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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 2 May 2011 3:26 am I noticed the news around 9:45 p.m. — President Obama would address the nation at 10:30 p.m. Uh-oh, I thought, then kept checking in on the Twitter parlor game of predicting what that news would be. The smart money was on Libya, which seemed logical — some escalation of the campaign against the stubbornly resistant Qaddafi. I had my laptop with me in bed, so I kept checking while the Mets and Phils continued their staredown on the TV.
Then the rumors started. Not Libya, which would almost certainly be some kind of bad news — a greater commitment of forces, tensions with allies and the U.N., political sniping about what should have been done and when — but Osama Bin Laden, which seemed a portent of something rather different, for why would the president be giving us bad news about him late on a Sunday night? The Bin Laden reports multiplied rapidly on Twitter, coming in from Cheney confederates, Congressional staffers, anonymous State Department sources and reporters with military connections until they reached the tipping point beyond which it was impossible that that many different people could be wrong: Ten long years after the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and Shanksville, Bin Laden was finally dead.
I devoted a tab on my browser to the White House feed and kept watching the game, now with about half of my attention, as the news rippled out from Twitter to the Times’ website and the AP and then, eventually, to ESPN itself. And to the crowd at Citizens Bank Park. With Daniel Murphy batting in the ninth, the crowd began chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” Murph, at least to my eyes, looked understandably baffled, and I wondered how many of the players knew, and how they were finding out, and what would happen when Obama spoke. Would they put it on the scoreboard? Would the game stop? Would Mets and Phillies stand side by side and hug, like the Mets and Braves had done in the first game at Shea after 9/11?
None of that happened, even as the president addressed the world and ESPN dropped its sports crawl to repeat the news. But the announcers (including Bobby Valentine, who conducted himself so admirably after 9/11) began to talk about it, and on the screen you could see fan after fan staring at their cellphones and Blackberrys instead of looking at the game. Normally such a sight provokes annoyance or derision, but this time it left me almost in tears. You could see people’s faces when they read the news and when the information stopped being letters and words and became something real. You watched them show their phones to their seatmates who hadn’t known, or who just wanted confirmation. You saw joy and amazement and pride and sorrow and everything else.
I didn’t know quite what to do. I saw tweets and Facebook updates from people I knew. Some were climbing to their roofs in Brooklyn to gaze out at lower Manhattan, which those of us who were here will always see with a terrible double vision, remembering it disfigured by smoke and ruin and electrical stench. Some people I knew were heading for Ground Zero, where a crowd was gathering, or Times Square, where an amazing photograph captured firefighters from the FDNY — an agency which lost an incomprehensible 343 firefighters that day — gazing at BIN LADEN KILLED on the ticker.
My first impulse was to go, to join the crowd, to walk down Liberty Street and see it impassable because of celebration instead of disaster. To bear witness as best I could. And maybe that’s what I should have done. Maybe I’ll regret it tomorrow, just as I regret that I didn’t head into lower Manhattan with a pen and notebook that morning long ago.
But I didn’t go. And I don’t think I’ll regret it. And here’s my fumbling attempt at explaining why.
On Sept. 11, 2001 I’d worked in the World Financial Center, catercorner from the Trade Center, for nearly six years. The walk from the A station at Broadway and Fulton to 200 Liberty Street was so familiar to me that I knew every square in the sidewalk — for instance, there was one near the Millenium Hotel that had an abnormally large concentration of mica in it that glittered when the light was right. I’d walk down Fulton and jaywalk across Church to the Trade Center Plaza, passing by the huge flagpoles and trying not to be nervous on windy days when the padlocks would bash themselves against the poles and clang like out-of-tune bells. Most mornings I’d cross the plaza, which accuracy compels me to admit was huge and dreary, and exit down the steps by WTC 2. Long before 9/11, I’d sworn not to become jaded about walking to work through a scene most people only knew from movies and postcards. I didn’t like the Twin Towers much, honestly — I thought they were outsized and cold — but I did like the way the steel formed trident-shaped structures at the base, becoming nearly human-scaled close to the ground. I’d often rap on the steel of WTC 2 as I passed, sometimes nodding at the tourists lined up for the elevator to the observation deck so far above. It was mostly habit, but also an acknowledgment that I worked and lived somewhere extraordinary, and that I appreciated it.
On the morning of Sept. 10, 2001 I took that walk for the last time. Less than 24 hours later those places were gone, along with so much else that we wondered if we could bear it. So many people were dead, and I knew so many more would die, before it was over.
I’d meant to go in early, then hit the snooze alarm multiple times. The impact with the first tower woke me up, but I sleepily convinced myself it was a truck going over one of those metal plates laid down in roadwork, and put my head back down. The impact with the second tower woke me up again, and this time I stayed awake — because I could hear people screaming. I watched the unimaginable, awful rest of it unfold on TV. I remember I kept shivering and couldn’t get warm, even though it was a beautiful late-summer day.
I was lucky on 9/11. I wasn’t there. No one I knew was killed, though colleagues of mine sent out to the street saw terrible things, things I know they will bear the awful weight of until the end of their days. They literally ran for their lives as the towers crumbled; our office building was ripped open by hurtling I-beams and filled with dust and powdered glass. We would rendezvous in temporary quarters outside Princeton, N.J., which would be our home for the next 51 weeks. Faced with a dreary commute made uncertain by terrorism closures and rumors, I’d stay in New Jersey for two or three nights in a row, then go back to Brooklyn. I got in the best shape I’d ever been in, flying along on the treadmill with my feet pounding out fear and anger. I also drank in the hotel bar until things went black far too many nights. I wonder sometimes how much damage that kind of hysterical overdrive did.
None of this, of course, is more than an infinitesimal disruption compared to those who had mothers and fathers and children and friends and neighbors taken from them, murdered by a madman half a world away. But at the same time, it was not nothing.
Nor is it nothing that our country changed, with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, horror stories about renditions and interrogations, an erosion of civil rights and the rise of a security apparatus that taps our phones and peers at our email and endlessly pursues obsolete targets at increasingly demeaning airport check-ins, all at an exorbitant cost. The character of our nation has changed, as we see it and as our friends and enemies see it. We will argue for generations over whether or not these changes were necessary and what harm they did us, but none of us involved in such arguments will ever remember how things used to be without regretting that time’s passing.
After 9/11 I wondered if I should leave New York. After Emily and I had a son 14 months later, I wondered that anew. Could I stand to live in the foremost terrorism target in the world? Was it insane to raise a child there? But we stayed. And almost against my will, I came to love New York in a way I never had before. Which leads me back to tonight.
Yes, part of me wanted to go to Ground Zero, to mark the occasion. And I smiled and nodded at the scenes of celebration there. But I decided not to go.
I thought of my son, not yet born on 9/11 and now sleeping safe and sound a room away, and said a silent but grateful thank-you to the brave men and women who had done so much to make it so. And then … I got back to watching the Mets game. I have a book deadline this week, so I organized some material for the final push there. There was Sunday laundry left to be done, so I kept the washer and dryer running through their cycles. But mostly I watched the game. I cheered on Pedro Beato and everybody’s new favorite Met Ronny Paulino and Taylor Buchholz and whooped when the Mets trooped off the mound victorious.
I’m glad that the Mets and Phillies kept playing, that the patriotic cheers were spontaneous, that there was no stoppage of the game for the president or anything else. The Mets and Phillies had a game to play, and they played it until there was a winner. People in the stands cheered for their team — men and women together at a sporting event, even the unveiled and unmarried, drinking beer and holding up signs and painting their chests and eating cheesesteaks and engaging in all sorts of foolishness. I cheered for my team at home. For the most part, I did what I do. For the most part, the people in the stands and on the field did the same.
