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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 Jason Fry on 3 August 2011 2:01 am Well, Emily and I had fun for eight innings.
It was a lovely night, we warmed up for the game with my wife’s first-ever visit to Donovan’s (I wouldn’t say it’s the best burger in New York City, but it’s very good — a bar burger executed perfectly), and during the mid innings I got to compare notes with an old Journal colleague and his daughter, Yankee fans making their first visit to Citi Field. They were big fans, with particular praise for the food and the fact that most of the fans in attendance weren’t psychotic. (Their words, not mine.) We chatted happily for a bit and then I went back to my seat and to Emily and the Mets fell behind again and then they tied it up again and then they took the lead and then bad things happened. Very bad things.
Izzy didn’t look right from the get-go, walking Logan Morrison, and the crowd started to mutter, no doubt recalling all those pitches last night.
(Brief digression about Monday’s game: We went out to dinner, and leaving the restaurant I checked MLB At Bat and groaned to see the Mets down 3-1. Back in Brooklyn, Emily headed home while I went to meet friends at a bar. I checked in grimly … and saw it was 3-3! Lucas Duda had hit a home run; with a happy suspicion, I pulled up the play by play and saw that yes, he had hit it with two out in the ninth. I fairly skipped the rest of the way to the bar, walked in, looked at the TV, saw the bases were loaded, and three pitches later Mike Stanton connected. That’s 42 years of Mets fandom in a nutshell right there.)
Anyway, from last night to tonight: With Morrison on first, up came Stanton (whose arm really ought to subject to some kind of weapons limit). He popped up, but old pal Mike Cameron ripped a single up the gap to left-center which Angel Pagan barely corralled to keep the game from being tied right there. Izzy then hit John Buck, and up came Bryan Petersen with the bases loaded and one out.
On 0-2, Petersen hit a little grounder to Justin Turner, who I thought had time to come home. But it would have been close, and Buck was sort of in the way (reluctant kudos to him for terrific base-running, slowing up to ensure Turner couldn’t go for the quick tag and throw to first) and Turner by his own admission “kind of got into panic mode.” He threw it past Duda, and a horrible groan went through the crowd. The Mets skulked off amid a torrent of boos, a Daniel Murphy double-play grounder snuffed any realistic hope of a rally in the bottom of the inning, and we filed out, made numb by an awful loss.
(Oh, and Johan Santana’s on his way to New York to be re-evaluated for lingering shoulder discomfort. Fan-fucking-tastic!)
The Braves have hit a bit of a bump themselves, so the Mets are still 7.5 out of the wild card, which you can argue is not insurmountable, particularly with Atlanta coming to town on Friday. And this year’s Mets have been so confounding, so crazily Jekyll and Hyde, that there’s no way I’m going to declare them dead this time. They’ve jumped out of coffins before; I wouldn’t be surprised to see them do it again.
But honestly, they can’t seem to escape the gravity of .500, or the reality of the standings. (The Marlins are a .500 team too, and those last-place Nats in the rearview mirror are closer than they appear.) I’m thinking less about the number in the GB column than I am about the team we see too often during these recurring ruts — the one that can’t get consistent offense from its patchwork lineup, has a ragged bullpen, and has to contend with a right side of the infield afflicted by chronic dingbatry and doofusness. Teams like that don’t win, unless they’re in crap divisions like the NL Central, which we aren’t.
Now, there’s no shame in not winning — these Mets are being stripped down and rebuilt with better parts, and that will take a while. Nor is there shame in believing — musing about a maybe is a lot more fun than shaking your head and offering nos and nevers.
But August is when time starts to become the enemy along with whomever you’re chasing. August is when it creeps into your mind that your team’s flaws aren’t going to solve themselves this season. August, all too often, is the death of maybes.
by Greg Prince on 2 August 2011 12:30 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” 103rd game in any Mets season, the “best” 104th game in any Mets season, the “best” 105th 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 103: August 4, 1985 — Mets 4 CUBS 1
(Mets All-Time Game 103 Record: 22-27; Mets 1985 Record: 61-42)
The Mets’ best pitcher pitched as New York faced Chicago in a game laced with deep historic overtones.
Rarely could such a sentence be taken two ways, but on this Sunday afternoon, you could say Mets fans were focused on a simultaneous doubleheader, the kind of situation that cried out for a split screen.
In New York, the Mets’ best pitcher took the mound.
In Chicago, the Mets’ best pitcher took the mound.
In New York, a milestone was at hand for the pitcher.
In Chicago, a milestone was at hand for the pitcher.
In New York, tens of thousands of the home fans rooted for the pitcher.
In Chicago…probably not, but back on cozily familiar Channel 9 in New York, the pitcher held as much attention of Mets fans as he could — when they weren’t watching the pitcher who was pitching in New York on relatively foreign Channel 11.
That was Tom Seaver, then of the White Sox, forever of the Mets. Fate landed him at 299 wins and inside Yankee Stadium going for his 300th win. Tom Seaver was the Mets’ best pitcher ever.
Though in the summer of 1985, so was Dwight Gooden, and he was pitching for the Mets at the moment, against the Cubs at Wrigley Field and, in his way, against the legend of Tom Seaver. Tom Terrific, sixteen years earlier, had won ten consecutive decisions, a franchise record. Four days earlier at Shea, Doctor K matched the streak and now was looking to exceed it. Twenty years old, and the kid was looking to out-Franchise The Franchise on the day Seaver was reaching for a whole other level of immortality.
So much symmetry and so much great Met pitching between Channel 9 and Channel 11. Mets fans working their remote controls could only hope they didn’t get stuck on Channel 10.
Technically, neither Mets ace was involved in a home game, but Seaver came remarkably close to transporting Shea to the Bronx. He upstaged a Yankee broadcaster on what was supposed to be his big afternoon— Phil Rizzuto was having his number retired — and lured a Met broadcaster back to New York for the afternoon. WPIX classily signed Lindsey Nelson to a one-game contract so one of the primary voices from Seaver’s heyday could call Seaver’s day of days.
Nelson, who underscored Seaver’s milestone jubilation by advising, “if you could hear him right now, his voice is up in such a high key only the dogs can understand him,” couldn’t bark at making the trip from Knoxville, Tenn., as it turned out to be an ideal day in the Bronx. If the White Sox starter wasn’t exactly the Seaver of old, he was close enough, carrying a three-run lead into the bottom of the ninth. With one on, Ron Hassey became Tom’s seventh strikeout victim, and Willie Randolph flied to right for the second out. A walk followed, bringing up pinch-hitter Don Baylor.
Unlike some later 300th wins that were left in the hands of closers, the 40-year-old Seaver went after Baylor himself. While Nelson practiced buoyant restraint on Channel 11 in applying the personal touch, White Sox fans watching in Chicago heard Ken Harrelson call the end of the game this way:
“Two outs! Fans come to their feet! The biggest media representation in Yankee Stadium in years! So it’ll be two veterans — Seaver and Don Baylor, who represents the tying run. Baylor hitting at .240, 18 homers, 67 RBIs. High to left, playable! Reid Nichols camps underneath it! History!”
History, indeed. Not just because Seaver became the 17th big league pitcher to attain what’s always been considered the milestone of pitching milestones, but because of the way his minions occupied normally unfriendly territory. It was a sight and sound to behold as a chant of “Let’s Go Mets” accompanied the White Sox’ four-run rally in the sixth. If the exhortation wasn’t universally appreciated in the renovated House that Ruth Built, Seaver certainly was — and Seaver appreciated the circumstances.
“I have beautiful memories here,” Seaver said after defeating the Yankees, 4-1, harking back in general to the days when he pitched for a New York team and specifically to moments like returning to town a month after his trade to the Reds to pitch in the All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium in 1977 and his Opening Day assignment when he wore Met colors at Shea again in 1983. “New York fans are fairly sophisticated baseball fans and they know what goes on and they know I’ve done in 19 years.”
They also knew what was going on two frequencies down the dial and one time zone to the west. While Seaver was basking in history, Gooden was making ever more of it. The Doctor wasn’t going to deny Mets fans a pitching sweep — and he’d do his best to not suffer the fate that befell Seaver in all those starts in which he pitched brilliantly but received tepid offensive support. Gooden drummed up his own support by doubling off Ray Fontenot in the top of the third at Wrigley and coming around on a Keith Hernandez single. By the end of the half-inning, the Mets led the Cubs 3-0 and their ace didn’t need much more help after that.
It may not have been a classic, but it was classically effective: a five-hit complete game victory for Gooden, albeit with “only” six strikeouts. The only Cub run was unearned, the only Cub hits were singles, and they didn’t record any of them until the fifth inning. The final score? 4-1, New York over Chicago, the same score by which Seaver won for Chicago in New York at the same hour. Seaver’s 300th was etched in stone, but erased that afternoon was one of his oldest standards. Gooden had just won a Mets-best eleventh decision in a row, supplanting Seaver’s mark from the magic summer of ’69 Bryan Adams was singing about regularly on Top 40 radio from coast to coast in the summer of ’85.
“Records are made to be broken,” the young Doctor confirmed, “and I’m proud to have that one.”
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On July 30, 2000, Mets fans saluted a slew of players who created their franchise’s most indelible episodes and then turned to the current crop of players to enjoy a couple of unforeseen treats. It was Ten Greatest Moments day at Shea in which Mets from 1962 to the present were introduced in pregame ceremonies and various peaks in Met history were applauded. An Internet fan vote had declared the 1986 World Championship the No. 1 moment in the first 37-plus years of Mets lore. After a string of ’86ers, ’69ers and other big names — everyone from Frank Thomas to Willie Mays to Todd Pratt — took their bows, two names nobody was associating with Mets history at that juncture came to the fore.
One inning after Benny Agbayani led off the ensuing Sunday game against the Cardinals with a home run off Garrett Stephenson, Bubba Trammell batted with two on and nobody out. Trammell had just been acquired from the Devil Rays, same as Mike Bordick had been obtained by trade from the Orioles. The day before, Bordick hit the first pitch he saw as a Met for a home run. Here, Trammell wasn’t quite so sudden in his impact, but on the third pitch he saw as a Met — still his first at-bat — Bubba followed Bordick’s example and hit one over the fence. The Mets took a 4-0 lead.
And probably more surprising than anything Bubba Trammel did in a Mets uniform was the performance of the pitcher who held on to that lead clear through the ninth inning. Bobby Jones, a Met since 1993, had been a dependable performer for several seasons, cresting as an All-Star in 1997, but had become a shaky proposition in recent years. Things got so bad in early 2000 that the Mets sent Jones (with his assent) to Norfolk to work out his kinks.
The so-called Norfolk Miracle Cure did wonders for the veteran righty, who fired his first complete game in more than three years in defeating St. Louis 4-2. Jones carried a no-hitter into the fifth inning, eventually giving up only four hits and striking out nine. The pitcher who had gone to Virginia with a 10.19 ERA weighing down his baggage had hopped back over to the right track. Bobby wouldn’t have another game quite as good as this one the rest of the 2000 season, but with Jones pitching in, there would be a 2000 postseason.
