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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 10 June 2024 2:42 pm Some wins you’ve got to have. You traverse an ocean and lose the first of two scheduled high-profile games, you’ve got to come home with the second contest in your carry-on. You catapult ahead from what the odds termed prohibitively behind, you’ve got to remain ahead until the end. You’ve got this reputation for inevitably finding a way to lose any game whose outcome is in doubt, you must discover a method that secures you victory. The Mets’ need to win on Sunday had nothing to do with the standings and transcended the concept of self-esteem; we sent our self-esteem to the cleaners weeks ago. There was nothing to gain, nothing to lose. But we had to win. Nobody who cares about the Mets was going to be well-served by a reminder that there goes this team they love Metsing it up again, despite all of us knowing that this team we love is capable at any moment of Metsing it up again. And again.
The ocean’s distance the Mets journeyed to absorb Saturday’s defeat and then attempt avoiding an encore result on Sunday was no small matter; baseball in London will grab your attention like no ten trips to Citizens Bank Park. The opponent was inconvenient for a team that usually stumbles into and out of ninth innings. The Phillies entered the series with the best record in the sport, even if they generally appear more talented than special. Although I’ve attempted to mute the echoes of 2022, I look at Philadelphia and I sense a bunch the Mets outclassed repeatedly just two years ago, with casts that at their core haven’t changed that much, yet here are the Phillies earning superteam status…and here are the Mets being the Mets most days. I saw on social media waves upon waves of Mets fans sending their greetings home from England because they took it upon themselves to represent the orange and blue five time zones east of Citi Field, then I see (and hear) little but scarlet and powder blue during the telecasts. We sent Mr. and Mrs. Met over there. I think the Phanatic devoured them.
Yeah, a win had to be had by the Mets on Sunday, and the Mets took it. Or accepted it with modest conviction when it was handed to them late. Maybe the Phillies decided they didn’t have room in their luggage for another one.
History was made as soon as Old Friend™ and designated home side twirler Taijuan Walker threw the game’s first pitch at 10:11 AM New York time. As outlined here, there aren’t many ticks on the 24-hour clock when the Mets haven’t been in action at least once. There are now 24 fewer minutes on that clock such can be said about. Thanks to extra innings in Tokyo in 2000, we watched/listened to/napped through the Mets on the job between 5:05 AM and 9:00 AM. Thanks to a lot of extra innings in Los Angeles in 1973, when games regularly started after 11 PM EDT, the Mets worked until nearly dawn: 4:47 AM back in New York. A Forbes Field doubleheader between the Mets and Pirates on July 4, 1969, commenced at 10:35 AM, beginning the Mets baseball day the earliest it ever had sans the Japan business. Now London on June 9, 2024, has usurped that distinction. For those keeping time, there are now only blocks of 18 minutes (4:47 AM to 5:05 AM) and 71 minutes (9:00 AM to 10:11 AM) that the Mets haven’t trod upon.
All this adjusting of Sunday morning routines seemed to be nonetheless steering us to a typically dreary loss, with Walker shutting down his opposition without sweat, and Jose Quintana providing less length than a yardstick. The corollary between starters going shallow and bullpens being overworked doesn’t require a trip across the Atlantic. We’ve already seen that formula play out from coast to coast in America, and boy is it played out. Quintana’s 3.2 IP Sunday on top of Sean Manaea’s 3.2 IP Saturday ensured too much relief and probably not enough relief.
The venue certainly didn’t help on Saturday. Odd sightlines from the vantage point of the outfielders. Bouncy turf at all points. The good news was those factors were in play for both sides, and on Sunday, you could see it hinder the Phillies some. You could also detect a quick hook performed on Walker, who was one out from getting through six scoreless, albeit with runners on first and second. Taijuan had thrown 79 pitches and given up no runs, one walk and two hits to that juncture. The walk and one of the hits had come in the sixth. Still, sometimes you beat back your albeits and leave your starter alone.
Rob Thomson opted to open his bullpen gate a little early. The Mets crashed through. Gregory Soto quickly whittled Walker’s 3-0 lead to 3-1 on a Brandon Nimmo double, then erased it entirely on J.D. Martinez’s two-run single. When it was 3-1, ESPN’s “win probability” graphic explained it was 88% probable the Phillies had this thing in the bag. Getting the game tied at three indicated they’d keep playing, regardless that mathematics suggested the Mets board their charter ASAP.
The Mets couldn’t push any more runs across whatever the British call the plate in the sixth, and they let a rally wither on the vine in the seventh. The overworked bullpen’s effectiveness — nothing surrendered between Quintana’s exit in the fourth and the close of the sixth — suffered a ding when David Dahl led off the bottom of the seventh with a home run off Dedniel Nuñez. Jake Diekman and Reed Garrett got the Mets through the rest of that inning no worse off than down, 4-3. If only you could ask relievers to do that every day and have them respond in kind.
A one-run deficit was still in place as the ninth unfolded. Jose Alvarado was on. Let me rephrase that. Jose Alvarado wasn’t on at all, but he did throw. He threw nine pitches to Tyrone Taylor who converted four of those into a leadoff walk. He threw two pitches to Jeff McNeil, the second of which became a Squirrely single that pushed Taylor to third. Mark Vientos bounced a ball to Alec Bohm at third, the bounce tricky enough on that turf to handcuff the barehanding third baseman and let Tyrone score the tying run. Then Alvarado walked the greatest catcher few among us knew two weeks ago, Luis Torrens, to load the bases. I don’t believe it was intentional, but it was all happening so fast, who could tell?
Let’s see: McNeil, mostly shunned these days, was at third; pinch-runner Jose Iglesias — who would pick up for Vientos at third a couple of innings after Mark did the same for Brett Baty (three third basemen in one day, with one making his club debut at the position, equaling a very Metsie thing) — at second; Torrens at first. How could you not love the Mets’ chances with the heart of their order coming up?
Because you know what the heart of this order can be like sometimes. Francisco Lindor struck out. Pete Alonso had the good sense to get hit and not get hurt, producing the go-ahead RBI. Brandon Nimmo followed by cleverly stepping aside as one of Alvarado’s 35 pitches went wild. Hey, 6-4, Mets! But then Nimmo struck out, Alvarado was replaced, and the Mets did no further damage.