When Osama Bin Laden murdered 3,000 people, it was a Tuesday morning on a warm late-summer day. Ten years later, I heard of his death on a pleasant spring night. I followed news of his demise via a technology that didn’t exist on 9/11, while my son, just just a vague imagining in September 2001, slept 10 feet away. Where the towers once stood, new towers are visible above the cityscape. Life has gone on in ways big and small, while this obscene murderous theocrat hid in caves and compounds, behind blast walls and barbed wire. He met his end on a Sunday night in America, during baseball season, with everything he sought to disrupt and ruin continuing without him — as it has for some time with him. Living as we have and as we wish and as we will is the best revenge.
by Greg Prince on 30 April 2011 7:39 pm Saturday’s was the first game of 2011 to leave me in Angry Bird/flipping bird mode when it was done, which seems awfully late considering much of this season’s first month was pockmarked by ugly Met losses. There were isolated incidences of ire through April, but they were usually situational, such as “how the fuck did Emaus does not pick up that ball fucking cleanly and get Capuano out of this fucking inning?” but mostly I had so few expectations for this team that they didn’t seem worth getting riled up about.
The surliest I got, probably, was when D.J. Carrasco let Chris Young’s small masterpiece against the Nationals turn into a no-decision that first home Sunday, with Blaine Boyer coming on soon enough to toss the entire team effort into an environmentally friendly Citi Field trash receptacle. But I was having a nice day in Promenade, so I chalked it up as (mostly) one of those things. Plus I was soon enough sated by how quickly the Republic of Aldersonia exercised informed impatience and disappeared those who committed game-blowing crimes against the state.
But peace in our time has given way to pissed all afternoon into evening, at least since the 2:25 Roy Halladay devoted to folding up the Mets and slipping them in his back pocket expired. What a lousy fucking way to lose a fucking lousy baseball game.
• I hate how close to moral victory territory losing 2-1 to Halladay felt, the way young Niese kept up with the old master. That’s great for Disney, not for the major leagues. They’re mortal over there, even in the rotation. Your guy pitches well, you should be capable of figuring out how to score for him, even against Halladay, against whom the Mets are 0-6 since he became a Phillie. We face this magnificent bastard far too often to revel the slightest in moral victory.
• I hate that Niese’s slim one-run margin through the middle of the seventh sat there so tenuously. The only other time this season when visions of a lead becoming a win danced through my oughta-know-better head was that Young game against Washington. That was my 500th official Mets game attended and I made the rookie mistake of trying to calculate how many wins I would soon have in the bag once the Mets nailed it down. The answer was one fewer than I dared to presume. Today, as Niese showed signs of just maybe besting Halladay, I wondered if just maybe I’d have to revise my Game 027 plans where The Happiest Recap is concerned. Once John Mayberry took Niese past the flower pots in left field, that pondering was rendered moot. (Smooth move, Ferguson.)
• I hate that the thought of beating Roy Halladay looms as so momentous an occasion that I was actually considering it as potentially one of the two best 27th games in Mets history. The Mets, as I’ve learned through my hours of scouring box scores, used to engage in and win pitchers’ duels with some degree of regularity. It wasn’t that big a deal to beat the Roy Halladay of other eras once the Mets conquered Koufax — it wasn’t unprecedented, anyway. Nowadays, it’s not that the aces have gotten bigger, it’s that the Mets have gotten smaller.
• I hate that I spent eleven seasons on a series of living room couches watching the Mets crumble before one edition of Atlanta Braves after another, cursing everything about the team that could not be dislodged from the top of the National League East, finally ascending to the mountaintop via one fleeting six-month joyride only to slide down the side of Everest yet again, left to stare up at another perennial division champion that’s just as formidable, just as indestructible, just as irritating to lose to too many fucking times in the course of a year.
• I hate that the six-game winning streak got me taking this stupid team more seriously than I’d ever planned on in 2011. As Joey “The Lips” Fagan tried to console Jimmy Rabbitte at the end of The Commitments, they raised my expectations of life and lifted my horizons…at least enough to make me think we were gonna ditch fifth place for the foreseeable future. Well, even that much hasn’t transpired. Fuck!
• I hate that the six-game winning streak was built on a foundation of hay. The Mets took one from the lousy Astros, three from the lousy Diamondbacks and two from the lousy Nationals before the lousy Nationals took one from us. You play who you play, I always say, but the Mets don’t seem to beat anybody who’s capable of sustaining superior play. They’re 8-7 against sub-.500 outfits and 3-10 against the thus far good squads. It’s eerily and unsatisfyingly reminiscent of how the Mets conducted themselves from June 11 through October 3 of 2010: 12-1 versus absolute dregs Baltimore, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, 35-54 versus all other comers. The Mets are the weasely third-graders who stick it to the first-graders just coming back from shingles, and can’t do a thing with the rest of the third grade.
Anything else to get my hate on? Oh, let’s see, I hate that…
the Phillies continue to have a nicer ballpark than we do;
that the character-starved people (with the occasional Well-Meaning exception) who get to go to that ballpark leave it, as a rule, feeling just super;
that Charlie Manuel obviously had no compunction about letting Halladay bat in the bottom of the seventh of a tie game — as it should be, but it’s become so goddamn rare that it’s almost shocking;
that Buchholz can get Polanco out and Polanco still produces the eventual winning RBI;
that the whole world stops spinning and lefties have to be retrieved from under rocks the moment Ryan Howard shows his face/arms;
that Wilson Valdez has managed to make Chase Utley’s absence almost incidental;
that Vance Worley, Joe Grahe and Darrin Winston combined to shut us out for eight innings Friday night;
that they don’t miss fifth starters nor two closers;
that Willie Harris is a no-tool threat coming off the bench;
that Willie Harris isn’t given every opportunity to pal around with his buddies in our nation’s capital;
that Ike Davis doesn’t know better than to swing at first pitches with runners on base;
that the Mets didn’t see Ball One until their tenth batter;
that there are still tailors who lovingly hand-craft double play balls and they all work for Roy Halladay;
that Fox chooses to save money by refusing to employ a professional play-by-play announcer and instead uses apparent contest-winner or obvious nepotee Matt Vasgersian to fill the spaces between Tim McCarver;
that the Mets continue to punish us by sticking us with Wayne Hagin;
and that exactly one-sixth of the season is in the books, we’ve had a lovely hot streak, yet we’re still a basement-dwelling 11-16 unit that might get better for a spell but will most likely revert to form, and whatever portion of the summer isn’t wasted worrying and wondering about which big contract will be traded — and for what — will be given over to teasing us with Matt Harvey or whoever because all this team has going for it is a vague notion that the future will beat the present all while the present proves it has a perverse talent for sticking around clear to the end of September.
Other than that, good game.
by Jason Fry on 30 April 2011 12:23 am That was going through my head as the Mets trudged to the plate for the top of the ninth: Gee, we’d have been beaten less badly if Terry Collins had run up the white flag a while back. The fact that Ike Davis and Jason Pridie held down the pig and rubbed some home-run lipstick on it before everybody got to go back to the hotel didn’t make me feel particularly differently.
Ryan Howard demolished us. So did somebody with the no-really name of Vance Worley. Ronny Paulino made his Mets debut, possibly after being coaxed back from standing alongside the highway with his thumb out and a sign reading ANYWHERE BUT HERE. Because yeah, it was that kind of night. A Mike Pelfrey Doesn’t Have It kind of night. A Dillon Gee Doesn’t Have It Either kind of night. A Why Am I Wasting a Perfectly Decent Friday Night On This Goddamn Debacle kind of night.