And it would be then that Bobby Jones would make his pitch to rewrite the list of the Ten Greatest Moments in New York Mets history.
GAME 104: July 31, 1983 (2nd) — METS 1 Pirates 0 (12)
(Mets All-Time Game 104 Record: 24-25; Mets 1983 Record: 39-65)
This, you might say, is where the Mets began to become the Mets, at least the Mets as they were on the verge of being understood. It wasn’t an instantaneous transformation, but it takes only a little hindsight to see how the pieces were coming together sooner than perhaps could be comprehended in real time. In real time, the summer of 1983 had been a terrible time.
This Sunday doubleheader at Shea commenced to changing all that. It couldn’t all be done in one day, even with a pair of twelve-inning victories and a Banner Day parade thrown in, but the seeds of contentedness could be viewed as finally taking root.
After entering the day as hopeless, hapless and 28 games below .500, the Mets bury themselves early versus the Pirates, falling behind 6-1 in the sixth, but storming back to tie it in the eighth — propelled by back-to-back home runs from Keith Hernandez and George Foster — and they win it in the twelfth, when Bob Bailor drives in Darryl Strawberry against long-ago Met farmhand Jim Bibby. Jesse Orosco pitches four scoreless innings to gain the 7-6 win.
Then come the banners.
After which comes discouragement.
The Met bats do nothing worth writing home (or on a bedsheet) about. Jose DeLeon has his way with them, collecting eleven strikeouts in nine innings. He collects all kinds of outs, actually. The Mets don’t get a hit off DeLeon until there’s one out in the ninth (Hubie Brooks doing the honors) and then that hitter is erased on a double play (Keith Hernandez’s, no less). But amazingly, the Mets are still in a scoreless duel because the mostly flammable Mike Torrez is bottom-line matching DeLeon. He’s not the same kind of untouchable (or “perfect” as Brooks judged) as DeLeon, but Torrez manages to scatter eight hits over eleven innings without allowing a single Buc to cross home plate.
It’s the most innings any Met pitcher has thrown in one game since Jerry Koosman went eleven five years earlier…and it’s the last time a Mets pitcher will ever go that far into a game. Perhaps manager Frank “Hondo” Howard figures that with a last-place club, there’s nothing to save Torrez for.
The Mets’ second hit, in the tenth, is also erased on a double play (a Bob Bailor lineout). In the bottom of the eleventh, Howard pinch-hits Rusty Staub for Torrez, but even Le Grand Orange comes up empty against Kent Tekulve, who replaced DeLeon in the tenth. In the twelfth, Hondo turns to hot hand Orosco to keep the Pirates at bay a little longer. The strategy works — Jesse walks Gene Tenace with two out but retires Lee Lacy to escape unscathed.
The Mets’ misbegotten 1983 marketing slogan was Now The Fun Starts. For once, it was truth in advertising.
Bottom of the twelfth. Mookie Wilson commences matters by singling off Manny Sarmiento. Mook’s the first Mets leadoff batter to reach base since Keith walked to start the fourth (and was erased on a strike ’em out, throw ’em out double play; Mookie’s single means the Mets have as many hits as double plays hit or run into in this game). Hubie is ordered to bunt and he complies, sacrificing Wilson to second. Chuck Tanner, no dummy, walks Hernandez to get to George Foster and set up yet another double play. It’s not bad strategy considering Foster is slow and Hernandez is slow.
But Mookie is fast, and what happens unfolds in a Flushing minute:
Foster grounds to Johnny Ray at second. Not a lightning fast grounder — and it’s not picked perfectly cleanly by Ray. Hernandez, as noted, is not lightning fast, either, but he runs and slides hard enough to make life difficult for Dale Berra, the shortstop who forces Mex. That’s one out. Meanwhile, Mookie is zipping around third. Foster is charging, in his fashion, for first.
Which means Mookie Wilson is scoring the winning run from second base on a ground ball out.
“I didn’t know Mookie was trying to score until the last second,” Berra said as he gave up on the 4-6-3 DP and tried to nail the Mets’ speedster.
No dice. Mookie had one destination in mind from the nanosecond George connected, and it wasn’t third. After receiving the high sign from third base coach Bobby Valentine, he knew where he was going.
“All my thoughts were collected before Foster even came to bat,” Mookie explained. “I’d already looked down at Bobby and got the OK, so there was no hesitation. He’d told me to go ahead.
Mookie went as fast as he could, which the National League had noticed was about as fast anybody could.
Berra: “Once Johnny didn’t field the ball cleanly, I thought about Wilson trying to score, but I didn’t see him.”
And how are you gonna catch what you can’t see?
With Mookie making himself a blur, the Mets win the nightcap 1-0 in 12 after winning the opener 7-6 in 12. Jesse Orosco, an All-Star selection earlier in the month, wins both ends of the doubleheader, the first time a Met pitcher has done so since Willard Hunter in 1964. Jesse will go on to become the National League’s most dynamic relief pitcher over the final two months of the season and finish third in the Cy Young voting.
Mookie, in the meantime, establishes a signature play. He will actually replicate it three days later, scoring from second under eerily similar circumstances (one out, grounder, same cast of supporting batters, same winning pitcher). His recognition as one of the sport’s true generators of excitement grows.
And the Mets? They’re out of it, of course, but they inject some life into their deadly ways at last, finishing their final 60 games with a record of 31-29, pretty much the first time in a decade that they’ve gone out on an indisputable high note. Mookie’s in place. Jesse’s in place. Mex is here. Hubie…Darryl…even Foster drives in 90 runs. Frank Howard will be replaced by the manager from Tidewater, Davey Johnson, who will bring with him some of the best starters the Mets’ minor leagues are developing. And in relatively little time, there will be consecutive Mets games whose signature moments will include Mookie Wilson hustling along the basepaths and Jesse Orosco recording a final out.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. 1983 was billed as the “now” when the fun was to start. On a most banner day at the end of July, it really kind of did.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On August 5, 1985, the Mets took sole possession of first place for an indeterminate span, though the way they claimed the top spot in the National League East was surely crowned with an exclamation point. Players and owners were facing off in one of their periodic battles to the death and the clock was ticking down on a strike deadline. This Monday would be baseball’s final day of games until nobody-knew-when. The Mets entered their Monday matinee at Wrigley Field a half-game behind the Cardinals and figured it couldn’t hurt to make a move on first just in case they had to lock the penthouse door behind them during any kind of protracted job action.
Nobody was more emphatic about evicting the Redbirds from the perch they’d held for more than a month than Darryl Strawberry.
In the top of the first, facing Cubs righthander Derek Botelho, Darryl lashed a three-run homer over the ivy to stake Ed Lynch to a 3-0 lead. Two innings later, Darryl homered with no one on to make it 4-0. In the fifth, with two out and Wally Backman on second, Cubs manager Jim Frey (the Met coach closest to Strawberry when Darryl came to the majors in 1983) learned his lesson and ordered Botelho to walk his obvious nemesis. The fans at Wrigley booed the decision, and were none too happy when Danny Heep rendered it useless with a two-run double.
And come the seventh, Darryl cracked his third home run of the day, this one off reliever Ron Meridith.
By becoming the first Met to blast three home runs in one game since Claudell Washington five years before (and the fourth ever), Straw stirred the Mets to a 7-2 win and the edge of ending a day alone in first place for the first time since June 6. They’d need a little help, and, as it turned out, Darryl’s power surge resonated all the way down to St. Louis where the Cardinals were pounded by the Phillies, 9-1. The loss pushed them into second, behind the first-place Mets, an order the New Yorkers quite liked and got to enjoy for the duration of the dreaded strike that was called that night. Fortunately for baseball, the labor dispute was settled within 72 hours and everybody was back on the field by Thursday.
But if you’re going to take what amounted to an extended coffee break, better to sip from first than from anywhere else.
GAME 105: August 20, 1995 — METS 5 Dodgers 3
(Mets All-Time Game 105 Record: 26-23; Mets 1995 Record: 45-60)
A phenomenon came to Shea Stadium this Sunday afternoon. He went up against something of a phenom. Those who showed up for the latter came away pleased with the results.
As for the former, in a way Nomomania, the excitement surrounding Hideo Nomo’s first start in New York, was a harbinger of crowds to come at Shea Stadium. Nomo was the first Japanese star player to make a splash in America and, as such, attracted attention as well as fans (Asian and otherwise) to a ballpark where post-strike attendance had been spotty as the team groped for any sustained stretch of success.
While the Mets went about building themselves back up, their building became an intermittent magnet not so much for Dodgers fans but for people drawn to big names and big deals. In later years, it would be everybody from Chan Ho Park to Mark McGwire to Sammy Sosa to Barry Bonds packing in those who didn’t seem too interested in the home team (throw in Merengue Night as another non-Mets attraction that helped fill Shea). That was all coming in the late ’90s and early ’00s. For August 1995, the bright, shiny object that briefly pumped up the gate was the hurler they called the Tornado.
All the Mets could offer to counter the publicity blitz around Nomo — 10-3, with a 2.08 ERA entering the game — was a homegrown pitcher whom their loyalists were watching closely even if the rest of the world wasn’t. Since his mid-July recall from Norfolk, where he had been toying with Triple-A hitters, Jason Isringhausen, 22, had given Mets fans a taste of a better future. Three of his previous four starts had gone eight innings and had yielded no more than six hits. If it wasn’t exactly the stuff of Izzymania, it — along with some promising outings by fellow freshman Bill Pulsipher — served as hopeful building blocks for anyone looking to pave a Met way out of the N.L. East cellar.
The Mets didn’t think they’d be stuck in fifth place for the bulk of the summer, but once it was apparent they weren’t going anywhere, they dispatched most of their higher-priced veterans and took to rebuilding in earnest. Bobby Bonilla and Bret Saberhagen went at the trade deadline. Then, just before this weekend set with the Dodgers commenced, the Mets returned Brett Butler from whence he came…right back to L.A. The Mets had signed him a couple of weeks before the season started, picturing him as the leadoff hitter they’d lacked since the apogee of Mookie Wilson and Lenny Dykstra (a.k.a. Mookstra).
Butler had lingered in the Mets fan regret-filled subconscious for several years, actually, having come on the free market the same winter as Vince Coleman. The Mets chose Coleman, who failed; meanwhile, Butler flourished. Finally in a Mets uniform, Brett wound up demonstrating late wasn’t always better than never. The 38-year-old center fielder proved a poor fit for New York and was happy to realight with his old club, one in a pennant race in 1995 and, conveniently, just across the diamond at Shea.
With Butler a Dodger, the suddenly younger Mets felt invigorated. They called up 23-year-old Butch Huskey, planted him at third base and took the first two games from the visitors from the west, both of them one-run affairs. They went for the sweep on Sunday in front of 33,668, their largest home crowd since Opening Weekend…and Opening Weekend was jammed only because the Mets had slashed ticket prices as a post-strike gesture of goodwill.
