He’s 23, which is real-life young and not baseball-old by any means. But he’s also played six professional seasons, none of them full or fully healthy. By the hard-bitten standards of the sport, he’s been a bust.
I’m sure he feels worse about it than we do.
I suppose I’m disappointed Fernando Martinez isn’t a staple of the Mets lineup the way he was projected to be when he was signed out of the Dominican at the age of 16. I’m sorry in a general sense that things haven’t worked out for some kid I’ve never met, and I’m sorry in a Met sense that my team eternally gropes for some semblance of outfield stability. Yet “disappointed” may not quite describe my reaction to a big-deal prospect fizzling. Reyes and Wright notwithstanding, I just don’t expect Mets prospects, save for the ones whose potential looms as extremely loud and incredibly close, to pay off. I’m rarely at the Strawberry 1983 or Davis 2010 level of anticipation, probably because almost everybody in between was, in the vernacular, a bust, and I not so deep down know prospect letdowns are the norm, not the exception. Milledge 2006 might have been the last time I was truly chuffed at a prospect’s callup. Lastings’s failure to last as a Met — see him this summer as a Yakult Swallow — probably frayed my final anticipatory instinct where hotshot Met minor leaguers were concerned.
Guys will still come up and succeed and it will be satisfying when it happens. I knew next to nothing about Ruben Tejada when he arrived and I fell in love almost instantly. I maintained no ceiling for Bobby Parnell, so it’s been no skin off my nose from a proprietary sense that he hasn’t come close to reaching it. Fernando Martinez was going to be a big deal, but Tatis the retread was a far more impactful Fernando for the Mets and Teddy the utilityman was a more useful Martinez to the Mets. It would have been swell had it worked out differently. Overall, however, I’m resigned to “they’ll get here if they get here and maybe something good will happen but probably not” as opposed to “check out these numbers from the Arizona Fall League!” Doesn’t mean I don’t want to see Mets prospects get every chance to succeed. It just means I’ll be surprised the next time one succeeds in a big way.
I understand the impulse to game the farm system; to adopt a prospect early on and decide he will be The One; to imagine having a handle on how things will shake out circa Opening Day 2015; to know in advance the outline of the next chapter before a word of it is written. I just don’t share in that impulse, despite my team so badly needing a future in light of its ongoing lack of a present.
I get the fan obsession with figuring out who’s going to be big next. I just don’t believe there’s much percentage in it, thus I don’t get wrapped up in a Fernando Martinez or whoever’s the next version of him. But I do get it even if I don’t share in it.
Maybe it’s like what Roger Sterling expressed to Don Draper in the “Three Sundays” episode of Mad Men. “Don’t you love the chase?” Roger asked Don after an opportunity to grab a grand advertising account went by the boards. “Sometimes it doesn’t work out; those are the stakes. But when it does work out, it’s like having that first cigarette: your head gets all dizzy, your heart pounds, your knees go weak. Remember that? Old business is just old business.”
So is the Met prospect who never becomes a Met star, actually.
by Greg Prince on 10 January 2012 3:35 am Twenty years ago this week, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum reached its peak as an institution of relevance when it ushered into its ranks Tom Seaver with the highest vote percentage ever. Since then, its various machinations have churned in a fashion that have overlooked the contributions of Gil Hodges, ignored the accomplishments of Keith Hernandez, thoroughly dismissed the credentials of John Olerud and issued a ballot that couldn’t spare one lousy line to briefly consider the honorable twelve-year career of Edgardo Alfonzo (while the Phil Nevinses, Tony Womacks and Eric Youngs all had their day). True, I’m offering up a parochial anecdotal worldview, but if I’m going to remain excited over Seaver’s still unmatched 98.84% coronation from January 7, 1992, I’m also going to retain the right to generate dismay by the slights I detect through my generally present blue and orange lenses.
Thus, I’m going to skip over the perfunctory nod of approval for the 2012 induction of Never Met Barry Larkin and brace myself for the disappointment attached to Über Met Mike Piazza being unfairly passed over in 2013.
What? It already happened? That was quick!
It hasn’t happened yet, but unless groupthink-disseminated innuendo has gone out of style, it will. I could sense it coming en masse a bare 24 hours before Larkin received Jack O’Connell’s telephone call. All I had to do was pick up the Sunday papers.