Those kind of nights happen when you’re a baseball fan. If you’re committed enough (or perhaps just numb enough), you stick around because you want to see another backup catcher make the all-time roster, or because it would feel like the smallest of moral victories to deny the other guys a shutout, or because a sophomore player’s modest hitting streak might become slightly less modest. And I suppose these are good things, even admirable in some way. Perhaps they’re money in the karma bank for use in games like the win against the Nats. Or perhaps they’re just evidence that we’re hopeless addicts. Either way, it’s too late. The Mets win and we watch and cheer rapturously. They lose and we watch and cheer for whatever we can find. It’s why I’m writing this and why you’re reading it. It’s what we do.
But even addicts can make good choices now and again. And I’m going to make one now: The Mets lost, it was bad, and we’re going to stop talking about it. Tomorrow’s another day.
by Greg Prince on 29 April 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” 22nd game in any Mets season, the “best” 23rd game in any Mets season, the “best” 24th 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 022: May 9, 1967 — METS 3 Reds 2 (11)
(Mets All-Time Game 022 Record: 27-24; Mets 1967 Record: 9-13)
The distance that got everybody’s attention when it was over was the distance from home plate to somewhere past the 371-foot mark on the left field fence at Shea Stadium. That’s how far Tommy Davis’s eleventh-inning, game-winning homer off Cincinnati reliever Mel Queen traveled, thereby allowing the Mets to beat the Reds 3-2 on a Tuesday night in 1967. Also of interest was how far Davis had come in the previous four years.
Tommy Davis was one of baseball’s best players as a Dodger in 1962 and 1963. He was darn near the MVP of the National League in ’62 when he drove in 153 runs, and won batting titles in both seasons. Then things took a downward turn as Davis endured a broken ankle, a dislocated leg and a reduced role in Los Angeles. In the 1966-67 offseason, the Dodgers sent the Brooklyn native back home, or one borough over. A fresh start awaited Tommy in Queens, and he was happy with what he was experiencing in the early going.
“This,” he said after his walkoff clout, “is the first time I’ve had anything to cheer about since 1963.”
If the heartwarming ending — and the transcontinental journey — belonged to Davis, something else about distance needed to be said for that night’s winning pitcher. The Mets’ Jack Fisher kept his team in the game the entire game…all eleven innings of it. Jack gave up two runs (one earned), six hits, three walks and struck out five. But the most impressive thing about his line was his IP. He pitched a complete game victory.
Fisher didn’t come out in the eighth even after pinch-runner Dick Simpson, inserted for Reds pinch-hitter Art Shamsky, scored the tying run on a John Sullivan passed ball. Wes Westrum left Jack in to pitch a 1-2-3 ninth as well as a tenth that saw him give up a leadoff single to Leo Cardenas but then erase it on a ground ball double play. When the Mets got runners on first and second with nobody out in the bottom of the tenth, Westrum sent Fisher to the plate to bunt them over. The strategy didn’t work to perfection (lead runner Tommie Reynolds was gunned down at third) and the Mets didn’t score, but Jack went back to the mound to pitch the eleventh. He gave up a leadoff single to Vada Pinson, but then induced three consecutive fly balls from Pete Rose, Tony Perez and Lee May. Center fielder Cleon Jones snagged them all.
One starting pitcher; eleven innings. Unimaginable today, isn’t it?
Yet it wasn’t unprecedented in Mets history to that point. Six times a Met starter had gone at least (at least!) that long in a game. The most recent incidence took place exactly a week earlier, and it was committed by the very same Jack Fisher, who went 11⅔ against the Giants. Unfortunately, Fisher (known maybe not entirely endearingly as Fat Jack) threw his last pitch to Willie Mays, which Mays belted for an RBI single, causing Westrum to remove Fisher in favor of reliever Don Shaw (who retired Willie McCovey and vultured the win when the Mets scored twice in the bottom of the twelfth).
But against the Reds — with a mighty assist from Davis — Fisher accomplished something no Met pitcher had done before: win an eleven-inning start. Jack’s 3-2 victory over the Reds set a record for the longest complete game win in Mets history, and it’s never been exceeded. Bob Shaw managed to match the feat a month later, and though there would be nine starts of that length or longer between 1968 and 1983 (including four by Tom Seaver and three by Jerry Koosman), no Met starter has won a complete game of such impressive distance since 1967.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On May 14, 1966, the Mets had their hitting shoes on, but they forgot to plug them in…in other words, no power. But no problem! The Mets unleashed on the Giants at Shea a Saturday barrage of singles: 17 of them. Cleon Jones, Ron Hunt and John Stephenson produced three apiece. Nine different players, including starting pitcher Jack Fisher, recorded at least one single. But nobody doubled, tripled or homered. Singles, however, were all the Mets needed to construct their 11-4 romp. Two San Francisco errors, four walks by Giant pitchers, a Ron Herbel wild pitch and a couple of Eddie Bressoud sacrifice bunts didn’t hurt, either. Seventeen hits of exclusively the single-base variety added up to a team record for, shall we say, the most successful power outage in Met history. It’s a singular mark that’s been equaled only once, in a 1982 6-3 Mets win over the Dodgers.
GAME 023: April 26, 2002 — METS 1 Brewers 0
(Mets All-Time Game 023 Record: 30-21; Mets 2002 Record: 13-10)
Impressions can form early in a season. Sometimes they grow indelible. Sometimes they are subject to revision. Consider the case of a Mets starter who made a fantastic April impression that would be obliterated by what he didn’t do come June.
You could say something similar of the 2002 Mets, who looked much better before anybody got to examine them very closely, but that’s a broader story of hope and disappointment. For now, we’re thinking about southpaw Shawn Estes and what, if one were to judge by results, should have gone down as his signature Met start.
Estes was a veteran of some standing in the National League and not an altogether unfamiliar presence to Mets fans when he came over in a December 2001 trade with the Giants in exchange for Tsuyoshi Shinjo and Desi Relaford. He was, in fact, San Francisco’s Game Two starter against Al Leiter in the 2000 Division Series. But to Mets fans, he was still mostly a stranger, with all of four Met starts (none of them extraordinary) under his belt entering a Friday night tilt against a far more recognizable face, that belonging to Brewers starter Glendon Rusch. Rusch had been a mainstay of the 2000 National League champions but had been — along with close to half of the 2001 Met roster — purged by GM Steve Phillips in an offseason housecleaning of epic proportions.
These two generally unremarkable starters put on quite a show at Shea. A leadoff single by Roberto Alomar, a two-out second-inning solo home run by Jay Payton and a fourth-inning single by Edgardo Alfonzo were all the hits Rusch would allow. Those and two walks were the extent of the damage the Mets would inflict on their former mate (though, actually, only four Mets that night had played alongside Glendon).
Estes, however, outdid Rusch. He outdid everybody from Milwaukee. Eighteen Brewers came to bat in the first six innings and none of them reached base. The only one who came fairly close was catcher Raul Casanova, who struck a ball off the pitcher’s foot. When it had the good Met fortune to bounce to first baseman Mo Vaughn and Vaughn tagged the plodding Casanova (“it was like two trains,” Raul said later of his and Mo’s “race” to first), the nearly 38,000 in attendance had the sense that maybe they’d lucked into something incredibly special.
Shawn Estes was pitching a perfect game.
