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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 27 May 2011 9:26 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 consisting of the “best” 46th game in any Mets season, the “best” 47th game in any Mets season, the “best” 48th 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 046: May 31, 1977 — METS 6 Expos 2
(Mets All-Time Game 046 Record: 25-26; Mets 1977 Record: 16-30)
Managing the Mets was a tough task, but not so tough that the next guy in charge couldn’t theoretically find time to play a little baseball while holding down his presumed full-time job. Chairman of the board M. Donald Grant and GM Joe McDonald must have thought so, for they announced on a Tuesday night at Shea that the man who was about to assume the office of Mets manager would be Joe Torre — as in Joe Torre, player-manager.
Unlike the seven skippers who preceded him, Torre was not long retired as a player. Time would prove that something of a trivial detail, however. Joe’s playing days weren’t completely done come the end of May 1977, but they were getting there. He’d insert himself into two games as a pinch-hitter before hanging up his spikes on June 17. More pertinently, the Mets were getting nowhere as the tenure of Joe Frazier came to a skidding halt, so why not try the Brooklyn boy who grew up to become not just an All-Star all around the diamond — catcher, third base, first base — but an acknowledged clubhouse leader. Two of the Met veterans who counted the 36-year-old Torre as a friend were Tom Seaver and Dave Kingman, both embroiled in salary-driven disputes with the Met front office when Joe took his new job.
Two stars looking to get out of town, on top of the 15-30 record that had landed Frazier’s Mets deep in last place, was a ton to toss on the rookie manager’s desk, but Joe took the daunting circumstances facing him in stride. “I am here to manage the team on the field,” he said before helming his first club. “Tom Seaver has made it known he wants to be traded and Dave Kingman wants to play out his option. I’d like to think they might change their minds. My office is open to them.”
As for the unit he figured he’d have at his disposal, Torre predicted, “We’re going to win a lot more games than we have. We’re not as bad as we’ve been playing and should be a representative team.” The representing started right away, as Torre led his charges to a victory immediately, a 6-2 win over the same Expos who the afternoon before had swept the Mets a Memorial Day doubleheader and put the final nail in Frazier’s managerial coffin. Part of Torre’s plan was to institute a set lineup, topped by recently acquired handyman Lenny Randle at third base, batting leadoff. Randle responded to his new status by singling, doubling, walking twice and scoring two runs.
There was a spark at the top of the order, and the Mets as a whole heated up under Torre’s tutelage. “It makes an awfully long year if you quit in May,” the manager said. The message was received ASAP: the Mets won seven of their first eight games with Joe as their leader. It wouldn’t last, and Torre’s relationship with his discontented stars didn’t make much difference even in the short-term, but when the man who would go on to win 2,326 regular-season games and four World Series titles enters the Hall of Fame as a manager, it will have to be recalled how it all began for Joe Torre: cleaning up Joe Frazier’s mess and attempting to set the Mets on course in what was rapidly becoming their most wayward season ever.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On May 27, 2009, an uncommon run of Met luck continued in a realm where they had proved curiously invincible. Four times previously in 2009, including thrice in the four games before this Wednesday night affair at Citi Field against the Nationals, potential Met home runs became subject to Major League Baseball’s new video review rule. In every instance, the decision that followed the second look — whether it confirmed the call on the field or reversed it — went in the Mets’ favor. This one, however, was going to be a tougher sell. In the sixth inning of a 3-3 tie, with Gary Sheffield (who had benefited from a video confirmation two nights earlier) on first, Daniel Murphy stroked a fly ball to right field off Jordan Zimmermann that…what? Did it land on the warning track of its own volition? Or did it scrape the unhelpfully yellow and white Subway Sandwich ad that fronted the Pepsi Porch overhang, which would make it a home run by the reckoning of the new ballpark’s ground rules? Washington right fielder Adam Dunn played it as if it was a live ball and threw it to the infield to eventually cut down Sheffield at the plate. Sheffield, on the other hand, played it as a home run and thus wasn’t running all-out. It was initially called a home run, but television replays on SNY seemed extremely inconclusive. Three members of Larry Vanover’s umpiring crew, however, spent several minutes out of sight examining all angles and decided the initial call should stand. It was a two-run homer for Murphy, allowing the Mets to take a 5-3 lead en route to a 7-4 final.
GAME 047: June 10, 1966 — METS 5 Reds 0
(Mets All-Time Game 047 Record: 25-25-1; Mets 1966 Record: 18-29)
You want out-of-the-box success? Then you want Dick Rusteck. No Mets starting pitcher was ever better sooner than the 24-year-old lefty from Chicago. And, judging by the relatively few households in which his name became enduringly recognizable, no Mets starting pitcher of surpassing promise ever disappeared quite so quickly.
But nobody envisioned that while Rusteck was doing his thing…his one and only thing, just about.
The Notre Dame graduate was having a fine year in Triple-A Jacksonville (pitching alongside first-year pro Tom Seaver) but “didn’t expect to get called up,” he told author William Ryczek. “My record was 4-0, then 5-0, then 6-0 and I wasn’t called. Then I lost one and I got hit by a batted ball [in BP, but Suns teammate Bud Harrelson] — and I couldn’t throw. I was sure they wouldn’t call me up.”
Perhaps it was the Metsian way of doing things to wait until a prospect was incapacitated to give him his big break, but Rusteck was ready for the big time, as personified by the Cincinnati Reds of Tommy Harper, Pete Rose, Vada Pinson, Deron Johnson, Tony Perez and Leo Cardenas. “I wasn’t nervous,” the kid said. “I just tried to force myself to pitch the way I did at Jacksonville.”
A Friday night at Shea, in front of nearly 34,000, and Rusteck treated the whole scene as if it were just another outing in the International League. He no-hit the Reds for four innings and maintained his poise after Perez broke up his bid for immortality with a leadoff single in the fifth. That would be one of only four hits the Reds would collect on the night, all of them singles. Backed by two Eddie Bressoud homers, Rusteck cruised to a complete game 5-0 shutout in his major league debut, the only Met starter to achieve that kind of instant success (Grover Powell threw a shutout for the Mets in his first big league start in 1963, but he had pitched several times in relief before that). Dick struck out four and walked only one in defeating Cincinnati ace Jim Maloney.
The reviews were raves. Ralph Kiner, watching from the Mets’ broadcast booth, said, “His fastball moves. A couple of times the ball jumped more than half a foot as it came up to the plate.” Home plate ump Ed Sudol testified that Rusteck’s fastball “has a tendency to rise at the last instant. It had the batters off balance and was probably the main reason they popped up so much.”
Because baseball is baseball, and baseball is rarely predictable and only occasionally fair, Dick Rusteck’s debut shutout was his last win in the majors and 1966 was his only season in the bigs. “Four days later,” he would recall for Ryczek, “I tried to pick up a ball and I could hardly lift my arm. I had a real sharp pain in my shoulder. They pleaded with me to start, because after pitching a shutout, how could you possibly not come out for your next turn?”
Rusteck was bombed by St. Louis in one-plus innings of ill-advised work in that second try. One more start, in early July versus the Pirates, didn’t go much better. There’d be a trip to the Disabled List, a few games out of the bullpen and a return to Jacksonville in 1967…and 1968. Rusteck would bounce around the minors clear to 1977 when he wound down his career on the unaffiliated Salem Senators of the Northwest League. His left shoulder healed, but his left elbow went bad, as did his luck. One day in Rochester, for example, a piece of glass fell from a building and cut his non-pitching shoulder badly enough to require seventeen stitches.
But for one night, at 24, Dick Rusteck had pitching successfully in the major leagues all sewn up.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On June 4, 1985, the Dodger Stadium mound served as the operating table as baseball’s most skilled surgeon extricated himself and his team from a most critical jam. The matchup that attracted 49,386 to Chavez Ravine on a Tuesday night was the same one that stirred Shea Stadium ten days earlier: Fernando Valenzuela vs. Dwight Gooden. The showdown at Shea was a disappointment to Mets fans, as their beloved Doctor K fell 6-1 to L.A., dropping Gooden’s record to 6-3, but this late-night West Coast rendezvous was a different story. The phenomena emeriti (Valenzuela ’81, Gooden ’84) hooked up in a pitchers’ duel worthy of the phrase. Fernando had limited the Mets to five hits through eight innings, one of them a solo home run by Ray Knight. But he was matched on the scoreboard and outdone stylistically by Doc. Through seven, Gooden had also allowed five hits and one run (a homer by Pedro Guerrero) but had struck out nine Dodgers. Trouble, though, beckoned in the bottom of the eighth. Steve Sax singled, as did Ken Landreaux; Sax raced to third while Landreaux moved up to second on the throw in from the outfield. Davey Johnson opted to have Gooden intentionally walk Guerrero, loading the bases with nobody out. And this is where the operation gets serious: Doc strikes out Greg Brock, pops up Mike Scioscia foul to Gary Carter and strikes out Terry Whitfield. So much for the Dodgers’ bases-loaded threat. Come the top of the ninth, the other duelist dropped his weapon, as Valenzuela allowed three Met runs. Gooden, of course, came out for the ninth and finished his own gut-check masterpiece, a 4-1 eight-hitter, featuring a dozen strikeouts.