• Tyler Kepner in the Times projected Piazza will be in the group of newly eligible HOF candidates to be “left out because of performance-enhancing drugs […] based on suspicion.” On Monday, in reporting Larkin’s election, Kepner reiterated in anticipation of next January, “No tangible evidence has ever linked Mike Piazza to steroids, but writers have long been suspicious.”
• Bill Madden in the News, while appraising the eventual Hall chances of about-to-retire Jorge Posada, referred to Piazza and Ivan Rodriguez as the gold standard among catchers of Posada’s era, but adding “it remains to be seen how the cloud of steroids — if not actual proof — around both their careers will affect their standing when they come up on the ballot.”
There ya go. They have in their hand a list of players suspected of using PEDs. Missing from the list is proof. Missing from any story while Mike Piazza played baseball — or since he retired — is the “actual proof” of which Madden made mention. A little hearsay here, a speculative allegation (perhaps imparted anonymously) there, maybe a rash of back acne reliably eyewitnessed, at least according to the eyewitnesses. Since the subject of Mike Piazza and how he managed to hit so darn well last came up in earnest, in 2009, there hasn’t been anything slightly revelatory, not even a fresh take on the ol’ “oh, everybody knew it” that was in vogue three springs ago.
Everybody knew it but nobody reported it, which I’m pretty sure is antithetical to the job of reporter.
When Mike Piazza was in his ten-year prime, it was de rigueur to refer to him as the best-hitting catcher ever. His inevitable first-ballot election to Cooperstown was probably referred to as a “no-brainer,” which would have been a shame since using all of one faculties would only enhance one’s appreciation of Piazza. If you had a brain or a set of eyes or a functioning figurative heart, you couldn’t have missed Piazza’s reign as the catcher of his decade, 1993-2002. If you wanted to argue he wasn’t a defensive wizard, didn’t win a World Series ring, was slow even for his position, you were entitled. But that was basically all you had.
He was the best-hitting catcher ever. Still is at last check. And at last check, he never tested positive as a PED user. His name never came up on any official list. He never volunteered he belonged on one. Except for recurring insistences that he had problem skin and “everybody knew it,” there’s been nothing.
But now there’s the so-called cloud. It must be there because national baseball columnists like Kepner and Madden are elevating it into the atmosphere. The cloud is aloft because two writers for large media enterprises say Mike Piazza may very well be controversial. Next thing you know, Piazza is in the company of those for whom the allegations over PEDs seem to contain some of that “actual proof”.
Funny how that works.
The use of PEDs may end all conversation for some voting writers when it comes to evaluating a Hall of Fame candidacy. It certainly seems to have done so in the cases of several heretofore “no-brainers,” numbers-packing superstars you never would have dreamed wouldn’t be admitted all but automatically to the Hall. Yet there are also those who have thought about PEDs and rejected them as a barrier to entry. Ken Davidoff in Newsday, the same day Madden and Kepner backhandedly slapped down Piazza’s chances, declared in the context of Jeff Bagwell:
“Until 2004, there were no collectively bargained rules covering steroids and such. My job as a voter is to recognize the laws that existed, not enforce retroactive, selective jurisprudence.”
Davidoff, incidentally, voted for Bagwell, tabbing the Houston first baseman as “one of the dominant hitters of his time. Did he use performance-enhancing drugs? First of all, there’s no tangible evidence. Second of all, I don’t care.”
There’s been nothing tangible brought against Bagwell in the same way there’s been nothing tangible brought against Piazza. Just speculation derived from Bagwell being kind of big and hitting a lot of homers at the same time as those who have had something tangible brought against them. Last year, on Bagwell’s first ballot, he pulled in a mere 41.7% of the vote. This year, prior the results being announced, he continued to be controversial by association. As SB Nation’s Grant Brisbee sardonically captured the argument against the author of 449 Astro home runs, “Jeff Bagwell played from 1991 to 2005, and he was muscular.”
Bagwell will not be joining Larkin at Hall ceremonies this summer, but maybe his exile on Muscle Beach won’t last forever. His vote-percentage bounced from 41.7% to 56% this year. That’s one of those shares that tends to eventually get authentically enhanced to 75% by the writers in their pack mentality. (MLB Network noted Monday that the only HOF candidate not eventually selected once he surpassed 50% on the BBWAA ballot is, somehow, Gil Hodges.)