Then, as fickle Met luck would have it, he wasn’t. Milwaukee’s leadoff batter, Eric Young — a New Jerseyean who had watched the Mets from Shea’s upper deck in his youth — started the seventh by lining the cleanest of singles to left. So much for the ultimate great game, but Shawn did not let down. Still protecting a slim 1-0 lead, he retired Ronnie Belliard on a fly to Payton in deep center before Vance Wilson threw out Young trying to steal second. When he struck out Jeffrey Hammonds to end the seventh, Estes was pitching a pretty nifty one-hitter.
And that it would remain. The only other blemish on Estes’s mark that night would be a two-out walk to Jose Hernandez in the eighth. He finished with a complete game, one-hit, 1-0 victory over Rusch, who also went the distance in recording his three-hitter loss. The dual CGs were a rarity unto themselves, as it was the first time since 1997 that a Met had engaged in such a duel (and it’s only happened twice since then). Time of game was a swift 1:53, making it the last nine-inning affair the Mets won in under two hours.
To put Estes’s eight-strikeout gem in a little more perspective, his Game Score — a Bill James invention intended to measure just how effective a starting pitcher is in a given assignment — was 92, the highest by any Met in 2002 and the best performance from any Met starter since 1999. That 92 has been matched twice since Estes, but it hasn’t been topped.
“It doesn’t get any better than that,” manager Bobby Valentine said of Estes’s brush with Met immortality, before amending his review. “It gets one pitch better than that, maybe.”
No-hitter flirtation remained in the air, as the next day Pedro Astacio, another of Phillips’s offseason imports, took a no-no bid of his own into the seventh. The Mets would win that game and thrust themselves into first place, a position they held off and on in 2002 until the end of May. By mid-June, though, they were slipping under .500 and from contention, as the promise associated with the revamped ’02 Mets faded quickly. It was then, against the Yankees and Roger Clemens, that Estes pitched the game for which most Mets fans recall him. But that, too, is a broader story of hope and disappointment…to say nothing of hits and misses.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On May 4, 1991, the Mets trailed the Giants 4-2 to start the bottom of the ninth when Buddy Harrelson went to his bench. Boy did his bench respond. First, he sent Mackey Sasser up to pinch-hit for Charlie O’Brien against San Francisco closer Jeff Brantley. Sasser launched Brantley’s fourth pitch over Shea’s right field fence to bring the Mets to within a run. Next, Harrleson called on Mark Carreon to swing for pitcher Alejandro Peña. Swing he did — connecting for a homer to left. The back-to-back cameo clouts tied the game at four and sent it toward extra innings. The teams played until the twelfth that Saturday afternoon when, with Rick Cerone on first, Howard Johnson, a mundane regular in Buddy’s lineup, whacked a two-out pitch from Mike LaCoss over the blue fence in right-center, producing a power-packed 6-4 Mets win.
GAME 024: May 14, 1972 — METS 5 Giants 4
(Mets All-Time Game 024 Record: 22-29; Mets 1972 Record: 17-7)
If Willie Mays had spent nearly fifteen seasons in California exile as a Los Angeles Dodger rather than a San Francisco Giant, then perhaps a Hollywood ending would have been scripted when Mays came home to New York in 1972 to play his old team. Yes, that’s it — Willie would have won the big game by lashing a home run with two out in the bottom of the ninth to beat Dem Bums he used to call his own.
But that would’ve been too much and too obvious. Willie merely coming home, a decade-and-a-half after being swept up by the westbound Giants, and donning a uniform representing the New York (N.L.) franchise that took their place…that was the drama right there. Anything else would have been too Hollywood, and goodness knows sophisticates connected to New York — and San Francisco, for what that’s worth — would turn up their noses at such obvious audience pandering.
We had Willie Mays as a New York Met all of a sudden. It was at first a mirage. How could it be? How could Jack Lang’s scoop in the Long Island Press be more than a crazy rumor? How could the Post’s big block, four-inch type headline — MAYS A MET — be 100% accurate? How could the best player in all of baseball for so long, if not so much anymore, have wound up on the Metsies?
It made sense on paper. The Giants owner needed someone else to pay Mays’s freight and the Mets’ owner maintained a special interest in doing so. It also clicked in the souls of former New York Giants loyalists like Village Voice writer Joe Flaherty, for whom “no matter how Amazin’ the Mets were, a part of our hearts was in San Francisco.” Restoring Mays to the city where it all started was, Flaherty wrote, “a lover’s reprieve from limbo”.
Hence, Horace Stoneham and Joan Payson made a deal. The Giants would get a serviceable pitcher named Charlie Williams and a bulging envelope of cash. The Mets would get Willie Mays — the very same Willie Mays who was a New York Giant from 1951 through 1957, back when the very same Mrs. Payson was a minority owner of those very same New York Giants.
Little was very same as it ever was by 1972, but Mays as a Met was no mirage. He was a vision. A very real vision, wearing a New York (N.L.) home uniform again, sporting that trademark 24 on its front and back (courtesy of Jim Beauchamp, who graciously and immediately switched to 5) and, once all was official and relatively comfortable, inked in as the Mets’ first baseman and leadoff hitter versus the…oh yes, San Francisco Giants on an overcast Mother’s Day afternoon at Shea Stadium.
If any mother ever knew how to land herself the perfect gift, it was Met matriarch Joan Payson.
“We have always wanted Willie Mays ever since the Mets were formed,” board chairman M. Donald Grant said in announcing the most instantly celebrated midseason acquisition in Mets history. “We repeatedly have advised Horace Stoneham of our desires. Our offers have been constant and continuous.”
Mrs. Payson may have finally gotten her man, but was Mays the perfect fit on those 1972 Mets? Could a 41-year-old part-time center fielder, part-time first baseman and full-time legend possibly be? Mays may have been viewed as a godsend to the nostalgically inclined fans of New York, but new manager Yogi Berra could be forgiven for thinking he’d just come down with Excedrin Headache No. 24. This was no spare part, no mere savvy veteran who might pinch-hit here, fill in there and, as Tom Seaver put it hopefully, “be of tremendous help to us”. This was Willie Mays. Yogi Berra was a legend, too, yet his luminescence couldn’t hold a candle to the Say Hey Kid’s…no matter that said Hey Kid had clearly aged and was batting .184 at the time of the trade.
“On a purely physical basis,” a skeptical Joe Gergen wrote in Newsday, “the acquisition of Mays should represent an addition. But the entire transaction was conducted in an unreal atmosphere. Emotions surrounding the move were overwhelming.”
Whatever conflict might arise from carrying Mays on the roster wasn’t the main thing on anybody’s mind that meteorologically cloudy but spiritually bright Sunday. All anybody saw was MAYS on the Mets’ lineup card and Willie as he appeared in the mind’s eye from all those seasons before — before his inevitable decline, before he burnished the Golden Gate, before there were Mets, when there used to be a ballpark right there at Eighth Avenue and 157th Street in Manhattan.
The Polo Grounds was gone, but Willie Mays was here…No. 24 about to play in the Mets’ 24th game of the year. It couldn’t get a whole lot better.
Yet it did anyway.
Willie leading off the bottom of the first elicited a standing ovation from the paid crowd of 35,505. They were thrilled to see him standing there, they were even happier when Willie worked out a walk against San Francisco starter Sam McDowell. Bases on balls to Buddy Harrelson and Tommie Agee followed, setting the stage for Rusty Staub (no insignificant recent acquisition himself) to slam McDowell for a four-run homer. The smiles in the stands as Mays crossed the plate with his first New York (N.L.) run since September 21, 1957, made the day seem that much less rainy.
Mays had returned. He had scored. What more could be asked of him?
