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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 15 October 2011 8:54 am You ever flip around while watching TV and discover some prime time show you’ve always liked is on in syndication five or six times a night and you start getting into it all over again? That’s the postseason to me right now. These games are as much fun as 30 Rock reruns, except I technically haven’t seen them before.
Having expended most of my animosity on the elimination of the Yankees and Phillies from the first round, I find myself with no solid rooting/rooting-against interest during these LCSes. I came into these series favoring the Tigers and the Brewers, yet I’m perfectly all right with the Rangers and Cardinals leading their sets 3-2. Seventh games would be wonderful. Any possible outcome that includes as much baseball as they can fit into their timeslots is acceptable. I don’t think I terribly mind anybody, save for one particular St. Louis catcher on whose head I am still waiting for space junk to fall.
Yadier Molina’s continued presence among the earthly aside, it’s simply fulfilling to have the grand old game infiltrating my media receptors every time I turn around. At least twice during the ALCS, I had to be reminded there was a game in progress. That’s made the Tigers and Rangers a pleasant surprise to behold. I’ve followed most of their scintillating action on radio, albeit with one ear’s attention. What I’m missing in detail and nuance — Cruz has how many homers now? — I’m enjoying via spontaneity. When I overheard something about a ball hitting the third base bag the other day while I was doing something else, well, gosh, that sounded intriguing. What’s that? Tigers won? Longer series? Swell! Bet I remember to tune in for the first pitch tonight.
I’ve attempted to be a little more engaged in my native League Championship Series, but it took me until Game Five to feel truly drawn in. As much I detest the Cardinals for crimes historic and imagined, I’m beginning to detect a little transitory red in my blood for them…and I surely didn’t see that coming. Part of it is disappointment in the shoddy workmanship of the Brewers, who probably should have shut the fudge up after escaping the Diamondbacks (though then they wouldn’t have been the Brewers), but more of it is a grudging admiration that the Cardinals are still playing, let alone managing to win.
Which is, I guess, what Tony La Russa does as well as anybody in the sport — which sucks, because who wants to watch Tony La Russa manage or win? Nevertheless, the real battle in this series as it heads back to Miller Park doesn’t seem like Cardinals vs. Brewers. Rather it’s the chances that the Cardinals’ bullpen arms don’t fall off from intense overuse versus La Russa’s apparent determination to rip them from their sockets. No St. Louis starter has gone more than five innings in the first five games, yet St. Louis is one win from another World Series.
Can that algorithm hold? Isn’t this supposed to be the time of the season when stud pitchers step up and give you seven or eight or nine? Or is that Verlanderian ideal overblown in the wake of the Four Aces from Philadelphia presumably sitting and stewing as their yachts float down the Schuylkill? Does Shawn Marcum have to materially outpitch Edwin Jackson tomorrow, or will Fielder and Braun simply slug away the Brew Crew’s problems long enough for Gallardo and Carpenter to match up the way each matched up, respectively, against Kennedy and Halladay on the electric Friday night that got their teams into this series to begin with?
Notice it’s all compelling questions and no definitive answers. That’s the kind of stuff that keeps you watching a show you can’t help but get hooked on.
And back from when our rooting interests were crystal clear, Mark Simon takes us back to perhaps the greatest baseball game ever played, Game Six of the 1986 NLCS, which sprawled out before us 25 years ago today.
by Greg Prince on 13 October 2011 3:48 pm The wedding of my longtime friend Fred to his new bride Karla (“my first wife,” he jokes) was a joyous event for Stephanie and me to attend last weekend, both for the nuptials of two fine people and the opportunity to spend time with other friends with whom I go back decades. Joel, Adam and I represented Long Beach at Table 6, which made us rather exotic down in Baltimore. It was as if nobody believed Fred knew anybody from his previous, pre-Maryland life.
We all went to high school together, which didn’t make it surprising that talk eventually turned to wondering how many of our teachers were still with us. Not all that many was the consensus estimate, supported by anecdotal evidence of what we’d learned here and there of late.
