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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 2 September 2011 12:11 pm Welcome to The Happiest Recap, a solid gold slate of New York Mets games culled from every schedule the Mets have ever played en route to this, their fiftieth year in baseball. We’ve created a dream season that includes the “best” 130th game in any Mets season, the “best” 131st game in any Mets season, the “best” 132nd game in any Mets season…and we keep going from there until we have a completed schedule worthy of Bob Murphy coming back with the Happy Recap after this word from our sponsor on the WFAN Mets Radio Network.
GAME 130: August 29, 1988 — METS 6 Padres 0
(Mets All-Time Game 130 Record: 21-27; Mets 1988 Record: 77-53)
One star was just beginning to burn incandescently. Another appeared suddenly on the horizon. All things considered, Shea Stadium seemed to be evolving into quite the stellar galaxy.
After struggling to gather momentum across the summer, the first-place Mets kicked their pennant drive into highest gear while on the West Coast. They swept the Dodgers a three-game series before coming home to take a pair of games from the Giants. They lost the finale of the San Francisco set — but found an startling new weapon.
Gregg Jefferies made his 1988 Met debut in that Sunday loss. The two time Baseball America Minor League Player of the Year (who’d pinch-hit in a half-dozen games the previous September) was the most hyped prospect the Mets had ever nurtured this side of Darryl Strawberry, and now that he was in Queens, he was intent on making an immediate impact. Davey Johnson started him at third, batted him second and was rewarded right away for his faith. Jefferies lined a single in the first and produced a double to deep right (and scored) in his second at-bat.
The next night, a rainy Monday against the Padres, Gregg showed he was no one-game wonder. Starting at second and again batting second, Jefferies once more stoked Mets fans’ imaginations when they saw him double and score in the first, homer to lead off the third and triple home a run in the sixth.
Other than wind up his second game as a starting infielder on a divisional leader with a .556 batting average (and 1.333 slugging percentage), what else had he done for us lately?
Jefferies was a line drive machine practically from the womb. Soon enough, the papers would be filled with stories of his father/hitting coach, his intense underwater training sessions, his carefully tended bats, his idolization of Ty Cobb and everything else that makes a legend come to life ten minutes after he arrives on the scene to stay. Gregg’s batting average after fifteen games was .400. He was no defensive prodigy, having come up as an unnatural shortstop, but Davey didn’t hesitate to write him in at second or third base almost every game for the rest of the season. By November, on the strength of 109 at-bats in 29 games, Gregg Jefferies — with 6 home runs, 17 runs batted in and a batting average of .321 — placed sixth in National League Rookie of the Year voting.
Gregg was the budding star against the Padres that Monday night, but a player who hadn’t been around the Mets all that much longer was one who truly glittered — as had become his happy habit.
David Cone entered 1988 as a middle reliever just waiting to explode into a starter. Despite the Mets’ talented rotation, it was just a matter of time before Coney made himself a regular in its ranks, and once Rick Aguilera went down with an injury, his chance materialized.
The righty didn’t waste it. His first start, in early May, yielded a shutout of Atlanta. By July, he was 9-2 and a member of the National League All-Star team. Then, in mid-August, just at the moment the Mets commenced putting space between themselves and the rest of the N.L. East, David took off into orbit.
In the second of what would eventually become eight consecutive wins in eight consecutive starts, Cone dominated the Padres. A Tony Gwynn one-out double in the fourth was the extent of the San Diego attack. Cone walked two but gave up no other hits and, despite two errors (one on a foul ball, one a stolen base attempt), let nobody else on base. When the night was over, David Cone had pitched himself a one-hitter, striking out eight and teaming with Jefferies to lead the Mets to a 6-0 win that allowed them to maintain a 6½-game margin over the fading Pirates..
Cone’s record rose to 14-3 en route to a final mark of 20-3. In any season that didn’t include Orel Hershiser stringing together 59 consecutive scoreless innings, David would have been a near-lock for the Cy Young. For now, the second-year pitcher, the rookie infielder and the other jelling Mets would have to sate themselves with a magic number that had just been reduced to 25.
Same age as Coney in 1988, come to think of it.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On September 1, 1990, it may have been a little late in the season for a new episode of Extreme Shea Makeover, yet the ratings were gangbusters as the Mets redid their look in the middle of a boiling pennant race.
With the August 31 waiver trade deadline looming, the one by which GMs have to abide if they want to add players who can join their postseason roster, and the once-hot Mets in danger of wearing down from injury and late-summer doldrums, Frank Cashen acted boldly. He obtained a deluxe defensive catcher, Charlie O’Brien, from Milwaukee. He sent two minor leaguers to Philadelphia for experienced middle infield help in Tommy Herr. He enhanced his bench by adding bases-loaded hitting wizard Pat Tabler. And he dipped down to Tidewater to shake up his veteran rotation by promoting and inserting Julio Valera, a righty coming off a decent season in the International League, into Ron Darling’s recently soft spot in the rotation.
With young Valera on the mound, Herr stationed at second and O’Brien putting down fingers behind the plate, the refurbished Mets starred on CBS’s Saturday Game of the Week, and all the changes seemed to work. Against the Giants, Herr led off the Mets’ first with a walk and came around to score, along with Dave Magadan, on Darryl Strawberry’s 30th home run of the year. Herr would lead off the fifth with a homer of his own to extend the Mets’ edge over San Francisco to 5-3, earning applause from a crowd of 40,000+ who had known him mainly as their nemesis from his Cardinals heyday in the late ’80s.
But now Herr was a new Met favorite, as was O’Brien, who guided yet another instant Flushing sensation, Valera, through six innings of three-run pitching. With holdovers Darling and Bobby Ojeda coming out of the pen, and John Franco finishing up for his 31st save (tying Jesse Orosco’s team record), the revamped Mets prevailed, 6-5, and took a half-game lead over the same old Pirates with a little over a month to go in what promised to be a divisional battle royal.
GAME 131: September 1, 1974 — METS 3 Braves 0
(Mets All-Time Game 131 Record: 22-26; Mets 1974 Record: 60-71)
A beloved Met icon and a revered Met opponent faced each other under circumstances that had been imagined as dramatic but, just as the season that was limping into its final month, were fairly underwhelming. Still, in retrospect, there was a poignancy to it that might not have been appreciated in the fleeting present of its day.
The opponent was Hank Aaron, crowned at the beginning of 1974 as the major leagues’ home run king. Really, he crowned himself, homering off Jack Billingham on Opening Day in Cincinnati to tie Babe Ruth’s allegedly unbreakable mark of 714 and taking Al Downing of the Dodgers deep four nights later in Atlanta for No. 715. Given the way things worked in those days, it was pretty much fait accompli that Aaron’s most historic home runs would come against N.L. West rivals. The schedule used to tick like clockwork — in April, you played the teams in your division. While the Braves were taking on the Reds, the Mets were preparing to begin defense of their 1973 pennant at Philadelphia before coming home to raise their flag against St. Louis.
That simple fact took off the hook any National League East pitcher who might have winkingly said, when asked the previous summer, that they wouldn’t necessarily mind being the pitcher who gave up Aaron’s 715th. Not that anybody would groove one to Bad Henry or disturb the integrity of the game…but if somebody was going to give it up and become famous for it, well…
These sentiments caught the attention of the underwhelming commissioner of baseball, Bowie Kuhn. Kuhn, who couldn’t be bothered to stick close enough to Aaron’s historic quest as it reached it climax (he missed No. 715, claiming another, more pressing engagement), let it be known with characteristic rectitude that this — the idea that a pitcher would be anything but stone-faced about being potentially part of the biggest story in baseball — was not a joking matter, even if one of the pitchers to joke about it was that beloved Met icon, Tug McGraw.
“I’d throw my best pitch,” McGraw asserted in the summer of 1973, “and hope like hell he hits it. I’d be a commodity. I’d always be in demand on the banquet circuit.”
If not exactly incendiary, Tug’s remarks struck the commissioner as borderline, so the screwballing lefthander clarified his thoughts for the press: “I didn’t feel I was misquoted. I still say that I would give Aaron my best stuff and hope like hell he hits it out. I’m not going to lay it in there. I’m not going to give it to him. But if he gets it off me, more power to him.”
Aaron finished 1973 with 713 homers, one shy of Ruth, and whatever hot water McGraw got himself in turned tepid over the winter. As he wrote in Screwball, published before Aaron would take his first swings of the following season, “Henry figured to break the record long before he played against the Mets in 1974. But if I were to end up giving him a home run this year, I suppose the commissioner would end up giving me a big investigation. The important thing, though, is that Henry Aaron will know I didn’t do it intentionally.”
For the record, McGraw — who identified a pitch he threw to the eventual home run champ in the 1969 NLCS as “one of the best screwballs I ever threw or imagined throwing” — gave up four home runs to Aaron before Hammerin’ Hank got to 714: the first he ever allowed to any big league batter, as a rookie 1965; one in 1966; one in 1969; and one in 1973. The last of those was the 698th of Aaron’s career and delivered while Tug was cast in the strange role of starter on July 17. That was the game in which Yogi Berra took a shot in the dark at fixing Tug, whose relief efforts had gone to seed all year long. McGraw was roughed up by Brave hitting, but the Mets roared back from a 7-1 deficit to win 8-7, foreshadowing what the rest of 1973 held in store for them.
While it was easy enough to figure out what 1974 had in store for Aaron when he began it sitting on 713, it would have been tough to forecast what kind of year awaited Tug. The thrill of ’73 wore off for all of the Mets, whose late-season magic did not carry over to the following April, but for McGraw, it was as if his redemption had never occurred. 1974 picked up where the doldrums of 1973 left off, with his “You Gotta Believe” heroics serving as some kind of evanescent aberration. The tone was set in the Philly opener when, attempting to protect a 4-3 lead for Tom Seaver, McGraw gave up a two-run, walkoff homer to third baseman Mike Schmidt.
And the tone never varied much from there
By late August, McGraw and Berra were back where they’d been a little more than a year earlier, each trying to figure out what was wrong with the man who had been one of the National League’s most reliable relief aces over the previous half-decade. And as Yogi did in July of ’73, he decided to give Tug a fresh start — literally. He handed Tug the ball to begin a game in Houston and the Mets won. So he did it again a few days later at Shea. This time the Braves were the opponent — and it would almost certainly be Henry Aaron’s last game against the Mets, a team he had tagged for 45 regular-season home runs since they’d entered the National League in 1962.
The first of them was off Roger Craig at County Stadium when Aaron’s team was still known as the Milwaukee Braves. The second was in New York, against Jay Hook, and it landed in the center field bleachers of the Polo Grounds, where only a couple of sluggers had ever landed a ball. He would hit one in each game against the Mets in their playoff encounter in 1969, reaching each Met starter — Seaver, Jerry Koosman and Gary Gentry — while batting .357 in Atlanta’s losing cause. The last home run he’d hit off a Met pitcher at Shea was against his former teammate, George Stone, off whom he belted two on July 8, 1973. And his last home run against a Met anywhere was the one he hit off McGraw the starter nine days later in Atlanta.
Unless he took advantage of his last opportunity against McGraw on the Sunday that began September 1974. Aaron, with 730 roundtrippers on his ledger by now, was presumed gone from the Braves, and maybe retired, after the season. Thus, 33,879 Mets fans took advantage of their last chance to see the home run king possibly do his thing against their team. Though things had calmed down between Tug and the commissioner, it wasn’t altogether without poetic justice that it would be McGraw taking on Aaron on this last trip in for Hammerin’ Hank.
With Aaron’s future unknown, it wasn’t out of the question that any homer he hit would be his last. The pitcher who gave it up would derive some measure of reflected fame for being on the wrong end of it. Thus, McGraw was asked how he felt now about perhaps giving up this historic home run to Aaron.
“I didn’t even think about Aaron until you just reminded me,” Steve Jacobson quoted Tug in his book, The Pitching Staff. “Damn you, now I’m thinking.” With thought devoted to the subject — and with his ERA hovering above 4 — the lefty declared, “I hope I strike him out four times.”