Nomo was the main draw; Birmingham Black Barons caps given away as a salute to the Negro Leagues probably helped, too. But Mets fans who came to the Mets’ stadium to see the Mets were pretty stoked to see if Isringhausen could keep pace with the Japanese import, a tough task. Nomo indeed got great mileage, dropping 13 strikeouts on Mets batters in seven innings, the ninth time he reached double-digits in his first MLB season.
But the Tornado wasn’t untouchable. With one out in the bottom of the third, Nomo walked Izzy on four pitches, then walked Joe Orsulak behind him. Jose Vizcaino, the Mets’ low-key but eminently useful shortstop of the mid-’90s, made Hideo pay for his only wildness of the day by blasting a three-run homer. Carl Everett was next in the order and next in the long-hit parade. Everett went yard and the Mets led 4-1.
Izzy would give back two runs in the Dodger fourth, but ground out ex-teammate Butler with the tying run on third and get through six with no further damage. Huskey provided an insurance run with a distant leadoff homer off Nomo in the seventh, and Doug Henry and John Franco closed down the Dodgers from there for the 5-3 victory.
Those customers who were most interested in “the scene” got what they came for — Hideo Nomo was the real deal, at least as far as 1995 was concerned. But the Mets fans who saw better days stitched into that long name above No. 44 were rewarded, too. Isringhausen went to 3-2 on the season en route to a 9-2 record all compiled in the second half. Izzy would ride that momentum to a fourth-place finish in the National League Rookie of the Year voting — well behind winner Nomo, but a pretty good showing considering how obscure he and his team were to the voters when ’95 began.
“As the Mets rebuild their product, they are trying to restore their fan base as well,” Marty Noble wrote in Newsday. “All Isringhausen did was beat Nomo. The magic was not back. But in the stands, winning and an absolute monster home run by Butch Huskey appeared to be enough to satisfy the hand-clapping, souvenir-buying, chant-chanting zealots and even the faithful who came armed with brooms, anticipating a third win in three games.”
Unknown to Noble — who framed the weekend finale as “the best of days for the Mets” coming as they did “in the midst of the worst of times” — or anyone on hand, the trio of triumphs over the Dodgers kick-started the Mets to a relatively hellacious finish: 34-18 over their final 52 games, a notable improvement from how they started their heretofore lackluster year. They had a potential ace pitcher of 22, a potential game-breaking slugger of 23 and a sweep of a first-place club. When you’ve been down in the dumps, that’s practically a bounty of riches.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On July 28, 2001, you could be forgiven a double-take as you watched the bottom of the ninth inning proceed. After all, you’d had less than 24 hours to process that two of your mainstay relievers were now aligned with your opponents. The night before, a Friday, Mets GM Steve Phillips continued to throw in the towel on what had been an extremely disappointing season, making his second trade in a week, each intended to strip payroll from a roster that Phillips judged incapable of rebounding into playoff contention.
First, he had dealt 1999 playoff hero Todd Pratt to the Phillies for a cheaper catcher, Gary Bennett. Then it was time for lefty Dennis Cook and righty Turk Wendell to make the trek to the same club, in exchange for two pitchers, major leaguer Bruce Chen and prospect Adam Walker. Spicing the wheeling and deal was that the Phillies were who the Mets were playing that very weekend. Cook and Wendell didn’t have to go far to find their new teammates — they were over in the visiting clubhouse.
Fast-forward to the bottom of the ninth of Saturday afternoon’s 3-3 game, one in which Pratt started for the Phillies and collected three hits off Al Leiter (the same pitcher who, as a Marlin, surrendered Pratt’s first Met hit in 1997 — a home run). Pitching for the Phils was Wendell, pretty close to a folk hero at Shea since emerging as Bobby Valentine’s most dependable middle-innings man in 1998. Whether it was the slamming of the rosin bag, the necklace of animal teeth, the sporting of No. 99 or simply his clutch pitching, Wendell was pretty popular. But so was the man he’d face to lead off the ninth, Robin Ventura. Robin’s popularity soared two pitches later as he took Turk for one last trip to downtown Flushing. Ventura’s booming homer to right-center gave the Mets a 4-3 win…and must have tempted Pratt to reprise his Grand Slam Single tackle from two years earlier.
But Pratt, like Wendell and Cook, was wearing the wrong uniform for those kinds of hijinks now.
by Greg Prince on 2 August 2011 3:35 am 1) Bottom of the ninth, Mets losing, Wright leads off. Grounds to short. Takes a nice play from Ramirez, but he’s out pretty easily. With that, I’ve decided, “Let’s just get this over with. The trains are all screwy as it is thanks to the storm that unleashed hail the size of hockey pucks on Long Island. The Mets are lifeless. I just want to get on the LIRR and go home…that is, unless the Mets plan on scoring at least two runs right now, which I doubt they can, but if they do, then I’ll happily stay.”
2) Pagan singles. Before I have a chance to process whether this is something that can be built upon for the kind of rally that will glue me to my seat, he’s stretching for a double, which I can figure out in a snap is massively inane. Being on second doesn’t particularly help anybody, and being thrown out at second will kill what lingering chances the Mets have. We already watched what a good throw could do when Mike Stanton’s outstanding fling from right nailed Reyes from here to LaGuardia in the fifth. “Angel, if you know what’s good for you, be safe — be very, very safe.” Angel beats this throw by a couple of eyelashes. He’s on second. It’s still inane.
3) Bay up. He homered earlier. They featured the Bay Home Run Graphic on the big screens. I didn’t know there was a Bay Home Run Graphic. I’m surprised that the Bay Home Run Graphic isn’t simply dust covering cobwebs. Anyway, I’m modestly confident in Bay here, which is a severely misplaced sentiment. Of course (and it is an “of course” kind of act) he grounds to third with no fanfare on the first pitch. Being Bay, he runs hard, but being Bay, he’s used up our second out. “Pagan at least stayed out of a double play because he was on second already, but I doubt they get a DP with Bay running, so it’s still inane from before. And Bay still sucks.”
4) Undeterred by Marlin defense, Pagan’s inanity and Bay’s futility, we’re screaming where we are for wonderful things to happen, even if they’re occurring only intermittently. As our group — I’m joined in grand shout by the Chapmans, the Kase, the Coop, the cousin of the Coop and the father of the Coop (Coop’s dad is a man kind enough to share a few Polo Grounds memories with me while Big Pelf was trying to outlose Little Al Jackson) — vocalizes our encouragement to our team, I begin to gather guilt, however, over disturbing the tranquility of Citi Field. We’re supposed to be quiet in the middle of ninth-inning uprisings so as not to rattle our visitors from Florida, correct? “You’re all a bunch of fucking zombies, you so-called Mets fans. And how come the only organic LET’S GO METS! chant that isn’t started by Kevin Chapman comes when the Mets are in the field, not at the plate?” In that same vein, I visited two concessions Monday night, neither with a long line, yet neither with a short wait. At the second of them, a fellow wearing a badge that said “SUPERVISOR” supervised his way past the waiting, unattended customers until one line member asked, in so many words, “WTF?” Slowly but surely (but mostly slowly), we got service. It was a direct callback to the SUPERVISOR in April at a wholly different concession who thought it was more important to address an underling at length than it was to allow said underling to take care of her customers. But it’s still deathly quiet in the stands, as quiet as it must be when Citi Field’s Best and Brightest pin their SUPERVISOR badges to their golf shirts to prepare for another night of sure slowness.
5) Lucas Duda emerges from the Citi Field solitude and changes everything about the ninth inning with one swing of the bat. Well, he’s not gonna do it with two swings, I suppose, but it’s always more dramatic to say “…with one swing of the bat.” Duda swings his bat and suddenly it’s not an impending 3-1 loss anymore. It’s a 3-3 tie. Noise control has gone all to hell. “Ohmigod, we’re tied! High-five! High-five! Who haven’t I high-fived? I’ll high-five you! And you! And you! I’m like Oprah: YOU get a high-five! YOU get a high-five!” Through several pokey train rides and concession lines, and then eight-plus innings of nothingness, my Monday night has been all about the back of my hand. I’m so delighted to share my palms instead.
6) Marlins closer Leo Nuñez has just given up the tying two-run homer to Lucas Duda and now he hits Scott Hairston to have us entertaining notions that we won’t even need extra innings — we can win it here. No disrespect to Marlins closer Leo Nuñez, but I go to the ol’ taunt by name: “NUUUUUU-NYEHHHHHHZ!” It rarely works for me, but I decide, in a fit of passion, that it can’t hurt. Marlins closer Leo Nuñez…again, no disrespect, but I had the same reaction recently to the phrase “Marlins closer Leo Nuñez” that Don Draper had to learning Roger Sterling was writing a book: “The Marlins have a closer?” Yes, Virginia, I suppose they do. And he strikes out Josh Thole to end the ninth.
7) I was so intent on getting out of Citi Field. Now I’m intent on settling in for a brisk top of the tenth as prelude to a triumphant bottom of the tenth and the gaining of ground on those awful Braves. I don’t mean to lean ahead a little, but what I envision is Jose will lead off and get on base. Justin will advance him in some clever fashion. Then Murphy…or David. “Yeah, David would be a better story, but Murph is bound to do something.” Never put it past Daniel Murphy to do something.
8) Izzy gets his first batter, that awful Brave Omar Infante (all ex-Braves are “that awful Brave” to me; Rafael Furcal is still “that awful Brave” in my book; so is Rico Carty, come to think of it). Gaby Sanchez, who, according to Elias, has shattered all mathematical models and has crafted a batting average of over 1.000 against the Mets, singles. That’s OK, I tell Sharon Chapman (resplendent in a marvelous fitting Bob Scheffing-era Tom Seaver t-shirt). I wanted Izzy to give Sanchez nothing to hit out of the park and he honored my wishes. Sharon turns baseball wisdom on its head: “A hit’s as good as a walk,” and she’s right on. But now Hanley Ramirez places a ball to the right of Reyes and it’s first and second. DeWayne Wise finds right field, which will load the bases, which is terrible, but Duda gets the ball back in and Murphy grabs the relay and Wise — Official Potato Chip and Cheez Doodle of the New York Mets — is caught off first. Murphy’s close enough to Turner, covering said bag, to play hangman. And together they can hang Wise out to dry. The other runners can’t go anywhere. Ohmigod, a second out couldn’t have come more gift-wrapped if we bought it at Tiffany’s. “C’mon Murph! C’mon! C’mon! You can do it! Just toss it to Justin and…hey, Murph, what are you doing? Why are you looking at second? Ramirez isn’t going anywhere. Just toss it…JUST THROW IT! OH MY GOD, WISE GOT BACK IN SAFE! HOLY FUCK ARE YOU STUPID! HOLY FUCK YOU ARE TEN TIMES STUPIDER THAN ANGEL PAGAN! HOLY FUCK YOU COULD BE A FUCKING CONCESSIONS SUPERVISOR AT CITI FIELD! THAT’S HOW FUCKING STUPID YOU ARE!” You and me, Murph. We’re not too bright, are we? You couldn’t throw to first with a clear shot at a second out, and me — well, I thought you would. I’ll meet you in the parking lot afterwards for a spirited game of javelin catch. That’s how stupid the two of us are. Anyway, never put it past Daniel Murphy to do something.