Back in New York, the timing was definitely a little eerie when I picked up Newsday on Sunday and found out another from the ranks of LBHS teachers had just passed away: Thomas DeLuca, 78. He was one of my gym teachers…I think.
I say “I think,” because when you’re not altogether athletic, chances are you’re not going to have particularly strong memories of your gym teacher, unless that person made your life miserable. From what I can remember, Mr. DeLuca did no such thing to me. I can picture him in his royal blue windbreaker passing out the dodgeballs, but otherwise I have no recollection of any gym class contact with him.
I do vaguely recall interviewing him for the school paper — which is where Fred, Adam, Joel, a couple of others who couldn’t make it to the wedding and I did our original hanging out (with some producing of the school paper thrown in) — but I don’t recall it sharply. Mr. DeLuca was the basketball coach who I’m sure gave me upbeat quotes about the star of the team. He took over as football coach before I graduated, but by then I was no longer covering sports. The only other thing I’m sure I knew was a friend who was on the basketball team mainly because he was tall was never too happy being nailed to the bench and thus blamed Mr. DeLuca for his lack of playing time.
Perhaps because we had just been talking teachers, I was compelled to at least skim Stephen Haynes’s beautifully written obituary, and was gratified to learn a fact included at the end:
“The passion for sports never left DeLuca. He remained an avid Mets (post-Brooklyn Dodgers), Jets and Knicks fan.”
I didn’t know that about Mr. DeLuca. I’m sure we would have enjoyed exchanging a few words about how Lee Mazzilli was tearing up the National League when I was a sophomore or what impact a returning Dave Kingman might have on the lineup when I was a senior. The obit mentioned that he coached baseball, too, something that sounds familiar, but I can’t swear I knew that before reading it (he may have taken it on after I graduated).
Knowing now this was a fellow Mets fan, I went back to the top and read Haynes’s work more closely. Turns out Mr. D — yeah, I kind of remember the basketball players calling him that — was a big-time athlete for Long Beach High School. That sounded familiar, somehow, though where I would have heard that, I don’t know. Starred for LBHS and then NYU as an All-American in the days when NYU was an athletic powerhouse.
NYU? Did I know that? It also sounded familiar, but by now I’m pretty sure I was revising my memory of Mr. D to fit his admirable life story…
He coached my alma mater to a championship while I was in college…
He served in the Army during Korea, same time as my father did…
He’d invite the other teachers and coaches back to his house for pizza…
He received letters through the years from his former players who wanted to thank him for impacting his life…
No, I didn’t know him, but now I was warming to the idea that I should have, even if he didn’t play my awkward tall friend except in blowouts.
This, however, I knew I didn’t know: Mr. DeLuca was a minor league baseball player. At age 23, after college, after the military, he was signed by the St. Louis Cardinals. Maybe he mentioned it to his players or other students along the way in his 20-year teaching career in Long Beach, but I never heard about it. Nearly a quarter-century had passed since he was in the Redbird chain, but that wouldn’t have stopped me from telling it to everybody I met if I were him. Even if I was handing out dodgeballs, I’d definitely look to slip in a “you know, I was a professional baseball player.”
It was for just one year — or one year longer than any of us has been a professional baseball player. Mr. DeLuca was considered a “slick-fielding shortstop,” but a knee injury ended his career just as it was starting.
Curious, I checked Baseball-Reference, and son of a gun, they have a record for Thomas DeLuca: all of six games accounted for in 1957, four at Class D Albany in the Georgia-Florida League and two more with Winston-Salem in the Carolina League. He collected three hits for each team. There isn’t any indication about power or speed. The numbers are pretty sketchy.
But one of the thousand or so great things about Baseball-Reference is you can see who else played on a given team in a given year, even in the low minors. And way down in Class D Albany, two other 1957 Albany Cardinals — the only ones to make the majors — were two future Mets: Jim Hickman and Gordie Richardson.