There’d be no strikeouts. But there’d be no home runs, either. McGraw faced Aaron, starting in left field for Atlanta, four times that day. Tug grounded Hank into a 6-4-3 double play to end the first. He gave up a single to him in the fourth. He got him to line to third baseman Wayne Garrett to end the sixth. And, with one out and one on in the top of the ninth — on the heels of a thirty-second standing ovation tribute from the Shea crowd — Tug McGraw threw the last pitch Hank Aaron would ever see from a New York Met.
He popped it to Felix Millan, a longtime Brave, at second base, and Millan gloved it for the second out. Tug then flied Dusty Baker to Teddy Martinez in center to give the Mets a 3-0 win and raise his own record to 6-7.
It may have represented an uneventful goodbye to New York National League baseball for Aaron, but the complete game, five-hit shutout — the first shutout of his career — would turn into an unforeseen milestone for McGraw. It became his final win as a New York Met. The next several weeks were lackluster for both the pitcher and the team. The Mets would finish up at 71-91, McGraw at 6-11. In the offseason, a new general manager, Joe McDonald, would announce there were only three “untouchables” on his roster: Seaver, Koosman and Jon Matlack. McGraw, a Met since 1965, was theoretically available, But that’s all it could be to Tug: a theory, and not a very appealing one.
“If I got traded,” he said in The Pitching Staff, “I wouldn’t even know how to put another uniform on.”
But — just as Hank Aaron would when the Braves sent him and his 733 home runs to the Milwaukee Brewers so he could finish out his career as a DH in the city where he began — Tug would learn different shades of fabric can fit just fine. On December 3, McDonald swapped Tug, Don Hahn and Dave Schneck to Philadelphia for catching prospect John Stearns, starting center fielder Del Unser and a presumed lefty bullpen replacement, Mac Scarce.
Aaron’s American League two-season goodwill tour ended in 1976, with 755 homers as his final tally. Tug’s Philadelphia tenure, however, was just getting started. After having his left shoulder repaired (the one that, it turned out, was giving him undiagnosed trouble those last two seasons with the Mets), he’d wind up pitching ten seasons less than a hundred miles from New York, with one of them, 1980, ending with McGraw on the Veterans Stadium mound, nailing down the final out of the Phillies’ first world championship.
Tug’s final game in the majors would come September 25, 1984 — at Shea Stadium. He was asked to save a 4-2 lead for Kevin Gross, but gave up a leadoff double to Hubie Brooks and a run-scoring triple to Mookie Wilson. He was removed for Larry Andersen, who, three batters later, gave up a pinch-hit, walkoff home run to Tug’s old Mets teammate, Rusty Staub. It put Staub in the record book as only the second player (alongside Ty Cobb) to hit a home run before his 20th birthday and after his 40th.
All of which somehow calls to mind the cake Tug was presented with for his 30th birthday, which fell just before that final start against Henry Aaron and that last win as a Met. It was inscribed, “Youth is like Irish whiskey. It doesn’t last long.”
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On September 3, 1985, an unprecedented Met power display was underway on the West Coast, and the sparks it threw off were deeply appreciated across the continent. Gary Carter belted three home runs off San Diego Padre pitching that Tuesday night at Jack Murphy Stadium, leading the Mets to an 8-3 victory. Three homers in one game wasn’t the unprecedented part — Darryl Strawberry had done in only a month earlier in Chicago — but the Kid adding two more homers the next night at the Murph allowed Carter to claim a Met first: five homers in two games. It was a rarity for any player on any team; Gary became the eleventh player in major league history to produce a quintet of roundtrippers in a pair of games. The last had been Dave Kingman in 1979, as a Cub, against the Mets.
There was definitely more to come for Carter as that searing September pushed forward and the Mets dueled the Cardinals toward a bitter end. Before it was over, the perennial All-Star catcher won National League Player of the Month honors for clubbing 13 home runs and driving in 34 runs, just about each of them crucial. Carter also had an indisputable hand in determining the National League Pitcher of the Month winner for September 1985. That one went to Dwight Gooden, who threw 44 innings and gave up no earned runs. Doc’s catcher in four of his five pennant-pressure starts? Gary Carter, of course.
GAME 132: August 30, 1999 — Mets 17 ASTROS 1
(Mets All-Time Game 132 Record: 22-26; Mets 1999 Record: 80-52)
The ultimate second-place hitter established himself as No. 1 in the Met record books when it comes to best game any Met hitter has ever had.
Edgardo Alfonzo was never quite the focus of the Met clubs on which he was such an essential element, and maybe that was for the best. He worked quite well just off to the side of the spotlight. Let Mike Piazza take on the glare. Fonzie seemed to have no problems operating in a bit of a superstar shadow. At his peak, Alfonzo was tabbed in a Baseball Digest cover story as “the game’s most underrated player,” with one manager testifying, “Piazza gets all the attention in New York, but Alfonzo’s the one who makes the Mets successful.”
He played Gold Glove defense at third for a couple of years before proving even better at second. He had a knack for clutch hits. He showed surprising pop for a relatively small player. He did all those little things scouts drool over right. He was as mistake-free as they came. But, no, Edgardo Alfonzo never garnered the lion’s share of Met attention…except for not getting enough attention.
Yet there was nowhere to hide this Monday night under the Astrodome roof. The quiet infielder carried far too big a stick for metaphorical soft speaking.
Edgardo cleared his throat in the top of the first with a solo home run. Perhaps reticent to stand out so ostentatiously, he gladly contributed one of six Met hits (a single) and scored one of six Met runs in the second to help build a 7-0 lead over the Astros. Perhaps feeling looser by the fourth, he treated himself to another big swing, one that resulted in a two-run homer for a 9-0 lead.
Fonzie was 3-for-3 with two home runs and three runs scored in less than half a game. Masato Yoshii was in full command from the mound and the Mets’ sure gloves, per usual in 1999, were making no errors. Everything was pretty much perfect.
So Edgardo Alfonzo improved it.
In the sixth, leading off against Sean Bergman, Fonzie blasted his third solo home run of the night, putting the Mets ahead 11-0.
In the eighth, his leadoff single set the stage for another pair of Mets runs that made the game 14-1; the first of those runs crossed the plate under the name ALFONZO and the number 13.
And in the ninth, the luck and the skill just kept coming. A one-out double that drove Todd Pratt to make it Mets 15 Astros 1 gave the Fonz six hits — a cool, new Met record. And when Shawon Dunston singled to score, in alphabetical order, Benny Agbayani and Edgardo Alfonzo, it not only provided the final score of 17-1 for the Mets, it mean Fonzie had set yet another record — six runs, one game, most ever.
AAAAAAYYYYYY!!!!!!
No other Met has ever matched Edgardo Alfonzo’s six runs or six hits, and the second baseman’s three home runs put him in limited company, as only seven other Mets (from Jim Hickman in 1965 to Carlos Beltran in 2011) have that many. And as almost a footnote, Fonzie drove in five runs in his six at-bats.
It bears repeating:
AAAAAAYYYYYY!!!!!!
The same week Fonzie was making Met history, he shared the cover of Sports Illustrated with his three infieldmates, John Olerud, Rey Ordoñez and Robin Ventura. They were featured for their fielding. In the article, Alfonzo was referred to as “heady” and was noted for having committed only four errors through five months of 1999. But that was it in a piece that was devoted mostly to Ventura. It would take a more specialized publication, like Baseball Digest, to dwell on Edgardo and proclivity for not being overly appreciated.
“He’s by far the most underrated guy here,” a coach at the 2000 All-Star Game said of Alfonzo in his only midsummer classic appearance. “I guarantee, if he’d played third or short, he’d be here as an All-Star at those positions, too.” Another manager added Edgardo was “an MVP type player who’ll beat you in every way you can be beaten.”
Including, as in Houston, over the head with the hottest bat imaginable.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On September 3, 1974, one of the most deceptively excellent seasons in the annals of Met starting pitching continued apace. The deception lies in Jon Matlack’s final won-lost record for the year, an unimpressive 13-15, which even given the Mets’ widely acknowledged lack of offense, probably played too large a role in contemporary consideration of what a wonderful season Matlack was having.
It’s not as if Matlack was a secret to the world at large. He’d won the National League Rookie of the Year Award in 1972, sparkled in the 1973 postseason and was named to his first All-Star team in July 1974. Still, the 13-15 mark tended to overshadow just how good Matlack was by his third full season as a Met. In a metric then unknown, Wins Above Replacement, Matlack’s put up a pitching WAR of 8.6, best by far among all National League pitchers. In more commonly acknowledged statistics of the day, Jon’s 2.41 ERA was third-best in the N.L. while his 195 strikeouts placed fourth. But the wins just wouldn’t come, not on the meager-scoring Mets. Perhaps if they had, his won-lost mark would have impressed Cy Young voters.
“Had Matlack played for the Dodgers or Reds that season and pitched just as well,” Alex Nelson posited in the Amazin’ Avenue Mets 2011 Preview, “it’s easy to imagine him winning 25-28 games and taking home the Cy Young Award that went to Dodgers reliever Mike Marshall.” As it was, Matlack’s losing record netted him exactly zero votes and his outstanding season got lost in the shuffle of an era when a pitcher’s wins were the first thing anybody looked at.
But when Matlack won, he was impossible to ignore, particularly since seven of his thirteen wins were shutouts, giving him the most in the National League in 1974. A representative outing for him came in the opener of a Tuesday afternoon doubleheader at Wrigley Field, when Matlack’s devastating mix of fastballs and curves baffled the Cubs for nine quick (2:16) four-hit, no-walk innings and ten emphatic strikeouts. All four Chicago hits were singles, and each occurred in solitary fashion in four separate innings; no Cub baserunner saw second. When the game was over, Matlack was a 2-0 winner, had his sixth complete game whitewashing and hiked his record to 12-10.
Six more starts awaited Jon in 1974. One became his seventh shutout, a three-hitter over the divisional champions-to-be Pirates. One was a game in which he didn’t have it and lost 12-5. The other four were losses that went against Matlack by scores of 2-1, 3-2, 2-1 and 3-2, the last of those a ten-inning complete game lost on a Bill Robinson sacrifice fly in the tenth.
by Greg Prince on 2 September 2011 8:42 am What a pleasure it was to watch Father Time tell Baby Next Year, “Not tonight, son. Not tonight.”
Let’s hear it for the unlikely 100th big league victory of Miguel Jerez (Descartes) Batista, born when I was in second grade and not dead yet. Baseball Reference identifies Batista as having been the sixth-youngest National League player of 1992 and the sixth-oldest National League player of 2011. Batista’s looked at ball from both sides now. Now he’s on our side, for however long “now” lasts, which couldn’t possibly be very long. While he’s here, I hope he enjoys — per Bobby Parnell’s country & western warmup music — the rest of his eight-second ride.
And may all his remaining prospective opponents fall down in front of the Batistamobile the way the Marlins did Wednesday night.
Give all credit that’s due to the ultimate journeyman (ten teams in seventeen noncontiguous seasons, featuring one very sweet eighth-inning out in arguably the most uplifting non-Mets victory ever recorded) for giving up but two runs in six innings. He had some trouble early, but early’s not a problem for 40-year-old pitchers making surprise starts after summering in Buffalo. It’s “what have you done for us lately?” that we are prone to ask a Miguel Batista. One of the latest things we saw him do was pound Gaby Sanchez — wanted in two states for Met-killing — into a 6-4-3 double play that preserved a 4-2 lead. At any stage of a player’s career, at any stage of a team’s season, that’s a high note either on which to build or go out.
Probably go out, in Miguel’s case. It was an emergency-style start and after surviving Irene, it’s safe to say nobody in these parts likes to endure a constant state of emergency. Terry Collins indicates he’ll be looking for somebody else to take the next Nieseless turn, somebody with more of an upside — somebody younger, basically. In other professions, that would be age discrimination. In this one, when sending out your theoretical best bet to win a given game isn’t exactly super crucial, it’s just the way it goes. You’d think Collins would love another look at a guy who just gave him six innings and give up only six hits the first time he pitched for him. Maybe not this guy, though.