Bagwell getting in after a few years doesn’t seem unfair if you factor out the utterly unfair McCarthyite standards applied to his candidacy. Don’t think Bagwell played well enough to be a first-ballot (or any-ballot) Hall of Famer? Don’t vote for him. Got a dead-certain cloud of proof to hold over his head? Reveal it and let the rain of judgment, sanctimonious and otherwise, fall where it may. Anything else is guessing at best, defamation at worst.
I was an admirer of Jeff Bagwell, maybe even a fan as far as sort of liking a Met opponent goes. While I watched him, I considered him pretty surefire for the Hall…but not nearly as much as I did Mike Piazza. No way Piazza wasn’t going in as soon as possible. The only controversy on his horizon regarded the engraved cap on his engraved head: hopefully Met, possibly Dodger. But then came a rebranding of his era from offensive to tainted. Then came actual proof or something a lot like it where some of his peers were concerned, including those who happened to play their last game in 2007, same year as Piazza. Thus, they will all debut on the same ballot that goes out in late 2012. By then, the portrayals of those peers and their non-performance liabilities will be sharply drawn…and if the chances of Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens or Sammy Sosa wither in the spotlight’s glare, then shouldn’t muscular Mike Piazza be subject to the same examination? Even though nobody has anything on him?
Kepner and Madden, whatever their intentions, have already gotten the ball rolling. Mike Piazza is suspect anew, no matter what he did or didn’t use.
So, no, I don’t expect to indulge in a Welcome to Cooperstown, Mike! piece in this space one year from now, and I can only hope the opportunity to lobby for an NY on his hypothetical plaque will come sooner than later. Should I be correct in my pessimistic outlook, I’ll hew to my line that the Hall of Fame doesn’t matter all that much, the same way I do as I continue to revere Hodges and Hernandez and Olerud (and Alfonzo) in the face of their continued and likely permanent absence from what others refer to as immortality.
Besides, Mike earned that categorization with me a long time ago.
by Jason Fry on 9 January 2012 2:25 pm Why did the Mets hire CRG Partners? Beats the hell out of me.
Intuition — which is often fallible — strongly suggests it isn’t just to tinker with bookkeeping, or to draw a couple of lines differently on the org chart. The nature of the Mets’ situation and the kind of business companies like CRG do both make you suspect something more is going on.
It also doesn’t help that, to be blunt, the last few years have trained me to automatically discount anything the Mets say about their own business affairs.
But the nature of that something more that might or might not be going on? You got me. And this is where I start to worry about how the world we live in has changed, and might be making us all a bit nuts.
I love all things digital. I made my bones as a journalist and writer in the digital world. My daily work life is almost entirely digital. Heck, Greg Prince and I began as digital friends, and our collaboration wouldn’t exist without a whole bunch of digital magic. Not so long ago, I used to listen to a Mets game a week by parking my car next to the Potomac River and cranking the scratchy radio, and my fondest hopes were for 30 seconds of Mets highlights on SportsCenter and the Washington Post to run two paragraphs from the AP instead of just the box score. Now, I can hear the Mets on my phone anywhere in the world, watch them on my iPad for a fairly modest amount of money, and I can absorb as much Mets news and opinion as I have time for, even on Jan. 9.
This is beyond a dream come true — we’re the fricking baseball Jetsons, even if we barely realize it.
But there is a downside, and I think you can see it at work with whatever’s going on with the Mets.
Between all this information, and all these voices, and the fact that the news cycle never stops, our habits for consuming information have changed. And so too have our expectations, which are curdling into demands. Between comment sections and Facebook status updates and text messages and Twitter, our vocabulary is increasingly dominated by two words:
1) WHY?
and
2) NOW!
This isn’t the end of the world, but it does leave us with a problem we don’t know how to solve yet. Our increasing voracity for information — summed up by those two little syllables — can leave us out of step with how inquiries get made and issues get solved. You see this, increasingly, with both people and organizations when they’re confronting allegations and potential scandals. We want to know why (followed, as always, by more whys), and we want to know now, and if we aren’t satisfied on either score, we will be inundated by voices accusing someone of incompetence, bad faith, or venality.
But what we’re in danger of forgetting is that sometimes it takes time to get to why. And that telling some stories now, before they’re complete, changes what happens.
Which brings us back to the Mets.