Hickman was an Original Met and a mainstay of the franchise for its first five years. It wasn’t until after Jim was traded to the Dodgers that he relinquished his position as the Mets’ all-time hit leader to Eddie Kranepool, who holds it to this day.
Richardson won four games as a member of the 1964 World Champion Cardinals and two more as a Met during the next two seasons. Gordie’s relatively brief New York tenure is nonetheless at least tangentially related to two intertwined central storylines in Mets history:
• He combined with Gary Kroll to pitch a Spring Training no-hitter over the Pirates in 1965, the only no-hitter of any kind ever pitched in a New York Mets uniform, even in an exhibition game.
• He was the last Met to wear 41 before it was donned by George Thomas Seaver in 1967.
Southpaw Gordie Richardson made his Met debut on July 9, 1965, relieving Jack Fisher in the third inning of a game the Mets trailed 6-0 to the Astros at Shea Stadium. He gave Casey Stengel a scoreless inning before being pinch-hit for in what became a 6-2 loss. Pretty run-of-the-mill stuff for the era.
But exactly four years later, Seaver — Richardson’s Jacksonville Suns teammate in 1966, Gordie’s last year in professional ball — would be pitching from the same mound in the same uniform number and would come within two outs of a perfect game. That, of course, was the Jimmy Qualls game, which came a day after the Don Young game, so named for the Cub center fielder who couldn’t catch the two ninth-inning fly balls that set up the Mets’ winning rally. Young subsequently caught hell from Ron Santo and was benched by Leo Durocher for the next game…giving way to Qualls and his breaking up of Seaver’s masterpiece, though not materially affecting what became one of the Mets’ most memorable wins ever.
In that similarly unforgettable Don Young game of July 8, 1969, incidentally, the Cub right fielder was Jim Hickman, who homered off Jerry Koosman in the eighth to give Chicago a short-lived 3-1 lead before the Mets scored three off Ferguson Jenkins (and Young) in the ninth. Righthanded Hickman, however, would sit against Seaver. Durocher started lefty Al Spangler in his stead — Spanky, as he was known, went 0-for-3 on July 9, 1969, as the Mets won their seventh game in a row overall.
I’m guessing that a dozen years after crossing paths with Hickman and Richardson in Georgia, avid Mets fan Tom DeLuca wasn’t at all displeased.
by Greg Prince on 11 October 2011 5:57 pm (As possibly occurred at Mets’ Dominican minor league instructional camp, following the 1999 season. Translated from the original Spanish.)
“All right everybody settle down. We’re going to take a break from our regular drills to talk about situational fundamentals.”
“Situational fundamentals, Mr. Minaya?”
“That’s right. I’m down here from New York in my capacity as senior assistant general manager because the organization wants you to know how to behave in every possible situation on the ball field. Our first priority is making sure you know what to do in an extra-inning postseason game.”
“Mr. Minaya?”
“Yes, Nelson?”
“Do you expect us to be in a lot of those in our careers?”
“Well, as New York Mets prospects, you should know that if you make the majors with our team, you have three-in-ten chance of playing in an extra-inning postseason game. That’s based on the most recently available data.”
“Wow, Mr. Minaya. That’s a very sophisticated statistical analysis.”
“Kid, we’re the New York Mets. We’re all about sophisticated statistical analysis. You know what I’m sayin’?”
“I’m not sure, Mr. Minaya.”
“We’ll save that for the class on free agent contract negotiations we’ll be holding later this week. For now, I want us to concentrate on these extra-inning postseason games. Those have some very tricky situations, so let’s get to the most important one.”
“What’s that?”
“Let’s say you’re batting with the bases loaded at home in a tie game, and you hit a ball over the wall…yes, Nelson?”
“No disrespect, Mr. Minaya, but aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves here? I mean we’re all basically rookies just trying to figure out how professional baseball works, and you’re talking about a very rare and very advanced situation.”
“Nelson, the New York Mets organization believes in starting at an end point and working backwards. You can’t say it doesn’t work, based on our recent success.”
“But you lost your last game.”
“You?”
“We. ‘We’ lost our last game.”