They’d be granted the opportunity to do damage in the bottom of the ninth, with the caveat that the damage would be to themselves. Garrett, still in there, would take a turn at playing Met closer in the absence of rehabbing Edwin Diaz (whose lockdown properties were AWOL even when he was physically present). Reed allowed a leadoff single to Cristian Pache, elicited a foul pop from Kyle Schwarber (caught by All-Time Met Third Baseman No. 190 Iglesias) and hit J.T. Realmuto. Enough with Garrett, onto Drew Smith, forever the reliever I forget is on the roster. Bryce Harper recognized Drew and singled to right the first pitch he saw. Smith’s delivery was addressed with such authority that the Phillie runners already on first and second couldn’t advance more than one base, and Harper didn’t have time to make like Jamie Tartt and perform a soccer-style celebration. A modicum of Phillie exultation would have its chance five pitches later, when Smith completed a bases-loaded walk to Bohm.
It was now 6-5, Mets. The bases were still philled with Phillies. There was still only one out. Genuine power threat Nick Castellanos was still due up. Drew Smith was still Drew Smith. I neglected to check the Win Probability calculations, but counting on the Mets getting out of this jam rated as folly. But if you were feeling lucky, perhaps you wished to wager a quid or two on the Mets’ good fortune. It’s only some other country’s money, right?
The savvy gambler, however, noted that Luis Torrens lurked behind the plate. If we’ve learned anything of late, it’s never bet against Luis Torrens. Thus maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised that when Castellanos got the slightest piece of the last pitch Drew threw and it traveled only the slightest patch of dirt from home out toward the field, Luis a) pounced on the ball; b) turned around and step on the plate ahead of an onrushing Garrett Stubbs, pinch-running in Realmuto’s stead, for the inning’s second out; c) fired a dart to Alonso; d) nailed Castellanos for the inning’s third out, with agile Pete proving he’s in there as much for his glove as his bat by performing a neat pick of his own.
Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised, but, oh, we were. We don’t see too many game-ending 2-2-3 double plays to preserve one-run leads with bases loaded. We don’t see the Mets execute rather than get executed that often, either.
The Mets held on, 6-5. The Mets held off the Phillies, 6-5. The Mets made watching baseball while we withstood both drowsiness and Michael Kay ultimately worthwhile, 6-5. The Mets weren’t that team that always finds a way to lose. That’s a departure from the routine welcome on any continent.
by Jason Fry on 8 June 2024 10:59 pm Back in the offseason, my mental calendar had a circle drawn around June 8-9: Mets in London!
A trip could be fun, particularly if Emily and I convinced our Phillies-fan friends to join us. That plan got kicked around with vague seriousness for a while, was downgraded to maybe and then died a quiet death before Opening Day, as too many things got in the way. But I was still intrigued by the Mets playing baseball on another continent. What would the park they played in be like? What reception would they get? Would the English find the whole thing as baffling as we find cricket?
Alas, my plans weren’t done being scrambled. I was scheduled to be in Maine for the series, which wasn’t a big deal: There are plenty of flights, we now have Internet, etc. But then things started to happen.
First my Thursday night flight got cancelled, a victim of storms at the midpoint of the route. (A route Delta seems to cancel at the drop of a hat, but let’s not get cynical.)
As I waited for Friday night’s do-over, I learned a storm had pulled the power lines’ mast off the house at some point since I last saw it in September. But I was assured that while an electrician’s services would be required and one should tread a little carefully, there was power.
Turned out there was power, but the Internet hookup hadn’t proved as resilient. It was toast.
Not ideal, but 5G is really robust in this part of Maine, so I was confident I could watch the game on my phone. Heck, I could probably even send the picture to the TV with a little fiddling.
Except the game was blacked out.
And there it was. I’d fussed and fiddled my way to a dead end. Even if everything had worked out as originally planned, I would have been experiencing a flashback to my AOL dial-up days.
Experienced through the radio feed, Mets-Phils in London was just another Mets game. I checked in on Bryce Harper‘s football-style celebration later and read about Francisco Lindor‘s Union Jack glove, but mostly I got Keith Raad and Pat McCarthy being genial about English vocabulary. (Nothing against those two gentlemen, but I really wanted to hear Howie Rose thrust into his own remake of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, complete with Howie reminding everyone that he is absolutely positively indubitably not from Connecticut.)
Deprived of visual pomp and circumstance, all I got was a Mets game — and a very typical 2024 Mets game at that. Sean Manaea was really good until he really wasn’t. His implosion was assisted by some iffy defense, with Starling Marte‘s deterioration as a defender front and center. There was some bad relief, not enough hitting, and a familiar result, an intervening ocean notwithstanding.
I was miffed I didn’t see any of it, until about the middle of the fourth. Then I decided that had most likely been a kindness. Funny how some plans work themselves out.
by Greg Prince on 6 June 2024 10:28 am Welcome to the United Kingdom. Before you enter the country, you must fill out this customs form.
NAME: New York Mets
OCCUPATION: Major League Baseball Team
PRIMARY DESTINATION WHILE VISITING: London Stadium
REASON FOR VISIT: Baseball Games (2)
WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO DECLARE?
(please answer in detail)
• We declare we have swept our three most recent baseball games, from the Washington Nationals, in Washington, DC, USA.
• We declare that we are hitting very well, having scored nine runs in the series finale we played on Wednesday, June 5, and 23 runs in the series overall.
• We declare that for the first time in ages, our previous three starting pitchers have posted wins, with the closest thing we have to an All-Star candidate, Luis Severino, accomplishing his win most definitively, lasting eight innings on Wednesday and allowing only a single run.
• We declare that our 9-1 win on Wednesday was unusually rousing for us, as we usually have to either creep from behind or hang on with all our might.
• We declare that on Wednesday, just as on Tuesday, every member of our starting lineup registered at least one base hit.
• We declare our top of the sixth inning on Wednesday made our fans overlook our standard shortcomings, as it started with Luis Torrens’s second home run of the game, continued on the very next pitch with a home run from Francisco Lindor and then resulted in six runs in all.
• We declare we are quite happy with what are often referred to as “scrap heap” finds: Torrens, who has already erased the unconditionally released Omar Narváez from the Mets fan collective memory; and Jose Iglesias, who at second base has gone from providing reserve depth to elbowing disappointing Jeff McNeil to the bench versus lefthanders.