Even if he’s already shown more Met staying power than David Einhorn.
I don’t see why the simmering Met youth movement doesn’t have space for Miguel Batista. He’s twice as young as the oldest man in a Marlins uniform…unless you count how much Jack McKeon must have aged watching his fielders thoroughly avoid defense. Let’s just say, as Warner Wolf might have, that if you had Miguel Batista scoring the first Met run of the night, you won!
To be fair to the Marlin defense, Marlin pitching was also absurd. And Marlin batters couldn’t solve a presumably washed-up quadregenarian nor fully purloin the candy Baby D.J. was begging them to swipe toward the end. As much of a 2011 plague as Florida has been, dating back to Opening Night, it was delightful to see the Mets take four of five from them this week.
Then again, considering the Hanley-capped position these Fish are in, what does it say about our juggernaut that Team Teal fell all over itself and the Mets still had to cling to dear life in the ninth one batter shy of Mike Stanton appearing as the go-ahead run?
It says it’s September and it’s better to be the third-place team twenty-two games from first with the forty-year-old who knows how to pitch out of jams than the fifth-place team nearly thirty games out that obviously has a bigger target painted on its feet than ours does.
***
Though my advancing chronological state makes me partial to most any player still hanging in there in his fifth decade, I must mention that I enjoyed Thursday night’s win in the company of (among other delightful folks) an intelligent, insightful, informed 14-year-old fan named Andrew Hees. The kid knows his Mets, knows farm systems and has excellent taste in both ballparks and books. I appreciated his joining me for several innings.
I also relished the opportunity to take in the wonderful pregame experience a couple of truly Amazin’ people had in the hours before first pitch, and I look forward to sharing their story (with pictures!) in the coming days. In the interim, thanks to the New York Mets media relations department for facilitating FAFIF’s coverage of a special afternoon and evening for that pair of incredibly courageous Mets fans.
by Jason Fry on 1 September 2011 12:12 am I’ve always kind of hated myself for liking Sept. 1.
When your team is in a pennant race, Sept. 1 feels like the car has shifted into top gear: You’re gunning for the finish line, and the only duties set to be assumed by rookies involve blowouts. If anything, you fear what may happen when your team runs up against some Triple-A starter they’ve never seen before, pitching for a team playing out the string.
When your team is one of those playing out the string, though, Sept. 1 feels like the first day of next year, with new players rewarded for strong minor-league campaigns and given a chance to impress somebody. It’s a time to wonder, and maybe let yourself dream — to see a first big-league hit tossed into the Mets dugout while the young man who earned it tries not to beam, and wonder if years from now you’ll tell people you remember the day.
A pair of Joshes are coming up tomorrow — middle reliever Josh Stinson and Murphyesque hitter/fielder Josh Satin, not to mention tomorrow’s starter, superannuated pitcher-poet Miguel Batista. According to Adam Rubin, later in September we might get a look at starter Chris Schwinden, injury magnet Zach Lutz, perennially ignored masher Valentino Pascucci and returnees Mike Baxter and Pat Misch. There may not be a blue-chipper in the bunch, but I’m always happy to make the acquaintance of a new Met, and imagine what might be.
Such optimism is helped by the fact that next year keeps arriving at Citi Field.
(Interlude: I’m writing this on our annual sojourn on Long Beach Island, which is happily unscathed by Hurricane Irene despite taking a direct hit from her early Sunday morning. The rental car Emily was given for this year’s trip? A Ford Edge. Despite my off-the-charts loathing for that horrible Derek Jeter ad, honesty compels me to say that the Edge is a pretty great vehicle.)
Anyway, Chris Capuano further explored the mysteries of pitching by following his Seaveresque throttling of the Braves with a slog against the Marlins. But he hung in there and so did the Mets, with David Wright clubbing two 2012 homers off the Great Wall of Flushing and Jason Bay going 3-for-4 and somehow erasing most of that good feeling by being tagged out following a horrid slide to the right of home plate that looked like a card table collapsing at a church social. The future part? Front and center in the comeback win against the hated Marlins were Lucas Duda and Ruben Tejada. Duda put the Mets on top with a very fine seventh-inning at-bat against Mike Dunn, one that saw him fight back from 0-2 to 2-2 and then rifle a ball up the middle for a 3-2 lead. Tejada then sealed the game with two out in the ninth, Alfredo Amezaga on second and Mike Stanton at the plate. Stanton hit a laser up the middle which Tejada snagged behind second, whirling and throwing a seed to Nick Evans despite his momentum carrying him the wrong way. (Josh Thole and Wright also made superb plays in the ninth.)
Nothing against Daniel Murphy or Justin Turner, but there’s no way either of them makes that play. Tejada did because he has the kind of superb fielding instincts that players either have or don’t — some attunement to what pitch is thrown and the angle of contact and the sound and spin of the ball coming their way that gives them a first step in the right direction while other fielders are still processing what’s happening. One way or another, Tejada’s a starter next year: hopefully as Jose Reyes’s counterpart in the middle infield, less happily as his replacement. He’s nearly as valuable a hitter as Turner and a far better fielder than either Turner or Murph, and he’s only 21. His has been an impressive campaign, one that we may look back on as the most significant of several good years for young Mets.
Will either of the new Joshes or Lutz or Schwinden or even Pascucci have a role to play alongside Tejada and Duda? I don’t know, and putting any kind of significant stock in September numbers is taking being a dreamer too far. But starting tomorrow we’ll find out, a little bit. And hopefully that finding out will include some nice moments and reminders that for all its stomach-turning plummets, this Mets season has included some significant lifts as well.
by Greg Prince on 31 August 2011 8:06 am In tribute to those wonderful people who show up to share the 7 train with us Mets fans for two glorious weeks every August and September, let’s just say the Mets lost in straight sets to the Marlins Tuesday night, 0-0, 0-0, 0-0, 0-0, 0-0, 0-0, 5-0, 0-0, 1-0.
Apparently you can only volley with Javier Vazquez for so long.
And how did the Mets gets bested in this match? By getting tangled in the net, though since there’s no net in baseball, let’s use the wheel as our excuse.
Oddly enough, the wheel came up in casual conversation between me and my BFF, Chuck, the other day. You know somebody’s your BFF if your casual conversation includes the wheel, though in our case “the wheel” rarely arises as part of an intense strategy session. It’s more like this:
HIM: What’s wrong with your Mets?
ME: I don’t know.
HIM: Maybe they’re not putting on the wheel enough.
I no longer remember why the wheel is funny to us. I’m not sure it was ever funny to me, but it cracks up Chuck in the same way football announcers invoking some receiver’s “explosive first step” tickles me every time.
HIM: We’re getting old.
ME: I know.
HIM: But don’t worry, we’ve still got that explosive first step.
Chuck and I have known each other for 27 years, and this stuff (unlike us) never gets old.
So where was I? Oh yeah, the wheel, and how it came off on the Mets last night.
Here’s how it went, according to the best of my recollection, which is a bit fuzzy now considering I fell asleep at the end of the postgame show, woke up with a nagging headache and hate the Marlins:
It was nothing-nothing (or love-love) in the seventh. Mike Cameron, whose Met tenure struck me as distant and brief even while it was in progress for 216 games across two seasons, doubled. John Buck walked. Vazquez — the last of the red, hot Expos as far as it pertains to tormenting the Mets — bunted.
And everything went to hell.
Vazquez didn’t bunt one of those bunts that gets through the infield for a Little League home run. Nor did he land his bunt on the square that qualified the Marlins for a triple run score. It was a bunt David Wright charged and had to eat because throwing to third didn’t strike him as an attractive option; and because Justin Turner had a notion about setting up a pickoff play on Cameron so he wasn’t covering first; and because Mike “They Have My Number” Pelfrey didn’t think (what a surprise) to pick up on Turner’s pickoff signal and throw over or at least step off
Quite a supercharged bunt: the Marlins went from two on and nobody out in a scoreless game to three on and nobody out in a scoreless game, yet a ball tapped no more than twenty feet from home plate was fingered for allowing five runs in the ensuing five minutes.
Sure. Blame the faulty spokes in the wheel. Blame Canada for not supporting the Expos and allowing Vazquez to pitch for Florida. Blame Pelfrey for being Pelfrey (I always find that handy). Blame one loused-up bunt for the Mets not doing a damn thing offensively. That’s the problem with sending plays like the wheel to the forensics lab for intense investigation. You wind up with evidence, but you don’t necessarily catch the culprit.
It’s no mystery why the Mets lost. They didn’t touch Vazquez, and Pelfrey — who tips his hat to the Marlins and calls them his daddy — was sooner or later going to crack. The wheel was just a convenient alibi.
by Greg Prince on 30 August 2011 2:44 pm Welcome to The Happiest Recap, a solid gold slate of New York Mets games culled from every schedule the Mets have ever played en route to this, their fiftieth year in baseball. We’ve created a dream season that includes the “best” 127th game in any Mets season, the “best” 128th game in any Mets season, the “best” 129th game in any Mets season…and we keep going from there until we have a completed schedule worthy of Bob Murphy coming back with the Happy Recap after this word from our sponsor on the WFAN Mets Radio Network.
GAME 127: August 27, 1986 — Mets 6 PADRES 5 (11)
(Mets All-Time Game 127 Record: 21-27; Mets 1986 Record: 85-42)
A temptation exists where the 1986 Mets are concerned — and it existed in real time, too — to accept their exploits as par for the course of its day, considering all of 1986 was their day. A Newsday back page headline from that June may have best expressed how their excellence became their norm:
Ho-Hum, Another Win
Nice problem to have, of course. The same paper actually ran a story as that summer wound down suggesting this year here, 1986, just isn’t as much fun as last year, 1985, when the Mets and Cardinals were locked in a daily struggle for N.L. East supremacy and every game was tinged with overtones of baseball life and death. Several Mets players agreed that, yeah, maybe it was a little more exciting then.
Yet it wasn’t like two of every three games the 1986 Mets played were necessarily predestined to become Met victories. It only felt that way.
For example, how could the Mets lose a game they led all night at the end of a trip when they were winning day in and day out? Didn’t seem possible. Still, the unthinkable almost came to pass…at least until the 1986 Mets came up with an almost unfathomable way — even for them — to prevent their version of calamity.
The smoothest of sailing was in progress at Jack Murphy Stadium this Wednesday night as the Mets appeared a dead, solid lock to finish their West Coast swing at 8-1. Darryl Strawberry knocked in two runs in the first with a single and another pair on a two-run homer off Eddie Whitson in the third, and the Mets led 5-0. Padre right fielder Tony Gwynn spiced up the proceedings by cutting down three Met baserunners in the first five innings, but Doc Gooden was sharp all evening, giving up just one run across seven before being removed for a pinch-hitter in the eighth with a 5-1 lead.
But what appeared to be an easy win fell into severe doubt thanks to neither Roger McDowell nor Jesse Orosco having it (and Wally Backman making an error). The Padres tied it at five in the eighth and it stayed tie into the eleventh. That’s when the Mets struck back versus Goose Gossage, via singles by Lenny Dykstra and Backman (Wally racing from first to third) and a Keith Hernandez sacrifice fly.
By necessity, the 6-5 lead would have to be handed to Doug Sisk, a distant third option in Davey Johnson’s 1986 bullpen. And true to every Mets fan’s deepest anxiety, Sisk gave up a leadoff double to Garry Templeton. Craig Lefferts struck out, but Tim Flannery lashed a single to center, quite possibly enough to tie the game and position the Padres for a win.
Or maybe such an eventuality was an impossibility for San Diego against these Mets.
Tim McCarver, on Channel 9, confirmed it most definitely wasn’t the home team’s night:
“Templeton’s comin’ around to score, Flannery to second. Out at home! He’s out at home!