How about carrying his new team to victory against his old team? It didn’t appear that would be necessary, never mind physically possible, but the Maysless Giants fought back against Met starter Ray Sadecki in the top of the fifth. A Fran Healy walk, a Bernie Williams triple, a Chris Speier double and a Tito Fuentes home run transpired in uninterrupted fashion. Just like that, Staub’s granny had been neutralized, and the Mets and Giants were tied at four going to the bottom of the fifth.
The Mets didn’t need what Mays represented. They needed what Mays could do. And leading off against San Fran reliever Don Carrithers, he did it. On a 3-2 pitch, Mays swung and not so much turned the clock back but set atlases everywhere straight. Willie Mays, New York’s favorite ballplaying son, put the New York Mets ahead 5-4 with a home run to left-center. Willie Mays and New York were synonymous once more.
“It’s a good thing Shea Stadium is made of steel and concrete,” offered Lang in the Sporting News, for the wet and wild Mets fans who were rubbing their eyes in joyous disbelief would otherwise “have ripped the place apart with their enthusiasm.”
A Willie Mays home run to beat the Giants in his first game as a Met in the bottom of the ninth inning would have indeed been too Hollywood. But the fifth? Just the right climax for Off Broadway.
The denouement was, per Flaherty, “the simple tension of watching Jim McAndrew in relief hold the Giants for four innings,” which the righty did. Staub’s grand slam and Mays’s emotional blast stood up to account for all the runs required for a 5-4 win. It was the third in a row for the first-place Mets and the third of an eventual eleven consecutive triumphs, tying the club record set in 1969, back when Mays was still stranded in San Francisco.
Not that Mays didn’t have that kind of magical year on his mind as he circled the bases after hitting the 647th home run of his storied career. “My first hit as a Giant was a homer,” the man of the hour said. “We won the pennant that year, in 1951. My first hit as a Met was a homer. I felt that maybe we’d win the pennant this year. That’s what I was thinking.”
The Mets win the pennant? The Mets win the pennant? The Mets won Willie Mays. Please — one unbelievable ending at a time.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On May 12, 1962, the Mets were bent on stunning the Milwaukee Braves and their fans, in no particular order. After coming from behind in the first game of a Saturday doubleheader at the Polo Grounds — when Hobie Landrith tagged Warren Spahn for a two-out, two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth for a 3-2 Mets win — the expansioneers set out for their first-ever twinbill sweep in the nightcap. It wouldn’t be easy, as a back-and-forth affair ensued, tilting in the Braves’ favor by the top of the eighth when Milwaukee grabbed a 7-6 lead (four of their runs had been driven in by Hammerin’ Hank Aaron). But these Mets weren’t about to let their big chance go by the boards. In the bottom of the eighth, Elio Chacon singled home Rod Kanehl from second base for the tying run, and in the bottom of the ninth, with one out, none other than old Dodger hero Gil Hodges hit the day’s second walkoff home run. The Mets won 8-7, nailing their first doubleheader sweep and making a winner out of reliever Craig Anderson twice in the same day. He was the winning pitcher in both games, a distinction that would be earned by only two other Met pitchers over the next half-century.
by Greg Prince on 29 April 2011 6:52 am Logic tells you one loss after six wins is no big deal, particularly when set against a field of 162 games. Good manners tell you that to complain about not getting everything you want once after getting all you could ask for over the course of a week is simply impolite. But watching the 2011 Mets since they commenced being the 2011 Mets tells you to take no single defeat altogether lightly considering how not so long ago, every victory was precious and being granted even one of them was turning unimaginable.
A winning streak ended Thursday night in Washington. It was bound to happen sooner or later. That’s always what I say in these circumstances given that a cursory combing of major league records indicates nobody wins ’em all. “You can’t win ’em all,” you say, so you pat your team on the back for winning as many as it did and you offer some variation on “go get ’em next time.”
It’s healthy and it’s decent to do that. It’s the pause we must all take from when we realize our greed for unimpeded perfection will not be validated. The Mets lost to the Nationals. They gave it a good try. The results didn’t bear out the effort. They’re 6-1 in their last seven, time to move on — tally ho, or whatever the royals say when not marrying off their young.
Still sucks to lose, though. Still sucks to lose a winnable game and not make it seven straight. Still sucks that they lost the game before the winning streak so last night wasn’t the eighth win in a row if you follow the trail of greed retroactively. When the memories of a 5-13 start are still so fresh as to be pungent, it’s not easy to be magnanimous let alone logical.
And this is good because a week or so ago, losing one game after winning six wouldn’t have bothered me. To be honest, 5-13 didn’t bother me the way it should have. Oh, it bothered me that the team I was rooting for was an utter embarrassment — the kind of team I was compelled to refer to as “atrocious” fifteen separate times in one dismayed post — but that meant any given loss was just spit in the ocean. It wasn’t going to matter if the Mets lost a game to the Nationals or whoever. They were going to lose oodles of games in 2011. “Another setback? For us? Oh, just put it over with the rest of them.”
But then came six consecutive wins, one more uplifting than the one preceding it — culminating in justice and karma aligning and producing a baby that looked suspiciously like Daniel Murphy — and I was forced to reconsider the season in progress. The Mets were no longer an embarrassment. The Mets were no longer fifteen kinds of atrocious. The Mets were a genuine ballclub for a week, with the hitting and the pitching and the fielding and the making it fun to care about what they were up to. It was a 180-degree revelation. Every ounce of 5-13 cynicism melted away from last Thursday to this Wednesday. I truly loved being a Mets fan for the first time since…well, their last substantive winning streak last year.
Yes, it’s true: loving your team is easier when they win. The dirty little secret of diehard loyalists is out. It isn’t nearly as much fun when they’re 5-13 as when they’re 6-0. Relentless winning indicates a complete lack of bad news. Everybody is your favorite player when your team is winning. You stop asking Chin-lung Why. You stop keeping track of how often a particular pitcher is on the mound at game’s end and the phrase “vesting option” exits your vocabulary. You laugh off the boneheaded plays because they were just one more obstacle overcome in your righteous charge to well-deserved victory.
Then it ends and you’re obliged to face an uncertain future all over again. You’re no longer 6-0. You’re 11-14. You’re inconveniently returned to fifth place after finally emerging from its depths and your next three dates are with the team at the other end of the standings, in their well-stocked lair, no less. You sort of see that as an opportunity for advancement but you also recognize the challenge it implies and you grit your teeth as you did when you were receiving your last tetanus shot.
We’re back to one game at a time territory, though I try never to leave it. If I’ve learned anything in this life, it’s that it’s counterproductive to attempt to set out your team’s course in advance. If winning ‘X’ of our next ‘Y’ games was as easy as we tend to make it sound, don’t you think the Mets would take us up on our math? I can’t live with “let’s take two out of three” or “let’s just win series” or “we should be able to win five of six from [insert two lousy upcoming opponents].” Baseball isn’t like that. It refuses to be. Mets baseball showed no signs of “we’ll win the last one from Houston, then sweep Arizona and then take the first two from Washington, the second of those after avenging the most galling bad call in the annals of humankind.” It just happened that way, and it was beautiful.
Now that part is over, at least for the moment. It left us, however, with a season. It left us with a ballclub that transcends our doubts and its potential soft underbelly. Just before the game that didn’t become our seventh consecutive win ended last night, I absorbed the circumstances at hand: Hu was on base, Harris was at bat, Hairston was on deck. A month before, they were each, in a Met sense, unknown quantities. Two weeks ago, they were part of the problem, new Mets who weren’t helping whatsoever. Now, though, they were Chin-lung and Willie and Scott, three of my guys, all of whom I fervently hoped would come through, keep the fun going, keep making me happy, keep the winning streak alive into eternity or at least the possibility of it.