GAME 048: June 4, 1969 — METS 1 Dodgers 0 (15)
(Mets All-Time Game 048 Record: 33-18; Mets 1969 Record: 25-23)
There was Jackson Heights. There was Brooklyn Heights. There was Washington Heights. But nobody was scaling the heights in New York like the Mets were in the late spring of 1969. With one increasingly characteristic thrilling victory, they reached all kinds of new peaks and didn’t appear intent on stopping their climb anytime soon.
It had already been a homestand like no other in Mets history. After salvaging a split of a two-game set with the expansion Padres, the Mets swept three from the Giants for the first time in their relatively young lives. Then the Dodgers came to Shea and the Mets beat them twice. On getaway night, they attempted to fully eradicate the ghosts of their other ancestral oppressor.
Gil Hodges assigned this task to 26-year-old lefthanded rookie Jack DiLauro, making his first start that Wednesday night after a handful of relief stints. “Gil told me I’d be starting two or three days in advance,” the former Tiger farmhand recalled for author Stanley Cohen nearly twenty years later in A Magic Summer, “but it felt more like a month. I was really nervous, and it took me a couple of innings to calm down.” Yet DiLauro appeared every bit the serene veteran across nine innings as he fired shutout ball at Los Angeles. Jack struck out five, walked two and, aided by some slick defense, allowed only two hits.
Bill Russell reached DiLauro for a first-inning double, “and I came within a couple of inches of giving up more. Buddy Harrelson saved a run with a great play at short” on a liner by Wes Parker, “and Cleon caught a drive at the wall that held up” in the second. When Jones hauled in that fly ball from Russell, DiLauro “took a deep breath; from that point on, I was all right.” Better than all right — after walking Andy Kosco with two out in the third, the rookie retired the next sixteen batters he faced, taking him through nine.
DiLauro received a standing ovation after Bill Sudakis flied out to end the top of the ninth. “That was the biggest thrill of my career,” Jack told Cohen. “I had been pitching in the minors for six years, trying to make it to the big club. And now, after my first start, to get an ovation like that from a New York crowd…it’s a moment I’ll never forget.”
Only problem for the Mets was Bill Singer, who would win twenty for the Dodgers that season, was just as effective, and a lot more overpowering. Singer struck out ten Mets while walking no one and giving up no hits through six innings. Harrelson became the first Met baserunner by singling to open the home seventh. A sacrifice bunt, a hit batsman and a fielder’s choice grounder landed the Mets runners on first and third with Ed Kranepool up to give the Mets a chance to take the lead. But Dodger catcher Tom Haller picked Buddy off third to end the threat. An Art Shamsky single with one out in the ninth was the only other offense the Mets generated versus Singer.
The starting pitchers exited and extra innings arrived. Tug McGraw held off L.A. in the top of the tenth as fellow screwballer Jim Brewer did the same to the Mets. McGraw and Brewer would give way to teammates Ron Taylor and Al McBean, respectively, and the zeroes would continue to flow. In the top of the fifteenth, however, things got very sticky for the Mets. With pinch-runner Billy Grabarkewitz on third (after a Jim Lefebvre double) and Russell on first, Willie Davis chopped a ball up that seemed headed up the middle for a run-scoring base hit. Taylor, luckily, stood in the way.
“It hit the back of my glove,” the reliever said after the game. “When it did, I thought it was by far a hit.” But the deflection altered the course of events long enough for second baseman Al Weis to lunge for the ball and make an off-balance throw to the plate. Jerry Grote took it on a short hop and tagged Grabarkewitz for the second out of the inning.
“It was the greatest play I’ve ever seen on any team I’ve ever played for,” the Mets’ catcher marveled.
After escaping the top of the fifteenth when Parker fouled out to third (L.A. batters had left a dozen men on base and had gone 0-for-14 with runners in scoring position), it was the Mets’ turn to make the Dodgers sweat. Walt Alston’s new pitcher, Pete Mikkelsen, made things difficult on himself immediately by walking Harrelson. A Tommie Agee grounder forced Buddy at second. Up stepped rookie third baseman Wayne Garrett, who stroked a single to center. Davis — who had three Gold Gloves in his future — charged the ball…but the ball charged right past him. As it rolled toward Shea’s center field wall, Agee came all the way around from first to score the winning run, as the Mets beat the Dodgers in fifteen innings, 1-0.
It was a great win by any measure, but what made it extra special was all the ways it could be measured:
• The Mets had won their seventh consecutive game, matching the franchise record previously achieved in 1966 and ending this eight-game homestand 7-1.
• The Mets had engineered what Leonard Koppett referred to as “the longed-for double sweep of the Giants and Dodgers”. How longed-for? Consider that the former New York City representatives of the National League teamed to slap around the baby Metsies 58 times in 72 opportunities in 1962 and ’63 and had never been fully avenged…not until late May and early June of 1969, that is.
• The Mets raised their record to 25-23, two games above .500, a modest apogee to the naked eye, but one the Mets had never seen in nearly seven and one-third seasons of playing baseball. And as they jetted to the Coast to take on the California teams on their turf, the Mets would do so as sole proprietor of second place in the National League East — another first.
“It was June,” Dana Brand wrote in Mets Fan, “and my eye didn’t need to look for my team at the bottom of the list. They were in second place. And for the very first time in my eight years of looking at the standings, the two-digit number on the left was larger than the two-digit number on the right.”
More than a plane took off for the West Coast after that win over the Dodgers. Hope did, too.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On May 31, 1982, the Mets reached an era’s high-water mark, though that wasn’t the idea. Overall improvement was in evidence since the ’82 season had started, and achieving a record six games above .500 was supposed to be a steppingstone to maybe reaching seven…or eight…or more over the break-even mark. But being safely on the happy side of .500 was achievement enough in the judgment of Mets fans when their long-downtrodden team took a bite out of Joe Torre and the Western Division-leading Atlanta Braves. While Torre — making his first trip back to Shea since being dismissed the previous October — had been riding high in Dixie, Met partisans could be satisfied by the progress that had transpired under the guidance of new manager George Bamberger. Bambi was supposed to be a marvel with pitchers, and his starter this Memorial Day at Shea, Charlie Puleo, a 27-year-old rookie who had languished in the Blue Jay system since signing out of Seton Hall in 1978, was surely blossoming under George’s wing. The New Jersey native baffled the Braves until there were two outs in the eighth, striking out ten batters along the way. Bamberger removed Puleo with an 8-3 lead that reliever Craig Swan protected en route to a 10-4 Met victory. Charlie’s record rose to 5-2. Ellis Valentine banged out four hits, including a two-run homer. John Stearns went 3-for-5, stole a base and drove in three. The Mets were 27-21, easily their best record at any point in any season since 1976…and ultimately their best record at any point during any season in that fallow period until 1984.
by Greg Prince on 26 May 2011 11:30 pm It occurred to me today — as R.A. Dickey slipped on the Wrigley Field grass and had his right foot slipped into a protective boot (lord help the Met who nicks himself shaving); and the Mets bore witness to the Cubs’ ability to scamper around the bases in the bitter cold; and David Einhorn introduced himself to us as either our savior or simply another obscenely wealthy hedge fund manager with $200 million getting bored in his back pocket — that 2011 hasn’t been the best of years for English teachers. I’ve lost my two favorites in the past five months.
Dana Brand wasn’t my English teacher, but as word of his passing sunk in throughout Thursday, I considered that there’s a whole other segment of people who are feeling a void right now, people unrelated to Dana by bloodline, marriage or even Mets Fandom. This has to be a crushing blow for his students past and present. When you lose someone who helps you reach inside yourself and communicate with the world around you, it leaves a mark.
It left a mark in January when I lost my English teacher, Mrs. Cuneo.
Technically, I haven’t had an English teacher lately, but Mrs. Cuneo was it for me. She was my ninth-grade English teacher. She, in case you’re wondering, is why you have the opportunity to read me here or anywhere. Mrs. Cuneo is the one who convinced me I was a writer and that I was going to be a writer and that there was no chance I’d be anything but a writer. I’d love to tell you what she said to so clearly blaze that segment of my life path, but I don’t remember. If there was a single flashpoint or conversation, I’ve forgotten it (and since I’m renowned in certain circles for my alleged Marilu Henner-like memory, that’s unlikely).