“The throw to third — out at third, the Mets win it, six to five! What a double play! Just your routine double play!”
Indeed, routine for the ’86 Mets, who could hand back a five-run lead, have three runners erased by the opposing right fielder and lean on their shakiest reliever…yet still win. Because in 1986, the Mets rarely lost.
Many moving parts had to click to end the game to their satisfaction, but the Mets were nothing if not in sync. Dykstra charged Flannery’s ball expertly and came up firing. John Gibbons was bowled over at the plate but hung on to the ball. In the instant he presented evidence that he didn’t lose his grip to umpire Paul Runge, Sisk emerged — positioned as a pitcher should be — to point Gary Carter’s injury fill-in toward third base. Doug saw Flannery flying around second and kept his catcher in the loop. Gibbons threw to Howard Johnson and Flannery was a fried Friar. With Bob Engel’s out call made, the Mets came together to celebrate yet another way they found to win. Dykstra’s high-fives were delivered with the same vigor as his rocket to Gibbons.
McCarver approved heartily of what he had witnessed:
“Your basic Eight-Two-Five double play.”
By beating the Padres 6-5, the Mets maintained their 20-game lead over Philadelphia while decreasing their Magic Number to 16. In other words, they continued to soar. Or as Timmy put it in his postgame coda, “We’ve got a plane to catch — oh baby!”
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On August 30, 1992, the Mets held Nostalgia Night at Shea Stadium, wearing 1962-style uniforms to honor the team’s 30th anniversary. Fortunately for them, the player who served as their lightning rod throughout the current season enjoyed a throwback of his own.
Bobby Bonilla had worked hard to give off the impression he was born to be a New York Met. Entering this world between the 1962 and 1963 seasons, the Bronx native made sure, when he was still a Pirate superstar and just before filing for free agentry, to let the likes of Ralph Kiner know how much he rooted for the Mets as a kid, dropping names like Lenny Randle and Willie Montañez into the conversation to enhance his bona fides. Naturally, if the Mets (coming off a lackluster 1991) were looking to hire a happy, go-lucky Mets fan with a recent track record of offensive success, why, shucks, Bobby Bo would be more than happy to listen.
The Mets made an offer of $29 million for five years (a record high at the time) and Bonilla accepted. It was win-win in the glow of December 1991: the Mets, coming off their worst season in eight, boldly secured the services of the prime free agent bat on the market, while Bonilla, hometown boy, promised the smile on his face would remain constant.
That was December. All of it (save for the sum owed Bo) was a distant memory by August. Bonilla hadn’t lived up to his reputation in any tangible way. He didn’t hit like he had as a Pirate. He didn’t grin like he had as a newly minted Met. The Mets didn’t win very often. It wasn’t all Bonilla’s fault — the whole highly paid roster disappointed in 1992 — but Bobby was definitely out front: leading a team media boycott when several Mets sweated out rape allegations in Spring Training; phoning the press box during a game after a bad Met inning to complain about being charged with an error in right field; tuning out the disapproving crowd with ear plugs while playing his position; and, mostly, collecting all that money while not earning it by dint of superstar play.
Nobody was smiling around Shea by late summer, but come one Sunday night against the Reds, turning back the clock seemed to do the cheerful trick.
The Mets celebrated their thirtieth anniversary by donning authentic throwbacks: dark blue caps, jerseys with no numbers on the front or names on the back, vintage stirrups — the whole 1962 bit. And to make things that much more retro, the visiting Cincinnati Reds joined in the fashion fun, reviving their early-’60s gear, most notably their sleeveless, gray uniform vests of yore.
Clothes didn’t necessarily make the Mets for eight innings. After three singles in the bottom of the first built them a 1-0 lead, they turned helpless against Cincy starter Tim Belcher, their unsung tormentor from the 1988 NLCS. The ex-Dodger retired 23 consecutive Mets after Eddie Murray drove in that sole run in the first. Sid Fernandez countered with eight strikeouts in 7⅓ innings, but he would have had to have been flawless to have kept up with Belcher. He wasn’t. Glenn Braggs reached Sid for a two-run double in the fourth and an RBI single in the sixth, leaving the Mets trailing, 3-1.
Belcher was unstoppable through eight. The only thing that could get in his way would be his removal. Lou Piniella did the Mets the biggest favor possible when he took out his starter after he had been so perfect for so long. Then again, the Reds’ manager called on Rob Dibble to replace him…big, hulking, scary, hardballing Rob Dibble, his biceps practically bursting through the red shirt under that vest.
Some favor. But it was better than Belcher.
The erstwhile Nasty Boy struck out Darryl Boston to begin the Mets’ ninth, the 24th consecutive out made my Mets batters. Finally, there was the slightest of breakthroughs, as Chris Donnels coaxed a 3-2 walk out of Dibble. But Dibble rebounded and struck out the recently acquired Jeff Kent. Murray, however, walked on four pitches. As Bill Pecota replaced Eddie on the basepaths, Bonilla — 0-for-3 against Belcher — stepped up to keep the rally going.
He didn’t do that. He ended the rally with one swing. Bonilla crushed Dibble’s very first delivery deep over the right field wall to give the Mets a tables-turning, frown-upside-down three-run home run and a 4-3 win. Suddenly, nobody looked better in 1962 Met blue than Bobby Bo.
“It’s a tremendous feeling,” the right fielder who was in one of his more talkative moods told reporters. “This is the kind of game that makes memories.”
It certainly manufactured one particularly indelible image for ESPN viewers that Sunday night, and it came not from the batter’s box, but from the pitcher’s mound. Dibble’s trademark wasn’t just his hundred mile-per-hour heat; it was his hot temper…and it was on full prime time display. Just after Bonilla blasted his homer and took off around the bases, Dibble simply took off his 1962 vest, flung it to the grass and left it there for Reds coaches, Mets groundskeepers or stray cats to have their way with.
Unlike the victorious, magnanimous Bonilla, Dibble didn’t have anything to add to the climactic scene from the ninth inning. “You saw what happened,” the irritable relief ace groused. “I have nothing else to say.”
How nice, for one night in 1992, to have the snarling emanate from somebody else’s clubhouse.
GAME 128: August 30, 1969 — Mets 3 GIANTS 2 (10)
(Mets All-Time Game 128 Record: 33-15; Mets 1969 Record: 75-53)
You don’t get out of the tangles the Mets found themselves in this Saturday afternoon at Candlestick Park. You just don’t.
But the Mets did. That’ll happen, apparently, when it’s 1969.
Here’s how the bottom of the eighth of this 2-2 game ended and how it stayed 2-2, per Retrosheet:
[Ken] Boswell caught popup and threw toward home, but [Ken] Henderson was retreating to third. Throw hit first base coach [Wes] Westrum and [Donn] Clendenon retrieved it to throw out Henderson who crashed into catcher [Jerry] Grote.
You got that?
Ken Henderson (future Met) was on third as a pinch-runner and go-ahead run with one out. Jim Davenport hit a popup behind second. Boswell caught it in the outfield. His throw home was not a good one — it indeed hit Westrum, former manager of the Mets, then coaching first base for San Fran. Henderson was scurrying back to third at that instant. Seeing Wes inadvertently get in the way of the play, Ken reversed his scurry and dashed for home. But Clendenon saw what was going on, picked up the ball and threw it to Grote to complete a sudden 4-3-8 double play.
You ain’t seen nothing yet, however, because you ain’t seen the bottom of the ninth, when it was still 2-2, with one out:
Big shift against [Willie] McCovey who sliced double down left field line. Grote waited casually at plate, pretending no throw was coming, then lunged at last moment to tag [Bob] Burda. Grote rolled the ball to the mound, thinking there were 3 outs. Clendenon retrieved ball and threw to [Bobby] Pfeil for out.
Where to start?
Let’s see…Gil Hodges had put a modified version of his McCovey shift into effect. Ol’ Stretch crossed it up and hit it the other way.
As Gaspar chased the ball down (he had just been inserted for defense in the eighth; Art Shamsky got the start that day), Bob Burda, who had been on first, decided to try to score.
Gaspar heaved to Grote.
Grote pulled the DEAD MAN play, acting as if absolutely nothing of interest was taking shape. But the throw came, allowing him to tag the surprised Burda for the second out of the inning.
It was such a supreme moment of deception that Grote stayed in character, and continued to portray a clueless catcher. In other words, he casually rolled the ball to the mound because forgot that THERE WERE ONLY TWO OUT.
Dead man, indeed.
McCovey saw this incredible faux pas unfold and, from second, started steaming toward third. It was Clendenon to the rescue again. Donn grabbed the ball and threw it to third baseman Bobby Pfeil who tagged McCovey for…the…uh…7-2-3-5 double play.
Then Clendenon homered in the top of the tenth off starter Gaylord Perry. And, in the bottom of the tenth, with two out, Swoboda lost Bobby Etheridge’s fly ball in the sun…but found it at the last second so the Mets could hold on to win, 3-2. They snapped the Giants’ nine-game winning streak and, presumably, broke their spirit (San Francisco was in an N.L. West dogfight, and their divisional lead has just been reduced to one game).
As for the Mets…well, geez, they’re the 1969 Mets for a reason.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On August 21, 1998, the biggest show in baseball came to Shea Stadium, and the Mets were not content to serve as spectators. For four games in two days, though, it felt the Mets were barely a sideshow attraction at the circus that surrounded Mark McGwire as he brought his quest for the single-season home run record to Shea Stadium. Big Mac was drawing big crowds and attention every bit as massive as his forearms wherever he went in the summer of ’98. Yet when he hit Queens, it was an even more enhanced deal because he was on the immediate verge of 50 home runs.
Mark reached his provisional milestone in the opener of the first of two consecutive twinight doubleheaders when he took Willie Blair deep. Then he made it 51 with plenty of time to go between it and Roger Maris’s 61 when he homered off Rick Reed in the nightcap. The Mets won that second game to earn a split, but it seemed scoreboard results were just background noise. Everything was a matter of McGwire.
The hype carried over into Friday’s doubleheader, even though Big Mac didn’t start the opener. It was enough for the near-sellout crowd to gawk when Mark pinch-hit and doubled to extend a Cardinal lead that became a Cardinal win. It was a warmup for the finale, when McGwire would be back in the lineup.
There’d be some homering then, all right, but it wouldn’t have anything to do with Mark McGwire.
The Mets’ second batter, Edgardo Alfonzo, took St. Louis starter Manny Aybar over the left field wall in the first inning of the second game. Mets fans with an eye on the Wild Card race applauded heartily. Ticketholders on hand to bask in the glow of a national phenomenon were still licking their wounds over McGwire doing no more than walking in the top of the inning.
Fonzie, Aybar and everybody else would soon have to take a back seat to McGwire and a Mets pitcher with a much lower profile, Armando Reynoso. Reynoso returned from a long disabled list stint in July and gave the Mets nothing but wins since. Now he was giving the unconflicted Met portion of the 52,000 on hand at Shea something to savor besides: Armando Reynoso took the Mets’ ballpark back for the Mets.
How? By striking out Mark McGwire to end the third inning. And by striking out Mark McGwire to end the fifth inning. And, yes, by striking out Mark McGwire to end the seventh inning. Reynoso would not be posterized nor become a speed bump on the way to somebody else’s history. He pitched seven shutout innings and clung to that 1-0 advantage Alfonzo gave him way back in the first.
The rest was baseball sans circus. Turk Wendell set down three non-McGwire Cardinals in the eighth and John Franco took care of another three in the ninth. The Mets held on 1-0 and came away from their brush with home run hysteria tied with the Cubs for the sole remaining N.L. playoff spot.
Mark McGwire went on his merry way and hit some more home runs in 1998. But he was no longer blotting out the Mets’ sun. And given the chance to inflict serious damage to their postseason hopes at a juncture of the season when every result loomed large, the enormous Big Mac was eclipsed by the generally unassuming Armando Reynoso. Thus, in an era when slugging was everything, solid pitching proved occasionally capable of casting a welcome shadow.