• We declare Iglesias is hitting .389 and Torrens is batting .300, all caveats regarding sample size duly noted.
• We declare that after a dismal start, Lindor appears to have come alive, even if we reflexively brace for backsliding.
• We declare Mark Vientos is developing a stranglehold on the third base job, though we might have thought that was the case with Brett Baty earlier in the year.
• We declare Pete Alonso, not noted for his defense, made several sparkling plays at first base on Wednesday.
• We declare that, although we maintain the contracts of many higher-profile relief pitchers, if we have to ring the bullpen, lately we most hope Dedniel Nuñez or Danny Young answers the phone, or even Adrian Houser!
• We declare we are heartily anticipating the return of Francisco Alvarez once we are back in the USA, but we are also kind of hoping our “taxi squad” catcher Joe Hudson gets into a game while we’re in London if for nothing more than a Met making his team debut on the other side of the Atlantic.
• We declare that while Londoners might mind the gap between our baseball team and that of the first-place Philadelphia Phillies who we are coming to your country to play twice, we couldn’t have more momentum, especially compared to how we’ve been playing most of this season.
• We declare we have exactly 100 games to go in 2024, and while our record remains abysmal, we can’t be considered completely dead for the balance of the schedule, given the spongy playoff picture in the National League.
Please add any further information that might be relevant to your forthcoming stay in the UK.
We’ve got to admit it’s getting better, a little better all the time; it can’t get no worse.
by Greg Prince on 5 June 2024 9:10 am A relatively stress-free win in which the Mets executed most facets of the sport at a higher level than their opponent for nine innings…was that too much to ask for?
It was not.
The Mets defeated an amorphous blob of unrefined talent better known as the Washington National Tuesday night, 6-3. They didn’t have to accidentally stumble from behind to ahead. They didn’t have to totally hang on for dear life. A little gripping the sides of the bed was required in the bottom of the ninth, but it wasn’t technically a save situation and the closer du nuit did not reach a point where he needed to be rescued. Let’s call it a triumph.
One Met home run (Harrison Bader’s two-run job in the fourth) build the foundation. A second Met home run (Pete Alonso’s wake-up blast in the ninth) provided the insurance. Slammin’ Starling Marte (two-RBI triple) and Hard Hittin’ Mark Vientos (an out lined deep to right with Marte ready to tag from third) came through in between. The McNeil-free lineup could have been thrown off course by the unforeseen challenge of facing callup lefty DJ Herz, a late replacement for scheduled but injured Old Friend™ Trevor Williams (who, in the midst of a stellar season, was a decent bet to flummox his erstwhile workplace proximity associates), but they waited out the kid and then took advantage of the Nats’ bullpen, just as a good team might.
Hipper-than-ever David Peterson went six-and-two-thirds serene innings, followed by Dedniel Nuñez for four key outs of trust-gaining. You never saw a Dedniel before this season, but now you want to see him get more clutch-type opportunities, right? When a four-run lead was turned over to formerly revelatory Reed Garrett — he was the Nuñez of the pen in April — for closing purposes, easy breathing seemed possible if not utterly advisable. Garrett did walk Jesse Winker and allow a run-scoring single to Jacob Young and have two on with two out when he ran a full count to Lane Thomas and the popup to short right Garrett elicited from Thomas nearly created a collision between Marte and an overeager Bader, but Starling’s version of “I got it!” proved true, and the Mets completed their rounds with a victory that clinched them the series with one game to go, plus a dash of professional credibility besides. They looked like a team that could best another team without the result seeming accidental.
Nice to see for a change.
by Jason Fry on 4 June 2024 2:18 am This time, somehow, they didn’t blow it.
Oh, how they tried. True to my prediction of reliever Mad Libs, this time Drew Smith was fine and Adam Ottavino was really not — oh boy was Ottavino not fine, which would have been infuriating except he was so much more disgusted with himself than you could be — and so the Mets turned back to Jake Diekman, asking him to get two outs with the bases loaded, the tying run on second and the winning run on first.
Somehow, Diekman did. It sure didn’t look like he would — he started off throwing three straight balls to pinch-hitter Joey Meneses, raising the prospect that the Mets would walk in their second run of the night. But Diekman got two strikes and coaxed a fly ball from Meneses to make it 8-7 but secure that critical second out, setting up a confrontation with Drew Millas for the entire sad handful of chipped and cloudy marbles.
This time Diekman got two strikes, but in my mind’s eye I could see a ball buried in the dirt skipping past Luis Torrens for an agonizing tie, and so on the couch I was giving Diekman useless advice — throw it out of the strike zone but not too far out of the strike zone, that sort of thing.
Instead, Diekman threw his best pitch of the night, a fastball at the bottom of the zone that froze Millas for strike three and an improbable Mets win.
A win’s a win, but this wasn’t exactly a showcase for baseball: The Mets hit a lot but so did the Nats, as Tylor Megill was lousy, and both teams kept wailing away at each other like drunks in a fistfight whose proximate cause no one can recall. In the late innings Gary Cohen brought up the fact that the Mets and Expos/Nats were tied in the record books when playing each other and also tied in all-time runs scored. I think Gary meant that as a chance to marvel at baseball symmetry, but I just thought it was very Mets-Nats to go to 55 years worth of trouble and somehow not have settled anything.
The Nats scored two more runs but the Mets won, so we have now won one more game, while they’re ahead in the runs tally by two. So there, says one combatant. So there, says the other, and now the fists are cocked and our combatants have staggered to their feet again, and if there’s a higher purpose to any of this it seems to have eluded us all.
by Jason Fry on 3 June 2024 11:30 am Reed Garrett and Adam Ottavino were good, but Jake Diekman was not — handed a 4-3 lead in the ninth, he surrendered a pinch-hit double and a home run (Ketel Marte‘s second of the afternoon) to put the Mets in their familiar behind-the-eight-ball position before an out was recorded. How familiar? Since May 1 the Mets have coughed up six leads after leading through eight, which is the kind of thing that turns casual fans into ex-fans and sends the diehards back into therapy. (Particularly when the game ends with the sight of perennially irritating Met Jonah Paul Sewald triumphant on the mound.)