9) With one swing of the bat, Mike Stanton…see? It’s so dramatic when you say it that way. Stanton hits the kind of grand slam Manny Acosta (who’s growing a most handsome natural in tribute to Nino Espinosa) usually gives up and it’s 7-3 from 3-3 even quicker than Duda took it from 3-1 to 3-3. Baseball doesn’t have a clock, but this felt quicker. “Geez, were all three Marlin baserunners on third? It’s like they all just scored at the same time. And now here comes Stanton with the fourth run. Red Lobster doesn’t have that many fish cross its plate.”
10) Bottom of the tenth, Reyes leads off. Flies to left. Takes no extraordinary effort to catch it. With that, I’ve decided, “Let’s just get this over with. The trains are all screwy as it is thanks to the storm that unleashed hail the size of hockey pucks on Long Island. The Mets are lifeless. I just want to get on the LIRR and go home…that is, unless the Mets plan on scoring at least four runs right now, which I doubt they can, but if they do, then I’ll happily stay.” But they don’t, so I leave.
by Greg Prince on 1 August 2011 12:27 am
Last Thursday, when Jason and I availed ourselves of the hospitality of the MLB Fan Cave, the first telecast that came on their massive wall of TV screens was the Marlins at Nationals. Like a good guest, I graciously asked our host, “Where’s the Mets game? I don’t want to watch the bleeping Nationals and Marlins.” (It is a credit to the comfort level of the Cave that I had no compunction about saying whatever bleeping thing I’d ordinarily say during a ballgame.)
Our wish was granted, and we got the Mets and Reds (and the Red Sox and Royals; and the Angels and Tigers; and the Cubs and Brewers; and the A’s and Rays; and the Padres and Diamondbacks before we remembered the Fan Cave wasn’t our living room and departed), yet I couldn’t help but return a wandering eye to the action at Nationals Park. What caught my attention was how bleeping empty it was, and how bleeping empty it always is, how in the seventh season of Washington Nationals baseball, there seemed to be nothing to it.
Stephen Strasburg showed up for ten minutes last year and it was a big deal. Then he went out and the crowds followed him to the exits. Bryce Harper, a Gregg Jefferies for the 21st century, is en route, but he ain’t there yet. Their manager quit at just the instant the team was improving, which was OK by me sentimentally, since it made room for Davey Johnson, but Davey doesn’t look any better in Nats colors than Carlos Beltran does as a Giant (or Rick Reed did as a Twin for that matter; deadline deals are always toughest on the sellers).
Meanwhile, the Nationals come off like an expansion team despite not having been an expansion team since they were in another country 42 years ago. They perpetually loiter in the depths of the National League East (better them than us) and have fewer people over to their domicile than the Fan Cave does on an average Thursday, yet then they’re perfectly capable of beating us two out of three.
Which seems to happen far too often.
I don’t want to them to pick up the pace any more than I do the Phillies, Braves or Marlins, but there seems something particularly pointless to their existence. Those empty seats at Nationals Park last Thursday made me ask, “The Expos left Montreal for this?”
Then, however, I remembered the point of there being the Washington Nationals. It’s so my buddy Jeff Hysen can see the Mets as often as any New York expatriate can.
Jeff was Faith and Fear’s Fantasy Camp correspondent in January 2009 and did a bang-up job of introducing us to the wonders of the laundry loop, the Golden Rope and Pete Schourek’s insistence on good grammar (check it all out here). Though he’s put his ballplaying days behind him since, he remains a fan of the game. He was up in New York the week before last for consecutive visits to Citi Field and stepped right up to greet the Mets all weekend in D.C.
See, Jeff lives down around Washington, presumably by choice. He works there, settled there, raised a family there, even “kills” as a sideline there, but he’s still a New Yorker, still a Met fan, still thrilled that the Nationals stopped being the Expos because it means the Mets step right up to greet him fairly often.
After Saturday night, when he learned neither Jason nor I was able to see as much of the game here as he did there (Jason was at the movies, while I took in a fireworks show that, unfortunately, didn’t completely drown out Wayne Hagin), he retroactively offered his blogging services. Do me one better, I said — when you get home from Sunday’s game, give us a full report: tell us what this weekend in Washington was like for a Mets fan living too far from Sheatown and tell us how it compared with your recent pilgrimage to Flushing.
Jeff obliged. His observations follow.
***
Sunday marked the end of a two-week stretch in which my son Dylan and I went to five Mets games, two in New York and all three this weekend. I won’t get all Donald Hall here about the significance of these days and nights together, but it gave us the opportunity to spend a lot of time doing the thing we love most — watching the Mets — before he departs for his first year of college, at what Greg likes to remind me, because it was mentioned in the movie 1776, Thomas Jefferson’s alma mater (Go Tribe!)
Going to Citi Field was a treat. I know that there are flaws (the sightlines, the too-high left field fence, the unnecessary angles across the outfield, and the fact that you can’t buy a burrito for your burrito-loving offspring) but we had a great time. I hope that you appreciate as much as we did the wonderful picnic area behind the center field scoreboard. Greg, my friend David, Dylan and I had fun out there before the Wednesday Cardinal game. I know that I don’t see Citi Field as often as many of you and I’m on vacation when I’m there, but I really believe it exceeds its reputation.
We were also there for the Thursday shvitz-fest and could have lived without that bland game. Fortunately, the happy memory of Angel Pagan’s neo-historic walkoff home run the night before will stay with us for a long time.
Citi Field is certainly better than Nationals Park. Don’t get me wrong — Nationals Park isn’t bad, but perhaps I think I’ve just gotten used to it by now. It doesn’t have many flourishes, but it is easy to get to by car (though the Metro is overrated and practically unusable on weekends), the seats are much cheaper than at Citi Field, and it has a nice array of food options now that the Big Four from New York (Shake Shack, Blue Smoke, Box Frites, El Taqueria) are on the second level.
What isn’t so great is the home fans. I have to tell you that I do not like Nationals fans. It’s a different kind of feeling than we have for Yankees fans and Phillies fans because Nationals fans are happy when they win and don’t care if they lose. I don’t like that attitude. If you’re a real fan, you should at least be a little upset when your team loses. Don’t give me this “we stink so I don’t care and I had a good time anyway” nonsense but then be in my face when your team wins. You can’t have it both ways.
There are Nationals fans who care, but just not many of them.
I wonder if this is a baseball town. Neither Nationals Park nor Orioles Park at Camden Yards is sold out for any of the Interleague games between the locals, which makes me question if the DC/Baltimore area can support two teams. Perhaps Nationals Park will fill up when Stephen Strasburg comes back and Bryce Harper arrives, but until then, it’s merely a place for some people to go and drink beer.
The Mets scored four in the first on Friday, and Nationals fans retreated to their drinks and Blackberries. You barely heard a word out of them, even when they threatened to tie the game. Saturday was a different story. The place was almost full: Mets fans + bobbleheads = big crowd. We went upstairs to Shake Shack and the line was absurdly long. I guess that Mets fans knew where to go because I’ve heard that the lines aren’t bad for other opponents (I won’t set foot in Nationals Park unless the Mets are playing).
Saturday’s game stunk — Jayson Werth homered early, the Mets’ bats slept; going to the movies and watching fireworks were good alternatives. Harris ended the game by watching a Drew Storen splitter, one almost identical to the one he swung at to conclude the Met loss in Washington on April 28. As Saturday’s game ended, a dope pointed to my scorekeeping son and said “I hope that you put down in big letters that the Nats won.” This was a guy about 50, not some kid.
Congrats, sir. Your team won. You’re still in last place.
Sunday was the deciding game in the series and the one that would determine if Dylan and I could claim a winning record over the course of our live Mets interlude. Because we didn’t, I am compelled to ask this: Why was Willie Harris in the lineup? I’m a Terry Collins fan (I didn’t expect to be but he has won me over), but I think that he’s the only person in the world who likes Willie Harris as a baseball player.
Oh, and when the Nationals took the lead, a different dope leaned over to Dylan and said “did you write that run down?” Classy!
Hey, you’re still in last place.
By the way, we only saw two other people keep score in these three days, and they give you a scorecard when you walk in.
Something I love about going to a Mets game in D.C. is the passion shown by Mets fans. If you go, sit in the lower level on the third base side and you’ll hear something I haven’t heard at Citi Field: the spontaneous chant of “Let’s Go Mets!” It’s done without prompting by the scoreboard and it’s loud and beautiful. It sometimes causes Nationals fans to boo us; that’s all they’ve got — they don’t try to drown us out with their own chant, they merely boo. It just makes us louder.
When we were in New York, Greg started chanting “Let’s Go Mets” without it being shown on the scoreboard; he was so loud that a woman in the row in front of us put her fingers in her ears. I leaned over to Greg and warned him, “You can’t chant ‘Let’s Go Mets’ unless they tell you.” My brother Lyle heard this and asked “are we allowed to clap our hands?” (he knows I don’t like the “everybody clap your hands” command). At Nationals Park, there’s no prompting necessary for us. Not so for Nationals fans who need the scoreboard to know when to cheer. Sadly, it seems to have gotten like that at Citi Field for the home fans, too.
Scott Hairston’s second home run Sunday, tying the game in the ninth, was great, but as you know, our joy was short-lived as the Nationals won without hitting the ball out of the infield. I was convinced that Bobby Parnell was a thrower, not a pitcher until his recent streak of success, but now I’m back to wondering about him. And don’t get me started on Daniel Murphy’s baserunning and fielding…though how can be so bad at that stuff almost all of the time and yet make such a nice play on a bunt in the 9th?
I sure hope it wasn’t heat stroke that caused him to wander the basepaths so aimlessly for eight innings. It was sure hot enough for it.
I’ll be back at Nationals Park in September when the Mets return. I know that some of you will, too. But I’ll be a little sadder because Dylan will be at school. The bad news is that if the Mets fall behind, some dope will chime in to tell me the score. The good news is that I’ll be among thousands of other Mets fans at Citi Field South.
by Jason Fry on 30 July 2011 11:48 pm Eventually it happens — the tumblers align all wrong, and one Faith and Fear blogger has Saturday night commitments, and so does the other Faith and Fear blogger. So you know more about tonight’s game than does your chronicler, and if you want to stop right there, understood.
I always feel guilty when I’m not at my station, for a couple of reasons. First of all, the Mets are my team and I ought to be at least contributing good psychic vibes, even though rationally we all know they’re worth absolutely nothing. The second reason, believe it or not, is crazier. Living in New York City, you’re never all that far from someone in a car listening to WFAN, or a bar with the game on, or people in their apartments watching SNY, or someone walking down the street with MLB At Bat cranked up. There’s a low-level Mets buzz all around you, and it seems like on some level I should be aware of it and intuit something from it — some collective negative mutter, or high-spiritedness in the air. Livestock and pets freak out before earthquakes, so why am I not subliminally aware that Jayson Werth has done something I won’t like?