“That’s better. Show some Met pride, Nelson. Just because you weren’t on the field with Kenny Rogers when he threw ball four, it doesn’t mean you can’t claim to have taken part in our success. We may have lost, but what we lost was a big game and a big series. Take pride in that.”
“But ‘we’ lost.”
“That’s better.”
“Huh?”
“Anyway, let’s get to our visual aid. I’m going to pop in the tape from Game Five — which we won, so Nelson won’t be confused — specifically the fifteenth inning when Robin Ventura batted with the bases loaded. Do you see what he does there?”
“He hits the ball out of the park.”
“Very good, Nelson. Can you see anything wrong with what happens afterwards?”
“Sure. Anybody can see that.”
“That’s correct, Nelson. Robin tried to round the bases.”
“Wait — that’s wrong?”
“Sure. If Robin rounds the bases and scores, we win 7-3.”
“How could that be wrong?”
“It’s all right, but anybody can do that.”
“Anybody? But nobody ever did that before! Nobody ever hit a grand slam home run to end a postseason game before! By definition, nobody can do it. Or has.”
“Nelson, you’re forgetting the Mets Way. The Mets Way is to go for the drama before anything else.”
“But what about Pratt?”
“Pratt? Very dramatic. He proved that against Arizona.”
“Yes, but didn’t Pratt do wrong by tackling Ventura? He cost the Mets three runs! You…”
“We.”
“Sorry. ‘We’ should have won 7-3 instead of 4-3.”
“But Nelson, don’t you see? It’s much more dramatic this way. It’s much more exciting and memorable. We can market this. It’s already known as the ‘grand slam single’. That’s so much more interesting than just another grand slam home run.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Minaya. It seems kind of important that every run score. Besides Ventura doesn’t even get credit for a grand slam this way.”
“Robin has plenty of those, but only one of these. What’s really important is how heads-up Pratt was there, making the scene so memorable. I don’t know what Robin will do when he’s retired, but I really think Todd is managerial material.”
“For ignoring the rules?”
“Nelson, we’ll have to work on this during drills. We’ll put three men on base and you’ll hit a ball over the wall. The goal will be to make sure you don’t reach second base.”
“That’s insane!”
“You’re a good prospect, Cruz, but keep talking like that and we’ll ship you off for some marginal utility infielder. Trust me, you’ll appreciate this lesson if you’re ever up with the bases loaded in an extra-inning postseason home game that’s tied. You know what I’m sayin’?”
“I know you’re sayin’ that if I ever have that opportunity and don’t let one of my teammates tackle me, they’ll say I’m the first one to hit a grand slam home run to end a postseason game, and they probably won’t even mention Robin Ventura.”
“Very good, Nelson! Now let’s move on to our next subject: batting championships. Say you’re leading the league in hitting by a few points and it’s the last day of the season and you’re leading off for the Mets, quite possibly in your last game as a Met. What do you do? Let’s hear from someone else…Jose?”
by Greg Prince on 8 October 2011 8:37 pm I’ve been kind of busy drinking and dancing this weekend, and speaking of which…
Mets fans!
There’s no need to feel down
I said, Mets fans!
Pick yourself off the ground
I said, Mets fans!
‘Cause in one silly town
There’s nobody very happy
Mets fans!
There’s some games you can watch
I said, Mets fans!
With no kick to the crotch
You can sit back!
And I’m sure you will find
An absence you surely won’t mind
It’s fun to tune in the N-L-C-S!
It’s fun to tune in the N-L-C-S!
You can root for the Crew
Or have enough of St. Loo
And there’ll be no Phillies no way!
Mets fans!
Are you listening to me?
I said, Mets fans!
They won two but lost three
I said, Mets fans!
I know it seems like a dream
But you’ve got to know it happened
No team!
Loses all by itself
Like the Yankees!
The Phils are now on the shelf
So just turn on!
Frequency TBS
Their games will be among the best
It’s fun to tune in the N-L-C-S!
It’s fun to tune in the N-L-C-S!