GAME 129: August 26, 1965 — METS 5 Dodgers 2
(Mets All-Time Game 129 Record: 22-26; Mets 1965 Record: 42-86-1)
David had Goliath. The Mets had Sandy Koufax. Just about everybody did, but the Mets more than most.
The first time the Mets faced Koufax, they pounded him for 13 hits…and lost. Sandy Koufax scattered those 13 hits for a complete game 13-6 victory at the Polo Grounds. Is it only that the 1962 Mets could pile up those kinds of offensive numbers against the premier pitcher of his generation and still be blown out, or is it that only Sandy Koufax in his prime could sustain a 13-hit attack and brush it off like lint?
A compelling philosophical question, but hardly an issue worth contemplating the second time the Mets faced Koufax. On that occasion, exactly a month later at Dodger Stadium, the Mets did nothing with Koufax. Nothing at all. Well, five walks, but no hits. That’s what you call a no-hitter, the first dropped upon the young Mets’ heads.
And it only took them 73 games.
That was life with Koufax whenever he and the Mets crossed paths. Three encounters in 1962 left the Mets 0-3 versus Sandy. They took him on four times in 1963 and provided him with a 4-0 component of what would become a Cy Young/MVP campaign. Koufax gave up two runs to the Mets in 31 innings that year, but only one of them was earned.
In 1964, Koufax started against the Mets three times, and the Dodgers won all three games. They did lead him in the last one, 3-2 in the eighth, and Walt Alston was forced to pinch-hit for him…but Wally Moon smacked a double off Tracy Stallard to tie the game and get Sandy off the hook. And Tommy Davis put the Dodgers ahead to stay thereafter. But Koufax, who was 9-0 in nine previous starts versus the Mets, was finally saddled with a no-decision.
All hail moral victory.
1965: More of the same. He won 2-1 in April; 5-0 and 2-1 in June; and 4-3 on August 10 at Dodger Stadium, giving Sandy his 20th win of the year and a 13-0 lifetime mark at the expense of the Mets.
Would it ever end? Would the Mets ever stop being Sandy Koufax’s patsy? He didn’t lose to many teams and the Mets didn’t beat many pitchers, so when you combined these two entities, it was hard to imagine the prevailing trends would soon change.
Enter, from stage left, a fresh-faced southpaw who would alter that little slice of Met futility.
Frank Edwin McGraw was an excitable 20-year-old rookie who spent four months not particularly distinguishing himself as a lefty reliever for Casey Stengel or Wes Westrum in 1965. Finally, as another Met season rushed rapidly down the tubes, Westrum gave the young man known as “Tug” his second major league start (three weeks after his first one lasted all of seven batters). Tug threw a nine-inning gem on August 22, beating the Cardinals in the second game of a doubleheader, 2-1. With nothing to lose, Westrum gave the kid another start four days later, a Thursday night at Shea, against the Dodgers.
Against Koufax.
1965: Still more of the same, at least in the first, before Koufax had even touched the ball. McGraw surrendered a leadoff single to Maury Wills (who’d go 4-for-4). Wes Parker bunted Wills to second, and Maury scored when Lou Johnson doubled. It put the Mets in a 1-0 hole as they prepared to face a pitcher who entered the evening’s action with a 21-5 record and a 2.18 ERA, never mind his total mastery of the Mets since 1962.
But you gotta play each of these games to find out what happens next. The Mets did, and on the strength of a leadoff walk by Ron Hunt, a Roy McMillan double and a Jim Hickman single, the Mets strung fused a pair of runs to give McGraw a 2-1 lead over Koufax after an inning.
Tug and Sandy each settled down from there. For Sandy, it was business as usual: 16 Mets batters faced from the second to the sixth, only one single (to McMillan in the third) allowed. For Tug, there was no usual business. It was his first year in the majors, his third start overall, and he was still settling into the role of big league baseball player. Nevertheless, he was as composed as his more celebrated (much more celebrated) rival, giving up only four hits from the second through the seventh, never more than one per inning. It remained 2-1, Mets, as they batted in the home seventh.
With one out, Ed Kranepool doubled off Koufax. After intentionally walking Chris Cannizzaro, Sandy pitched to pinch-hitter Bobby Klaus, who grounded to short, forcing Cannizzaro at second. That put runners on first and third with two outs and Tug coming up. It was a recipe for extrication: the greatest pitcher on earth against a pitcher batting .111. And, sure enough, McGraw grounded to Don LeJohn at third.
It was all a perfect setup for a Dodger escape, except LeJohn made a bad throw. Tug was safe at first as Kranepool scored to increase the Mets’ lead to 3-1. It was a much better margin than 2-1 for McGraw to nurse in the eighth, for after he grounded out Jeff Torborg to start the inning, Koufax’s spot in the order was due up.
But not Koufax. Alston sent in a pinch-hitter, meaning Sandy was out of the game, with no chance to beat the Mets. Dick Tracewski walked in his place. Tug surrendered a single to Wills, which sent Tracewski to third; Wills, however, was thrown out by center fielder Hickman as he failed to stretch his hit into a double. That proved huge, as the next batter, Wes Parker, tripled home Tracewski to cut the Mets’ lead to 3-2. Westrum finally removed McGraw in favor of Jack Fisher, the Mets’ ace starter. Jack walked Jim Gilliam but grounded out Johnson to end the top of the eighth with the Mets still up by one run.
The new Dodger pitcher, Johnny Podres (like Koufax, a holdover from the team’s Brooklyn days), was struck for back-to-back homers by Joe Christopher and Ron Swoboda in the bottom of the eighth. And Fisher held that 5-2 lead in the ninth.
The Mets won. Tug McGraw was the victor. And for the first time in the history of the world, Sandy Koufax was the losing pitcher in a game he pitched against the New York Mets.
The New York Mets beat Sandy Koufax.
McGraw remembered it fondly nearly a decade later in his autobiography, Screwball:
“We were what they call ‘the pitchers of record,’ so I stayed out on the bench and watched Fisher get out of the [eighth] inning. Then they sent me to the clubhouse to get rid of my wet stuff — my game clothes — and I was still there when the game ended. It was unreal, beating Koufax, because it was my second straight win and he was Koufax, he was the best, he’d won the Cy Young Award and twenty-five games and everything. So I started jumping up and down when it ended, going crazy as usual, but this time the rest of the guys didn’t shake their heads or anything, and nobody went around the locker room saying McGraw’s some strange cat.”
Technically, though, he was. Tug McGraw was the oddest duck in Mets history. He was the Met who bested Sandy Koufax. Nobody else would be able to say that until just over a year later, on McGraw’s 22nd birthday, as it happened. Tug started against Koufax again on August 30, 1966. During that season, Sandy had started another four games against the Mets and won them all. In this rematch, though, each starter was bombed and out of the game by the third. By then, the Mets led the Dodgers, 6-2, and went on to a 10-4 victory. Bob Friend earned the win in relief, while Koufax took the loss, dropping his lifetime ledger against the Mets to a paltry 17-2.
That was the last the Mets would see of Sandy Koufax from a major league mound. His left arm was in too much pain to carry on, and 1966 wound up being his final year in baseball. He went out on a high, posting a 27-9 won-lost mark, a 1.73 ERA and 317 strikeouts in 323 innings.
But also on a one-game losing streak versus his latent nemeses, the New York Mets.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On August 24, 1962, the Mets decided the outcome of the National League pennant race in as unlikely a fashion, with as unlikely a handful of players, as one could imagine. Facing Don Drysdale, who was en route to winning 25 games and capturing baseball’s then single Cy Young Award, they provided a trio of traffic cones on the Dodgers’ freeway ride to the World Series. Their names were Choo Choo Coleman, Marv Throneberry and Rod Kanehl, each usually associated with some form of Original Mets daffiness, but on this Friday night at the Polo Grounds, they were all sluggers who took Drysdale deep. Their solo homers allowed Jay Hook to stay locked in a 3-3 battle with Big D until the bottom of the eighth when Kanehl, Gene Woodling and Hook himself all singled in runs to provide the winning Met margin in a 6-3 decision.
The loss dropped Drysdale’s mark to 22-7, which may not have gotten in the way of his Cy Young campaign, but it was a loss the first-place Dodgers couldn’t have been counting on. If they had beaten the Mets, as they had in 16 of their other 17 meetings in 1962, then they wouldn’t have found themselves tied for the league lead after 162 games and wouldn’t have been forced into a three-game playoff with San Francisco to decide the pennant…and wouldn’t have lost it to the Giants in the ninth inning of the third game.
Coleman, Throneberry, Kanehl and the rest of that first Mets club may have been good for a lot of laughs, but out in L.A., their professional exploits had to have caused not a few grimaces when 1962 was said and done.
by Greg Prince on 29 August 2011 11:40 pm I think that I won’t raise a peep,
And just enjoy my twinbill sweep.
A sweep half-won on R.A.’s wits;
Allowed one run on seven hits.
A sweep, thanks to Gee, in Game Two,
All Mets all clad in BP blue.
A sweep enhanced by healed Jose,
A welcome sight, sans Jason Bay.
Upon Evans, this squad depends;
Nick’s exile finally ends.
Posts are blogged and aim to be deep;
But why dissect a lovely sweep?
by Greg Prince on 29 August 2011 8:34 am In lieu of weekend results to chew over, let us celebrate June 6, 1972, for on that Tuesday night at Shea, Tommie Agee knocked in Jim Beauchamp with the go-ahead run in the seventh inning, while Jim McAndrew and Tug McGraw combined on a five-hit, 3-2 victory over the Cincinnati Reds. In the short term, the win lengthened the 32-13 Mets’ lead in the National League East to four games. In the great sweep of history, however, it drew the Mets, as a franchise, to within 278 games of .500.
They’ve never been closer.
Never.
Oh, technically, they were closer on April 11, 1962, before they took the field at Sportsmans Park in St. Louis for their first-ever game. Then, silly Mets that they can be, they went out and lost. Thus, really, the closest the Mets have ever been to .500 as a franchise was one under, at 0-1. Then two under, at 0-2, after their second game, and so on. But let’s put aside the Mets’ wonder years, when they were dropping to 343 games below .500 after seven seasons. That was the hole.
Actually, the initial hole was dug to its deepest on May 27, 1969, when the Mets bottomed out at 18-23 on the year. That brought their lifetime mark down to 348 games below .500. From there, though, they took off for glory, followed by respectability. Other teams might have tried respectability first, but the Mets were attempting to dig out from 348 games under, so there was no time to waste.
Give them their ’69 glory, their ’70 and ’71 respectability and their hot 1972 start, and you had a franchise that rose to 278 games under .500, which time would reveal as the mature Mets’ high-water mark.
Seriously, they haven’t gotten as close since.
Allowing for the ebbs and flows that would ensue once injuries began mounting in 1972 (including a nadir of exactly 500 below .500 on April 2, 1984, following the Opening Day 8-1 loss at Riverfront Stadium that preceded the franchise’s relatively golden age), the closest they’d come after June 6, 1972, would be July 21, 1991. On that Shea Sunday, Dwight Gooden and the Mets topped Darryl Strawberry and the Dodgers to move to 53-38 on the year and within 284 games of .500 for all of Mets history.
Then they backslid. It would be inaccurate to say they’ve just kept sliding for the past two decades; fairer would be to characterize them as failing to gain traction. Once 1991 fell apart altogether, and more ebbing and flowing ensued, the Mets wouldn’t see the bright side of 300 games from .500 again (that is, no worse than 299 games short of breaking even) until May 15, 2009.
It only took them the better part of eighteen years to return to that high point. And about a month later, they gave back that progress and have been scuffling at substantially more than 300 games below .500 ever since. Following Chris Capuano’s two-hitter over the Braves on Friday night, the Mets climbed to within 336 of .500 as a franchise.
So? These thoughts:
1) The chances of the Mets reaching .500 as a franchise would appear remote as long as they must statistically account for falling 348 games below between April 11, 1962, and May 27, 1969.