Didn’t happen. Harris struck out. Mets lost. I minded. Of course I minded. But I didn’t fume at any one of them individually and I didn’t 180 back to calling the whole lot of them atrocious. They and the rest of the Mets had played too well for just long enough to fully win me over to their side. Those unfamiliar with our folkways and our recent past may wonder what the hell that’s all about. “You’re a Mets fan. You needed to be won over to the Mets’ side?”
We know better. We know what it’s been like. We know how too many seasons of late proceeded and how too many seasons ended. We know how this season started. And we know how liberating it was to shake off that start and begin to move ahead to its middle.
Philadelphia awaits. So Let’s Go Mets already.
by Jason Fry on 27 April 2011 11:45 pm A sometimes irritating, sometimes amusing side effect of chronicling games as a blogger is the weird double vision you develop as events take their course. By the middle innings you find yourself wondering what your theme is — or wondering if this is one of those ho-hum games where you’re going to have to invent one and hope people think it sort of fits.
This game looked like the latter, and somewhere around the seventh I decided — with no great degree of enthusiasm — that I’d explore what you think games will deliver and how thoroughly that can differ from what you actually get. The beginning of the game was delayed by rain, spatters of storms were visible up and down the coast on radar, I thought about R.A. Dickey trying to grip knuckleballs and Tom Gorzelanny (not exactly an athletic-looking athlete) as his opposite, and figured this was going to be one of those 9-7 games that’s delayed five times and ends at 2:30 a.m with 200 people in the stands and both teams looking more relieved than anything else. The odds were good that I’d see the rest of the 1982 Mets Yearbook, which talked about the actual ’82 Mets for about eight minutes (which might have been about six too many) before retreating frantically to footage of Tommie Agee.
But that wasn’t at all what we got — at least not at first. Instead we got a rather lethargic, low-scoring show, one of those games in which you’re not sure if the pitchers are doing well or the hitters just feel like they’re underwater. Top of the eighth, Nats up 2-1, and maybe we were just going to have to accept it.
Nope. Things were just getting started.
There was Jose Reyes, rifling one up the gap and streaking around to third, where he arrived just ahead of Rick Ankiel’s admittedly rather awesome throw and stayed just on the bag despite momentum and Jerry Hairston Jr. trying to separate him from what he’d rightfully earned. SAFE! No wait, Marvin Hudson inexplicably said OUT, and cue the ballistics. “He’s practically climbing on Chip Hale’s back!” marveled Howie in a great call on WFAN — if Jose had been any madder he might have jumped over his coach. For some reason — every Mets fan immediately saw it as evidence of a guilty conscience — Hudson remained mild under unmild criticism from Jose and Terry Collins (so far more supplicant than litigant in rhubarbs), not excusing either angry man from further play. The way I was reacting in Brooklyn, I wouldn’t have been astonished to see Hudson take out his cellphone and excuse me from further watching.
Get me rewrite, blog-style: Mets robbed, winning streak broken, things said about Marvin Hudson that will need to be shamefacedly qualified tomorrow.
But wait a minute, rewrite desk — we weren’t done. Daniel Murphy, prodigal Met without a position, rose up against the sneakily deadly Tyler Clippard (whom I vaguely remember pitching for the Yankees as a small child) and imprinted a mighty statement upon the horsehide, a declaration that This Will Not Stand, that The Men of Metdom Shall Hold the Line Against These Nats and Their Allies in On-Field Judication. I was briefly thrilled before remembering that it should have been the go-ahead run, which got me mad all over again. (“According to Marvin Hudson, that’s a long fly ball caught by Rick Ankiel,” I tweeted, which I don’t feel bad about yet.)
Ah, but further rewrites awaited. The Mets then promptly sprang some defensive leaks. First Jason Bay nearly corralled an Adam LaRoche parachute on the left-field line, and would have had LaRoche at second after disentangling himself from David Wright, except Murph was gazing in wonder at the little outfield drama instead of covering the bag. Ugh. Then there was a passed ball and a sacrifice fly and, oh, things were fumeworthy again. Now what should we make of this game? The Mets had been robbed, but they’d then rather deftly picked their own pockets. Bad luck? The karma engineers showing us we were going to lose it anyway, so relax? Random noise in a long season?
Oh rewrite, how did you know it was me calling?
In the ninth it was the Nats (whose grasp of defense can be approximate) who fell apart. Little bleeder by Bay, an Ike Davis bloop that a year ago Willie Harris turns into a double play but this time eluded Roger Bernadina, then a Harris bunt thoroughly screwed up by Sean Burnett and their Hairston brother, then a long sac fly by Chin-lung Hu, of all people, an RBI groundout by Josh Thole thanks to smart baserunning by Davis, intentional walk to Reyes and a clothesline double by Murphy to put the game safely in our column.
I’m sure lots of the game stories will talk about grit and fight and Things That Wouldn’t Have Happened Last Year. And maybe rightly so. Maybe Murph was spurred to greatness by the awareness of his employers’ short memories and the Emaus-sized hole lurking behind his position. Maybe this is just life with a young hitter still learning second base and refining the mental checklist of those aspects of baseball that don’t involve a bat. Maybe this is random noise that for one evening produced a result we found harmonious and pleasing.
Whatever it was, it sure was fun. Oh what the heck. Let’s call it karma.
by Greg Prince on 27 April 2011 8:33 am 1. Five consecutive wins (after holding off the Nationals in Washington)
2. Climbing almost out of last place (a half-game behind the Nats, one behind the Braves)
3. Having the best last place record in baseball (a dubious distinction, but ya gotta start somewhere after digging yourself a 5-13 hole)
4. Jason Bay batting fifth (that’s the Jason Bay from before 2010, apparently, my instinctive chant of “Hey, hey, Jason Bay, how many Mets did you strand today?” every time he shows his face notwithstanding)
5. Carlos Beltran relatively unencumbered in the field and on the basepaths (tripling and everything — life begins anew at 34)
6. Daniel Murphy in the two-hole (and at second base, even allowing for the likelihood of sudden Bonehead Murphy reappearances)
7. Josh Thole with his confidence and his stroke (I’ve taken to calling him Jock Thole, because he so looks like the earnest kid on the high school baseball team who wouldn’t join in the picking on of the schlubby kid in gym class)
8. Jason Pridie getting comfortable (his walkup music in my mind is “Funky Céilí” by Black 47, specifically the moment at the beginning when lead singer Larry Kirwan is calling out achingly for “BRIDIE!” which is close enough to “PRIDIE!” for my purposes)
9. Chris Young handling a bat (maybe he’s not back up to speed on the mound, but what a gorgeous safety squeeze from our recent 1.000 hitter)
10. Ike Davis with a glove (averting looming disaster on the final play Tuesday night when he stepped off the bag to corral David Wright’s nearly errant throw and applied a tag on the last National baserunner of the night)
11. Heretofore unsung relief pitchers (Ryota Igarashi flummoxed Jayson Werth, Taylor Buchholz plugged two solid innings…it’s like having an entire bullpen!)