As best as I could piece together when I was compelled by her death to recall ninth-grade English, I remembered being buoyed by the confidence Mrs. Cuneo exuded on my behalf whenever she read something I wrote, and how she strongly suggested I write something more. It was infectious. This woman was so matter-of-fact about what I could do and what I should do, that I just felt dutybound to follow through. It wasn’t that she taught me some hot new way to conjugate verbs or unlocked the mysteries of participles and predicates for me. She essentially said, “You’re a writer,” and I believed it. Before ninth grade, I was just a kid who could write when called upon to do so. From ninth grade on, writing — like rooting for the Mets — was what I did.
I hadn’t actively thought of Mrs. Cuneo in decades, probably, when I got a phone call in early January from Ellen. Ellen was my seventh- and eighth-grade English teacher. I never called her Ellen then but when we found ourselves in unlikely touch a couple of years ago, she reintroduced herself as Ellen, and since we’re both adults now…sure. Anyway, Ellen called me and said she had some bad news about Jo.
And I was thinking, “Who’s Jo?”
Jo was Josephine. That was Mrs. Cuneo’s first name. Honest to goodness, I never knew that. Maybe “J. Cuneo” on a report card, but otherwise she was Mrs. Cuneo to me — always was, always will be. Well, by whichever name we were referring to Mrs. Cuneo, Mrs. Cuneo had passed away at the age of 87. Ellen knew how much she meant to me, and thought I’d want to know. Mrs. Cuneo’s wake would be taking place not far from where I live, so I would definitely pay my respects.
I showed up at the funeral home on a weekday afternoon and was surprised not so much that there were many people there, but at how many people there were young people — in their early twenties, I’d guess. I learned Mrs. Cuneo had kept teaching until only a few years before, into her eighties. The young people at the funeral home showed up for the exact same reason I did: because their English teacher meant that much to them.
Someone pointed out Mrs. Cuneo’s son for me. I extended my hand and said what I came to say: I’m a writer…and it’s because of Mrs. Cuneo (not “your mother” or “Josephine”). This made the son happy, even though he’d been hearing variations on the theme for a couple of days. After he called his sister over so I could repeat my testimony, he asked me when I had Mrs. Cuneo for a teacher.
“Ninth grade,” I said.
“No, what year?”
“1977-78.”
“1977 — wow.”
Yes, I suppose — wow. By January, it had been about 33 years since the spring of 1978, since Mrs. Cuneo had last encouraged me to write a little more than was required, probably 32 years since I had seen her at all, but her influence has been with me the whole time. Even without the nudge a person’s passing provides, I knew that. If you had asked me ten or twenty years ago, “How did you become a writer?” Mrs. Cuneo’s name would have come up no later than the third sentence of the second paragraph.
Professor Dana Brand at Hofstra University, I’d be willing to bet, had that kind of impact on his students. Good English teachers stay with you. Mrs. Cuneo did. Ellen did. A couple I had in college still do, and college was more than a quarter-century ago. I’ve been on my own as a writer since then, which may be why I so appreciated knowing Dana.
Beyond all the reasons that existed to befriend him and admire him and, sadly, to miss him, he was an English teacher who really liked my writing. He wrote some of the nicest things anybody has ever written about what I’ve written. He did so as a fellow Mets fan and as a blogging peer, but I’m pretty certain deep down that when I would read his thorough critiques or his offhand remarks, I’d see a gold star atop my paper. That English teacher thinks I can write — maybe I can!
Trust me, that feeling never fully goes away.
by Greg Prince on 26 May 2011 11:54 am I will endure its passing, but I would have loved to have been an old man in these seats, under these lights.
That’s what Dana Brand wrote in Mets Fan, in an essay he entitled “For Shea“. I’ve thought of those words often since Shea Stadium was scheduled for and then met its ultimate demise. Every time I felt silly for missing the imperfect ballpark or ungrateful for not unquestioningly accepting the obvious improvements its successor offered, I reminded myself of what had been taken away from me: the opportunity to be an old man in those seats, under those lights. I never equated Shea Stadium with that segment of life. Shea, no matter how decrepit its infrastructure turned, was an expression of youthful enthusiasm. The Mets were an expression of youthful enthusiasm.
Dana Brand knew how to express youthful enthusiasm. To me, in the Mets Fan world I’ve been fortunate enough to inhabit, where I was blessed to have known Dana Brand and call Dana Brand my friend, he was the embodiment of youthful enthusiasm.
Dana was born at exactly the right moment in time to be and to call himself a Mets Fan. He was 7½ years old when they played their first game. That meant Dana and the Mets started with the same clean slate. The Mets, for too long, filled their slate with losses. Dana filled his (and that pocket notebook he toted everywhere) with the youthful enthusiasm of someone who wasn’t thrown by their conspicuous lack of success. “I want,” he would write well after 1962, “my baseball to be like real life, seasoned with failure and disappointment, ennobled by hope, and studded with just a few spectacular moments of pure joy.”
Dana began embracing the Mets and their intrinsic nature at the instant there were Mets to embrace and he never stopped, not until yesterday, I suppose, when he passed away at the criminally young age of 56.
We’re lucky in that Dana wrote relentlessly about his personal relationship with the Mets, the way others might write about a personal relationship with their deity. Thanks to him, we know what we missed if we missed it and we’re sure what we saw because he saw it, too. Through two marvelous books and a vital, eloquent blog, Dana let us into his Mets Fan world, from 1962 on. He made me understand those early years I didn’t see. He made me appreciate the texture of 1969 more than I possibly could have even after living with it in my consciousness since I was six. He laid out the entire life of the franchise and what we take it mean to us tribally and why it means so much to us individually.
He loved the Mets and boy did he love Shea Stadium. He got Shea Stadium as few others ever have. He got what made it more than its rotting architectural bones. He got how so many grew up in it and had every reason to suspect they’d grow old in it, under those lights. That Dana Brand had the foresight to anticipate such an actuarial possibility is a credit to him as a writer and a thinker, because every moment I spent with him he never really stopped being that kid who loved the Mets. Don’t let his academic day job and professorial demeanor, let alone his scholarly credentials (which were substantial), mislead you. Dana Brand was a kid who loved the Mets. He was just one of the older kids when we got to meet him.
After I learned that Dana had died, I flashed back on our last meeting, unplanned, in the Jackie Robinson Rotunda at Citi Field on April 10. He was at the first Sunday home game of the year alone and I was at the first Sunday home game of the year alone. Dana wanted to soak up the new season in solitude. I wanted a magnetic schedule and didn’t feel like asking around if anybody wanted to go. When we recognized each other, we greeted as old friends, as people who had been old friends going much further back than September 2007, which is when we actually first met. As I learned on that occasion, at the Long Beach Public Library, we went way the hell back. I guess I knew that from having read Mets Fan, but it was kind of thrilling to feel it unfold in person. Here was, per the title of the book from which he was in my hometown to read, a Mets Fan. Here was somebody who shared my life with me without knowing it. That’s how it is among all of us, isn’t it? With Dana, it was immediate and it was warm and it was as all-encompassing in a Mets Fan sense as it could be.
In April, we did what Mets Fans like us who go way the hell back do: we complained. We complained about the Mets. We bitched and we moaned and we griped and we found fault. But not for a second were we unhappy while we were doing this. Oh, we would have preferred whatever it was about the team and the management and the ballpark that didn’t satisfy us be resolved to our tastes. We would have preferred to have had to have spoken up to hear each other over the fluttering of a few more championship banners and we wouldn’t have minded if whoever decided what gets sold in the team store opted to stock a small shelf with books like ours. But these were fleeting if recurring misgivings. The overriding emotion for Mets Fans like us is we were very happy in the context of what aggravated us. We were thrilled, on some level, to be a little disappointed in the Mets, to care that much about the Mets, to share that much about the Mets. I always thought Dana maintained an ideal for his team and it was his mission to frame a world in which they lived up to what he knew they were at their core; to what they will always be to all of us; and to what they meant eternally in the heart and the soul and the beautiful mind of the kid of 7½ who deserved a longer stay in those seats under those lights.
by Jason Fry on 26 May 2011 1:58 am As baseball fans, we have a lot of phrases we repeat to ourselves to keep watching after things have gone to hell. As Mets fans, I’d wager we have even more of them.
Down 8-1 8-0 [sorry, was apparently huffing paint thinner] after the top of the first? You never know how the other starter will come out.