For me, the real issue isn’t Diekman’s failure, but my sinking feeling that you can rearrange the above three Met names as a Mad Libs of purposelessness, throwing in Drew Smith and other bullpen colleagues as you see fit. Maybe tonight Diekman and Ottavino will be good but Garrett will fail, or maybe Smith and Dedniel Nunez … you get the idea.
Such are the serial failures of junky enterprises: Something different breaks every day, until consternation gives way to bleak assessment.
At least if you were at the park you got a nice day, a Darryl Strawberry bobblehead (if you came early enough) and a J.D. Martinez triple — back-to-back triples, in fact! All neat, but soon it’ll be hot as blazes, the Mets have gone about as deep down the nostalgia well as they can, and J.D. triples are as rare as Met relievers converting saves.
Ahead lies D.C. and then a trip to London, which one fears will amount to giving hapless English fans an object lesson in how baseball shouldn’t be played. Though perhaps, as our Twitter buddy D.J. Short cracked, “it’s actually good timing for the Mets to go to London. Maybe they just take the summer off and backpack through Europe.”
by Greg Prince on 2 June 2024 12:44 pm I got chills several times on Saturday afternoon. The weather was beautiful, but there was something else in the air. A distinct hint of Strawberry.
Darryl Strawberry’s No. 18 was retired by the New York Mets, the sixth time in the past nine seasons that the franchise has raised a number to the rafters. In the first decade of this blog, we bemoaned the Mets’ inaction when it came to honoring their own history and the greats who made it memorable. In our second decade, we grab a seat for festivities and jump out of it to applaud this streaming acknowledgement of the past and discern what it might say about the present.
The present will give a Mets fan a case of the blahs. Saturday’s game, the one that followed 18’s rise high toward the sky (an area once crowded by Darryl’s home runs), brought the Mets down to earth from their modest two-game winning streak over their erstwhile Flushing patsies the Arizona Diamondbacks. It was the kind of game when the Mets starter, Sean Manaea, could strike out ten over five-and-two-thirds, and two fans in particular — my pal and podcast co-host Jeff and me, ensconced in the first row of Promenade boxes in left field — didn’t even notice, because what are ten strikeouts against ten runs? Manaea didn’t surrender all of them, but you might say he contracted a bit of the Steve Carlton bug by way of Arizona’s version of Ron Swoboda. In 1969, it was Swoboda’s two home runs that blotted out Carlton’s 19 K’s in a legendary Mets win. Saturday, it was Christian Walker belting a third-inning grand slam that made Sean’s striking out of the side in that frame glow not so much.
The Diamondbacks wound up winning, 10-5, with the Mets posting four ninth-inning runs the way their opponents did the night before: for show. The best part about the Met offense was Mark Vientos and Pete Alonso each raised the Home Run Strawberry. Kudos to whoever decided to transform the Apple’s identity for an afternoon. A nice touch in a day defined by making a Mets fan feel something.
 Darryl did most of the reaching out and touching, and not like he did to National League pitchers when doing damage to their self-esteem and earned run averages. He spoke to us — and he really did address his audience — about realizing he never should have left New York as a free agent. It’s easy to say now, and he’s said it a lot, but his words had the impact of a confessional. We, certainly those of us who came to Shea to cheer him and maybe hint to him he could be doing a few things a little more effectively when he played, were the best part of his Metsdom, he said. We got him going, kept him going, made him, albeit after the fact, wish he hadn’t gone.
The Straw Man kept bringing us back into his talk. When he turned his attention to the current Mets, progenitor of all the blahs, he didn’t simply encourage them to play better. He told them that we, the people in the stands, were the best fans they were every going to play in front of, and they should appreciate that. We were outstanding as fans in the Strawberry Era because his team gave us something to get behind, but, yes, we did bring a certain spark to Shea that I can’t imagine other NL ballparks were quite as electrified by. We still do it, if more modestly. Darryl slipped something in there toward the end about making us great again (a loaded phrase in these times). Yes, we were, are and will forever be “faithful,” to use the pastor’s word, but the whole enterprise requires lifting. You can’t look at the standings and not realize that.
Still, Darryl wouldn’t have us singing the blahs. He praised Steve and Alex Cohen, namechecked David Stearns, and declared better days were coming. He should know from better times on the field, just as he knows from bottoming out off it. Darryl was the first undisputed sign that there would be a promised land. He wouldn’t take the credit for powering us there. A slew of his 1986 teammates surrounded him as he spoke, and he was grateful for their support, then and now. Keith Hernandez, Straw said, was the best and most intense player he ever played with, teaching him to hit lefties. Gary Carter (represented, as he was in April for Doc Gooden’s day, by his wife Sandy) and Mookie Wilson were the men modeling the life he realized he needed to live if he wanted to keep living and do it righteously. He had love for everybody, and we who stood for him tried our best to return it.
My chills came from realizing how glorious it is that so many world champion Mets from 38 years ago continue to come around. On Saturday it was Darryl, Keith, Doc, Mookie, Hojo, Ronnie, Raffy, Jesse, Mitch, Gibby, Lyons, El Sid plus Mrs. Carter (they were joined by later Met addition John Franco and Straw’s childhood chum Eric Davis). We do see some combination of these guys a lot, and it might be tempting to be blasé about it. We shouldn’t be. For decades, the 1969 Mets were regulars at Shea Stadium, so regular that maybe it didn’t seem special to realize they were down on the field being introduced one more time. Suddenly, you’re inside Citi Field and you don’t see too many 1969 Mets too often. Two years from now, we’ll reach the 40th anniversary of 1986, with 2026 marking what 2009 did for 1969. When our first world champions came back for that reunion, their appearance took on a little extra emotional oomph. “Oh, them again” transformed into “look — it’s them!” When their 50th-anniversary meeting arrived in 2019, fewer of them were available for our adulation.