12. The continued presence of Dillon Gee on the 25-man roster (because he earned it, and because demoting the thus far ineffective D.J. Carrasco imbues the old saw about “no scholarships” with real fiber — my goodness, I love the informed impatience of the new regime)
13. Not hearing Terry Collins mention how close we were to winning (because we won — teams that win don’t much mention how they nearly lost)
14. Human-scale camera angles at Nationals Park (no more D.C. vertigo on SNY — who’d we pay off?)
15. Black jerseys (four straight in those tiresomely derided ebony tops, five straight with some shade of the vintage Mets In Black look…when the Mets win dressed something like Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, then baby, black is beautiful)
16. Brad Emaus’s listing among Mets you can punch out on your just-released All-Star ballot (which is actually pretty dim of MLB to have authorized considering Brad Emaus is a fading Met memory who is currently adding “organizational depth” to the Rockies at Colorado Springs, but when you win five in a row, stuff that normally bothers you strikes you as mostly amusing)
by Greg Prince on 26 April 2011 1:23 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” 19th game in any Mets season, the “best” 20th game in any Mets season, the “best” 21st 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 019: April 29, 1987 — METS 2 Astros 1
(Mets All-Time Game 019 Record: 26-25; Mets 1987 Record: 10-9)
It’s an article of faith that the Mets had to defeat the Astros in Game Six of the 1986 National League Championship Series because had Houston forced a Game Seven, Mike Scott and certain demise awaited them from sixty feet, six inches away. That was the story then and nobody’s much deviated from it for a quarter-century. Scott was that good — and perhaps that devious via his illicit use of sandpaper — and the Mets were that helpless against his split-finger scuffball.
In the first game of the ’86 playoffs, at the Astrodome, Scott outdueled Dwight Gooden 1-0, yet it was never really very close. It didn’t even take Glenn Davis’s second-inning leadoff home run to put the Mets in a hole. Baffled by one of Scott’s mysteriously dipping, darting deliveries in the top of the first, Gary Carter asked home plate umpire Doug Harvey to inspect the baseball, expecting or least hoping the man they called God would see as obvious the markings of a cheater and throw Scott out.
Harvey didn’t answer Kid’s prayer, so Scott kept pitching. Carter struck out swinging. He wasn’t the first Met to do so (Hernandez had just gone down) and he wouldn’t be the last. By the end of the evening, Scott was, to borrow a phrase from Bob Murphy, wearing the hitters on his watch chain: 1 walk, 5 hits, 14 strikeouts in the complete game shutout.
When next the Mets met their nemesis, they were still operating on Scott Standard Time. This time the Mets scuffed…make that scratched out a run, but it was a mighty lonely tally in the Game Four 3-1 loss at Shea Stadium. Master Mike went the distance again, striking out only five but scattering just three hits.
So yeah, it was imperative in the Mets’ minds, when they held a 3-2 lead in the series, to go to Houston and wrap things up in six. Nolan Ryan was tough. Bob Knepper was difficult. But Mike Scott, they decided as a unit, was literally impossible. Anybody who watched the Mets grit their teeth for sixteen innings in Game Six until they absolutely, positively pulled out a 7-6 victory and can attest they were playing to win more than a pennant — they wanted desperately to gain a reprieve.
But what about the parallel universe? The alternate history? What if the Astros had not permitted the Mets to tie them in the ninth inning of Game Six? Or what if Kevin Bass had gotten ahold of one of Jesse Orosco’s breaking pitches in the sixteenth? What if the Astros had evened the series and the Mets, for all their reservations, were compelled to reserve their Houston hotel rooms another night and face Michael Warren Scott with everything in the balance in Game Seven?
We’ll never know, and we can only imagine what those circumstances might have wrought. The 1986 Mets might have surprised themselves and their followers and discovered that Scott, deep down, was as mortal as any pitcher (say the Mike Scott who scared nobody when he wore a Mets uniform from 1979 through 1982). Ron Darling, the Mets’ prospective Game Seven starter, might have pitched the game of his life and rendered Scott irrelevant. Or the worst that everybody feared might have come to pass and the Red Sox would have blown the 1986 World Series to the Astros. We can imagine all we want but we will truly never know.
But we do have a little proof that maybe, just maybe, Mike Scott wasn’t necessarily going to be Kryptonite to those 1986 Mets…if you’re willing to use the closest chronological thing possible from which to draw conclusions.
Nineteen games into the 1987 season, the defending world champion New York Mets hosted the defending National League West champion Houston Astros at Shea Stadium. If it wasn’t a playoff atmosphere, and if it wasn’t the playoffs, it represented a chance for each side to maybe slay a ghost. The Astros could no longer capture the 1986 flag, but if their ace remained true to his previous October’s form, they could perhaps be satisfied on some level that ultimate success could have been their if only this, that or some other thing had gone their way six months earlier. As for the Mets, dragging with a bit of a post-championship hangover as 1987 commenced, it would be reassuring for them to know there was no single individual (save, perhaps, for Gooden, who had wrapped a four-week stay at the Smithers Alcoholism and Drug Treatment Center a few hours before this Wednesday night’s NLCS rematch proceeded) who could stand in their way as they attempted to repeat their championship feat of a season ago.
Opposing Scott was Fernandez, losing pitcher from Game Four. Sid didn’t much have it in the playoffs, confined to that one start in which Alan Ashby and Dickie Thon each tagged him for homers. Both pitchers were tough in the early going this dance. The Mets couldn’t put two runners on base at the same time in the first three innings while the ’Stros wasted three singles, a walk and a stolen base through four.
Keith Hernandez led off the bottom of the fourth and, with one swing, eviscerated Kryptonite. His solo home run gave the Mets something they never had versus Mike Scott in October 1986: a lead. It was only 1-0, but it was a changing of the tides. After Fernandez escaped the top of the fifth unscathed, Hernandez kept the tide rolling in the Mets’ favor. With two out and two on, Keith delivered a single to right, scoring Wally Backman from second and giving the Mets a 2-0 lead over the man they were all but certain they couldn’t have beaten in the year when they beat just about everybody else.
This was Sid Fernandez’s turn to be impenetrable. The long-relief hero of the World Series kept the Astros off the scoreboard for seven innings. “This is Sid’s game,” Hernandez said afterwards. “He knew that he would have to give us an ‘A’ game against Scott and that’s what he did.”
Doug Sisk pitched a scoreless eighth, exiting after allowing a leadoff double to Bass to start the ninth. Jesse Orosco, he whose glove still presumably floated over Shea from the previous October 27, got two quick flyouts before allowing pinch-hitter Mark Bailey to single in Houston’s first run. But without nearly as much Sturm Und Drang as transpired in the sixteenth inning at the Astrodome, Jesse struck out Jose Cruz to end the game, the Mets victors, 2-1.
Scott was just another pitcher now. Not a bad one by any means, but no longer loitering among the Mathewsons. Ex-Met Mike went six, struck out seven and walked nobody, but he was touched for seven hits and those two juicy rib-eye steaks off the grill of Keith Hernandez. He was, against the Mets, not long after he loomed as unbeatable, the losing pitcher.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On April 24, 2007, Orlando Hernandez of the Mets and Aaron Cook of the Rockies exchanged seven scoreless innings at Shea, then handed their zeroes to their respective bullpens. Met and Rockie relievers kept the blanks firing until the top of the tenth when rookie shortstop Troy Tulowitzki tripled off Billy Wagner to drive home catcher Yorvit Torrealba. Colorado closer Brian Fuentes made quick work of the first two Met batters in the bottom of the inning and put pinch-hitter Damion Easley in an 0-2 hole. After then taking two balls, Easley got a pitch he liked and sent it soaring over the left-center field fence to tie the game at one. The score remained deadlocked until the bottom of the twelfth when Ryan Speier gave up a walk, a sacrifice and a balk, suddenly placing Shawn Green on third base with one out before recovering to fan pinch-hitter David Newhan for the second out. Opting to intentionally pass eventual National League Player of the Month Jose Reyes, Rockies manager Clint Hurdle had his righty reliever pitch to Endy Chavez. After taking one pitch so Reyes could race to second on defensive indifference, Endy laid down an exquisite drag bunt that took the entire ballpark by surprise, nobody less than Speier. The pitcher had no chance to cleanly glove the ball, which one chronicler likened to a faithful dog “companionably rolling alongside Endy” as Chavez sprinted through the first base bag. Green, meanwhile, crossed the plate and the Mets lapped up a 2-1 win.