Score just zoomed from 2-1 you to 6-2 them? It’s hard to pitch with a big lead.
Down two runs, no one on base, one out to go? Bloop and a blast, of course.
The vast majority of times, all these phrases do is offer a little comfort while you demonstrate that you’re a sucker. But we say them anyway, because it’s what we do.
Dillon Gee comes out for the bottom of the first and promptly gives up four runs? Maybe he’ll settle down.
This didn’t seem terribly likely. It was freezing at Wrigley, with a 20-mile-an-hour wind whipping in and the radar showing a sheet of red and yellow moving up from the southwest. Gee quite obviously had no feel whatsoever for his curveball and possibly not for anything else, either: Standing on the mound, he was constantly blowing on his hand, mist swirling out of his mouth with each breath. It was a horrible night on which to play baseball, and it was going to get worse.
Now, throw in the other factors, such as the possibility that Fred Wilpon would be quoted saying shitty things about his players and/or setting draconian payroll targets in yet another publication, or that the Mets’ defense would engage in more bag-on-the-head slapstick, or … or God knows what, really. As Greg captured marvelously but depressingly yesterday, right now the definition of a brave Mets fan is one who continues to show up at this screwed-up office to confront whatever unfathomable nonsense will be on the docket this time.
“Overwhelming and absurd” is it exactly. After an off-day turned into Maelstrom Monday, the Mets got to actually have some say in their condition on Tuesday, and the bar was pretty low for getting everybody to calm down. They didn’t need to win. They just needed to play baseball with some modicum of professionalism, letting the game’s normal rhythms and routines quiet the waters. So of course they displayed exquisite timing in playing what might have been their worst game of the year, a relentlessly thorough exhibition of depressing dingbattery that left us all wanting to break stuff.
Anyway, yeah. That was what was going on when Dillon Gee gave up four in the bottom of the first.
But there was a bigger game afoot, and by the middle of the second it had revealed itself. You saw it after Mike Quade sent Casey Coleman home and brought in Justin Berg, who failed to throw a strike on his first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th, 11th or 12th pitch, a rather convincing demonstration of ineptitude that led to his own departure. When James Russell then arrived and rather matter-of-factly threw strike one to Jason Pridie, he got a near-standing ovation. And veteran Mets fans knew where we stood.
One of Metdom’s reliable pleasures is the early-season donnybrook with the Cubs at Wrigley. Sometimes the Mets win these and sometimes they lose them. Sometimes the wind is howling out and sometimes it’s whipping in. Sometimes both teams are good, sometimes one is and the other manifestly is not, and sometimes they both pretty much suck. Regardless of the details, you tend to see wacky Wrigley affairs coming early, and you buckle up knowing you’ll get somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 runs, at least one lengthy rain delay, a parade of relievers sad bad and accidentally effective, the near-certainty of a managerial ejection, errors and baserunning blunders, lots of emo from the Cub faithful, and an ending you don’t see coming but feels like the logical last piece the next day.
With the Mets somehow up 6-4, I was ready and in fact sort of eager — in these affairs, even Met losses don’t have the sting they do elsewhere, because just crawling out of the wreck more or less intact feels like an accomplishment. Plus Keith Hernandez was clearly unhinged, something I’ve noticed tends to happen without Ron Darling acting as superego. Gary Cohen, sensing the possibilities and unable to help himself, was also starting to bait Keith; I decided that when this game got to the 12th inning and it was 3 a.m. and more rain was coming, I was TiVoing the rest and setting it to KEEP UNTIL I DELETE, which I would never do. It was gonna be that good.
And I maintain it would have happened — except Mother Nature shrunk the whole affair down to snack-sized proportions and Gee refused to live down to his role.
Rather then get pinata’ed and depart for a period of shocked penance on the bench, Gee did what suckers like us are always hoping starters in his predicament will do: He settled down. It didn’t get any warmer or drier or more pleasant, but somehow Gee harnessed his wayward pitches and started knocking Cubs off left and right.
Which led to the drama within the drama: When baseball becomes a race against the weather, less can actually be more. When the Mets opened the top of the fifth with a rally, you could sense Mets fans everywhere caught in a dreadful tug-of-war. More runs are always nice, as is beating up on the Cubs. But once it started raining it wasn’t going to quit, and so those extra runs could actually result in the entire game being washed away and not counting. Those runners out there were quite possibly the opposite of insurance runs — they were runs that somehow might decrease one’s chance of winning.
Which, honestly, would just have been so, so, so Metsian.
It didn’t happen, though. The rain held off long ago for the game to go official and for Carlos Beltran to hammer a triple up the gap, prompting a sudden fury in me and a yell of “WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT 65% TO 70% OF, FRED???!!!” (The most annoying thing to me about Wilpon’s New Yorker quotes, besides the shitshow they provoked, was the revelation that Fred is every bit as unfair to Beltran and myopic about his value as those late-night WFAN callers whose putrid, mouth-breathing stupidity makes you wonder how in the world they can operate a phone.) The last sight of the game wasn’t some Met long man trudging off as Cubs hugged each other, but Quade screaming at the umps he knew had signed his team’s death sentence.
So the Mets won. One day later than when we all desperately needed it for a mental clean slate, perhaps, but they won.
And now we’ll all be back at the office tomorrow, wondering what the hell’s in store for us this time.
Addendum #1: I talked the Mets, baseball, New Orleans and hardcore porn with the folks at Bloomberg Baseball yesterday. Despite the porn discussion, I swear it’s perfectly safe for work.
Addendum #2: For a terrific story about how fringe guys such as Gee live while waiting to see if they’ll stick with the Mets or rejoin the Herd, see The Wall Street Journal’s Brian Costa. I always wondered about this particular subject; Costa does a great job turning it into an interesting, very human tale.
by Greg Prince on 25 May 2011 3:02 am I thought it was passion, but it’s just drama.
—Nate Fisher, “Ecotone,” Six Feet Under
Is there a more exhausting baseball club to root for than the New York Mets? Has there ever been a more exhausting baseball club to root for than the New York Mets?
The Mets used to tire us out with manic playoff runs, with Octobers and Septembers and late Augusts we couldn’t turn off. That’s what we knew as the good tired. The Mets could put us through the ringer like nobody could, and we welcomed it. In the spirit of Dana Carvey’s Grumpy Old Man, we loved it.
The Mets don’t tire us out that way anymore. They are a high-maintenance obsession that offers us increasingly little return on our emotional investment: fictitious profits, mostly. We don’t get the championships. We don’t get the contention. We get no more than a nugget here or there to keep us going — an obscure achievement; a middling milestone; a face in the crowd that makes us smile for a night or two at most. What I’m coming to appreciate these days is when things are kind of boring because it means things aren’t blowing up on us.
Things are blowing up on us. Things are almost always blowing up on us. Lately they’re as continually explosive as Jason Bay’s bat is chronically dormant (Bay is what we know as the bad boring). The Mets have been the flashpoint lately for a disheartening Subways Series meltdown; for genuinely terrible news regarding one of their living legends; for a slew of disturbingly mysterious injuries; for scandal that continues to require sopping up from the mess a former high-ranking employee left behind; for the mind-boggling callousness the organization showed in enhancing/degrading their literal brand. Yet y’know what? All that stuff from the past couple of weeks — from the revelations contained in Paul Lukas’s backstory on how we wound up with black uniforms to the arrest of Charlie Samuels to the disabling of David Wright and Ike Davis after plays that appeared relatively benign on first glance to the tumors afflicting Gary Carter to Mike Pelfrey’s inability to escape the seventh inning in the Bronx — have all but disappeared from view since Sunday night.
The “great guy/poor judgment” Fred Wilpon PR offensive, consisting of articles in the New Yorker and Sports Illustrated, has altered our agenda as Mets fans, at least until something else overwhelming and absurd comes along to replace it as the dominant force in our concerns. Now all we’re thinking about and talking about is the principal owner of our favorite baseball team: what he said; what he shouldn’t have said; what he shouldn’t have done; and, because we wouldn’t care what a great guy some real estate magnate we’d never heard of was if he didn’t own our favorite baseball team, when and under what circumstance he and his will be compelled to sell…and how much damage he and his will inflict upon our favorite baseball team in the interim.
After 36 or so hours immersed in dissecting quotes and reactions and implications (with breaks for sleep and scattered responsibilities), I tuned in Tuesday night’s game from Wrigley Field almost surprised there was a game. You mean they play baseball, too? I thought the Mets were simply a conversation piece.