Let’s try a scenario: Suppose you were facing legal jeopardy that might be grim but survivable, or might mean your financial ruin. You’d need to be prepared for both eventualities. And that would mean hiring someone whose job was to think of the unthinkable, and figure out how you’d navigate that. It wouldn’t mean that you’d made up your mind to do something, just that you had accepted that you might be forced to. If you were in that situation, there would be a host of reasons — from deepening your own legal peril to not wanting to endure more distractions to distaste for the whole spectacle — for not discussing it publicly.
In 1995 this wouldn’t have been an issue. Today it is.
Here’s another scenario: Suppose you were the czar of a sports league, and you had accepted that one of your premier clubs was in such financial distress that its owners — who’d been your supporters in a lot of knife-in-the-back political fights — needed to step aside. Having reached that unhappy pass, would you move quickly, or deliberately? Quickly means likely legal strife, a blizzard of embarrassing press coverage, wrecked personal relationships and a cloud of suspicion the next time you have to do such a thing. Deliberately might land you in the same fix, but your chances are better.
Such a thing was never easy. But today the ceaseless choruses of why and now make it a lot harder.
(If this is too baroque for you, substitute firing the incompetent, litigious guy down the hall. Yeah, a public stoning is justified. But it’s probably smarter, if a lot less satisfying, to let his contract lapse or start filing the paperwork to eliminate his position.)
I don’t know if either of the above baseball scenarios has any basis in reality. I’m glad we know about CRG, and proud that one of our blog brethren ferreted out the news. And I understand that being discreet and deliberate can be a cover for perpetuating rotten institutions and hiding gross misconduct. But sometimes things take time and take place behind closed doors. That’s something we increasingly have trouble accepting, because we’re being trained to demand the opposite.
Hat tip to this Will Leitch post, which covers somewhat different ground but got me thinking.
by Greg Prince on 6 January 2012 10:22 am The Mets are only enlisting a “turnaround consultant” now? Where was this service in September 2007? August 2002? May 1993? June 1977? The Mets have definitely been in need of a few sharp 180s in their storied history. You’d figure they’d have a “turnaround consultant” on call 24/7.
The “turnaround” in question isn’t directly baseball-related, though I guess a sturdy financial footing would be the first step back on a player-procurement path that isn’t littered with the likes of Omar Quintanilla, Jeff Stevens and Corey Wimberley. I’ll take the easy way out and say I have no idea what the revelation contained in Eno Sarris’s report at Amazin’ Avenue will lead to — it’s easy and it also happens to be true. The endgame might be in sight where a sale of the New York Mets is concerned. Or, per what CRG Partners says it does, unique operational and financial challenges faced by the Mets organization may be singularly focused upon and that organization’s results may be changed.
I honestly don’t know that an outcome from this news is preordained, I do know companies don’t enlist consultants of this nature because a tweak here and a tightening there is in order. I also know that when a company starts bringing in people like these, it’s tough to believe the statements that are issued as explanation.
The Mets’ statement is, “Mets Limited Partnership engaged CRG Partners to provide services in connection with financial reporting and budget processes.” It sounds pretty innocent, as if the only thing ownership has been lacking lately is someone to strongly recommend the colors on the tabs of the file folders be changed.
I find myself reminded of a company for which I worked some time ago. It was neither public nor large. Those of us employed by it figured everything was pretty much status quo until one day somebody picked up an industry newsletter and noticed an item about our president retaining the services of a firm that placed valuations on companies like ours for the purpose of selling them. Naturally, everybody got very curious and very nervous, for nobody told us anything — we had to read about it second-hand. When approached, our president said, basically, “Oh, that…it’s nothing.”
Three months later, the new owners stood in the middle of our office introducing themselves to us.
The Mets are a private enterprise that we semi-reasonably treat as a quasi-public trust. We don’t work for them, though you could say we are, collectively, their biggest client. So we have an interest in what hiring the firm that shepherded the Texas Rangers through bankruptcy and into new ownership means. Right now, I suppose, it means whatever we wish it to mean, at least until it doesn’t or, more likely, somebody brings the new owners around to meet everybody.
by Greg Prince on 4 January 2012 7:27 pm Who says there’s nothing to do on a Thursday in January? Three things you the Mets fan should know about:
1) Blood drive at Citi Field (I swear I was gonna say “at Shea”) between 10 and 5. Good cause, of course, and a bonus show of appreciation from your New York Metropolitans in the way of two tickets for a game in April when you roll up your sleeve and give; a discount at the team store is part of the bargain, too. The donations will be, shall we say, collected in Caesars Club — no fancy seats required, just a vein. Enter Hodges gate on the first base side. Park in Lot G if your mode of transportation involves parking.