The Cards annoy us a lot
But the Phils they are not
And for that we’re grateful
by Greg Prince on 7 October 2011 12:35 am Joe Girardi just made another pitching change. He’s penciled in NOBODY to start for the Yankees on Saturday. But he’s probably not going to leave him in very long.
Thank you, Detroit Tigers. We may not have much these October nights, but we sure have you.
Happy Elimination Day, Metsopotamia and all the ships at sea. Enjoy the rest of your postseason in peace.
by Greg Prince on 6 October 2011 12:37 pm The Cardinals keep drawing well in the intolerability seedings. No way under most circumstances imaginable would I have pulled for them to have captured the Wild Card, but their opponent was the Braves. Advantage: Cardinals. After they clinched that, I thought I couldn’t possibly have pulled for them to capture their current NLDS. But their opponent is the Phillies.
Advantage again: Cardinals.
We’re only two weeks removed from the Mets playing the Cardinals in a crucial game for one of those two teams. Seems longer ago. After all, the Mets were still a baseball team back on Thursday, September 22, not merely an East Coast testing laboratory for dynamic pricing. And there was no doubt that when you saw Jose Reyes, you’d see him wearing a Mets uniform (as opposed to nothing at all) and you’d see him for nine or more innings. We were all so much more innocent back then.
When the Mets charged from behind in the ninth inning of what became the “best” 156th game the franchise ever played, it was sweet as any 2-6 deficit that turned into an 8-6 victory could be on merit, but just a touch sweeter because it was the Cardinals who stayed stuck on 6. That it might have helped the Braves, while unfortunate, didn’t faze me all that much.
Whereas my lifelong antipathy for the Cubs remains relatively steady no matter how little they play the Mets nowadays, my disdain for the Cardinals is more of a renewable energy source. It flared up in 1985 and remained incandescent for the rest of that decade. Then the disgust (except retroactively) went into strategic reserve. 2006 — a seven-game span, specifically — relit it to a point where it’s prone to flicker all out of proportion to the impact the Cardinals have on my life since that most fateful Thursday night five years ago.
My recurring Redbird disdain tends to be pretty selective. The 2007 & later guys are a situational call. For example, two weeks ago, I had it in for the reliever whose name I can’t spell without looking up because he was a consonant-laden obstacle to my happiness. Last night I learned his teammates call Marc Rzepczynski “Scrabble,” and I find it adorable. Not unless we’re engaged in 13-, 14- or 20-inning wars of attrition with St. Louis do I make enemies with them gratuitously, at least not with those Cards who came on the scene in 2007 or later.
There aren’t many October 2006 Cardinals are extant this month, and only a couple really get under my skin. One is the manager and one is the catcher. Mostly the catcher. Totally the catcher, really. I could conceivably root for a team helmed by Tony La Russa (he did manage Tom Seaver, after all), but one that includes Yadier Molina is another matter entirely. If one of Playboy’s centerfold questionnaires ever accidentally landed in my mailbox, I’d fill it out just so I could write in “Yadier Molina” under “turn-offs”. (But I wouldn’t include a picture — I’m no Jose Reyes.)
Molina, however, is just one man. Loathsome for the events of 10/19/06, but there’s only one of him. The Phillies, on the other hand, have like twenty Shane Victorinos. And twenty Shane Victorinos are marginally more abhorrent than a single Yadier Molina.
Even if the contest is much closer than the score would indicate.
On some level, I admire the Phillies’ sustained success — the seeds of which were planted before they had loads of money and prospects to throw at free agents and the Astros — and, if there existed a way of looking past Phillies fans being Phillies fans, I’d admire the passion their long dormant base has conjured for its team. When you read Gary Smith on the topic (and you should, despite the topic; he’s just that great a writer), the current Phillie fever seems more genuinely contagious, albeit like a plague, than that Best Fans In Baseball crap from St. Louis. But anyone who’s been to a Mets-Phillies game in New York lately (never mind Philly) isn’t about to find anything admirable there. Thus, you’re left with a vat of Victorinos versus a lone, loathsome Molina. Given that choice, I believe you simply have to Yadier it up for one more game.