They didn’t play baseball remotely well against the Cubs, giving all of us, including the principal owner, every opportunity to consider ourselves (yet again) schmucks for being charter passengers on this bizarro bandwagon. They instead capture our attention for a day-and-a-half because of colorful phrases like “schmuck” and “shitty team” and “not a superstar” and “bleeding cash” and “a dupe rather than a crook”. They get us worried over whether our shortstop (who on Tuesday quietly passed our idle and presumably insufficiently stellar third baseman for No. 3 on the franchise’s all-time hits list, with the No. 2 spot, held by Cleon Jones since 1976, just five hits away) will be our shortstop for more than another couple of months. They get us up in arms on behalf of our valiant right fielder and his 65/70/100% state of being. They make us wonder (yet again) if our flagship radio station should be WTF instead of WFAN.
They really are exhausting. They take it out of you with the no-win debates they can’t stop themselves from inspiring.
“He didn’t say anything any of us hasn’t said.” “Yes, but he’s the owner.”
“Well, he isn’t a superstar, not really.” “Look at his numbers, of course he’s a superstar.”
“I don’t want to see him go.” “I don’t think he’s worth that kind of money.”
“They’re going to have to slash payroll.” “They’ve had a big payroll and they haven’t won anything.”
We know, we know, we know. Fred Wilpon and his potentially hundreds of millions of problems aren’t exactly breaking news, but we’re sure incredibly conscious of them now. Carlos Beltran not endlessly repeating the seven games he filed against the Cardinals in October 2004 (while he’s endlessly reminded of one at-bat he had against the Cardinals in October 2006) isn’t a bulletin either. Jose Reyes is due to get paid? David Wright hasn’t busted down the far-away fences of Citi Field? There was too much devotion to the object of Fred’s childhood affection when our ballpark opened and next to none for ours? Bernie Madoff is a sociopath? Saul Katz could moonlight for Rawlings because he claims a big set of balls?
OK, that last one I didn’t know. And I didn’t know Fred Wilpon jetted around Europe in search of better weather on holiday because he could. I didn’t know of the existence of the Old Farts Club (and could have done without that tidbit). I didn’t know Fred got Jeff a gig catching BP through Joe Pignatano or that he hung around Shea in the late ’70s with Joe Torre, which I actually enjoyed learning because it gave me an inkling that Wilpon might have actually cared ever so slightly about the Mets before he owned a piece of them.
Besides having it drilled home that Fred’s a good guy undermined by poor judgment (so Picard, get your hand out of his pockets already yet), another theme the self-inflicted media onslaught emphasized was the owner of the Mets loves being owner of the Mets. Take it from perenially reliable source Steve Phillips: “I know how important the team is to the Wilpon family.” Yet, for what little it’s worth in the big picture, I don’t necessarily equate that with loving the Mets. I’ve never gotten the feeling Fred Wilpon does, not in the way those of us who don’t get to shove blueprints at an architect and tell him to shut up and just rebuild Ebbets Field do. I’m sure he loves the Mets as a property, and that there’s more to the Mets to him than there is to this or that building in Manhattan, but I also get the feeling his acumen was most acute in tending to inanimate objects.
Fred, as Tom Verducci noted in the SI piece, doesn’t keep an office in Citi Field. He wasn’t supposed to be the one out front at this juncture. The Mets were on track to becoming Jeff Wilpon’s show. Take that for what it’s worth. The Wilpon family was going to be one with the Mets forever. For better. For worse. Probably for what the last decade has been like since Wilpon bought out keen-insighted Nelson Doubleday and it’s been all Fred and Saul and Jeff.
They run a lot of Viagra ads on SNY, I’ve noticed, the ones that tell me I’ve reached the age of knowing how to get things done or something like that. After winking not very hard about those things (the kinds of things for which Saul Katz cops to being exceptionally well-equipped), the commercials urge the viewer to consult with a doctor to make sure one’s heart is healthy enough to engage in what Viagra is supposed to help you get done.
At the risk of TMI, I don’t need to see a doctor to ask about that. I need to see a doctor to find out if I can take being a Mets fan much longer. It’s exhausting. It really is.
by Greg Prince on 24 May 2011 11:30 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 consisting of the “best” 43rd game in any Mets season, the “best” 44th game in any Mets season, the “best” 45th 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 043: May 29, 1971 (2nd) — Mets 2 PADRES 1
(Mets All-Time Game 043 Record: 29-22; Mets 1971 Record: 27-16)
Twenty-four years old, with the stuff to strike out as many ten batters in a game eleven times. That describes the pitcher the Mets sent to the hill for the nightcap of a doubleheader at San Diego Stadium this Saturday.
That’s quite a weapon to have on your side. Why you’d want to give up on it is anybody’s guess. But the Mets weren’t giving up on Nolan Ryan at this stage of the 1971 season. They were giving him the ball and he was giving opposing lineups like the Padres nothing to swing at but a blur.
To be fair to those early Friar batters, the blur started its journey toward their bats as a ball at some point, but it was hard for any individual San Diegan to tell. That’s how fast young Ryan was as a rule…and make no mistake: in this game, Nolan Ryan ruled.
Every inning that Ryan pitched — and he went the distance — included at least one Padre strikeout. Seven frames ended on a strikeout. The bottom of the sixth gave the home team some hope, as Nolan lived down to his reputation for wildness and walked the first two batters. The Padres’ three best hitters were up next. They were also down next.
Cito Gaston…K.
Nate Colbert…K.
Ollie Brown…K.
This was what Nolan Ryan did. It was his modus operandi to blow balls by hitters. Sometimes other things happened. Sometime he missed. in the first inning, a walk to second baseman Don Mason led to a run via a fielder’s choice, an error and a wild pitch, but that was all the damage Ryan sustained this Saturday. He struck early, he struck often.
He struck out Gaston and Ivan Murrell three times apiece. He struck out every starter at least once, except for shortstop Enzo Hernandez, but he made up for it by striking out pinch-hitter Angel Bravo. And, as if to mix things up, he got third baseman Ed Spiezio to fly out to Tim Foli at short for the final out of a 2-1 win (Art Shamsky drove in both New York runs).
Nolan Ryan had just struck out 16 batters, the most he had ever struck out as a Met, the second-most any Met pitcher had ever fanned. Only Tom Seaver’s National League record-tying performance against these largely same Padres a year earlier yielded more K’s (19); only Dwight Gooden and Sid Fernandez would ever match 16 as Met pitchers. What’s more, Ryan turned in his twelfth double-digit strikeout showing as a Met that Saturday in San Diego. They weren’t all as neat as this four-hitter. Sometimes he walked more than four. Sometimes he could throw as hard as he wanted and he wasn’t effective enough to win.
But he was 24, and no one could deny his talent. Six starts into 1971, his record was 6-1 and his ERA was 1.08. Ryan couldn’t keep up that pace for the rest of the season. There’d be a game in June when he’d walk seven and give up seven walks in less than six innings. In July, he’d go five and walk nine. But there was also to be an outing at Montreal when he scattered eleven hits en route to a 4-1 complete game victory, striking out 10. And later, he’d K 12 in six innings, walking only one for his 14th double-digit strikeout game with the Mets.
Surely the flamethrowing young man from Alvin, Tex., was a mixed bag. Surely there were some clunkers buried deep in that sack. His final start of the season saw him face five St. Louis Cardinals. He’d walk the first four he faced and then surrender a two-run single to Ted Simmons. Gil Hodges removed him then and there, leaving Nolan Ryan with a 1971 mark of 10-14, an ERA that had ballooned to 3.97 and a walk total that topped a hundred: 116 BB in 152 IP, against 137 SO.
Ryan was what would later be known in the industry as a project, though by the time that kind of nomenclature was catching on, Nolan would deliver on his promise. He’d strike out 10 or more 201 times from 1972 to 1993, matching or exceeding the 16 he fanned against San Diego fifteen times. After recording 29 victories in 67 decisions for the Mets through 1971, he’d compile a record of 295-254 for the rest of his career.