I know this is insane. But it still bugs me that I obviously lack such a Spidey sense.
Anyway, we got out of Harry Potter (better than the last one because SOMETHING FUCKING HAPPENS, but so desaturated that I left the theater desperate to see a full color wheel) and it was 3-0 Nats in the seventh. I checked in on the Mets periodically until the top of the ninth, when I laid the iPhone down between me and Emily on the (TV-less) restaurant counter, and we watched the balls and strikes advance. We saw the Mets load the bases and, well, anything seemed possible. I thought about switching to Gameday, but decided there was luck in the bare-bones narrative we had. There wasn’t: The count on Willie Harris went to an impossible 1-3, and that was that.
It wasn’t until later that I filled in the details: that Werth had hit a knuckleless knuckler, that Jason Marquis hadn’t even shown up except to pack for Arizona, that the Mets had been throttled by the thoroughly unassuming Yunesky Maya, that Harris had been Wainwrighted by a perfect slider at the knees. And so our streak is over, and we’re back to an ominous 7 1/2 back of Atlanta. When I miss games and we win, I lovingly watch the replays and then the condensed game and generally luxuriate in guaranteed good news. When I miss them and we lose, it’s on to the next one, and led us never speak of this one again.
Besides, I know I didn’t miss much of anything a Mets fan would ever want to see again. My Spidey senses may suck, but they told me that much.
* Noted for the younger set, or those with a better Yankees information blackout than mine: “WW” was Phil Rizzuto’s scorecard notation for “wasn’t watching,” which he did more often than was charming, no matter what Bronx Bombers fans tell you.
by Greg Prince on 30 July 2011 2:48 am When the Wild Card was introduced into baseball in 1994, the Mets were mostly hopeless, yet this extra playoff spot allowed me a touch more hope. So I invoked the 14th Amendment (or perhaps it was Rule V) and decided that if the Mets were five out of the Wild Card at the end of July, they were a contender. This was back when the Mets were nobody’s idea of a contender, so the idea that they could be judged one, by whatever standard you could reasonably apply, was an intoxicating one.
The Five Games Out/End Of July rule did not come into play for several years. The Mets were Nowheresville in 1994 and 1995 at that stage of those seasons and they peaked a touch too soon in 1996 (if being two games under .500 and 4½ out, sixth in line to the Wild Card on July 17, could be said to involve peaking). Then came a bunch of years, 1997-2000, when the Mets played well above the minimum criteria I had set for them and there was no need to split half-game hairs. They were legitimate contenders.
2002 was the first time I had to apply FGO/EOJ in earnest. The Mets had fallen prohibitively behind the Braves in the N.L. East and were generally sluggish in their approach to their jobs, yet I looked up from their Alomar/Vaughn morass and there they were: four games above .500 and 4½ out behind the Dodgers, with the Giants the only other team ahead of them on July 31. That certified them more or less contenders — more, really — so I was forced to take them seriously. So was Steve Phillips, who acquired four playoff-chase reinforcements (giving up, among others, an anonymous minor leaguer named Jason Bay in the process, proving, perhaps, that Steve Phillips possessed extraordinary long-term vision). Thus fortified by the presence of John Thomson, Mark Little, Jason Middlebrook and Steve Reed, I settled in for a spirited run at the National League Wild Card, and…the Mets went poof! They lost five straight to open August and soon dropped a dozen in a row besides.
In 2002, Keith Hernandez, then of MSG Network, wrote that the Mets “quit,” which was too tough a word for those Mets’ delicate sensibilities. To borrow the nomenclature of the cuddlier Keith we hear on SNY these days, it was as if they had applied “vanishing cream” and disappeared. However you framed it, the Mets of nine years ago only looked like contenders on paper, and then not at all after July ended.
Following that bracing experience, I kind of forgot about FGO/EOJ and went with my best available read of the subject. When the Mets were kind of close with a decent interval of schedule remaining, was there any reason to believe they were contenders? Could I picture them hanging on, gaining ground, compelling me to care about them more than habitually or nominally? Would I…should I get sucked into obsessing over their remote chances enough so that when a likely letdown occurred, it would be worth the anguish I would endure?
That’s where I am now, at the question mark.
I never — never — dreamed that 2011 would ask me to give this matter any thought. Once the Mets stopped being 5-13 in April, I took that as the victory. There were ups, there were (as I saw it) inevitable downs and there were surprising rebounds. And then there’d be downs, and I’d tell them, that’s OK, I know you’re not really any good, whatever you do the rest of the way is fine, I know it won’t be much.
Then, suddenly, there are more ups, a few downs, another rebound. The funny thing about the downs is they don’t last long and they don’t seem to be keyed to what you’d assume would be fatal setbacks.
Injury after injury…not that much of a factor.
More inexperience than experience…experience simply gathers the more the inexperienced play.
Expulsion by trade of accomplished mainstays who were doing very well for themselves and for the team…now that’s really interesting, because the Mets have voluntarily removed two genuine All-Stars from their roster in the past two weeks, and those who continue to be Mets seem to have taken their absence as almost a personal challenge.
Management took away their closer — a perfectly understandable business decision — and it’s hard to say it’s hurt them tangibly. Then the slugging right fielder, by everybody’s account the bulwark of the operation, was sent away via another perfectly understandable business decision, and they haven’t lost since it happened.
All right, you might say, it’s been a whole three games since Carlos Beltran was traded, which is no sample size at all. Except if the Mets had lost their first post-Beltran game, we would have probably taken that as a terrible sign of what was to come. Or if the Mets had lost the second game, particularly after building a formidable lead, we would have begun the writing-off process in ink. Now that it’s three games after Carlos, and the Mets are 3-0, and they’re hitting almost without pause, and they’ve squirmed out of uncomfortable situations and emerged essentially unscathed…
…well, I tell ya, I’ve begun to look at the standings as if there’s a point to it. And I’ve begun to glance ever so subtly at the schedule ahead. And for the first time since the 2011 season began, I thought of October and us in the same hypothetical paragraph. I mean, not really, and not seriously, and not without rolling my eyes a little…but it’s almost the end of July; and we’re almost five out of the Wild Card; and we’ve won five straight, the last three of them without Carlos Beltran; and though torrential offensive tears inevitably subside, we have players who tend to get better instead of get worse, so the net-net, as sharp people in boring meetings like to say, conceivably veers to the good.
David Wright is back and smoking. Jose Reyes is still on his feet. Daniel Murphy has gone from sub to grinder to hero and continues to sandwich base hits. Dillon Gee has ten wins. Jason Isringhausen hasn’t melted. Johan Santana recently used his left arm in a game of some sort. D.J. Carrasco used his right arm in an inning of great import. The Mets have the exact same record they did at this stage of the 2002 season, but bring an exponentially better vibe to the ballpark every day. They’re ahead of where they were in 2009 and 2010, late Julys when they were statistically viable for the Wild Card but substantively done for the season. And they’re way beyond what they were when 2011 shaped up as a lost cause at worst, an exercise in head-patting place-holding at best.
They’re 6½ in back of Atlanta, with Arizona, Pittsburgh and St. Louis also ahead of them — but each of them only by a couple of fingers. The Nationals demand their attention for two more games, then the Marlins for three, but the Braves materialize at Citi Field on Friday night. That, like the Mets’ tenuous status as a cusp-contender, is neither here nor there. All that matters is the next game to be played; I’ve always said that and I’ve always believed it.
Still, it’s July 30. Frankie Rodriguez is gone. Carlos Beltran is gone. Ike Davis is long out and probably won’t be in. Johan Santana has yet to make like General MacArthur and return. It’s a reach to think about the Mets and October, or the Mets and September, or maybe even the Mets and six days from now.
Yet here I am, wary of letdowns, cognizant of anguish, understanding fully the definition of long odds…and I’m kind of, sort of thinking about the Mets on the fringes of a context I didn’t anticipate, don’t fully buy into, and can barely believe.
Holy crap, they got me again.
by Greg Prince on 29 July 2011 10:03 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” 100th game in any Mets season, the “best” 101st game in any Mets season, the “best” 102nd 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 100: July 28, 1993 — METS 5 Marlins 4
(Mets All-Time Game 100 Record: 24-25; Mets 1993 Record: 35-65)
Nothing lasts forever, and there’s an individual who will drink to that…though you couldn’t have blamed Anthony Young had he started drinking long before it was confirmed eternity isn’t always what it appears to be.
Young — or AY, as he came to be known — was considered a leading pitching prospect in the Mets organization when he was called up to the majors in August 1991. He started eight games and won two of them. Pitching in a rotation alongside David Cone, Bret Saberhagen, Sid Fernandez and Dwight Gooden, AY started 1992 brilliantly, throwing a complete game six-hitter against the Cardinals the first week of the season. Used in relief later that April, he raised his record to 2-0 with three-and-a-third solid innings of work.
That would end AY’s familiarity with W’s for a mighty long time.
It’s not as if Anthony Young did not contribute to the 1992 Mets. When injury sidelined John Franco all of July and then for the last six weeks of the season, AY filled in admirably as closer, notching 15 saves to tie for the team lead. Thing is, Young was available to pick up for Franco because he had pitched his way out of the rotation. By the time Jeff Torborg had seen enough of him in that role, AY was 2-7. And come September, Anthony’s save magic began to turn sporadic. He wasn’t only blowing his saves, but he was turning them into losses…his own losses as well as the team’s. In his final outing of the season, at Veterans Stadium, AY came on in the ninth to protect a 3-2 lead and, within four batters, the Mets were trailing 5-3, the eventual final score.
That the loss came in relief didn’t keep it from being a loss. That two of the runs scored were unearned didn’t keep them being scored. That Young seemed to attract bad luck to his cause was becoming a very disturbing fact of Met life. AY finished 1992 with a record of 2 wins and 14 losses — the last 14 of them in a row.
And the worst was yet to come.
1993 dawned. The sun failed to shine on any Mets. Anthony Young lived in a state of perpetual solar eclipse. As the Mets buried themselves under an avalanche of indifference and ineptitude, Young evolved into their most sympathetic character, but far from its most successful (and it wouldn’t have taken much to have exceeded any and all 1993 Mets). His first appearance became his 15th consecutive loss. He pitched in nothing but Met losses for almost two months, during which time Torborg was fired and a couple more decisions fell on Anthony’s head. AY was on a personal 18-game losing streak when new skipper Dallas Green got him an inning and a five-run lead. AY didn’t blow it.
If that was the moral equivalent of a roll, Young didn’t remain on it for very long. Having matched Roger Craig’s 18 consecutive losses from 1963, AY took aim at another early Met’s uninterrupted flow of futility, one whose streak seeped into multiple seasons the way Young’s did.