So I had chills from understanding that. I had chills from a shot on the enormous video board of the 1986 banner, the marker for what remains our most recent world championship. Damn. I’d really like another one, as would anybody reading this with a home book bias, but taking in the Metscape that had emerged on this day, I was reminded a world championship is not easy. If it was, we’d have a third by now. We haven’t had Doc and Keith and Gary and Darryl and everybody else as active Mets for a very long time. They only made it look readily attainable. I got chills not just for the gratification that 1986 brought me as a Mets fan who’d already been at it quite a while by then, but also because I remembered watching Darryl Strawberry swing successfully for the fences in the company of my mother and father, temporarily diehard Mets fans in that age of miracle and wonder. We, like Mets fans all over the Metropolitan Area, talked about what Darryl had done or what Darryl had said or what Darryl might do next practically every day of our right fielder’s seasons. My father died in 2016. I miss him most every day. My mother died in 1990, a few months before Darryl departed for the West Coast. For a moment in my mind Saturday, we were all together again, with no tension evident, except wondering what the score in the Cardinals game was, and that was tension I could embrace.
Because I’m a fan of a team and the players therein, I mostly had chills for Darryl Strawberry, an individual whose existence was unknown to me before Sports Illustrated informed me he was ripe for the picking as he was finishing high school in Los Angeles, which coincided with the Mets holding the No. 1 pick in the nation. When the Mets selected accordingly, this young man from Crenshaw High (he’s the reason we know what Crenshaw High is) became my cause. Every Mets fan’s cause, I suppose, but I felt an affinity based on the shared year of our birth. Darryl was born in 1962. I was born in 1962. The Mets were born in 1962. We had a chance to collectively forge a path in the years ahead. My way of looking at it was Darryl Strawberry would be a great baseball player, the Mets would become a great baseball team, and I, their fan, would be happy as a result. That’s pinning a lot on factors out of your control, yet somehow it worked.
Now, in 2024, with 18 secured next to 16, just two doors over from 17, I listened to a man who is 62 and aware of how fortunate he is to have made it there. In his voice, I heard not an “old man,” but someone who has aged and, I was convinced, picked up the wisdom said to gather from aging. Me, I’m 61 and still seeking happiness from baseball players and baseball teams, with much of the outcome of the rest of my life as up for grabs as it was when I saw “Strawberry” in SI and hoped the Mets wouldn’t choose anybody else first.
They didn’t. The happiness where the Mets were concerned proceeded to pour over me. Me and wisdom as I approach 62? If I’m lucky, I still have time to garner some. In between, I’ll keep watching the Mets. Like Darryl said, I’m faithful.
by Greg Prince on 1 June 2024 11:04 am The alchemy of desperation works in mysterious ways. The Mets…
say their murky goodbye to Jorge Lopez;
have an accountability meeting;
decide they can do better for part-time catching and hitting with Luis Torrens than they any longer will with Omar Narváez;
opt to provide regular reps for Christian Scott at Syracuse rather than let the rookie’s momentum stall amid a flurry of off days before and after London;
squeeze out Opening Day third baseman Brett Baty in the name of bench flexibility;
make up some new base hit gesture;
collect oodles of base hits allowing them to demonstrate the slapping or whapping or whatever it is they do to celebrate themselves;
and win two games in a row at the end of a month when they hadn’t done any such thing in more than weeks.
“Go figure” will work as a nutshell summation here.
The Mets of backup infielder Jose Iglesias (a little rusty with the glove in his start at second base, assuringly frisky with the bat), Chief Accountability Officer Francisco Lindor (two hits to go with the four from the night before), looking-alive Starling Marte (a three-run triple that will have you jumping out of bed seven mornings of every seven), plug-in professional hitter J.D. Martinez (another no-doubter over another fence) and new full-time third baseman Mark Vientos (three hits and two ribbies while not splitting a position with his bud Brett) brought an onslaught upon the Arizona Diamondbacks that suggests Whacking Day is a federal holiday. The D’Backs are defending National League champions, though the mere sight of Citi Field rattles them to their core. That old chestnut about calling your team meetings when your ace is pitching could also apply to the eve of a series versus the one opponent you’ve been handling in your ballpark for years on end.
The Mets have taken 17 of 19 from Los Serpientes in the borough of Queens since May 18, 2018. Little besides Brandon Nimmo connects the Mets from then to now, so let’s not bother trying to figure what’s up with this. Let’s just be glad the Mets poured on ten runs and built a sturdy enough fortress to protect themselves from Snakebites. Four of those nipped at their seemingly impenetrable lead in the ninth, vaulting a semi-laugher into Damn Thing territory. Yet the Mets held on, 10-9. First they ripped, then they gripped, albeit barely. Whatever nervousness rippling through our anxiety receptors as Reed Garrett did not smoothly pick up for Sean Reid-Foley (who had succeeded an adequate Luis Severino and sharpies Dedniel Nuñez and Jake Diekman) didn’t match the frustration D’Back boosters felt in falling short in Flushing yet again.
Even the black uniforms didn’t quite get in the way of a Friday night victory. Go figure, indeed.
***
A proposal was put on the table more than four decades ago. “Here,” it was said, “is the deal — you be the best player we’ve ever come up with, because we’d really, really like that to happen. Just be mind-bogglingly great from the first day of your career and then get better all the time. It will make us extremely happy and possibly satisfied. Sound good?”
The counterproposal: “Well, I don’t know if I can do all of that, certainly not right away. What if I’m far above average most of the time with bursts of the spectacular sprinkled within? I might sort of stop and start in terms of my progress, but I’m going to be worth watching, and definitely more productive than just about anybody you’ve seen from the beginning. I’ll frustrate you now and then, and it will take me a while to mature, given how young I am and all, but you’ll look up one day and realize I’ve put up numbers hardly anybody else wearing this logo can touch and given you memories you’ll always cherish. Does that sound good?”
Negotiations broke off with, “We’ll get back to you.”
We’ve gotten back to Darryl Strawberry by putting up the number from his jersey where those associated with the cream of this franchise’s legends reside. It sounds good and I believe it will look splendid this afternoon when we see 18 slide in next to 16, 24, 17, 36, 31, 41, 14 and 37. The annals of New York Mets baseball at its best are uniquely Strawberry-flavored. Might as well adorn the rafters to reflect reality.
The stupendous presence and production of Straw from 1983 to 1990 was rarely quite enough to sate those who watched him. “More, please” was what we implored from the time he broke in at age 21 to the time he packed his stuff and took what was left of his prime home to Los Angeles. Darryl has said over and over going home to the Dodgers was a mistake, that Shea Stadium was really home. I don’t know how much of this is revisionist people-pleasing, given that the people who ask Darryl to retrace his path are generally coming at him from a Met perspective, and how much of it was arrived at organically. He says it now, though, and we’ll take him at his word. He did enough as a Met and has been through enough as a person that he can say what he wants.