None of that, by the way, would occur in a New York Mets uniform.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On May 21, 2005, a stranger from a strange land did a very strange and very wonderful thing for the New York Mets. The strange land in question was the Met bullpen, but it could also apply to South Korea, homeland of one Dae-Sung “Mister” Koo. Koo had arrived in Flushing a lefty specialist for manager Willie Randolph. How special he was as a reliever is up for debate, but the distinctiveness of his hitting portfolio is beyond reproach. Mister Koo’s first Major League at-bat, on May 16, in a Met blowout against the Reds, was as comical as it was futile. Standing as far from home plate as he possibly could while still technically in the batter’s box, Koo watched four Todd Coffey pitches sail into catcher Jason LaRue’s mitt. Three were strikes, and when the third was signaled by home plate ump Phil Cuzzi, Koo emerged from the box like a man from a dentist’s chair, simply happy to get it over with. Five days later, nobody expected much different when Randolph decided keeping Koo in a 2-0 Subway Series game was worth sending him to the plate to lead off the bottom of the seventh against Randy Johnson. Koo would just stand there and take…HE SWUNG! HE SWUNG AND HE DOUBLED! DAE-SUNG KOO DOUBLED TO THE CENTER FIELD WALL OFF OF RANDY JOHNSON! Seriously, it was something to shout about. And if you think Sheagoers were loud when Mister Koo landed on second, the squeals could be heard clear to Seoul when the next sequence of events transpired: Jose Reyes attempted to bunt Koo to third. Yankee catcher Jorge Posada fielded the sacrifice and threw to first to retire Reyes. Koo, meanwhile, on his first-ever tour of the bases, noticed Posada left home uncovered. So this time, instead of avoiding the plate, he attacked it. The pitcher kept running, and in one of the most unlikely plays Shea Stadium’s home plate ever saw, Dae-Sung dove headfirst toward the dish and avoided (by umpire Chuck Meriweather’s reckoning, at any rate) Posada’s tag of his fingers. HE’S SAFE! MISTER KOO CAME AROUND FROM SECOND ON A BUNT! It was, literally, Koo’s first slide since high school and his first run since junior high…and it came against Randy Johnson en route to a 7-1 Saturday afternoon bashing of the Mets’ crosstown rivals. Said awestruck teammate Doug Mientkiewicz, “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. And I probably never will again.” True enough: The double off the Unit came in the last at-bat of Dae-Sung Koo’s brief major league career. He retired a .500 BA/.500 OBP/1.000 SLG hitter.
GAME 044: May 23, 1999 — METS 5 Phillies 4
(Mets All-Time Game 044 Record: 24-27; Mets 1999 Record: 25-19)
Another object lesson in it ain’t being over until it’s actually over unfolded this gloomy Sunday afternoon at Shea, though one could be excused for believing it was long over before it was done. The Mets, after all, played with forks stuck in them for eight long innings. You might even say they played like they didn’t want to play, which may have been a little bit true. A nearly two-hour rain delay pushed back first pitch and the forecast grew more threatening when the presence of Curt Schilling was factored in.
Talk about a cold front. The Phillies’ ace entered the game with three consecutive complete-game victories to his credit, an overall 7-1 record and an ERA of 2.58. Good numbers anytime, fantastic figures in homer-happy 1999.
The Mets were reportedly not universally happy that the game couldn’t be postponed, preferably until the next time the Phils were in town, in September. By then, it was considered a decent possibility that Schilling would be in another uniform, possibly in the other league. But the Mets had an advance gate of better than 30,000 for a t-shirt giveaway and the front office wasn’t hot to turn those tickets into rainchecks.
So the Mets played ball…just not very well. Rick Reed went seven ineffective innings and left with his team trailing 4-0. Schilling was as good as he had to be: seven hits, seven strikeouts, a glide path to another complete game and his first shutout of the season.
Then, all at once, it simultaneously fell apart on Schilling and came together for the Mets. Mike Piazza singled and Robin Ventura homered to begin the bottom of the ninth. The Phillie lead was halved to 4-2. Not a great development for Schilling, but in a perverse way at least it cleared the bases. He could tell himself that after he grounded Brian McRae to second base for the first out.
But the ninth’s narrative picked up immediately thereafter. Matt Franco singled and Luis Lopez was hit on a 1-2 count. Jermaine Allensworth, pinch-hitting for reliever Rigo Beltran (who had kept the Phillies off the board for two innings), singled home Franco, and now it was 4-3.
Funny thing: Curt Schilling was still in there pitching. In another era, it might not have seemed strange, but by the end of the 1990s, complete games were almost dinosaurs (the ’99 Mets wouldn’t record one until Labor Day) and relievers were compensated handsomely to preserve seven- and eight-inning starts. Why didn’t Phillie skipper Terry Francona pull Schilling?
“I thought he was in complete control,” was Francona’s answer. His usual closer, Jeff Brantley, was unavailable, and besides, Curt’s fastball registered 94 on the radar in the ninth. “I felt very good,” the pitcher affirmed. Most of all, he was Curt Schilling — ace. It was an old-school decision.
“I’ve been around Schill long enough to know he was OK,” Francona said. “He was throwing good. I thought he had everything left.”
The next batter, Roger Cedeño, shot one back at Schilling, who composed himself long enough to force Allensworth at second; Lopez moved to third. Next up was Edgardo Alfonzo…whom (after Cedeño took second uncontested) Schilling hit. With his second HBP of the inning, the ace loaded the bases.
Up next was lefty John Olerud, who started the day batting .357 and was already 2-for-4 against Schilling. Francona had a lefty, Jim Poole, warming up, but stuck with his righthanded ace for his 138th pitch of the day.
Olerud, in turn, stuck it to Schilling. Gary Cohen’s call on WFAN:
“The pitch to Olerud…line drive…BASE HIT INTO LEFT FIELD! In comes Lopez! Here comes Cedeño! Here’s comes Gant’s throw from left field…the slide…SAFE, THE METS WIN IT! THE METS WIN IT! Cedeño slides home under the tag of Mike Lieberthal, a two-run GAME-WINNING single for John Olerud, the Mets score FIVE RUNS off Curt Schilling in the bottom of the ninth inning, and the Mets win it in a REMARKABLE finish!”
Remarkable, indeed. Cedeño accented the stunning nature of it by punching up at the air while lying on his back after being called safe by Jeff Nelson. Roger’s reaction after sprinting 180 feet to score was approximately 180 degrees removed from Schilling’s. “There’s no excuse for losing a 4-0 lead,” the losing pitcher for Philadelphia lamented. “There’s no way you should choke and blow up like that. I don’t care who you are.”
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On May 21, 2000, the Mets were the team with something extra, as base-hits that went for doubles and home runs provided them almost all the sustenance they would require to prevail. And until the end of this overcast Shea Sunday, they needed every darn base they could touch, most of them against their enigmatic opponent, Randy Johnson. The last time the Mets saw the Big Unit, it was in Game One of the ’99 NLDS, when they had trouble with the Diamondback stopper (11 strikeouts) and were trouble for him (7 earned runs en route to an 8-4 triumph). The pattern was familiar in the rematch, albeit with a slightly altered cast of characters. The first two batters Johnson faced, Joe McEwing and Derek Bell, were new to the Mets in 2000. The pair doubled back-to-back to put the Mets on the board right away. Then Edgardo Alfonzo doubled to double the Mets’ run total and give them a 2-1 lead in the bottom of the first. Everything the Mets produced thereafter — off Johnson and Arizona reliever Mike Morgan — continued to be of the extra-base variety. The nine New York hits from the first through the eighth consisted of five doubles and four homers, including a third-inning shot launched deep into the Mezzanine by Mike Piazza. McEwing was particularly super, with two doubles and a homer, all off Johnson. The D’Backs were hitting, too, resulting in a 6-6 tie heading into the bottom of the ninth. By then, Byung-Hyun Kim was on for Arizona. He issued a leadoff walk to McEwing, who promptly stole second, making it an easy trip home for him when Bell hit a ball fair down the right field line. It was scored an RBI single, the only non-extra base home team hit of the day in the Mets’ 7-6 win…but under any other, non-walkoff circumstance, it would have gone into the books as a double.
GAME 045: May 23, 1998 — METS 3 Brewers 0
(Mets All-Time Game 045 Record: 19-32; Mets 1998 Record: 25-20)
All he had to do was show up, and for one day, a Saturday like no other in Mets history, that would be enough. It would be more than enough. It would be, by universal agreement, the best thing to happen to this franchise in more than a decade.
He would show up, though, right? The Mets were playing a home game, but their newest teammate Mike Piazza would have to make a road trip. Piazza was in baseball limbo, a Marlin for a week in May 1998, dealt by the Dodgers in a fit of salary dispute pique. Florida was clearly not holding onto the superstar catcher for very long, and as the Marlins sought what they considered would be their best deal, all Piazza could do was wait for word from his agent regarding his ultimate destination. He went to take a shower assuming he would be sent to the Cubs. He emerged to discover that instead, he was Met, dealt to New York in exchange for Preston Wilson, Geoff Goetz and Ed Yarnall.
So informed of his fate on Friday, May 22, Piazza headed the next morning to the airport in West Palm Beach so he could his make his flight to LaGuardia and show up at Shea Stadium in plenty of time for his Mets debut against the Brewers. Only thing was Piazza was booked on a flight out of Fort Lauderdale. He had to shift gears and direction ASAP.