In 1962, Craig Anderson was humming along with a 3-1 record when he made the mistake of not retiring. Anderson went 0-16 the rest of 1962, returned from Triple-A Buffalo in September 1963 to lose two more and just about capped his Met career by taking another loss in May 1964. That gave him a 19-game losing streak across three seasons that Anderson never got to end. His last appearance came in the third inning of the Mets-Giants 1964 Memorial Day doubleheader nightcap, the one that would plow forth for 23 innings (the Mets lost it, but Anderson was far removed from the decision).
Roger Craig. Craig Anderson. There were Craigs from the mustiest past the Mets could muster. Wherever the Craigs stuck their names — first, last — they had an impossible time abutting them next to a W. Their marks seemed to fit everything you’d ever heard about 1962 and 1963 to a tee, let alone an L. For Mets fans who never saw them pitch, their burden seemed unimaginable.
Then those Mets fans were introduced to Anthony Young and they got the picture. In the time it took to get reacquainted with those early ’60s sufferers, a new, unwanted chapter was added to the annals of Met unsuccess.
On May 28, 1993, AY entered a 2-2 game in the tenth at Cincinnati, was undermined by a Howard Johnson error and a bunt single and…suddenly it was Reds 5 Mets 2. Anthony Young lost his 19th in a row, surpassing Roger Craig and matching Craig Anderson (to say nothing of his own uniform number, though after losing that many, the 27-year-old righty had to be feeling like a very OLD 19).
The bullpen was proving not to be AY’s bailiwick, so Green returned him to the starting rotation at the beginning of June (the Mets were 17-31, so what the hell?). Young left for a pinch-hitter in the sixth at Wrigley Field, holding a 1-0 lead. Mikes Draper and Maddux promptly blew it for him. Another Mets loss, but an ND for AY. Progress? If it was, it was fleeting.
On June 8, 1993, with his ERA a quite respectable 3.21, Anthony Young tried starting again. He didn’t pitch terribly, which is not the same as pitching well, but four runs in six innings (three earned) weren’t enough to prevent AY from taking the loss in another game versus the Cubs, this one at Shea. That made it 20 in a row, putting Craig Anderson in his cracked rearview.
Green kept starting Young. Young kept pitching not necessarily awful baseball, but the Mets kept finding ways to lose when he pitched, and Young kept finding ways to be on the mound when the other team took the lead they’d never surrender.
On June 27, 1993, AY was moving on from expansion Mets to Boston Braves on his ladder of downward mobility. Cliff Curtis had lost a worst-ever 23 consecutive decisions for the Braves of 1910-1911, teams so bad they went under the names “Doves” and “Rustlers,” perhaps in the hope nobody would be able to determine their whereabouts. Young, however, bumped into Curtis. He had lost 23 for the 1992-1993 Mets. If there was ever a time to get off the not-too-merry-go-round, this start at Shea was it.
The Mets scored two runs for Young in the first. He didn’t give up a hit for three innings. And then…a walk, a single, a ground ball double play which proved illusory when three successive hits produced three Redbird runs. Young pitched seven innings that Sunday. He gave up five runs. It wasn’t a quality start, but it didn’t seem bad enough to merit immortal infamy.
But it did. The Cardinals won, 5-3. Joe Magrane improved his record to 7-6. Anthony Young took the loss to fall to 0-10 on the year, and 0-24 since his last win.
Cliff Curtis was off the hook. AY was now the biggest loser.
And it just kept going. Young trailed 3-1 after five innings in his next start. The rains came and, like Anthony’s streak, wouldn’t go away. Young was saddled with his 25th straight loss, though credited with a complete game for his considerable troubles. In his start after that, Young kept the clouds at bay for seven innings. He gave up no runs and only a leadoff single to the San Diego Padres. Problem was Andy Benes gave up no runs to the Mets, and only one hit. Something had to give, and, unsurprisingly, it was AY’s luck. With two outs in the top of the eighth, Kevin Higgins singled and Archi Cianfrocco homered to put Anthony behind 2-0…the score by which he absorbed his 26th consecutive loss.
Kevin Higgins. Archi Cianfrocco. The Mets’ lineup. It truly didn’t matter who attempted to get in the way of Anthony Young and a win. Sooner or later, somebody would.
After throwing his best start of the year, Young was removed from the rotation. Returned to relief, the Mets began to win when he pitched, but never at the moment that would have gotten AY a win. On July 22, he could sate himself with a two-inning save at Dodger Stadium, his first of 1993. But lest he grow too comfortable acquainting himself with something approximating victory, he walked Dave Hansen with the bases loaded in the bottom of the tenth two days later to give L.A. a 5-4 win, and to stick himself with his 27th consecutive loss.
There’s really nowhere to go but up in the Anthony Young story at this point, but that was pretty apparent back when he was on his fifth, tenth, twelfth, seventeenth loss in a row. All Anthony Young could do was detect the route down. If there was a hole, he would dig it for himself. And then he’d cover it with dirt so nobody bearing a win could discover him.
More of the same awaited him on a Wednesday night in Flushing, July 28. The Mets were playing the expansion Marlins: not a particularly good expansion team, but eight games better than the Mets coming in to the evening. The Mets were seventh in a seven-team division, the only year the N.L. East contained such an unwieldy number. Seventh place was long accepted as the fate of the 1993 Mets by late July. None of the 24,377 souls sweating it out at Shea could have been particularly concerned anymore with the indignity attached to finishing seventh. What they wanted, should the pitcher on their minds all summer get a chance to make it happen, was to see 27 not grow into 28.
Fat chance.
On July 28, 1993, Anthony Young entered a 3-3 game in the top of the ninth. He surrendered a single to Benito Santiago. Todd Hundley couldn’t handle the sacrifice bunt laid down by Darrell Whitmore (E-2). Walt Weiss reached on his own bunt. Whaddaya know? The bases are loaded and nobody is out.
Where had everybody seen this movie 27 times before?
In a season when Met sequels got worse and worse, a plot twist revealed itself. Pinch-hitter Rich Renteria grounded to third and Bobby Bonilla started a 5-2-3 double play. The lead run was cut down at home. Marlins remained on second and third, but one more out would extricate Young from another disaster flick.
But this was 1993. This was a 162-game disaster flick. The next batter was ex-Met Chuck Carr, a speedy fellow whose mouth was known to motor as fast as his legs. He, like Whitmore and Weiss before him, bunted. And, like Whitmore and Weiss before him, Carr reached base…and while he did, Whitmore scored to put Florida ahead, 4-3.
The pitcher of record on the losing side? Even after he struck out Bret Barberie to end the top of the ninth? That would be the same guy it always was.
Anthony Young’s only hope of avoiding a 28th consecutive setback was a Met rally, and it would have to come against All-Star closer Bryan Harvey. The Marlins would win but 64 games in 1993, yet Harvey would earn 45 saves. He had already racked up 29 of them.
Plus, these were the 1993 Mets, a team that had not long before lost 45 of 58 games, a team that was inexorably en route to losing more games in a single season than any Mets team since 1965 — and doing all that while throwing a six-month tantrum that crested the previous weekend in Los Angeles. That was when Vince Coleman was charged with tossing a firecracker “significantly more powerful than a cherry bomb” out of Eric Davis’s car in the Dodger Stadium parking lot and injuring a two-year-old girl, among others. It was only the most glaring episode in a campaign whose standings may have been reminiscent of the Stengel-era Mets, but otherwise definitively delineated the “lovable” from the “losers”.
Still, when they weren’t being snippy or surly or downright dangerous toward the outside world, these Mets professed a genuine desire to pull their one truly pitiable teammate out of his historic hole. Wouldn’t it be great, they seemed to ask after every Young loss, if we could score a couple of runs for AY?
It would be. But what were the odds they’d do that? Or do it twice here in the bottom of the ninth? If you were a Mets fan, all you could do was rub your 28th rabbit’s foot raw and hope for the best for the pitcher who wasn’t great, but surely wasn’t this bad.
Jeff McKnight pinch-hit for Tim Bogar to lead off the bottom of the ninth and singled off Harvey. Dave Gallagher proved the Mets could bunt, too, and moved McKnight to second. Ryan Thompson was the next hitter and he cleverly lofted a pop fly into No Fish Land somewhere between first base and right field. It fell among three would-be fielders and brought home McKnight with the tying run. That released Young from his usual hook.
But could the Mets do more than that for their beleaguered teammate? You wouldn’t want to trust your fate to this 1993 bunch, but they’re all Young had, so he did.
A Joe Orsulak flyout is what AY got for investing his trust in them, but that made it only two out. The Mets’ next batter was one of the all-time greats…or was before he became a Met. In any event, Eddie Murray was Eddie Murray and just maybe he could be the key that unlocked Young from his cell of his misery and his seeming life sentence of endless defeat.
It took only one pitch from Harvey. Murray lashed it on a line to right field. Thompson ran…
…and ran…
…and ran…
…and Thompson scored.
The Mets won 5-4.
The winning pitcher was Anthony Young, he who lost 27 consecutive decisions but who would never lose a 28th. AY had just won his first game since either the flood caused Noah to visit Home Depot or April 19, 1992. It was hard to tell because it felt like forever. But it wasn’t. The longest losing streak any one pitcher had ever suffered through was over.
“It’s like winning the World Series,” Anthony said in the postgame jubilation.
Of course it wasn’t. It was nothing like winning the World Series. Teams that win the World Series aren’t elated to have drawn to within seven games of sixth place, improve their record to thirty games below .500 or boost one of their pitchers to 1-27 in his last 28 decisions. But forgive Anthony Young his exuberant misjudgments. He had no relevant experience where World Series were concerned. He was a 1993 Met.
It wasn’t like winning the World Series. It was like winning the one game that you never thought Anthony Young would win.
Which, unto itself, was plenty good.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On July 28, 1962, two of the veterans with which George Weiss was so intent on stocking the baby Mets showed they could still play a little bit. Thirty-nine year-old Gene Woodling stroked a two-run pinch-homer in the fifth inning at Sportsman’s Park to complete a four-run rally that brought the Mets from a 5-3 deficit to a 7-5 lead over the Cardinals. That Saturday’s eventual 9-8 win would be secured via the contributions of another graybeard, 35-year-old Richie Ashburn, who went 4-for-5 on the day and, doing his best Maury Wills impression, swiped two bases.
Though Ashburn, like Woodling, was on his figurative last legs, playing his final big league season, he was going out with as much of a bang as any 1962 Met could detonate. Two days after playing a big role in a rare Mets win, Whitey would return to one of his old stomping grounds, Wrigley Field, to participate in that summer’s second All-Star Game as the Mets’ lone representative. The former Cub and Phillie (mostly Phillie) singled and scored…and, as was the case so often in 1962, Ashburn’s team lost.
When league action resumed, Richie didn’t slow down, finishing the Mets’ inaugural season as their leading hitter, sporting a nifty .306 average. Before Ashburn exited New York, he was honored by Met beat writers as the team’s first MVP. That is to say he was considered the most valuable member of the worst team ever. His prize was a boat that the Nebraskan docked in New Jersey.