2) Then again, the Braves not long ago (1991-2005) spent 15 seasons going 510 games above .500, and after 136 seasons of baseball in various cities under multiple guises (even given the 6-0 loss Friday) the Braves franchise stands 16 games over .500. And that’s the same outfit that not only stunk up WTBS for the bulk of the 1980s, it’s the direct descendant of the 38-115 1935 Boston Braves, an enterprise whose winning percentage was .002 worse than the 1962 Mets — and one so embarrassed at its .248 performance that it called itself the Boston Bees for the next five seasons.
3) Though I continue to be fascinated by stuff like this, there is neither prize nor penalty for being above or below .500 across the life of a franchise. Every year is a clean slate at its beginning, and no year is a drag on the next year once it ends.
4) Every day is an opportunity to go 1-0, unless it’s a day like today when it’s an opportunity to go 2-0, commencing at 4:10 PM.
5) Whether you experienced Irene as a hurricane, a tropical storm or a news nuisance, here’s hoping you stayed above .500, all things considered — and that you play as close to 1.000 ball for as long as you can.
6) But if you can’t keep up such a blistering pace, at least have fun while you give it your best shot. That’s what we as a people have been doing with our perpetually sub-.500 franchise for 50 years, and we’re still here.
by Greg Prince on 27 August 2011 12:12 pm Of course Chris Capuano pitched a great game Friday night. Mets starters always pitch great games when hurricanes are bearing down on New York.
Mind you, my sample size is now three, which is a good thing since although we all want more well-pitched Mets games, none of us wants any hurricanes. Seems to me you can’t always get what you want.
On August 8, 1976, as Belle loomed and all of us on Long Island were battening hatches (“battening down” suddenly strikes me as overwording — like “now defunct”), Mickey Lolich threw an eight-hitter at Three Rivers Stadium to beat the Pirates, 7-4. That may not sound particularly great, but consider Lolich did it by not striking out a single Buc, the last time any Met pitcher used his fielders quite so efficiently in a complete game triumph. No wonder a game that included 11 runs and 20 hits took only two hours and four minutes to complete. Nothing but flyouts, groundouts and a couple of lineouts. Lolich’s ERA actually went up a tick for his troubles, from 2.81 to 2.88, as his won-lost record (I’ve also never understood “won-loss”; it should be either “won-lost” or “win-loss”) rose to 7-10.
Imagine a pitcher going nine and not striking out anybody. Imagine all that offense and the game lasting barely more than two hours. Imagine an ERA under 3, yet a record in which the losses substantially outnumber the wins.
Now imagine why Mickey Lolich retired after 1976 (even if he did cost us Rusty Staub and even if he did nefariously sneak back into baseball with the Padres in 1978).
As for Belle, we had only so many hatches to batten when it was decided my mother and I would take the LIRR — back when such trains ran in advance of bad weather — into the city the next day to meet my father and my sister (then a summer intern at a slightly skeevy PR firm) at Dad’s office on E. 49th St. We stayed overnight at a pretty nice hotel and returned to Long Beach the next day to discover Belle’s landfall left a few branches on the ground and some yogurt in our fridge inedible.
The Mets were off.
On September 26, 1985, with Gloria moving up the East Coast amid intense media scrutiny (I distinctly remember a television reporter berating someone who allegedly held a “Gloria Party” during which Laura Branigan’s signature single blared — kind of a limited playlist, I thought), I was focused on Chicago, where Dwight Gooden was doing what Dwight Gooden always did in 1985. Doc threw an eight-hit shutout out at the Cubs, winning 3-0 and keeping the Mets as viable as he could: four behind the Cardinals with nine to play, most critically three the following week in St. Louis. Doc, raising his mark to 23-4, was a veritable life saver (not to be confused with emergency crews on alert to be literal life savers), as his eighth shutout of the season compensated for a miserable game the day before, one in which Jesse Orosco and Gary Carter combined to let a walked Davey Lopes (with two out in the bottom of the ninth) steal second and third and be driven home by Chris Speier. The Mets lost 5-4 despite Kid’s grand slam. It was a disheartening result in a searing pennant race, but also a personal letdown given Carter and Orosco were pointing fingers at each other afterwards. And here I thought all the Mets loved all the other Mets.
But Doc made everything better, except the weather. Our Gloria party the next day followed the evacuation route to South Side High School in Rockville Centre, where everybody and his brother joined me, my mother, my father, my sister and my brother-in-law to — and wow, what traction this cliché has gathered in the past 24 hours — ride out the storm. We dragged with us a bag of rapidly hardening bagels at home that my mother insisted on piling into one of our many Heftys for what became, in the spirit of Gilligan and another infamous episode of islands battered by storms, a three-hour stay. When we got home, the power was out, which was a problem in that the Mets were in Pittsburgh and it was essential I follow their progress.
So I used precious battery life to listen to the Mets build an early 5-2 lead over the pathetic Pirates, only to have Ed Lynch, Tom Gorman, Wes Gardner and Randy Niemann give it all back by shabbos candlelight (any candle in a storm). The Mets would lose 8-7 and be barely clinging to non-elimination before the TV came back the next day.
I don’t remember what became of the stale bagels.
Friday night, August 26, 2011, the dance partners were Chris and Irene. Irene seems like a far worse threat than Belle and Gloria did. Chris is a way less accomplished pitcher than Lolich or Gooden were. But on any given hurricane eve, any journeyman lefty can throw a two-hit, thirteen-strikeout game of his or most post-Doc Met’s life. I have to admit that last evening, as Stephanie and I toured our local retail establishments in search of non-perishable food items (if I succumb this weekend, it won’t be to the elements — it will be from a Pop-Tart overdose), I thought to myself, “Who’s pitching tonight?” That’s how removed my immediate concerns were from my constant concern.
Then I remembered it was Capuano and went back to collecting enough emergency toaster pastries to satisfy Mickey Lolich in a blizzard.
Well, laugh’s on me, which is nice because who’s otherwise in the mood to laugh with twelve times as many reporters on six times as many channels as in the days of Gloria telling me how doomed I am? I live about a mile north of the evacuation zone, but power lines and killer wind and whatever else are out there, so mentally preparing for the worst (while using these remaining hours of relative calm to blog) seems of the essence. Anyway, all those bastards on all those channels are depressing the hell out of me, but Caps lifted me up, if only for 2:35 (see how long strikeouts take?)…and only partly because I decided he has to be worth a pretty decent prospect, assuming Caps made it through waivers.
Which I’m assured over and over most everybody does.
Capuano’s Game Score business is astounding. David Cone filed the best one in Mets history, a 99, when he struck out 19 Phillies as the cops waited to question him on the last day of 1991. Tom Seaver’s 1970 one-hitter rated a 97, second-best we ever had. Then, it’s a three-way tie between Seaver’s more famous 1969 one-hitter, his fellow Fresnoan Dick Selma 1965 ten-inning shutout (Mortimer Snerd’s second big league start — seriously, that was his nickname) and Capuano last night.
Game Score is a fantastic tool to measure levels of dominance and effectiveness, but declaring Caps’s performance one of the five best pitching outings in Mets history is a real salt-grainer. By this measure, Johan Santana’s nine-strikeout three-hitter on short rest and a bad knee versus the Marlins to fend off playoff demise in 2008 (to use a memorable, high-profile example) registered a Game Score of 87…tied with 19 others as 66th-best in Mets history.
No offense to Caps, but I’ll take Johan’s, if only for 21st century posterity. Still, what Capuano did was lovely. Even giving up the two hits demonstrated a knack for timing. What if Chris Capuano had stayed as perfect as he seemed to be on the verge of doing? Would anybody but us have noticed? It wouldn’t have made the front pages in this Irenecentric age; it may not have even made the crawl underneath local officials scowling at us for throwing Me, Myself & Irene parties.
Bloggers can’t be choosers, especially with a hurricane warning in the air, but I’d prefer the first no-hitter in Mets history arrive in better weather.
Like when hell freezes over.
Finally, before I leave you to return to my contingency packing, my simmering panic, my avoidance of “futurecasts” (as opposed to “forecasts”) and the fervent hope that I’ll be able to sit at a computer and type about the Mets past, present and futurecast for you before not too long, here is a passage I enjoy quoting at times like these. It’s from Jerry Mitchell’s sublime book, The Amazing Mets.
It was the morning of October 23, 1962. President John F. Kennedy had the night before declared an embargo on Cuba, taking a step which could have meant the beginning of thermonuclear war. There was a sense of crisis all over the United States and all over the world.
In the quiet little village of Cooperstown, N.Y., far from the centers of anxiety but feeling the impact nevertheless, Lee Allen, historian of the Baseball Hall of Fame, sat at his desk. He was thinking that if the Russians picked up the challenge it might very well mean the end of life as we know it. Brooding over the future, Lee attacked his mail. He turned over a postcard from New York’s Bronx, and read:
“Dear Sir:
What was the record of the New York Mets this year on Thursdays? I would appreciate a game-by-game total. Thank you.”
The preposterous postcard pulled him right out of his depression. He suddenly realized that, to the Met fan anyway, crises were commonplace. Somehow the card made him feel a lot better.
“My first impulse was to toss it into the wastebasket,” related Allen. “But it occurred to me that the writer must have had a purpose in asking the question, as unusual a one as I ever received. I checked the records and found that the work of the Mets on Thursdays showed no victories and 15 defeats.”
After replying to the fan, Allen forwarded the postcard to the Mets with the observation, “With the world on the verge of ruin, I thought you might be interested in what the Mets’ fans are worried about.”
Take a hike, Irene. And Let’s Go Mets.
by Jason Fry on 27 August 2011 12:18 am The mysteries of baseball are part of its wonder, and nothing is more of a mystery than pitching. A pitcher can completely fall apart without warning, missing targets and walking guys until he’s trapped trudging around behind the mound, pain etched on his face. His mechanics are gone, the baseball feels like a foreign object in his hand, and he’s having an out-of-body experience in front of tens of thousands of people. There’s nothing he or anybody else can do about it, and it’s pitiable to watch.
But sometimes a pitcher is touched by grace, for want of a better word. All of his pitches are working. He can put the ball anywhere he wants. The mound is his, and he stands atop it with a faintly glassy look of mild amazement on his face, while teammates try not to break the spell and enemy batters wait for it to be over.
It can happen to anybody, which is the joy of it. It happens to guys for whom Cooperstown is a foregone conclusion, sure — but it also happens to ham-and-eggers and raw specimens and lost causes. When it does, you see the whole package as imagined by some scout, the possibility that made that scout drool and a GM urge an owner to write a big check. For two or three hours, the gap between potential and reality vanishes. (One of my favorite such cases: Len Barker’s May 1981 perfect game. Pitching before a tiny crowd on a clammy night in Cleveland, the oft-wild Barker threw 84 of 103 pitches for strikes, with no batter seeing ball three. When Barker’s grandmother heard he’d pitched the 10th perfect game in baseball history, she said she was proud of him and hoped he’d do even better next time.)
Chris Capuano has been … how to put this? Workmanlike? Distressingly predictable? He’s had a habit of looking very good early, giving up a run or two in circumstances you want to shrug off as unlucky, and then imploding hideously. But not tonight. Tonight all of the mysteries of baseball were an open book for him. His fastball, change-up and slider were all superb, borderline untouchable. He knew it, the Mets knew it, the nicely appreciative crowd knew it, and the Braves certainly knew it.
Over at ESPN New York, Mark Simon has some interesting notes: The game rated a 96 on the 1-100 Bill James Game Score metric for starts, the best by a Met since David Cone fanned 19 Phils on the final day of the ’91 season. And Capuano’s performance was only the second time a Met threw a shutout, allowed two hits or fewer, struck out 10 or more and walked nobody. The other guy who did that? It was Tom Seaver, in the Jimmy Qualls game.