All the racing around was apropos, as Piazza’s head was doing the same. West Palm? Lauderdale? Dodgers? Marlins? Cubs? Mets? Sooner or later, Mike would have a chance to settle in, catch his breath and figure out where he was.
But not on Saturday, not with a 4:05 start at Shea, not with his being hustled to the ballpark by Mets PR director Jay Horwitz around two o’clock, not with a press conference to conduct, and not with a starting pitcher — Al Leiter — waiting to go over hitters.
Mike Piazza was immediately the center of the action in the Mets’ world as soon as he arrived in Flushing, and there was no mistaking he was the reason there was any action. The Mets had been playing pretty well in the first quarter of 1998 but were generating little buzz in the marketplace. Four nights earlier at Shea, the Mets swept a doubleheader from the Reds in front of fewer than 16,000 paying customers, many of whom, based on their level of vocal support for the home team, seemed to come for the librarian convention.
That changed immediately with Mike Piazza. More than 13,000 ticket-buyers walked up to the windows that Saturday, pushing attendance to nearly 33,000 (the next day it would top 47,000). John Franco — graciously peeling the 31 off his back so Piazza could wear it — reported having to sit in Shea traffic “for the first time in a long time”. Jerry Seinfeld, having just completed his sitcom run, could be picked out in the crowd, just another Mets fan thrilled to have one of the biggest hitters in baseball suddenly playing for his team.
The Mets, unlike Seinfeld, were a show about something.
Now all Piazza had to do was live up to the hype…which he did instantly. After absorbing multiple standing ovations for simply being Mike Piazza, New York Met, the slugger gave an inkling of what he could do and (offseason contract negotiations willing) would do for years to come in the bottom of the fifth. With the Mets up 1-0 and Matt Franco on first, Piazza stroked his first Met hit, a line drive to right-center off Milwaukee starter Jeff Juden, a ball that seemed to accelerate as it rolled toward the wall. Franco scored while Piazza took third base on the throw home. Another ovation ensued.
“There’s a marquee player, in a Met uniform, behind the plate,” observed Fred Wilpon (whose partner in Met ownership, Nelson Doubleday, was considered the more instrumental of the two in deciding to deal for Piazza). “The fans have reacted. The media has reacted. I think New York is going to love this player.”
Mike Piazza had an RBI as a Met. Soon he’d have a shutout caught, as Leiter went the distance in downing the Brewers 3-0. The start of a beautiful if intermittently tumultuous friendship between a superstar and a fan base had begun. The appreciation for his boarding the correct flight and then not seeking the first bus out of town was still immense in the summer of 2000 when Mets fans voted the acquisition of Piazza the eighth-greatest moment in Mets history. Mike accepted the honor gratefully, if with a little embarrassment.
“I wish I would have hit a big homer or something,” Piazza reflected, “not just have been traded.”
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On June 1, 1969, the Mets decided mass production was overrated, choosing instead to hand-craft their winning run the old-fashioned way: one base at a time, eschewing modern contrivances like hits. Their Sunday game at Shea against the Giants boiled down to the bottom of the ninth, the score tied at four. The Mets took on reliever Joe Gibbon in a very stealthy manner. Buddy Harrelson led off with a walk. Tommie Agee bunted him to second. A Wayne Garrett grounder to the right side moved Harrelson to third. Cleon Jones (batting .364) was intentionally walked. Jones foiled San Francisco manager Clyde King’s strategy by taking off for second, stealing it safely. Amos Otis (batting .141) then walked, loading the bases. Ron Swoboda, with a chance to be a hero, kept his bat on his shoulder long enough to accept ball four from Gibbon, and the Mets won 5-4. It was their fourth consecutive victory and their third in a row over the Giants, encompassing their first sweep ever against the team that previously wore the mantle of New York (N.L.).
by Greg Prince on 23 May 2011 4:15 pm “Your phone number for a Monday night schmooze, One Eight Seven Seven, Three Three Seven, Six Six Six Six on your Fan — WFAN, here taking your calls until Richard Neer at ten o’clock. Fred from Locust Valley, you’re next.”
“Hello Steve.”
“Hello Fred! You’re calling from the Valley of the Locusts, with the bedbugs…what already?”
“Steve, I want to talk about the Mets.”
“Fred, getting right to it!”
“Steve, I want to talk about Jose Reyes.”
“Fred from the Valley of the Locusts and the bedbugs and the shortstop of the New York Metropolitans.”
“Steve, Jose Reyes is a racehorse.”
“Fred from the Valley of the Locusts stepping up to the pari-mutuel window with the mint juleps and the black-eyed susans and the Shackleford already. I get the feeling Fred maybe won a few shekels wagering on the Preakness Saturday before watching his racehorse Jose Reyes run in the Subway Series. Fred from the Valley of the Locusts with the thoroughbreds already!”
“No, Steve, I lost money.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. What’s on your mind regarding the shortstop of the New York Metropolitans, Jose Reyes?”
“Steve, Jose Reyes is a racehorse. He thinks he’s going to get Carl Crawford money.”
“Fred from the Valley of the Locusts setting the odds on the free agent market for Jose Reyes while Jose Reyes is still under contract to play shortstop for the New York Metropolitans! Is that tampering? We’ll let it go.”
“Steve, Jose Reyes isn’t going to get Carl Crawford money. He’s had everything wrong with him.”
“Fred from the Valley of the Locusts offering, what, with the diagnosis of your Jose Reyes and your New York Metropolitans — everything wrong with him! Jose Reyes at or near the top of your National League leaderboard in hits and doubles and triples and stolen bases and leading off and getting on base, but Fred…not so impressed with Jose Reyes.”
“Steve, Jose Reyes isn’t going to get Carl Crawford money. He’s had everything wrong with him. He’s not going to get it.”
“Fred from the Valley of the Locusts making with the forecast and the apocalyptic doom with the world ending! It didn’t end Saturday, but now Fred letting us know Jose Reyes, shortstop for his Metropolitans won’t be making the, what, one-hundred forty-two million dollars for the seven years like Carl Crawford with the Boston Red Sox, we should only be so lucky to live another seven days let alone seven years. Fred, are you there?”
“I’m here Steve. And I want to talk about David Wright.”
“Fred from the Valley of the Locusts and the bedbugs and maybe they should spray while you’re all infested, what do you want to say about David Wright, third baseman for the New York Metropolitans?”
“He’s pressing, Steve.”
“Fred from the Valley of the Locusts making like the batting coach and the sports psychologist at the same time for your New York Metropolitans, seeing exactly what is wrong with David Wright!”
“He’s pressing, Steve. David Wright’s a really good kid. A very good player. Not a superstar.”
“Fred from the Valley of the Locusts sticking the needle into the face of the franchise! David Wright with All-Star appearances and the hundred RBIs every year and now with the strained lower back, what, and Fred from the Valley of the Locusts recommending acupuncture! The needle for the face of the franchise!”
“Steve…”
“Call me Steve.”
“Steve, about Carlos Beltran…”
“Fred from the Valley of the Locusts turning his attention to the right fielder of the Metropolitans.”
“One good series, Steve, in 2004, for Houston.”
“Fred from the Valley of the Locusts boiling down the career of Carlos Beltran to one series! Fred, not impressed with the last seven years of Carlos Beltran running around in center field and now right field for his Metropolitans.”
“Steve, we had some schmuck in New York who paid him based on that one series.”
“Fred from the Valley of the Locusts getting ethnic! Can Fred say that on the air? Brian Monzo on the other side of the glass shaking his head. Fred with the salty language, the tongue already!”
“Steve, he’s sixty-five to seventy percent of what he was.”
“Fred from the Valley of the Locusts downgrading Carlos Beltran in his final year as a New York Metropolitan. Doesn’t think Jose Reyes is Carl Crawford. Thinks David Wright is pressing. Evaluates Carlos Beltran at about two-thirds of what he was. Fred, I want to ask you — are there any New York Metropolitans you’re excited about already?”
“Pedro Beato — Brooklyn boy. And Ike Davis, Steve.”
“Fred from the Valley of the Locusts happy to have Ike Davis on the Metropolitans!”
“Good hitter. Shi…”
“Fred with the language again! You can’t talk like that on the radio, Brian Monzo on the other side of the glass quick with the button. You have to watch it, Fred! This is a radio station, not Locust Valley!”
“Sorry Steve. Lousy clubs, that’s what happens. We’re snakebitten, baby.”
“Fred from the Valley of the Locusts getting intimate on a Monday night!”
“I grew up in Brooklyn, Steve.”