It sank.
GAME 101: July 29, 1988 — METS 1 Pirates 0
(Mets All-Time Game 101 Record: 19-30; Mets 1988 Record: 61-40)
It was the showdown the Mets weren’t necessarily expecting when the season began, but when it came, they were ready for it.
Their archrival of the moment wasn’t the Cardinals, who got on their nerves twice in the three previous years by edging them out in hotly contested pennant races. Instead, it was a resurgent pack of Pirates, absent from the upper echelon of the standings for a half-decade and not directly in the Mets’ path to first place in a decade-and-a-half.
Pittsburgh was once the longstanding class of the National League East, winning division titles five of the first seven seasons there were division titles (while the Mets took the other two). They remained a force through the late ’70s and didn’t entirely drop off the contending map until the Mets re-established their own credentials. But come 1984, they fell with a thud that echoed around the basement of the N.L. East. The Pirates were perennial cellar-dwellers in the mid-1980s, almost as bad as they’d been when Branch Rickey was telling an underpaid Ralph Kiner, circa 1952, that the Bucs finished last with him, they could finish last without him.
The Pirates ceased finishing last in 1987 despite spending most of a fourth consecutive season there. The Mets received a sneak preview of the trouble Pittsburgh might cause them when they Bucs beat ’em three of six in September, a year after the Mets took 17 of 18 from them between April and October. Yes, the Pirates were turning a corner. They had a second-year manager named Jim Leyland spurring a core of talented kids to new heights, most notably 24-year-old third baseman Bobby Bonilla and 22-year-old left fielder Barry Bonds. Their sizzling September not only threw the Mets off course in their quest to catch the Cardinals, it pulled the Pirates out of last and into fourth.
When 1988 rolled around, the Pirates saw no reason they couldn’t aim higher…directly at the front-running Mets. The teams ran 1 and 2 in the East almost the entire summer leading up to a four-game series at Shea that could potentially change not just the standings, but the tone for the rest of the year. The Mets led Pittsburgh by 7½ games on July 4; seventeen days later, the margin was cut to a half-game. The Mets weren’t scoring much in July and the Pirates simply weren’t going away. When their showdown approached, the combatants were separated by only two games.
Once the teams got down to the business of their Friday night opener, there was no daylight between them, thanks to a pair of lefties at the absolute top of their respective games. Grizzled Bobby Ojeda and the oxymoronically named John Smiley kept each other’s teammates stymied for seven innings. It was 0-0, with precious few baserunners on either side. Ojeda gave up only three hits heading into the eighth. Smiley, a baby-faced assassin of 23, allowed only a second-inning single to Kevin McReynolds. The Pirates would not let the Mets out of their sights.
But the Mets didn’t particularly care for being tailed. Ojeda kept firing from his arsenal of dead-fish bullets, overcoming a Dave Magadan error that opened the eighth and retiring the next three Pirates he faced, the last of them Bonds, who flied to Tim Teufel. Then it was Smiley’s turn to extend the suspense for the 49,584 on hand. He got Howard Johnson to foul out to his catcher, Mike LaValliere, and perhaps saw light at the end of the inning’s tunnel. His next batter was eighth-place hitter Kevin Elster. Get Elster — he of the struggling sub-.220 average — then you have the pitcher’s spot.
Smiley, however, didn’t get Elster. Quite the opposite, actually. The rookie shortstop was all over Smiley’s changeup and belted the first pitch he saw over the left field wall for a 1-0 Met lead. Given an edge, Ojeda was sent to the plate and he singled. Smiley immediately returned to his grimly efficient self, flying out Mookie Wilson and grounding out Teufel, but Elster’s home run had done maximum damage to the Bucs. It not only put them behind, but it kept Ojeda in the game.
The ninth inning brought the Pirates’ two-, three- and four-hitters to the plate. Among them, Jose Lind, Andy Van Slyke and Bonilla saw all of seven pitches, which became three quick outs to end a 2:07 game that couldn’t have lasted much longer lest everyone in attendance be choked by the prevailing tension. Ojeda’s and Smiley’s particular type of scintillating duel — in which each man threw a complete game while allowing no more than three hits — became only the second 1-0 win in Mets history to meet such stringent standards. The first time it occurred was in 1965, when Al Jackson, on a two-hitter, defeated Claude Osteen, who lost on a three-hitter after Billy Cowan (batting in the .170s) homered in the top of the ninth at Los Angeles.
As for the 1988 race, this was just one game and the lead was no more than three games for now, but the Mets defended the castle as effectively as could be imagined considering how overwhelmingly Smiley smothered their offense most of the night. The youngster was so brilliant for so long…and then one mistake got him.
“It seemed,” Smiley admitted, “like you knew it was coming.”
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On July 29, 2004, Eric Valent made an eclectic list that much more unusual when he tripled in the seventh inning of the Mets’ 10-1 win at Montreal. When the utilityman touched third base after earlier singling, doubling and homering, he became the eighth Met ever to cycle, joining Jim Hickman, Tommie Agee, Mike Phillips, Keith Hernandez, Alex Ochoa and John Olerud in the exclusive club. Whether Valent goes down as the most obscure Met to cycle is open to debate. He did play fewer games as a Met than any of his cyclemates and one would be hard-pressed to remember anything about him besides that one impressive feat.
But what a thing to be remembered for.
Valent made certain he was going to get remembered, too, or figuratively die trying. Eric sent a ball deep into the right field corner of Olympic Stadium off righty Roy Corcoran, and anything third base coach Matt Galante may or may not have signaled was going to be for naught. “I just kept going when I hit it,” Valent said. He was rewarded for his determination. “When I hit the ball in the corner like that, I knew I was going to third. There aren’t a lot of guys who can say they hit for the cycle, no matter how long they play.”
Eric’s major league career would be over within ten months of that Thursday afternoon in Montreal, but he can still say he hit for the cycle. Not a lot of guys can.
GAME 102: July 24, 2008 — METS 3 Phillies 1
(Mets All-Time Game 102 Record: 24-25; Mets 2008 Record: 55-47)
First place hadn’t been so blatantly on the line for the Mets and an on-site opponent in quite so literal a fashion in 23 years before this series with the Phillies commenced. The two teams — rivals in earnest for the first time despite brushing up against one another geographically since 1962 — were tied for the top spot in the N.L. East when Philadelphia traveled to New York for a three-game set. Two nights in, after each team won one and lost one, they were tied again.
This, then, would be the rubber game that would decide who could claim sole possession of first for…well, for as long as whoever grabbed it could keep hold of it. But aside from a one-game lead with sixty to play, winning the finale would serve as a statement of sorts — a preamble for the rest of what figured to be a tight two-team race the rest of the way.
As much baseball was left to play in 2008, the Mets and Phillies competed as if there would be no tomorrow.
Both teams cleared their throats cautiously this Thursday afternoon at Shea. Certainly their bats were whisper-quiet. Ageless Jamie Moyer (technically 45) was just about untouchable, going seven innings and giving up only a run and two hits. His opposite number, however, was not to be outpitched. Oliver Perez was stupendous: 7⅔ innings, just six hits, one walk and one run (a Jayson Werth homer) and twelve strikeouts. Ollie marked up Utley and Howard thrice apiece on Shea’s Azek K board.
It was 1-1 heading to the bottom of the eighth when one of the truly bit players in this drama moved upstage. Third-string catcher Robinson Cancel — appearing in his first major league season since 1999 — pinch-hit and singled off J.C. Romero. Jose Reyes, who could probably lap Cancel around the bases twice, was called on to bunt his lead-footed teammate to second. Questionable strategy from the mind of Jerry Manuel? Maybe, but it worked as intended and Cancel advanced ninety feet. Romero drew a soft liner out of Endy Chavez for the second out, then walked David Wright intentionally. It would all come down to lefty pitcher Romero versus lefty swinger Carlos Delgado.
Very hot lefty swinger Delgado, it bears noting. Starting with a lights-out performance at Yankee Stadium a few weeks earlier, Delgado was en fuego, driving in 24 runs in 24 games, posting a staggering 1.203 OPS in the process. If anyone was likely to get Delgado out in a big, late-inning situation, however, it was Romero. In eighteen at-bats dating to 2000, when Romero was a Twin and Delgado a Blue Jay, Carlos had collected only two hits.
In this battle of battle-tested lefties, it was Romero who got left out. Delgado’s second-half RBI storm rained down on this hot, sunny Queens day, with a thunderbolt of a double into the left field corner. Cancel scored. Wright scored, exulting in such a fashion that he resembled the Captain Morgan mascot as he made his way to the dugout. Carlos, on the other hand, did his best Robinson Cancel impression and was cut down at third trying to take the extra base on the throw home.
Billy Wagner was called on to attempt to close out the Phillies and retake first place for the Mets. After a quick pair of outs, Chris Coste reached him for a single. Charlie Manuel sent up Jimmy Rollins as a pinch-hitter. The All-Star shortstop and Shea bête noire was held out of the starting lineup after reporting late to the ballpark. Jimmy claimed he had gotten caught in traffic, but anyone notorious for proclaiming he played for the “team to beat” should know how to beat New York City traffic. With two out in the ninth, Rollins must have been worried about rush hour on the Grand Central, because he swung at Wagner’s first offering. He grounded it to Wright at third, who forced Coste at second and, with a 3-1 victory sealed on Wagner’s final Shea Stadium save, the Mets were in first.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On July 25, 1978, Shea Stadium’s diehards forgot who they hated more than any single visiting player and gave him a standing ovation nobody could have possibly envisioned five Octobers earlier. Pete Rose was Public Enemy No. 1 in Flushing dating back to the day he slid a little too hard into Buddy Harrelson in the 1973 NLCS. A steady stream of flying debris greeted him when he took his position in left field after that brawl for the ages concluded. The venom might have faded over time, but the thought that Rose would someday be vociferously cheered at Shea was absurd.
Then came the 1978 hitting streak that captured much of America’s attention. Charlie Hustle topped thirty games and kept going. Joe DiMaggio’s standard of 56 was off in the distance, but the modern National League record was clearly in sight, and it lay straight ahead at Shea Stadium. Rose came to New York having hit in 36 games in a row; the mark at which he was aiming (for the time being) was 37, set by Boston Brave Tommy Holmes in 1945.
And wouldn’t you know that Tommy Holmes, generations later, was an employee of the Mets, working in their community relations department? Thus, Holmes was on hand the Monday night Rose tied him at 37 (as Mets fans stood and applauded their archvillain for three minutes). The old Brave outfielder and native of Brooklyn was there on Tuesday night, too, as Pete attempted to oust Tommy from the record book.
Which he did, in the third inning of a scoreless game against Craig Swan. Rose, improbably, was feted lavishly by a crowd comprised of many of the same folks who no doubt called for his head in the not altogether distant past. But 1973’s evildoer knew how to win over a hostile throng. Sweetly, Rose shared his big moment with Holmes. Both men stood at first base and basked in the appreciation of 38,000-plus history-minded New Yorkers who normally would have no use for any Red not named Tom Seaver.