But I’m totally with the Brewers in the next round. Or the Diamondbacks. Or actual poisonous diamondback rattlesnakes who pass some sort of anti-Molina venom on to those squirrels that keep romping around Busch Stadium. The squirrels would just be carriers, mind you. Like “Scrabble,” I find them adorable.
by Greg Prince on 5 October 2011 7:33 pm Not long ago I was at a game with somebody who loves the Mets but isn’t necessarily on top of their day-to-day machinations. He noticed from where we stood a very familiar figure he hadn’t noticed previously during the 2011 season.
“Mookie Wilson’s a coach?” he asked with a bit of surprise.
Yes, I said, first base coach. Funny thing was I wasn’t shocked that this particular Mets fan might have missed Mookie’s presence after several months of him standing in the same box night after night. If anything, I gauged my friend’s reaction as fairly savvy in its way. To me, there’s always been something just a little…let’s say off about Mookie Wilson serving as the Mets’ first base coach.
I felt it this year, and I felt it during his first stint in the role, from 1997 to 2002. It’s not a reflection on Mookie’s skills for the job, whatever it is a first base coach does exactly. Mookie coached baserunning as well as outfield play. Apparently he didn’t do it smashingly enough to pass muster with the Mets, for he, along with several of his colleagues, have been dismissed and/or will be reassigned. I couldn’t tell if you if Mookie was great at coaching or not particularly suited for it. During my last on-field visit, I saw him doing, if you’ll excuse me using sophisticated baseball jargon, coach stuff. Mookie was hustling in and out of the dugout, hitting grounders, providing tips, carrying gear. He was doing what coaches do.
 Mookie, doing what coaches do. (Photo by Sharon Chapman) Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s that your legends becoming workaday baseball men is at odds with the mind’s eye. Make no mistake: Mookie is one of our legends. Mookie is — not was, is — one of our champions, and I mean that in a more transcendent sense than he was on the roster the last time the Mets won a World Series. Howard Johnson was a coach for several years. As good as he was as a player, and as authentic as his 1986 credentials are, I didn’t find his descending from his lofty status among the Mets’ all-time statistical leaders to work on the swings of mere Met mortals all that strange. When Tim Teufel is third base coach next year, he’ll be Tim Teufel, the old infielder doing what old infielders do. If he gets a runner thrown out at the plate, I won’t find his playing identity trumping his errant decision.
Mookie, however, will always be Mookie. I never needed him to be anything more. His being something that by the nature of the job isn’t legendary couldn’t help but be a letdown. When I’d listen to him talking about pedestrian issues like how a generic runner gets a good jump, or what a youngster like Lucas Duda has to do to craft himself into a legitimate right fielder, I felt a tad disappointed. “You’re Mookie Wilson,” I would think. “Your being Mookie Wilson is plenty. You shouldn’t have to take Chin-lung Hu’s helmet at the end of an inning on those extremely infrequent occasions he’s on base. You shouldn’t have to hit fungoes to the likes of Scott Hairston. You’re Mookie Wilson! Isn’t that enough?”
Actually, I’m sure it wasn’t. Mookie Wilson is a legend to and for us, an avatar of everything we wanted our Mets to be, but ultimately, he’s a person who worked in an industry and wanted (after a hiatus) to make a living in it. Few are the stone immortals who can write their post-athletic ticket on image alone. Mookie wasn’t quite that, at least outside of Queens (and maybe Toronto). He’s a baseball man. Baseball men work in baseball. Coaching first base and baserunners and outfielders at the major league level is a pretty good gig. Of course Mookie deserved a shot at such a job if he wanted it, particularly in a Mets uniform.
And yet…he was Mookie. He was Mookie who streaked down the line, and Mookie who never gave up on fly balls, and Mookie who treated second to home like it was ninety feet and Mookie who ran hard but never appeared overheated…and Mookie who hit the grounder. I was trying to go as far as I could without playing the Buckner card, but let’s face it, it’s a helluva card. Yet Mookie’s not Mookie because he hit that grounder. Mookie hit that grounder because he’s Mookie.