2) As noted in the previously posted consideration of George Vecsey, the columnist who covered Casey Stengel and the ’62 Mets will be taking part in the Varsity Letters series of sports literature reading, 7:30, the Gallery at LPR on Bleecker between Sullivan and Thompson, an establishment accessible via multiple subway lines. Joining George (who recently published a biography of early Met-killer Stan Musial) will be Mark Ribowsky, author of a new bio of the first Mets radio pre- and postgame host, otherwise known as Howard Cosell. Dave Zirin, who has lately written about John Carlos and the 1968 Olympics, will round out a formidable trio of writers for your listening/q&a pleasure.
3) If you’re intent on sticking to your couch Thursday night, SNY has at 7:30 a…wait for it…new Mets Classic! The network delves deep into its vaults and fishes out from July 3, 2011, the Subway Series game that made Jason Bay seem like a bargain. (Gosh, I can remember it like it took place six months ago.) No, it’s not some incredible video find from 1973 or even the pre-SNY 2000s, but as we often say of our Bayloved left fielder, it’s better than nothing.
by Greg Prince on 4 January 2012 1:14 pm Good thing in this day and age that a farewell column doesn’t have to be definitive. George Vecsey published his in the Times last month, yet he is still writing — for himself and for his old paper on an occasional basis. That’s a pretty good thing, indeed, for Mets fans who like to read.
I’m glad I can still find some George Vecsey if not as much as I had grown used to for the better part of three decades I spent reading him as a featured Sports of the Times columnist. There was a handful of bylines that stopped me cold in sports sections as I fed my newspaper addiction through the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s. George Vecsey’s was generally the most delightful stop as I made my daily rounds from the News to the Post (when I wasn’t partaking of one of my periodic anti-Murdoch boycotts, the most recent of which has been in effect since March 2003), Newsday and, saved for last as if I had to earn it, the Times.
Maybe if more people like me hadn’t gotten out of the seven-day three/four-newspaper habit, newspapers wouldn’t be chronically offering buyout packages that longtime newspaper employees — skilled at reading writing on walls as they are — feel compelled to accept. George Vecsey accepted his buyout after 50 or so years of writing for newspapers. Some would call that a good, long run. His devoted readers would say it hasn’t been quite long enough.
I think I looked forward to Vecsey because he seemed so much more like a person who wrote a column about sports than a sports columnist. If he enjoyed his subject matter, he didn’t hide it. If he didn’t, he wasn’t any more cynical about it than he had to be. Vecsey wrote lovingly about sports for which I will never rustle two hoots — say, soccer — and let me know what he thought was wrong with the bigger-time sports the rest of us tend to consumer in mass quantities; as a f’rinstance, he could do without the crushing enormity football represents. After the columns begin to number in the thousands, you pick up on recurring themes. In the wrong hands, the reader’s senses are dulled. With Vecsey, it was a consistently engaging conversation resumed. I would read him on soccer. I would read him on football. I would sure as hell read him on baseball.
In an interview with Gelf Magazine to plug his appearance at Varsity Letters in Manhattan this Thursday night, the professional who abided by the sportswriter’s code to not root for teams the way a fan would did allow to Michael Gluckstadt that, “Deep down, we probably are all National League baseball fans, and I know how to agonize with the Mets. That’s what they are for.”
One’s orange and blue hackles may instinctively rise in the face of such resigned fatalism, but from George Vecsey, I’ll accept it in good humor. The man was present at the creation, for goodness sake. He covered the Mets in 1962. He covered Casey Stengel. Stengel, he wrote a few years ago in an essay for a book called Coach, has never really departed his consciousness:
I can picture him naked, a tough old bird in his early seventies, his Mets uniform lying discarded on the floor of his office, while he pounded his burly chest and proclaimed the entire franchise was “a fraud”.
Casey was doing something no other man in “the baseball business” had ever done — he was managing and performing vaudeville at the same time. He was creating a personality for a bad baseball team in the toughest market in the country. He was inventing the New York Mets on the fly.