The Jimmy Qualls game, of course, was nearly a no-hitter. (It was mentioned in our house tonight in the third, when Joshua asked how close the Mets had come to the promised land of being a normal franchise. I forgot Leron Lee also got a hit instead of becoming Out No. 26, not to mention Joe Wallis getting one as the potential Out No. 27. Though Wallis wouldn’t have counted anyway.) As Simon’s notes attest, it’s not an idle comparison: Capuano certainly had no-hit stuff, and in fact wound up facing one over the minimum. Which just goes to show you how much luck has to do with it: You can be in a state of grace, and still have your date with destiny canceled because of a single lapse in concentration, or a pebble three feet in front of the shortstop, or a little mis-hit parachute, or most anything.
With nobody out in the fifth, Dan Uggla broke his bat on a chest-high change-up, which went through the hole after David Wright seemed to shy from the airborne barrel of the bat. Hard to blame Wright for that, but it was close enough for grumbling about a playable ball, so I was actually a bit relieved when David Ross scorched one past Lucas Duda and practically into the Mo Zone for a clean double in the eighth — a solo homer in some Citi Field reconfigurations being discussed these days. After that it was a joyride until we were down to Michael Bourn staring glumly out at Capuano, knowing he was being fitted for the golden sombrero and unable to escape it.
I can’t think of a better game to get if Mother Nature is going to deprive you of watching your team for two days. Besides Capuano’s pitching clinic, good performances were turned in by Ruben Tejada (who inspired a discussion with Joshua about patience with young players and consistency), as well as by Lucas Duda and Nick Evans, once more freed from the back of the milk carton for garbage time. Evans has been particularly impressive in his last two games — it’s not just the hits, but watching him calmly monitor the strike zone and wait for something he can drive, instead of letting doubt and rust help tempt him into expanding the zone.
And now, well, a lost weekend. Rain and the closure of the mass-transit system have erased tomorrow’s game, followed by a rather definitive erasure courtesy of Hurricane Irene. Evacuating apartments is now the main order of business for a few Mets, and I imagine for a few of us, too.
Emily and Joshua and I were scheduled to make our annual weeklong trek down to Long Beach Island tomorrow morning. Scratch that, obviously. Maybe Monday morning, assuming Irene hasn’t done terrible things to the Jersey Shore, or to Brooklyn for that matter. Until the storm’s gone through, our priorities are staying safe and staying dry. Here’s hoping all of you do the same.
by Greg Prince on 26 August 2011 6:34 am Welcome to The Happiest Recap, a solid gold slate of New York Mets games culled from every schedule the Mets have ever played en route to this, their fiftieth year in baseball. We’ve created a dream season that includes the “best” 124th game in any Mets season, the “best” 125th game in any Mets season, the “best” 126th game in any Mets season…and we keep going from there until we have a completed schedule worthy of Bob Murphy coming back with the Happy Recap after this word from our sponsor on the WFAN Mets Radio Network.
GAME 124: August 22, 2006 — METS 8 Cardinals 7
(Mets All-Time Game 124 Record: 27-21; Mets 2006 Record: 76-48)
It was a good game for fans of The Flintstones. You know: Bam! Bam! And then a few more well-chosen Bam!s, with the last of them absolutely resounding.
First Bam! Unassuming enough, but effective. It was Bam!’d by Carlos Delgado, leading off the bottom of the second versus the Cardinals’ Jeff Weaver this Tuesday night at Shea, kick-starting a three-game showdown between potential playoff opponents. A simple, elegant line drive, Delgado’s 30th homer of the season put the East-leading Mets up 1-0 over Central-leading St. Louis. Carlos D’s powerful bat had immediately transformed the Mets’ lineup into a veritable war club when it was slotted into the cleanup niche at the onset of 2006. He’s a big man on this campus, serving not just as the slugger the Mets were missing but as the relatively extroverted Carlos. His buddy, Carlos Beltran, sort of shrank from the spotlight when asked to be The Man the year before. Carlos Delgado may not have overly embraced such a role, but he didn’t quite so subtly reject it as Beltran had. However Delgado plays it, it’s a good part for him to assume. And it’s got him near a milestone, too: that shot off Weaver was the 399th home run of Delgado’s career.
Second Bam! After Aaron Miles singles and Chris Duncan doubles, John Maine is tasked with facing Albert Pujols in the fourth. Maine struck him out in their first encounter. Unfortunately, Maine commits a rookie mistake thereafter: He faces him again. This meeting results in a three-run homer that gives St. Louis a 3-1 lead.
Third Bam! Maine failed to learn his lesson. With one on and two out in the fifth (the second out executed 7-6-2 — Michael Tucker to Jose Reyes to Paul Lo Duca — to nail Ronnie Belliard at the plate), the righthander walks Miles and Duncan, which brings up Prince Albert with the bases loaded. That’s really not how or where you want to see His Royal Bam!ness, ’cause all that’ll get you is a Grand Bam! Pujols matched his earlier home run to right-center with another to left-center. And this one brought home four runs. The Mets were down 7-1. Pujols had his 39th home run of 2006 and his 13th against the Mets in 128 at-bats dating to his first series against them in April 2001. This grandest of swings lifted Albert’s lifetime average versus Mets pitching to .320. To call Albert Pujols a Met-killer would be to overlook that he put up numbers like that against everybody. But he surely didn’t do the Mets any favors.
Fourth Bam! Easy sledding for Weaver from here, right? A six-run lead and a presumably demoralized opponent. Willie Randolph removed Maine for pinch-hitter Ricky Ledee to start the home fifth. He walked and took second on a passed ball. Reyes flied to Duncan in left…but Duncan didn’t catch the darn ball, so the Mets had first and second. Lo Duca singled to right to load the bases, setting the stage for mighty Carlos Beltran to swing and…ground back to Weaver, who forced Ledee at home. But the Mets, per their one of their 2006 outdoor ads, took themselves up on their own offer. “Buy One Carlos, Get One Free.” They indeed had another Carlos, and that one who had already homered, went for a twofer. And he got it. Carlos Delgado reached that 400th home run milestone with little wait and a lot of flair: a grand slam that Bam!’d the Mets back to within two of the Cards at 7-5. Who knew it would be so easy to neutralize the worst damage Albert Pujols could inflict?
Bam!less Interlude: The Mets opted to not leave the infield as they batted in the sixth. Endy Chavez bunted his way on. Chris Woodward walked. Jose Valentin sacrificed each of them up a base. Jose Reyes placed a friendly grounder to second. The Redbirds nailed Jose at first, but Endy zipped home. The Mets were within a run, at 7-6.
Who Gives A Bam!? Not Albert Pujols in the seventh, not even with his personal tablesetters Miles and Duncan each on via one-out walks from Pedro Feliciano. Submariner Chad Bradford is called on to keep Albert below the surface and he grounds the most dangerous hitter in captivity into a 6-4-3 DP.
I Bam! I Said: Mets still down 7-6 when their last chance rolls around in the ninth. Bradford and Aaron Heilman have kept the Cards off the board (and Pujols from another plate appearance). On the mound for St. Louis is their closer, ex-Met Jason Isringhausen. The Mets have the top of the order up to get something started. Reyes starts nothing except a routine groundout. But Lo Duca, the catcher who bats second because he hits .300, singles. And that first Carlos the Mets bought? Beltran? Let’s tune into WFAN and listen to Howie Rose describe what happens the second Izzy takes him on:
“First pitch…fastball hit to deep right field! IT’S GONNA WIN THE BALLGAME! HOME RUN!”
It sounded remarkably similar on SNY, where Gary Cohen had this to say about that:
“One swing could win it for New York. He rips it to deep right! THAT BALL IS OUTTA HERE! OUTTA HERE! THE METS WIN THE BALLGAME!”
Indeed, Mets take it 8-7, or three BAM!s to two.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On August 22, 1999, one scoreboard bulb was destroyed while most of the others gleefully lit up. The literal destruction of Shea Stadium property came at the hands of Mark McGwire, whose first-inning bomb — and that’s almost not hyperbole — slammed into the scoreboard so high and with such force that it did a number on 16 LF. Big Mac’s monstrous shot, measured at 501 feet, blitzed teammate Ray Lankford’s electronic listing in the Cardinal lineup in the first inning of the first game of this Sunday doubleheader. It was a crackling blow some Mets fans couldn’t help but acknowledge with applause, even as it took out a bulb and put a crooked number up along the St. Louis half of the line score.
The Cardinals were lighting up the Shea scoreboard a little too vividly as the game moved on. McGwire added another dinger in the seventh — his 50th of the season —and ex-Met Bambi Castillo (the nickname, short for Bambino, was supposed to be ironic) connected in the eighth. By then, the Mets were trailing 6-1 and might have been looking forward to breaking even in the nightcap.
Or they might have been looking to get even right away. A double by Rey Ordoñez and one-out walks to Rickey Henderson and Edgardo Alfonzo presented a golden opportunity to John Olerud…and John Olerud cashed it in, swatting a grand slam to reduce the Mets’ deficit to 6-5. Exactly two pitches later, Mike Piazza erased the Mets’ disadvantage altogether by lining the tying home run.
Armando Benitez let all that good work go to waste in the top of the ninth, allowing the Cardinals the go-ahead run. But the Mets weren’t in the mood for self-pity. They got right up off the mat and stuck it right back to the Cardinals in the bottom of the inning. With one out, Ordoñez walked, pinch-hitter Matt Franco walked, Henderson doubled to tie the game at seven, and Alfonzo found the narrowest of holes between short and third to bring home Franco. The Mets turned out the lights on the Cardinals, 8-7.
GAME 125: August 21, 2001 — METS 5 Rockies 2
(Mets All-Time Game 125 Record: 19-29; Mets 2001 Record: 57-68)
“What have you done for us lately? would have been a fitting question this Tuesday night at Shea. Both of the co-aces of the 2000 National League Champions started, but only one, Al Leiter, was a Met anymore. The other made the mistake of seeking literally greener pastures following the last time he started a game in Queens.
It wasn’t a mistake when you consider that the $123.8-million eight-year contract Mike Hampton signed with the Colorado Rockies no doubt represented a most pleasing shade of green for him and his family. And there’s no doubting his earning potential was honed at Shea Stadium in the previous fall’s playoffs. Yet if he thought his eventually lucrative accomplishments would earn him much goodwill from those on whose behalf he accomplished them…well, maybe he needed to back to school.
Don’t worry — Mets fans didn’t mind reminding him he had opted for a place that was supposedly ideal to do just that.
Hampton was a Met summer rental whose lease extended into October. Traded from Houston prior to his free agent walk year, he gave New York a solid, occasionally spectacular regular season in 2000 and an extraordinary National League Championship Series. He threw seven scoreless innings to take Game One from St. Louis and a complete-game three-hit shutout to clinch the pennant in the NLCS finale. As Shea went predictably berserk with glee, Mike Hampton was hoisted high above the mound in celebration.
Within a year’s time, the Shea crowd would have just as soon hung him in effigy. Hampton indeed walked after his walk year, not just accepting the Rockies’ staggering terms but framing it as a lifestyle choice. Denver — Coors Field’s offensive equities notwithstanding — was simply more the pitcher’s speed when it came to choosing a year-round home for his family. In explaining how the area jibed with his small-town background better than New York did (without disparaging New York in any tangible manner), he elaborated, “This was a place I could move my family to without having to take my kid out of school every three months…personally, I like the schools, the environment, the people.”
Hampton could purchase his offspring the slickest batch of school supplies available, but it didn’t mean anybody was buying what Mike was selling. Sandy Alderson, an executive vice president for Major League Baseball, was incredulous that the curriculum taught in the Denver suburbs was that much of a difference-maker: “The spin to which that deal was subjected, I think, was just an embarrassment. I don’t want to hear about the Wheat Ridge school system.” Mets GM Steve Phillips, who put forth a seven-year, $105 million package to convince Hampton to stay, echoed the sentiment: “I think it was made clear it wasn’t about the money. Of course it’s always about the money, especially when it’s not about the money.”