Kind of zen, but so is Mookie Wilson, I’ve always believed. Unlimited exposure to Mookie, however, made him seem almost ordinary, as if he was hiding in the coaching box in plain sight. I want him to grace us with his presence reasonably regularly, but at the risk of messing with another man’s money, I didn’t want him held to some boring standard of whether runners ran bases better because of him or outfielders tracked deep fly balls properly because of him. I want Mookie around, but now and then, not as wallpaper. I want him to offer a wave, to tip a cap, to answer a question about what it’s like being Mookie Wilson. That’s worth compensating handsomely in the Mets universe. I never wanted a Mookie Wilson sighting to be rendered ordinary.
He’s too extraordinary for that.
by Greg Prince on 4 October 2011 8:07 pm The Mets announced a new “dynamic” ticket-selling plan today. I was going to call it a ticket-selling “scheme,” but that carries such negative connotations, just as “dynamic” carries positive connotations. Dynamic sounds exciting — like Jose Reyes when we knew for sure that he was a Met. Even in a 140-character, “Like” button, “This” world, words carry weight.
You can read the Mets’ words here. You can read some of Dave Howard’s words to a graciously arranged blogger conference call here and a good analysis of what’s going on here. Overall, I wouldn’t call the plan a scheme in that you’re the consumer, so you can decide what you want to consume. It is, however, dynamic in that the Mets have put in place a mechanism to let the prices for single games rise (a lot) or fall (a little) depending on how much demand any given game generates. If the Mets are dynamic, one imagines the lines at the box office or, more modernly, the queue at the Web site will be somewhat dynamic, too.
And if the Mets fail to sustain on-field dynamism for a fourth consecutive season, then seller beware.
There are deals and perks to be had for season-ticket buyers, a group Howard rightly referred to as just as important to the Mets as their corporate clients. There is more club access on the horizon if you have a full season-ticket ticket, and, if I was interpreting Howard correctly, there will be more to come if you have a partial season-ticket plan (they’ll tell us more next month). There will be, no doubt, the opportunity to come to the park and put your plastic through its paces if you so desire and can afford it. Who among us wouldn’t do it as much as we could if a) we had the resources and b) we were continually tempted by the super exciting dynamic Mets?
If I don’t sound overwhelmed by the dynamism or, for that matter, no more than modestly moved regarding schemes and plans, it’s probably because five years ago today, I was watching Paul Lo Duca tag out two Dodgers on the same play, Carlos Delgado register four hits and John Maine personify “emergency starter” successfully. I was at the Mets’ first playoff game of 2006. It was electric. Every seat was filled. Nobody was quiet. Baseball was like it oughta be.
My god, I miss that sort of thing. There isn’t a Next Year ticket promotion in the world that could be anywhere near as good as playoffs Right Now.
Phillies bloggers, Rangers bloggers, Cardinals bloggers, even Rays bloggers had better things to do today than think about the structure of season ticket plans for 2012. Tonight, such diagrams and calculations will be the furthest thing from the minds of Tigers bloggers, Brewers bloggers, Diamondbacks bloggers and You Know Who bloggers. Those poor saps won’t have to have dynamism explained to them. They’ll look for it on a field or television near them and figure it out for themselves.
Full transcript of the call, from Chris McShane of Amazin’ Avenue here.
by Greg Prince on 4 October 2011 1:48 pm With apologies to the late Warren Zevon:
Hurry home early, hurry on home
The Rays and the Rangers, and you’ll hear Gary Cohen
Fortunately, you don’t have to hurry home. At 2 o’clock Eastern, just flick on ESPN Radio (1050 AM in New York) wherever you happen to be. Or go to espnradio.com. Fire up the appropriate app. Hitch a ride to St. Petersburg and stand outside the broadcast booth if you have to.
Gary Cohen is doing baseball on the radio. How can you not listen?