“Call me Steve.”
“I grew up in Brooklyn and went to Ebbets Field.”
“Fred from the Valley of the Locusts with the nostalgia from fifty-something years ago.”
“Steve, my hero was Jackie Robinson. I went to Lafayette High School with Sandy Koufax.”
“Fred from the Valley of the Locusts and the nostalgia for the good old days and the egg creams and going to school with Sandy Koufax already!”
“I pitched at Lafayette High School, Steve. The only reason he joined the baseball team was so we could hang around together. I pitched batting practice for the Dodgers.”
“Fred from Locust Valley with the beautiful memories, not so much with the patience for your New York Metropolitans of today. Thank you for calling, Fred, next time watch the salty language, like you don’t think anybody is listening when you talk already? One Eight Seven Seven, Three Three Seven, Six Six Six Six your number on the Fan. Eighty thirty-nine and fifty-five seconds, with the twenty-twenty flash, here’s Rich Ackerman!”
by Jason Fry on 23 May 2011 12:24 am Bottom of the 7th
B Gardner singled to center.
Ivan Nova was quietly terrible, short-arming the ball and giving up hit after hit after hit. But after their early flurry of singles, the Mets (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) couldn’t seem to get the big hit that would put him away. Games like that slowly turn from confident affairs in which you calmly wait for the worm to turn to anxious ones where you realize the worm is going to stay right where he is and you’ll be cursing about it under your breath hours later. As Nova wiggled out of jam after jam, helped immeasurably by the unfortunately rather awesome glove of Mark Teixeira, Mike Pelfrey was also pitching not terribly impressively while avoiding major trouble. Starting the seventh, Brett Gardner whacked a single up the middle, between Pelfrey’s legs and just out of his reach. It seemed ominous, but there had been lots of ominous things that hadn’t led to anything.
C Dickerson walked, B Gardner to second.
And that was a bad idea.
F Cervelli hit by pitch, B Gardner to third, C Dickerson to second.
The ball, fortunately, didn’t hit Cervelli square in the face. Yes, I meant “fortunately.” He’s Francisco Cervelli, who’s Victorino-level annoying and a Yankee. But let’s still not have people get hit in the face. Instead it drilled him in the upper arm near the shoulder, which was bad enough. And now that we’re done being human and all, it loaded the bases. That was worse.
D Jeter singled, B Gardner and C Dickerson scored, F Cervelli to second.
Oh, it was gritty. It was classy. It was such a team hit that Jeter’s current teammates found their ailments cured and dead Yankees materialized in spirit form in Monument Park to announce via pinstriped Oujia board that their only desire was to have been born later so they too could be Jeter’s teammates. Actually it was a horrible little bouncer that just eluded Pelfrey’s glove and then just slipped under Reyes’s. The bastard hell-child of Luis Sojo’s horrible little bouncer, in other words. Perhaps it was Jeter’s intangibles that guided it past those gloves worn by mere mortals. I began clawing divots in my own flesh here.
C Granderson sacrificed to third, F Cervelli to third, D Jeter to second.
An out, thanks to a phenomenally stupid play by a great hitter. Granderson had been launching homers all weekend and Tim Byrdak was facing a huge mess. Why on earth would you give up an out there? Baseball is so beautiful that it offends me to see it played idiotically, even if it’s a Yankee doing the idiotic thing. By the way, Willie Harris almost threw the ball away.
M Teixeira intentionally walked.
Teixeira frightens me. He looks like a lunatic at the plate, like he’s about to snarl and run out and bite the pitcher. I can’t help thinking this even though his interviews reveal him to be almost comically bland. Mark Teixeira would never bite a pitcher because that would be interesting.
A Rodriguez reached on infield single to third, F Cervelli scored, D Jeter to third, M Teixeira to second.
God bless Pedro Beato for saying he dislikes the Yankees and nobody in his family roots for them. That’s awesome. Beato got A-Rod to do exactly what the Mets wanted, hitting a little grounder to an infielder. Unfortunately, he hit it so softly (it barely made a sound) that it trickled to Harris, who had to hold onto it. As Harris raced in, Beato hit the dirt, lying prone in the grass. With the play lost, he looked like he had half a mind to stay there. I felt the same way.
R Cano singled to right, D Jeter scored, M Teixeira to third, A Rodriguez to second.
First decently hit ball of the inning. I held my breath and tried to die. Stupid involuntary muscles.
J Posada struck out looking.
He struck out looking because the ball was practically in the dirt, one of several third strikes called on Yankees by Eric Cooper that were questionable at best. Not that I was sad.
B Gardner doubled to left, M Teixeira and A Rodriguez scored, R Cano to third.
A little parachute that landed in short left, perfectly placed. Long after the game, Joshua looked at the play by play and asked, “You mean four guys batted twice in the same inning?” I don’t remember what I said, because I was in the fetal position.
C Dickerson singled to left, R Cano and B Gardner scored.
Another mighty hit — a little humpbacker that dropped in just beyond Reyes. Yes, they do all count.
F Cervelli safe at first on error by third baseman W Harris, C Dickerson to second.
Because what I’d been thinking was, “This inning is humiliating and makes me want to vomit, but since the Mets haven’t made an error, I have no urge to kill myself.” That Willie Harris, he provides.
D Jeter grounded out to second.
Actually he beat the throw.
So there you have it. Four Mets pitchers gave up eight runs on six hits (one struck with any kind of authority), two walks, a hit batter and an error. Which seems deeply unfair, except the three outs they actually recorded came on a moronic sacrifice, a called third strike that wasn’t a strike and an incorrect call at first. It actually should have been much worse.
Don’t worry if you missed it: I have it on decent authority that this half-inning will be the only thing available on MLB.com in Hell.
by Greg Prince on 22 May 2011 9:10 am And sometimes a lineup patched together with recently recalled minor leaguers gets beat. Go figure.
BuffaMets fever broke a little Saturday night, though Justin Turner continued to hit, which was good news for Americans from coast to coast wondering breathlessly whether Turner would break the longstanding record for most consecutive games with a run batted in by a Mets rookie. It was one of the most cherished records in all of sport, dating back to 1965 and embedding itself in the consciousness of fans everywhere since at least Friday when it was casually mentioned on SNY.
I love worrying about records I not only never heard of before but records I had never stopped to consider were records. “Most consecutive games by a Mets rookie with a run batted in”…who knew? Once I did know, it became imperative to me that Justin Turner would come to own it.
While I’m tickled orange and blue over Turner having knocked in a run in seven straight games as a relative neophyte, I have to admit I was disappointed to learn that until Friday night he had never heard of Ron Swoboda, the man who established the heretofore unbreakable consecutive rookie RBI game streak 46 years ago. It’s one thing to not know you’re making obscure history. It’s another to not know that you’re unseating a legend.
A Met legend, certainly. When I read Turner’s admission of ignorance, I couldn’t be disappointed in Turner. How can any Mets fan be disappointed in Justin Turner? I did ponder, however, how a player can be a Met/Bison for a year and not be properly indoctrinated into team history. You go to work for a sizable company, you are usually subject to some sort of orientation that may include, “This is what we do here” and “Here are some of our successes.” Given six weeks of Spring Training and all the downtime on flights and in hotels, the Mets don’t/can’t take maybe an hour and show their rookies a highlight video? Maybe one day at home, before the gates open and before BP is rained out, they don’t/can’t lead them through the tunnel in the other direction from the clubhouse and show them the Mets Hall of Fame and Museum?
Orientation doesn’t have to be overly formal. Just take a rookie around and say, “Hey, Justin, check out this silhouette of the guy making the sprawling catch adorning the Right Field entrance. It was one of the best catches ever made in a World Series and represents one of the greatest moments in the history of the franchise from which you’re drawing a fine paycheck and excellent meal money. You became part of that legacy when you put on the Mets uniform. Wear yours with Swobodan pride.”
Yeah, that’s gonna happen.
Ultimately, I hope some Met rookie of the future comes along and is thrilled to know he topped the record for consecutive games with an RBI set by the great Justin Turner in 2011, that magical year everybody remembers, but as long as I’m dreaming, I dream of the chain being unbroken and the torch being passed and Jason Bay maybe getting a big hit. Or any hit at all.
A Mets fan can dream.
by Greg Prince on 21 May 2011 3:04 pm Tough, tough news today where Gary Carter is concerned: four “small tumors” were found on his brain; their status as malignant or benign hasn’t yet been learned.
If there’s any sentiment as obvious as Let’s Go Mets this otherwise sunny Subway Series Saturday, it’s Get Well Kid.
Update: Carter issued a statement explaining he will be examined further this Thursday.
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