Leaving the Mets was a mistake, of course. I say that from a Met perspective. The Mets were never the same after Darryl left in November of 1990. Of course, they were never the same as they’d been once Darryl arrived in May of 1983. The man was a difference-maker. You knew you were watching somebody making a difference when you watched him do anything on a field, even if it was just standing in deep right field (when maybe he should have come in a few steps). What he did at the plate is most of what we remember. I can think of 252 baseballs that were never the same.
One element of Darryl Strawberry’s reign as all-time Met lightning rod and power source that I think gets overlooked is how much of a winning player this guy was. Darryl showed up on a team that had been stuck in losing forever. Darryl settled in, and the team began to win chronically. Darryl left, and the team essentially disintegrated. Darryl didn’t do the winning alone, but the team didn’t win without Darryl.
Straw homered in 221 games as a Met, sometimes twice in a game, once thrice. The Mets’ record in those games was 156-65. How good is that? It factors out to a winning percentage of .706. In 162-game season terms, that’s equivalent to a mark of 114-48, or six games better than 1986. Difference-making at its finest. Again, you had Keith, you had Doc, you had Kid, you had so many Mets doing so many Amazin’ things while Strawberry was in full bloom. But let’s not deceive ourselves. You had Darryl Strawberry homering, and when that was happening, you had the Mets winning a lot.
You had those first-inning homers that notified the opposing pitcher it was going to be a long night.
You had those second-at-bat homers that had the manager in the other dugout turning his head toward the bullpen phone.
You had those midgame homers that broke ties and put leads out of reach.
You had those late-and-close homers that alerted one and all it was later than they thought and it was no longer that close. The Mets were winning, and the Mets were about to win.
Maybe Darryl lashed a double or stole a bag or leapt a little to rob a would-be version of himself or gunned down an ambitious baserunner who would have been wise to stop at third. Maybe just the sight of Strawberry was enough to rattle a reliever into four balls. The next Met in the lineup automatically got more dangerous. The Straw Man contributed in small ways, too.
But, oh, the big ways. Every home run Darryl Strawberry blasted, launched and/or sent into orbit was big because it was a Darryl Strawberry home run. If you saw him hit one, it was like you got to show everybody you knew the next day that you’d caught a foul ball. This was better, though. Nobody got the ball when Darryl hit it a mile. We all got the thrill.
That cliché about a superstar carrying a team on his back may never have been invoked in these parts as much as it was when Darryl lifted the Mets. He would tear through National League pitching staffs for a couple of weeks and we’d jump on for the ride. He’d do damage. We’d win games. We’d rise in the standings. We’d be sure we were unbeatable. For a couple of weeks, maybe a month, we would be. One year we absolutely were. Another couple of years Darryl could have used a little help.
The career as a Met didn’t last forever. The impact from his Met career lives on. The number being retired reminds us, in case never fully grasped it, that Darryl Strawberrys don’t grow on trees.
by Jason Fry on 30 May 2024 11:51 pm The recap of Wednesday’s debacle belongs in my blog partner’s already pretty big Hall of Fame, because Greg nailed it: That disaster, from its on-field component to its off-field sequel, might or might not be rock bottom for the 2024 season, but it was unquestionably the end of something.
Somehow we all knew it, and I suspect a lot of us spent the day after acting accordingly.
Take your recapper, for instance. When Thursday night’s game started, I was on the East River off a pier in Brooklyn Bridge Park, sitting in a kayak and making sure people in other kayaks didn’t get themselves in trouble while enjoying a lovely spring evening. (Come join us! It’s free!) I knew the game was starting but didn’t trouble myself beyond that – and yes, I remembered it was my recap. So what? I had things to do and the Mets had forfeited their right to be atop the list of those things.
Afterwards, when my kayak buddies opted for pizza and beer I joined them, letting the Mets linger down at the bottom of that list. And I didn’t feel a twinge of guilt about it. They would do what they did and I would do what I did and I would chronicle it afterwards, without apologies for the proportions of baseball and the avoidance of same. But old loyalties die hard: After my pizza came I propped my phone up against my water bottle and put on Gameday. When I registered that the score was AZ 2 NY 1, I rolled my eyes, muttered something about poor Christian Scott getting a hell of initiation, and went back to a conversation made considerably better by a lack of wailing about the Mets.
I don’t remember what the stages or steps are and so I can’t put a number on it, but I’m pretty sure this is acceptance.
And as is often the case, once I quit trying I got rewarded. I registered that the score had become 2-2, investigated and discovered that Francisco Lindor and Pete Alonso had collaborated to turn the 1 into a 2, briefly groused that they hadn’t done that often enough this season, and went back to chatting.
It was only after leaving the restaurant and strolling through Brooklyn Bridge Park that I resumed my usual routine. MLB Audio told me J.D. Martinez was at the plate, and a moment later Howie Rose was very excited, telling me that this one might go, which it did. I did a brief little dance whose emotions are honestly hard to describe: Happiness? Sure. Exasperation? Also sure. Disbelief? Definitely in there. There were a lot of things.
Walking back through Brooklyn Heights, I listened as Reed Garrett walked the leadoff hitter in the ninth, which you don’t have to be a long-suffering Mets fan to know is usually fatal. I called my mother, who I knew would be in front of her TV swearing at Garrett and importuning the baseball gods to quit being such jerks, and told her I was coming over.
Garrett managed not to do what Met relievers have done serially of late, collecting one out and then another, both by way of hit-it-in-a-silo pop-ups. Then, in the elevator up to my mom’s apartment, the game vanished, a victim of the thick walls of the building core. I opened my mom’s door tentatively … did they? Had they?
Nothing had happened yet. I stood in front of the TV in time to see a groundball, hard but right at Jeff McNeil, and the Mets had won.
That was novel. That was good. That meant a lot less than it would have even a week ago. But it still meant something.
* * *
A lot of pixels have been spilled over Jorge Lopez, whose glove-gifting tantrum was followed by a jaw-dropper of a clubhouse interview and then by his excision from the Mets via DFA.