Like an unclad Ol’ Perfesser, it may be hard to shake the image of the Mets as what the Mets were when Vecsey first encountered them. When I see them, my instinct is to still LOOK WHO’S NO. 1 as the shot of the scoreboard advised me in September 1969. George sees them and he’s tangled up in empathetic agony. We all filter information in our own way.
Not that the man from the Times doesn’t know the whole story. He wrote one grand book about 1969, Joy In Mudville, before leaving sports for news and features, and another about 1986, A Year In The Sun. The former has been understood as essential to the Mets canon since its 1970 publication, but the latter (on whose cover the author stands among comfortingly familiar orange box seats) captures as well as any contemporary account the excitement that surrounded the Mets in their most overwhelmingly successful season.
Published in 1989, A Year In The Sun is essentially a columnist’s diary. Vecsey tours a momentous year on the beat, offering a veritable commentary track to his ’86 columnic output, the heart of which can be found when he’s writing about the best Mets team ever. One passage finds him at Shea on the day of the Home Opener, where he allows us to meet or better know an array of characters from Frank Cashen to Dick Young to his late father who introduced him to the joy of newspapers and clung to his own foothold in the business (inside Shea’s press box, no less) as long as he could.
Later on, George spends virtually all of October with the Mets, which was a very good month to be a sports columnist in New York. Here he takes us inside the less glamorous aspects of filing on deadline in those pre-Internet days, especially when the lede changes and changes again. Reflecting on the Game Six column he planned to write about the Bambino avenged and the one he actually wrote about Buckner’s unwanted date with destiny, Vecsey — all pro, no fan by then — admitted, “I had thought a Red Sox championship would be the best story of this Series. Show how much imagination I have.”
Yet the best Met story materializes in November of 1986, when George Vecsey is taking his teenage son David (today a Times copy editor) to Boston to visit colleges. Two New Yorkers in Boston a month after the Series to end all Series. The father is not on assignment now. Instead of hewing to objectivity, George and David are all agloat as they walk the back end of Fenway Park, recalling the Game Three leadoff swing that turned the Series away from the Red Sox and toward the Mets:
We are chortling now, looking down at the sidewalk to see if the Greater Boston Historical Society has gotten around to including this historic moment on the footpath for tourists. This is where Cotton Mather preached his fire-and-brimstone-sermons. This is where Paul Revere warned that the Redcoats were coming. This is where Len Dykstra’s home run took off into the night.
George was midcareer then, at least as far as daily newspapering went. He’s now an occasional contributor to the Times sports section and otherwise blogging on whatever moves him. When he started with Newsday in 1960, he was about the same age Casey Stengel was when that young feller was getting his baseball feet wet with Kankakee in the Northern Association. For what it’s worth, Vecsey’s 72 now, or the age Ol’ Case turned in the midst of the Mets’ first season. As the self-described “only journalist I know who has interviewed Casey Stengel, Loretta Lynn and the Dalai Lama” (and was pretty sure he “understood all three of them”) takes flight in a new direction, I look forward to reading George Vecsey reinvent himself on the fly.
by Greg Prince on 3 January 2012 7:31 pm The Hofstra Cultural Center’s conference honoring the 50th Anniversary of the New York Mets is coming Thursday to Saturday, April 26-28, and if you’re in interested in contributing a paper or presentation regarding some aspect of your favorite ballclub, please contact me at faithandfear@gmail.com. Full details are posted here (with some more information here).
This conference, celebrating the Mets at this milestone juncture in their history, was the brainchild of the late Dana Brand, a great friend to all Mets fans in blogging and in rooting. Dana was a longtime professor at Hofstra and got the conference moving toward reality before his sudden passing last May. The rest of us working on it look forward to pushing it across the finish line in his memory, and you are most heartily invited to join in that push.
We’ve received some great proposals that examine the Mets from all kinds of angles since first mentioning the conference in November, and more great proposals are welcome through next week. Again, please e-mail me with your ideas or any questions, and I’ll do my best to be of assistance. Thank you.