When the impromptu ceremony ended, Rose went back to collecting base hits. He got two more off of Swan, but that was OK, because his teammates registered only four hits among them, while the Mets did their best to overshadow their unusually celebrated visitor by pounding out a dozen safeties. That provided plenty of support for Swannie, who got over his incidental place in history and went nine to beat Cincinnati, 9-2.
by Jason Fry on 28 July 2011 10:41 pm Carlos Beltran is wearing black and orange, like he was shorn of blue in a Citi Field makeover. It looks weird. It will for a couple of days, and then it won’t much matter. By then, I presumably won’t be listening to Giants-Phillies games just because Beltran’s a part of them.
The post-Beltran Mets can help by doing their part, as they did yesterday and again today, completing a four-game sweep of the Reds in their Grating American Ballpark. I love the view of the river, and the park looks nice in general, but I can’t get past that tower/restaurant/batter’s eye thing in center field. I get that it’s supposed to remind me of a riverboat, but sitting there marooned behind the center-field fence it reminds me of a riverboat that was dropped out of a cargo plane, and moving it was such a pain in the ass that ballpark engineers just shored it up, propped up the smokestacks vaguely nearby and skedaddled. Plus the out-of-town scoreboard blurbs look like 20-foot Chiclets — I don’t think the out marker needs to be bigger than the left fielder’s head. Now that I’m a little more used to new ballparks, it occurs to me that most of their flaws are a product of trying too hard.
Anyway, the Mets had never swept the Reds in four on the road — nada, zip, zilch, not once. Today wasn’t exactly easy — they escaped with a 10-9 win, and the game seemed a lot closer than that, like the final score was Mets 10, Reds 9.9992. The ball was flying, as evidenced by an excuse-me home run from the very strong Joey Votto and a no-excuses-needed blast from Popeye Miguel Cairo, as well as repeated drives up the gap and down the lines by a happily long list of Mets, led by Lucas Duda and Jason Bay. The heat helped lift balls — by the middle innings the ballpark was a red sea of empty seats, with the crowd having largely departed to huddle in front of misters in the concourse. For which I blamed them not at all — the sight of a sweat-soaked, armored John Hirschbeck behind the plate was frankly a little scary.
Greg and I were together for this one, in a unique setting — we took it in from the couch of the MLB Fan Cave in lower Manhattan, in the old Tower Records space. (When I realized the connection, I tried to think of a CD I’d bought where I was now sitting, except I remembered it was Tower Records and everything cost $17.98, which is why a] I never bought anything; b] Tower Records doesn’t exist anymore; and c] CDs basically don’t exist anymore.) The Fan Cave is continuously inhabited by two bloggers — Orioles fan Ryan Wagner and Yankees fan Mike O’Hara — who have a bank of 15 HDTVs at their disposal, as well as lots of computers. Besides the occasional dorky Mets blogger, their visitors include rock stars and baseball players (today brought the frontman of the Dropkick Murphys and the guy from Megadeth), there are pool and air-hockey tables, and there’s a club in the basement for events. The Fan Cave is only lacking a secret stairwell to a submarine base to make every part of your Y chromosome (and a few Xs I know) thrum with happiness. I asked Wagner how he kept track of all those games at once (I had whiplash with just Mets-Reds and Nats-Marlins on), and he responded with a pretty great simile: It’s like driving, he said. The three big TVs in the middle are the windshield, the smaller ones above are the rearview mirror, the smaller ones below are the dash, and you’re constantly scanning. (Wagner and O’Hara both seem to have eyes in the back of their head, keeping pretty good track of several games at once while multitasking across the room.)
The principals were pretty busy, so Greg and I took in the Mets from their couch, talking baseball with each other and a pal from MLB and everyone who crossed our paths. Aside from the terror of watching the Mets try to blow a fairly big lead, it was enormous fun — thanks to our hosts for letting us put our feet up in their temple of baseball for a few hours. Plus I got a ball from a dispenser outside for checking in to Showtime’s Giants documentary on Foursquare. Try it — it really does work.
Greg got very quiet as Manny Acosta did what Manny Acosta generally does, but order was restored, and a ninth-inning wild pitch gave the Mets a crucial cushion for Jason Isringhausen. For my part, I was only theoretically worried, which is what happens when your team can do no wrong. Since that never lasts, my philosophy is to not question it and allow yourself momentary smugness.
But back to Izzy. It’ll be strange and faintly worrisome if he’s back next year, but for now I’m thrilled to have him as closer and team mentor. Izzy has become the Mets’ Elvis: Those of us who are old enough remember Skinny Izzy, all aglow with the fires of youth and potential, even as we cheer for Fat Izzy, who has become wide but also wise. (He’s not that wide, actually — just trying to tie in with Elvis. Anyway, it’s not like you’d confuse the 1995 me with the 2011 me.) Perhaps the Mets should have an Izzy postage stamp night, with fans randomly getting the ’95 stamp on which our young badass wears his Mets cap and a strip club’s softball uniform or the ’11 Izzy stamp in which the veteran shrugs and smiles slightly, well aware of the fickleness of fate and pitcher’s body parts, and how enduring everything that happens with them will eventually teach even the most resistant student a lesson or two. Today, those lessons were enough — tomorrow, no one can say. Skinny Izzy would never have understood that; Fat Izzy learned it long ago. Baseball will do that to you.
by Greg Prince on 28 July 2011 2:08 am After pitching the Mets to a complete game victory over Cincinnati, Mike Pelfrey told Kevin Burkhardt his team is focused on making the playoffs and then, if the matchups break right, eliminating Carlos Beltran and the San Francisco Giants. He said it with a straight face and I listened without laughing out loud.
Oh, the Mets aren’t likely to make the playoffs, but why tell them that? Why tell them the competitive portion of their season is over just because one of their two or three very best players is no longer one of them? Why bother explaining to them the niceties of the standings and how there are too many teams in front of them; and that they’re too many games behind the one at the head of the list; and that there aren’t, quite frankly, enough very good players among the lot of them to take this slightly above .500 song of a season and make it exponentially better?
That portion of reality is irrelevant when a team has 58 games remaining, isn’t mathematically eliminated and accepts that no day begins with a foregone conclusion of how it will end. I would have guessed the Mets, gutted of Beltran, might mope into their next contest and mope out of it with a desultory loss.
I would have guessed wrong.
It wasn’t so much what Pelfrey articulated after the game that convinced me 2011 isn’t wholly kaput but how Jose Reyes appeared when it started. After beating out an infield hit (gracious hometown scoring where Joey Votto was concerned), Reyes didn’t seem to be in mourning. He sported a magnificent smile and made with the spotlight/claw toward the Mets’ dugout. That’s when I had the sense that this team, whatever its fondness for Carlos Beltran, wasn’t going to sit shiva while the Reds went to town on them.
Pelfrey (9 IP) was the Pelf he rarely if ever is. Murphy (4-5) was the Murph he always is…just blessedly less adventuresome. Wright (4 RBI) was as Wright as rain. Reyes was Reyes, which is about as good as anybody could be. Duda was a slugging right fielder, which was very helpful since we just traded one of those to San Francisco for Zack Wheeler.
The Mets were a beautiful team Wednesday night. They continued to make us proud, whether their playoff talk was sincerely delusional or delusionally sincere — even if they were permanently minus one of the most beautiful players the franchise ever hosted.
If you loved watching Carlos Beltran as a New York Met, you were very lucky to have had that opportunity for the bulk of seven seasons. I know I was.
If you didn’t love watching Carlos Beltran as a New York Met, that’s your problem.
Too many thousands of words have been wasted huffing at those who found fault with Beltran’s style or performance or whatever it is he didn’t do or how he looked when doing all that he did. I’m not sure why we expend our proverbial breath assailing those who decided they’d rather not appreciate the value — or relish the beauty — in a player who could do everything and did it often. It’s enough, for me, to celebrate Carlos Beltran, the best center fielder the New York Mets ever had, not to mention probably their finest right fielder (offense and defense inclusive) of the past decade.
I loved watching him track fly balls. I loved watching him line pitches into the gap. I loved watching him overcome the aches in his knees and race to third. I loved watching him not give up. I loved the grace always. I loved the enjoyment late. I pity more than excoriate those who didn’t. Their loss for seven seasons.
Our gain. And we’ll see about this Wheeler kid.
by Greg Prince on 27 July 2011 4:49 pm Tonight’s lineup:
Jose Reyes – SS
Willie Harris – 2B
Daniel Murphy – 1B
David Wright – 3B
Angel Pagan – CF
Jason Bay – LF
Lucas Duda – RF
Ronny Paulino – C
Mike Pelfrey – RHP
No Carlos Beltran, as he is about to be gone for real, to San Francisco by all reports, in exchange for someone we hope will make us better in the long term and to save a few bucks besides. Dealing Carlos Beltran to the Giants for young righthanded pitcher Zack Wheeler makes as much sense as something like this can.
Thus, there is about to go Carlos Beltran, one of the best players we have, one of the best players we’ve ever had. Only the details are news at this point. We’ve known this day has been coming, and we’re in the 24-hour period in which it will definitively come as soon as i’s and t’s receive their respective dots, crosses and blessings.
Carlos Beltran becoming a Met was no sure thing in 2005. The Mets were no sure thing before 2005, at least when it came to respectability. Carlos changed that. He elevated what it meant to be a fan of this team. You entered a season with Carlos Beltran as your best player, you figured you had improved, and you did. Others came and still others improved and 2006 became the kind of year about which we could only dream before 2005. Beltran led the way there chronologically, statistically and artistically. Carlos and the other Carlos and Paul and Billy and Xavier and Duaner and Endy. Carlos and Pedro, first, then all those other guys to add to whatever was being fastened into place prior to 2005.
That was a great year. It’s been over for quite a while, but it’s still a great year. Carlos Beltran had a great year. He had a couple of other really, really good ones, as the Mets almost did in the years that followed. The year he’s been having in 2011, however, might have been the best one he’s had as a Met since 2006. It’s the year he shook off everything that had curdled since 2006 and elevated again what it meant to be a fan of this team. Carlos and Jose and Murph and Justin and Jon and Dillon and Izzy and Terry. And everybody, just about. The 2011 Mets weren’t constructed the way the 2006 Mets were. They just kind of happened, and they happened to have provided more fun for more months than any Mets team has in five years, probably. They didn’t have a helluva chance to compete for tangible rewards before Carlos Beltran for Zack Wheeler was worked out, and they’ll quite likely have even less once Beltran is officially a Giant, but I’m guessing they’ll still compete the way they have, and that will provide us with its own reward.
I’ll miss Carlos Beltran. It’s only sinking in how much I’ll miss Carlos Beltran. Those he leaves behind, though…them I’ll continue to enjoy, individually and as a unit. I wouldn’t have believed that in April. I might not believe it by the end of September. I believe it for now.
Here’s to the other guys. Let’s stay elevated.
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