Reading the post-mortems, I found myself lamenting how ill-suited the Twitter age is to any thing resembling substantive commentary about one of the worst hours in a relief pitcher’s life. What happened to and with Lopez demanded nuance, and everything about our digital age is engineered to shove nuance aside as outmoded and boring if not downright cowardly. This is the age of TLDR, in which your take better be instantly available out of the oven, served piping hot and prepared spicy.
Which means we’ve lost something important if we still want to understand the world and, frankly, each other.
Look, Lopez deserved to get DFA’ed, full stop. He embarrassed his employers by representing them horribly in a public forum, after years and years of being taught to know better. The interview in a second language was a bit halting, yes, but Lopez’s standard is to conduct his interviews in English. And while the specifics of what he was saying got a bit hazy, the gist of it was unmistakable. He was offered multiple off-ramps from the bad road he was speeding along. He took none of them.
But that’s not the whole story.
Lopez’s teammates past and current seem to genuinely like him, but they also know him as a guy who’s hard on himself to a worrisome degree, and whose emotions can overwhelm him. You could see it in that clubhouse interview – this was a man who was clearly struggling. And this isn’t new for Lopez: Last year the Twins put him on the IL for 15 days to deal with his mental health, a move no one with a shred of decency should scorn.
Moreover, Lopez has a son named Mikael who suffers from a malady called Familial Mediterranean Fever, which has meant regular hospital visits and multiple transplants, with few opportunities to watch his father pitch. Wednesday, cruelly, was Mikael’s 11th birthday.
The Mets’ decision wasn’t unjust. But let’s not fall into the trap of thinking anything here was simple or straightforward. That does a disservice to not only Jorge Lopez but also to ourselves.
by Greg Prince on 30 May 2024 11:08 am A 4:10 weekday start to conclude a home series against the Dodgers evoked, however briefly, one of the few peaks of the Mets baseball experience in the 2020s. On September 1, 2022, the Mets and Dodgers began play at Citi Field as leaders of their respective divisions. L.A. was running away with the West. The Mets had fashioned a smaller cushion in the East, but were successfully fending off Atlanta. The three games in Queens loomed as an NLCS preview. The Dodgers took the Tuesday night opener, the Mets the second on Wednesday evening in grand and dramatic fashion. Jacob deGrom had thrown seven innings of three-hit ball, assisted on defense by Brandon Nimmo robbing Justin Turner at the center field wall. Starling Marte had homered with a man on. Adam Ottavino pitched a scoreless eighth and, with a 2-1 lead in the balance, Timmy Trumpet — live and in person — heralded the entrance of Edwin Diaz for the ninth. Trea Turner, Freddie Freeman and Will Smith went down in order, setting up the Thursday late-afternoon rubber match. It was at least as huge a deal in New York as whatever Serena Williams was doing across the boardwalk at the US Open in her final professional matches. That’s how immense the Mets had gotten as a ballclub and a story as 2022 had progressed.
The Mets didn’t disappoint in the finale. If their third game versus the Dodgers wasn’t quite as grand and dramatic as the second, it was effective. Chris Bassitt hung in against Clayton Kershaw, exiting after pitching six innings and the Mets trailing, 2-1. Kershaw went only five, opening up possibilities in the bottom of the sixth and seventh. Versus the Dodgers’ pen, the Mets put up two runs one inning, then two runs in the next, with RBI honors performed by Francisco Lindor, Darin Ruf, Nimmo and Marte. Mr. Trumpet had left town, but the man for whom he was musical muse, Mr. Diaz, was deployed successfully enough in the eighth by Buck Showalter (one run allowed versus the heart of the L.A. order) and Ottavino took care of the ninth. To borrow some tennis parlance, the Mets had won this qualifying tournament, 3-4, 2-1, 5-3. The championship round in October was gonna be something else.
Something else got in the way. The Mets sputtered in September. Starling Marte was hit in the hand in Pittsburgh, Atlanta revved its engines, and the Mets entered the postseason as a Wild Card, leaving it before the tournament ever got serious. The 2022 National League Championship Series paired the Phillies and the Padres. Mets-Dodgers at the end of August and beginning of September was not a harbinger of something even greater. In retrospect, from a Met perspective, it was the end of not an era, but an interlude.
We thought we were in the midst of an era for five months of 2022. Something grand. Something dramatic. Something that would grow and endure and fill us with satisfaction that we who’d been Mets fans all our lives, through handfuls of ups and torrents of downs, had stayed Mets fans. We had the kind of team, led by fresh-air ownership, that was as formidable as any in baseball. This is what we’d been waiting so, so long for.
It can now be said with certainty that the wait continues. The very last semblance of what 2022 represented at its heights is dust. Following the late-season and postseason deflations of that year, the mess that was last year, and all that had been going wrong this year, such an assessment might strike you as a rather slowly arrived bulletin. Yet 2022 had earned the Mets enough good will with me that for all of my 2023 dismay and 2024 disgust, I believed somewhere in there was the heart and fiber of a good baseball team, a perennial contender, a top-flight professional enterprise. I no longer believe any of that. I believe the Mets are back to being the Mets of popular, unfriendly imagination. Go ahead, those who peer inside Metsopotamia only to mock — say what you will about how hopeless, ridiculous, whatever these Mets are. After Wednesday’s late-afternoon finale, there’s no reason inside our bubble to dispute any of it.
The Mets lost, 10-3, to the Dodgers, who never more than pause from being a powerhouse. It was 3-3 through seven, which indicated that if the Mets could craft one of their flash-mob walkoff rallies to end a series they had already lost on an upbeat note, they would take bows for never giving up…or if they fell short by a run or two, they could console themselves with how they had stayed in yet another close, hard-fought contest.
Except the Band-Aid was torn off with force. Six Dodger runs in the eighth, another in the ninth. David Peterson’s return to active duty was modestly encouraging in a vacuum (5 IP, 3 R, 7 H, no noticeable hip discomfort). Tomás Nido, who nobody wishes was the primary catcher, belted a two-run homer, and what had been a 3-0 deficit was erased when J.D. Martinez doubled home the tying run in the fifth. It was almost enough to make a person forget that a) Edwin Diaz went on the IL before the game with shoulder impingement issues and b) Pete Alonso left the game in the first inning after his right hand absorbed one of James Paxton’s fastballs.