This also seems like a decent time to ask you to consider making a contribution to the Dana Brand Memorial Scholarship Fund at Hofstra. You can send online contributions to www.hofstra.edu/giving. Under “Gift Designation,” please specify the Dana Brand Memorial Scholarship Fund. If you prefer to contribute by check, please send whatever you can to Meredith Celentano; Assistant Vice President for Development; 102Q Hofstra Hall; Hempstead, NY 11549. Anything you can do to help a student carry on in Dana’s name is greatly appreciated.
by Greg Prince on 3 January 2012 8:36 am You’d think it would be too soon for a 2012 injury update, but we received one worth passing along regarding FAFIF reader Andrew Hees. His uncle Phil reports Andrew and his family were the passenger victims of a car accident on New Year’s Eve. Andrew, a devoted Mets fan with whom I had the pleasure of taking in a game just before he started high school this past September, was thrown from the vehicle and had to spend the first overnight of 2012 in the hospital for observation (or “the entire year,” as Andrew put it upon his release). Happily, no serious injury for him, though his younger brother Timothy went on the proverbial DL with a fractured elbow.
We wish all involved a speedy recovery in plenty of time for Pitchers & Catchers.
by Greg Prince on 1 January 2012 2:56 am Happy New Year! We look forward to an exciting 2012 here at Faith and Fear, even if we have to create the excitement ourselves. But isn’t that what Mets fans do when the Mets don’t necessarily contribute as much fun as they could?
And while you’re waiting for pitchers, catchers and trustees to report to Spring Training, may I suggest a few well-chosen steps into baseball to get this year started briskly? Our friend Peter Laskowich, New York and baseball historian par excellence is conducting one of his all-absorbing walking tours of Brooklyn on Monday morning, 10 o’clock. The subject is our National Pastime and its deep Kings County roots.
“Most of baseball comes from Brooklyn,” Peter writes. “The borough devoted itself to baseball from the start, fostering all three of the great early teams, inventing the curveball and the bunt, and establishing the craft of pitching. For Brooklyn, a proud city absorbed into New York in 1898, a baseball team became essential in gaining attention and respect. Said one civic leader in the 1930s, ‘we exist again as [independent] Brooklyn every time the Dodgers take the field.’ The same factors that led to the borough’s unparalleled allegiance to its team would one day make the Brooklyn Dodgers central to the cause of American racial integration.”
I took this tour in 2009 (and went on two of Peter’s Manhattan sojourns) and can vouch for the vibrancy of the presentation. Peter knows his stuff and tells it so it becomes your stuff. It’s a great time for any New York baseball fan who likes to learn a little more every day. Spent part of your Monday with Peter, and you’ll have learned plenty.
If you’re interested, please get in touch with Peter via e-mail at peterlaskowich@earthlink.net or call him at 862/226-1244. Reservations are required.
Also recommended, albeit with regrets, is Matt Silverman’s beautiful tribute to his friend Greg Spira, who passed away a few days ago at the age of 44. Read it here.
by Greg Prince on 31 December 2011 11:29 am With my incurring a 49th birthday today, I received a number of touching messages from Mets who can truly relate to being 49. Thought I’d share them with you.
“Let me be the FIRST to wish you happy birthday.”
—Don Aase
“I’ll see to it that your birthday’s perfect even if it falls to me to ensure that perfection.”
—John Stephenson
“Too banged up — again — to write much.”
—Jon Niese
“Wanna meet for lunch? I could really go for Howard Johnson.”
—Walt Terrell
“How about dessert? I could really go for a cone.”
—Ed Hearn
“We should get together for a drink. You pick the place this time.”
—Dyar Miller
“TODAY’S the big day? Cripes, I’m not ready yet.”
—Phil Humber
“I didn’t have time to get you anything while I was in town, but next year I promise I’ll have something memorable for you.”
—Brad Clontz
“Let me know what you think of the book. It’s ‘Meditations In An Emergency’. It really got me through some challenging times one summer.”
—Don Schulze
“MEOW!”
—Felix Heredia
“Happy…WAIT! I DIDN’T EVEN GET A CHANCE!”
—Ruddy Lugo
“Listen, I feel terrible about blowing out all those candles when you were looking forward to the big finish. Just my instinct for blowing kicking in at the absolutely biggest moments, I guess. But I did save you some cake. No, not the really important pieces, but here’s some I saved like back in June. Those are important, too, if you think about it. I mean, c’mon, we wouldn’t even have made it to end of the year in position to have some of the tastier portions of this cake if not for what I did earlier. Right? Right?”
—Armando Benitez
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