OMG (which stands for ohmigary), it’s been a thrill having Cohen on the radio once more this fall, even if it’s for a division series in the other league, even if it’s in the company of tyro/bogeyman Aaron Boone, even it’s ultimately only going to be a four- or five-game reminder of when Mets radio broadcasts were something to seek out, not shy away from.
It’s not like we don’t get 150 or so games of Gary on TV, which is a fact that makes my cable bill worth paying. But this is different. This is where Gary Cohen’s voice belongs. All of Gary can continue to be on TV, expertly conducting the orchestra of Keith and Ron and Kevin and updates from the studio and Toyota Text Polls and all that. The man deserves the exposure SNY has brought him. He’s fantastic there, too.
But my radio deserves Gary Cohen. My ears deserve Gary Cohen. I want OUTTA HERE! back where it belongs. I want the ebb and flow of nine or more innings that baseball on the radio is supposed to be, the way Gary brought it to me with Bob Murphy from 1989 to 2003 and the way Gary brought it to me just as satisfyingly with Howie Rose in 2004 and 2005. I’m tired of crossing my fingers that Wayne Hagin will have the inning off.
I love Howie, but I loved him way more when he and Gary bounced Metsiana off each other. Howie without Gary, but with Wayne (or anybody else) is a voice in the wilderness. He’s become a bit of a kvetch, actually. A lovable — and knowledgeable — kvetch, but a bit cranky. Black uniforms tick him off. Odd start times tick him off. Coffee shop menus on the road tick him off. Commercials featuring Randy Johnson (“he’s not cuddly!”) tick him off. Howie’s become noticeably prone to bouts of irritability…which is understandable, given that he loves the Mets. Yet I don’t remember him sounding so less than thrilled doing his dream job before he was left to fend for himself against the inanity of Tom McCarthy first and Wayne Hagin now.
But this isn’t about merely craving Radio Free Hagin, and it isn’t even about getting the band back together. It’s about figuring out a way to get Gary Cohen some kind of Vin Scully deal down the road. Vin does a simulcast for three innings and then slides over to TV for the rest of the game. Can Gary do something like that, maybe? Vin works alone. Gary wouldn’t have to do that. He shouldn’t do that. He makes every announcer better. He made Ed Coleman an almost decent listen.
We’ve got a great thing going with GKR, but a lousy thing going where G&H used to reign supreme. I don’t want to lose the great thing, but I want to fix the lousy thing. Mets games on WFAN have been less than optimal since 2006. They’re OK when it’s Howie talking (kvetchiness notwithstanding) and Wayne getting a coffee or something. But they’re not the showcase for broadcasting they used to be. They’re not an end unto themselves anymore, not in that “turn the radio on, game’s about to start!” sense. They’re a means to an end: “We are on our way to a television, but until then, we should probably settle for the radio, lest we be tempted to hit refresh while driving.” The best Mets radio announcer alive isn’t doing Mets radio. He’s busy being the best Mets TV announcer alive. There’s got to be a way to properly apportion those competencies.
I knew the Rays and Rangers would be having a better October than us, but I didn’t realize how much better.
by Greg Prince on 3 October 2011 8:48 am  Vivacious Field equaled Victorious Shea 25 years ago. If you watched the 1986 World Series or have seen enough of the footage, you know there was a vivacious lady who did her part to win the damn thing for the Mets by rolling, rolling, rolling her arms from a seat behind home plate while Red Sox hurlers hurled. The distracting maneuver was obviously effective because the Mets won the World Series (don’t tell Pythagoras how our logic works). Anyway, Mark Simon of ESPN New York, a longtime friend of FAFIF, is looking for the rolling arms lady — her name is Bo Field. Why? We’re not fully certain, but if Mark’s seeking to contact her, there must be a good Mets story in the offing.
She’s been to Citi Field all decked out in her Mets finery, so we know she’s still rooting if not rolling for the home team. If you happen to know a way to get in touch with her, please contact us at faithandfear@gmail.com. Many thanks.
Image courtesy of Mets Police.
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