The money appeared reasonably well spent by the Rockies as Hampton raced to a 9-2 start, an All-Star berth (as bestowed by Bobby Valentine) and seven home runs. Yet as 2001 went on, and Colorado failed to contend, Mike, for all his Silver Slugging, wasn’t looking like such a bargain. Then again, the team he left behind didn’t seem to be going anywhere, either. The Mets spun their wheels for more than four months, bottoming out at 54-68 until winning the last two games of their just-completed trip to California. The pitchers signed to essentially replace Hampton — Kevin Appier and Steve Trachsel — weren’t producing much. Really, he entire Zeitgeist surrounding Mike Hampton’s departure left Mets fans in a grumpy mood when he returned to Shea to take on his erstwhile teammates.
It showed. Hampton was booed as if he were Chipper Jones going into a windup. He was booed when he batted. He was subject to homemade signs brandished behind the third base dugout that read “TRAITOR” and “LOOSER” (the latter perhaps justifying his concerns over the quality of education in New York). You would not have believed this was the same man at the center of that joyous pennant-clinching less than a year earlier.
“I was surprised at it,” Leiter admitted. “As a Mets fan, I appreciate what he did to get us to the World Series. It was a personal decision, not a slight to the team or anyone in this room or the fans or the city.”
Hampton took his unseasonable greeting in stride, at least for the record: “The fans were in the game. What more can you ask as a home team? I knew what to expect. I pretty much knew what I was going to get. That’s up to them. I pitched the best I could for them last year and I’m doing the best I can for the Rockies this year.”
His best wasn’t good enough here, though. Much to the delight of the home fans, the Mets raked Hampton for four-first inning runs, with one coming in on a wild pitch and two via a Rey Ordoñez single. In the second, Hampton’s former catcher, Mike Piazza (whose honor Hampton did not strenuously defend after Roger Clemens tossed a bat shard at him in Game Two of the 2000 World Series), deposited a 463-foot “welcome back” up onto the center field camera deck.
That nobody booed. Piazza received a curtain call, as it was his 300th home run as a catcher. “It was kind of early in the game,” the Mets’ Mike said in his typical attention-deflecting way. “I didn’t want to celebrate it too early. It was flattering, definitely. The fans here have been awesome as far as the support.”
As long as you kept wearing their favorite uniform, that is. And indeed, the guys in Mets black came out ahead, 5-2, versus the guy who used to be one of them. Hampton’s troubles over six innings tickled most in attendance, which elicited more shrugging from one of the richest of the Rox: “I’m a Rockie now and I’m pretty happy about it.”
You didn’t need an extra period of study hall to figure out the 123.8 million reasons why.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On August 20, 1963, a star was born, even if it was destined to flame out almost immediately. The southpaw supernova that briefly brightened the Mets’ sky — clad in No. 41, no less — was Grover Powell, 22 and arguably the first Mets’ breakthrough pitcher. He broke through in style, all right. In his first start (following nine relief appearances), Pennsylvanian Powell held his home state Phillies scoreless for nine sublime innings at Connie Mack Stadium. Backed by two runs in the eighth and a Frank Thomas two-run dinger in the ninth, Powell came away the 4-0 winner of this Tuesday twinight opener.
After nearly two seasons of flailing and failing, maybe the Mets were finally on to something: they had a young pitcher who dazzled the opposition. Powell was an instant sensation. Between games of the doubleheader, he had each of his teammates autograph the game ball to commemorate his four-hitter. “I’m going to stick it in my front window,” he promised. Later that night, he was the apple of the Mets’ beat writers’ collective eye who at last had something positive to chronicle (never mind the Mets losing the second game). Grover even drew the attention of a most unusual reporter.
Manager Casey Stengel, perhaps giddy from the Mets having matched their entire 1962 victory total when Powell raised the team’s record to a sassy 40-85, picked up a pencil and notebook and joined the journalistic scrum. While other gentlemen of the press inquired after Grover’s nerves (he had plenty) and sought predictions regarding his next start (he’d probably get bombed, he allowed lightheartedly), Ol’ Case injected the perfect non sequitur for the interrogatory occasion:
“Wuz you born in Poland?”
It wasn’t (or wuzn’t) where Powell had come from, it was where he was going. Stengel thought the kid looked 14 (“just imagine what he’ll be like when he’s 16”) but he had just pitched one of the young Mets’ most mature games. He’d certainly done it quicker than anybody else in orange and blue. His future could only grow brighter.
Except there was no future to Grover Powell as a Met pitcher. His next start, against Pittsburgh, was derailed when a Donn Clendenon liner caught him in the face, and he didn’t win another game in 1963. Grover had adjusted his pitching motion after the injury and it not only made him less successful, it led to tendonitis in his left elbow. He injured his moneymaker in winter ball and, despite pitching professionally through 1970, never returned to the majors. Leukemia would cut him down at the age of 44.
But oh, what a night, late August, back in ’63.
GAME 126: August 24, 2005 — Mets 18 DIAMONDBACKS 4
(Mets All-Time Game 126 Record: 19-29; Mets 2005 Record: 66-60)
One minute, your big league career is through before it’s even started. The next minute, you’re setting big league records. It was some kind of span of New York — or perhaps Arizona — minutes for the emergency catcher turned slugging first baseman named Mike Jacobs.
A seven-season minor leaguer whose largest claim to low-level fame was homering to win the Cyclones’ first-ever game in Brooklyn in 2001, Jacobs was not exactly knocking on the door to the Mets’ 25-man roster in 2005, at least not until Mike Piazza absorbed a foul tip that fractured a bone in his left hand. And even then, Jacobs showed up on the Mets’ radar behind backup catchers Ramon Castro and Mike DiFelice as no more than a worst-case option on the Sunday Piazza was officially DL’d. The Mets were expecting to activate the previously injured Steve Trachsel soon thereafter, so Jacobs — who’d been honing his first base skills at Double-A all year, having drifted away from catching as his primary position — was being asked to simply be happy to be here for a spell…and only grab a chest protector if absolutely necessary.
With the Mets down 7-0 to the Nationals in the bottom of the fifth on getaway day at Shea, manager Willie Randolph threw the rookie a pinch-hitting bone. Jacobs came to the plate with two on and one out. He made the best of his cameo, blasting Esteban Loaiza’s 0-1 changeup over the right field wall to bring the Mets to within 7-3 and earn himself a curtain call from a crowd that had had nothing to cheer about all day.
“I was just trying to get a base hit, maybe an RBI or something,” the callow callup said. “But to hit the ball out of the park is an awesome feeling. I definitely floated around the bases.”
Jacobs’s reward for joining Benny Ayala (1974), Mike Fitzgerald (1983) and Kaz Matsui (2004) as the only Mets to homer their first time up in the majors? A trip back to the bushes from whence he came. And not even the Triple-A bushes. He’d gone down to Binghamton at the start of the season to recover from the torn labrum that had sidetracked his offensive progress the year before (he had been the Mets’ minor league player of the year in 2003). Freak circumstances elevated him two levels, straight past Triple-A and then to a 1.000 batting average and 4.000 slugging percentage as a New York Met for a day. Now a numbers game — the 25-man limit versus that 3-run jack — was going to send him away again.
Not so fast, said the most important Met of 2005. Pedro Martinez lobbied for Jacobs’s retention on the roster. His reasoning was as sound as his influence was tangible: The Mets were fighting to gain traction in a Wild Card race — how do you demote the only guy who did anything in an otherwise desultory loss to Washington? Thus, with Pedro on his side (and aided by a management decision that Trachsel wouldn’t be needed until week’s end), the Mets changed their minds and told Jacobs to forget about Binghamton and hop on the bus to LaGuardia.
You’re flying to Phoenix with the rest of the team.
It had to be one of the best changes of travel plans in baseball lore. On Monday night at Bank One Ballpark, Randolph inserted the 24-year-old as his starting first baseman and the Mets won. On Tuesday night, despite his having been hitless Monday, Jacobs was back at first and he began to hit in earnest, singling in the midst of a two-run third-inning rally and belting a two-run home in the fifth before walking twice. With Jacobs getting in gear, the Mets romped 14-1.
Now that Mike was comfortable, he could really enjoy Arizona. On Wednesday night, Jacobs pounded Russ Ortiz for a two-run homer in the second and a run-scoring double in the third. After walking and scoring as part of a five-run pile-on in the fifth (when the Mets would take a 13-0 lead), Jacobs capped his wondrous night in the desert by singling and scoring in the sixth, then homering off Jose Valverde in the ninth. When he touched home plate following that second trip over the wall, it gave him five runs for the game.
The Mets pasted the Diamondbacks 18-4, while Mike pasted his name into the record books by becoming the first player in major league history to rack up four home runs in his first four games. His teammates found his fevered hitting contagious; their 13 extra-base hits and 44 total bases established franchise records. The Mets scored in seven of nine innings. David Wright, like Jacobs, had two homers and four hits. Jose Reyes, like Jacobs, had four RBI.
But in the midst of this unforeseen hot streak, nobody was like Jacobs — particularly when it came to finding himself dumbfounded by such sudden, smoldering success. “I was just kind of like, ‘Wow, you know, that’s pretty tight,’” the .538 hitter from Chula Vista, Calif., pronounced. “That’s awesome.”
So, yes, after barely avoiding seemingly inevitable demotion, you could definitely say Mike Jacobs was happy to be here.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On August 21, 1962, the Mets learned the most Marvelous way to break yet another mammoth losing streak was with more Marv Throneberry, not less.
The legend of Throneberry as avatar of laughable failure in the franchise’s inaugural season is littered with everything that went wrong for his disaster of a team. Some of it was even true. Just as true, though, is that these fellows were human, and no human being likes to be laughed at…or provide anybody watching them a reason to snicker.
The Mets, however, were their own worst enemies in that regard. Their record wasn’t making up that they’d just lost their 13th consecutive game (their third losing streak of ten or more games) to start a doubleheader versus the Pirates at the Polo Grounds. They really were bad enough to have entered this Tuesday twinighter 51 games out of first place. Maybe the stress of it all got to be too much for third base coach Solly Hemus, for Solly argued a call with umpire Frank Walsh and got tossed from the nightcap for his troubles. In those days, there weren’t bench coaches and batting coaches filling the dugout, so Casey Stengel needed someone from the ranks of his players to fill in at first after he shifted first base coach Cookie Lavagetto to the third base box. His original choice was veteran Gene Woodling, but then he used Woodling to pinch-hit, so he needed somebody else to pat fannies and handle helmets.
Who else for such a delicate assignment but Marv Throneberry?
Well, why not? The Mets were a mere 65 games under .500 at the moment Stengel required a volunteer and Richie Ashburn volunteered Throneberry. The 4,184 who trekked to Coogan’s Bluff in search of a full evening’s entertainment were tickled to death. They cottoned quickly to the concept of Marv Throneberry, first base coach.
But not as much as they adored the notion of Marv Throneberry, pinch-hitting hero.
The Mets were three outs from their 14th consecutive loss when Ashburn led off the Mets’ ninth with a single to right. After Buc starter Harvey Haddix walked Joe Christopher, Pittsburgh skipper Danny Murtaugh opted to bring in relief ace Roy Face. Face fanned Charlie Neal for the first out of the bottom of the ninth, but then allowed a run-scoring single to Felix Mantilla. After Frank Thomas flied to center and the Mets were down to their last out, Casey wanted a lefty batter to face the righty Face. Thus, to pinch-hit for the righthanded Jim Hickman, he chose the people’s choice of 1962.
“We want Marvelous! We want Marvelous!” the fans cried, as remembered in The Amazing Mets by Jerry Mitchell. So Ol’ Case gave ’em what they wanted.
So did Marvelous. Throneberry blasted a three-run homer to right. The Mets won 5-4 — the same score by which Bobby Thomson’s three-run homer won the pennant for the Giants in the very same inning in the very same ballpark eleven years earlier.
Hard to decide which was the bigger miracle under Coogan’s Bluff.
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