Diaz, not the closer he was when he was serenaded by international recording stars, is still the closer of record. Being without him for however long represents a return to last year’s situation of every reliever being asked to step up a rung, and we all remember how that went. Alonso, who has personified the word “slump” since launching his 200th career home run more than a month ago, is too much the slugging sun around which this lineup orbits to not miss if he has to sit (x-rays were negative, further imaging to be announced). Besides, the HBP that Pete couldn’t shake was a little too reminiscent for comfort of the one that bruised Starling two Septembers ago.
So it hadn’t been a good Met day Wednesday, but it hadn’t been full-on calamitous until Jorge Lopez drew everybody’s attention. Lopez had passed for a pleasant surprise when there was anything pleasant about watching the 2024 Mets. He’d pitched in more games than any reliever on the club and forewent imploding for the most part. But Wednesday was about to change perceptions.
Lopez was called on to clean up for Ottavino. Ottavino also pitches quite a bit for the 2024 Mets and has also resided on the brighter side of dependable a little more often than not. Wednesday was a different story. The Dodgers, led by Will Smith leading off the eighth, proceeded to light up Otto. Smith homered, par for the course. Jason Heyward tripled with one out. A walk and a steal set the stage for Miguel Rojas to drive in another run. It was 5-3. The game was not beyond repair when Carlos Mendoza made his next call to the bullpen.
A busy signal would have been preferable. Jorge attempted a pickoff at third base that the third baseman, Brett Baty, wasn’t expecting. It hit the third base umpire, Ramon De Jesus. It allowed the baserunner on first to move to second. And it didn’t pick off the baserunner it was intended to trap. The fella at the plate while all that was happening, Miguel Vargas, soon doubled both of those runners in. It was 7-3. One out later, Shohei Ohtani, who had been too quiet for too long, homered. It was 9-3. Versus Freddie Freeman, Lopez didn’t get a strike call he wanted on a checked swing. Lopez barked at De Jesus. De Jesus ejected Lopez. Perhaps the umpire could have been the bigger man, but Lopez had recently hit him with a pitch, so who knows what he was thinking? A more apt question might be what the hell was Lopez thinking when, as he trudged to the dugout, he flung his glove over the protective screen and into the stands.
Josh Walker, who had been optioned before the game to make room for Peterson and then almost immediately recalled when Diaz went on the IL, finished the game, giving up an extra run for good measure. Then the Mets players took it up on themselves to hold an internal airing of grievances. When the media had their chance to read tea leaves, they sought out Nimmo, Ottavino and Lindor for explanations. I listened intently to each of them as they were aired on SNY’s marathon postgame show. I can’t say any of it registered with me, other than when you lose enough games in enough ways and there’s no sign you’ll stop losing games, you kind of have to have a meeting.
Reporters also checked in with Jorge Lopez, who used his platform to talk himself off the team. Maybe the glove toss had opened the door for his departure, but his decision to not publicly regret his behavior, along with muttering something about the Mets being probably “the worst team” in “the whole fucking MLB,” did his standing no favors. His forthcoming designation for assignment, which in the heat of the moment seemed an excellent idea, leaked out. It’s been one of those seasons when DFAs of any three Mets in one swoop wouldn’t make you blink. Lopez’s clubhouse performance may not have stood out as particularly bizarre when set against how players in decades past used to unleash their frustration for notebooks and tape recorders (the Mets are this weekend retiring the number of a player who wasn’t shy in that regard), but we live in a buttoned-up age, when the most any teammate will say about another teammate is some boilerplate about the need to hold each other accountable. Lopez told it like it was, clarifying that they’re all accountable, himself included. Maybe he told it like it was a little too well.
The 2024 Mets now wallow eleven games under .500. A couple of days ago, I looked up incidences of Mets teams that had fallen double-digits below the break-even mark and still carved out a winning record by season’s end. It has happened three times in franchise history: 1973, 2001 and 2019. I offer that tidbit for nothing more than trivia’s sake, given that there’s no way this team is going to be the fourth edition of the Mets to bounce back from below. Likewise, I am no longer concerning myself with the National League playoff picture, multiple Wild Card berths notwithstanding. The Mets aren’t a part of that snapshot as June approaches and won’t be the rest of the way. As a guy who analyzes returns until he can call elections accurately on social media likes to say, I’ve seen enough. Four months remain to 2024. Get out of it what you like, or just get out and do something else.
Circling back to the last game of that Dodgers series from 2022, several of that magical summer’s names are still very much attached to the Mets. There’s definitely been churn, but here we are, citing Diaz, Alonso, Marte, Ottavino, Nimmo, Lindor, along with the likes of Nido, Peterson, Baty, Tylor Megill and Jeff McNeil in the present day. Steve Cohen is still the owner, and if he’s not too distracted by building other things, we’ll assume he’s still committed to building a long-term winner in Flushing. He’s got the president of baseball operations he wants, and David Stearns has a moldable manager of his own choosing. Carlos Mendoza doesn’t have the track record of Buck Showalter, but every skipper hired for the first time had to have impressed somebody to be entrusted with running what is technically a major league team. Injuries are injuries, and to this point, injuries have removed Francisco Alvarez, Kodai Senga, Brooks Raley and Drew Smith from the daily equation, with Diaz added to their ranks. Stearns’s pickups — like Martinez, Sean Manaea, Luis Severino and Harrison Bader — have all had their moments. Christian Scott and Mark Vientos have each shown wisps of the potential we’d been told they carry.
There was a time, maybe even a couple of weeks ago, when I would have considered all of the above and inferred that these elements together, less than two years after that day the Mets took that rubber game from the Dodgers, were, at their core, capable of coalescing into something solid. A lousy record last year, a lousy record thus far this year, but surely they were better than they’d shown. They were so good at the peak of the season before last. Everything that made them that good couldn’t have completely disappeared in a span of roughly 20 months. Could it have?
It did. It’s gone like Jorge Lopez and Jorge Lopez’s glove. Welcome, at last, to the discouraging present, where there’s no sign things were fairly recently a whole lot better.
Let’s Go Future Mets, whoever you are, whenever you get here. You won’t have a tough act to follow.
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