GAME 020: April 28, 1992 — METS 4 Astros 0
(Mets All-Time Game 020 Record: 29-22; Mets 1992 Record: 11-9)
On a staff fronted by Dwight Gooden, embellished by Bret Saberhagen and steeled by Sid Fernandez, nobody would have much argued that none of them had better stuff than David Cone. To date, Cone wasn’t quite as accomplished as Gooden and Saberhagen — each of whom were won a Cy Young before turning 22 years old — and he wasn’t generally as tantalizingly unhittable for stretches the way Fernandez could be, but he was plenty good and plenty baffling. Certainly nobody brought the kind of arm angles to bear the way Coney did (or did you think Laredo was merely a town in Texas?) and nobody inspired the brand of empathy David could when working hard, working tough and working to confound the opposition.
David had it all working against the Astros on a chilly Tuesday night at Shea. Houston fielded a fairly young, not yet fully bloomed lineup, and it seemed as overmatched by Cone as anything just planted would have in the cold of Queens in late April. Kids like Craig Biggio, Steve Finley, Jeff Bagwell and Steve Finley — the Astros’ first four batters — weren’t quite ready for Cone time. Nobody in orange and yellow trim was. Bagwell walked in the first; Gonzalez was hit by a pitch in the fourth; veteran shortstop Rafael Ramirez walked in the sixth but was erased on a Biggio ground ball — and Biggio was himself eradicated when Finley grounded into a double play.
That was the extent of the Houston offense for six innings. The Mets led 4-0, thanks to a two-RBI double in the first and a two-RBI single in the fourth, both courtesy of Eddie Murray, but the excitement abounding wasn’t over how much the Mets were hitting. It was because the Astros weren’t…or rather, because David Cone was no-hitting them.
If they handed out primers on Mets fandom for newcomers, even twenty years ago, the lack of a no-hitter despite all the Amazin’ pitchers who had passed through Flushing would have be printed no later than Page 3. It was part of Met lore and an essential element of Met heartache for three decades. Didn’t matter if it was Seaver, if it was Gooden, if it was Randy Tate…no Met had ever done it. Yet here in 1992, David Cone, as mysterious to the other team’s batters as the lack of Met no-no’s was to their hardcore loyalists, seemed to be on the verge of breaking the barrier. When he stormed through the seventh by popping up Bagwell, lining out Gonzalez and striking out Pete Incaviglia, Coney appeared almost destined to be The One.
“You get the sense,” Astros skipper Art Howe would observe, “something was going to happen.”
His attempt became, of course, the main attraction of the night. Jeff Torborg, who’d caught no-hitters thrown by Sandy Koufax and Nolan Ryan, was taking no chances when he removed lumbering Bobby Bonilla from right field and replaced him with the swift Rodney McCray. With the best possible defense the Mets could rustle up behind him, Cone took the mound in the eighth in reach of the unreachable star: a Mets no-hitter.
First batter: Third baseman Casey Candaele. He grounded to Murray at first. One out.
Second batter: Catcher Eddie Taubensee. Cone missed on a 3-2 pitch and walked him. Not an out, but not a hit.
Third batter: Lefty inch-hitter Benny DiStefano.
Note the last two letters of that last name: no. Under the right circumstances, that could be a prefix for what Cone was five outs from nailing down…but, no. Out of the majors since 1989, receiving only his second Astro plate appearance of the season (a campaign he started in Triple-A Tucson), grown up in Brooklyn a Mets fan conversant in the vocabulary of Jimmy Qualls, it would fall to DiStefano to extend the world’s most unlikely streak. Benny hit David’s second pitch off the end of his bat. It rolled toward third base, but not far enough to be picked up by Dave Magadan, who positioned himself properly for the normally dead pull hitter. Mags had made one of the several Met defensive gems earlier that contributed to the sense that TONIGHT COULD BE IT!, but this infield roller was immune to that kind of magic.
DiStefano was safe. The no-hitter was out.
Again.
“I thought it was my night,” David allowed after putting in the books a 4-0 victory, a two-hitter adorned by eleven consolation strikeouts of Astro batters not named Benny DiStefano. Oh, Cone was very good despite not quite making Shea’s dreams come true. “His fastball was alive,” Torborg judged, “his backdoor breaking ball was working, he was all over the outside of the plate.”
Outstanding pitching, to be sure. And a nice win, yes. But no…well, you know.
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On May 6, 1962, the recently born Mets never say die, scoring two to knot the Phillies at five in the eighth inning at Connie Mack Stadium, and then take the lead in the twelfth when Gil Hodges singles home Rod Kanehl and Gus Bell. Casey Stengel calls on his ostensible ace Roger Craig (knocked out of the box in the first inning two nights earlier) to preserve the 7-5 win for Craig Anderson. Despite allowing a leadoff double to catcher Clay Dalrymple and wild-pitching him to third, Roger struck out Roy Sievers to give the 4-16 Mets their first-ever extra-inning win. It wouldn’t be an official statistic for seven years, but the scoreless twelfth also earned Craig the first save in Mets history.
GAME 021: April 30, 1974 — Mets 8 DODGERS 7
(Mets All-Time Game 021 Record: 21-30; Mets 1974 Record: 8-13)
Second acts in Metropolitan life? They’re a mixed bag, as anyone who has grown excited over the return of an old favorite only to be let down when stark reality trumps sepia-toned memory can tell you. But one Recidivist Met surely made more of his second tour of blue and orange duty, even if the sequel didn’t provide nearly as much in the way of color as the first act.
If you’re thoroughly schooled in the ways of Mets, then you must have heard of Bob Miller. No, you must have heard of the two Bob Millers. It was their proliferation that made them colorful in the first place…or, more accurately, in last place. That’s where the 1962 Mets were involuntarily ensconced, and when you’re en route to losing 120 of 160 decisions, everything seems a little absurd. The 2000 Mets offered the world two Bobby Joneses and, really, few gave it a second thought. But in 1962, when little thinking was devoted to winning, you needed all the distractions you could get.
Or all the Bob Millers.
The Mets’ first Bob Miller was obtained with every intention of taking him seriously. He was one of the Mets’ four $125,000 picks in the 1961 National League expansion draft. In 1961 money, that made him a big-ticket item. Though he hadn’t yet compiled much of a track record in segments of four seasons as a Cardinal, Miller would be 23 entering 1962 and therefore represent an infusion of youth on a roster saddled (through a combination of philosophy and availability) with age. He was worth a shot, in other words.
This is Bob L. Miller, we’re talking about, a distinction that went unspoken for four months as Bob L. was the only Miller on the Mets. Sadly, the L’s weren’t lonely. Bob had a tough time as a reliever and as a starter, and after 18 appearances, he was 0-7. While he was minding his own business, pitching but neither losing nor winning as a reliever, the Mets did something proactive.
They brought in another Bob Miller: Bob G. Miller. The Mets traded for the aging lefty pitcher, along with Cliff Cook, in early May (coming over with third baseman Cliff Cook from Cincinnati for Don Zimmer, another of those valuable $125,000 draft picks) but didn’t get him on the big club until late July; he’d wanted to quit baseball but had to be talked out of it and then talked into a stint at Syracuse to get back in shape. The materialization of Bob G. Miller made Bob L. Miller — a righty — not just 0-7 but half of an unavoidable storyline.
The Mets are stuck in tenth place, but they lead the league in Bob Millers.
It was as good as anything in 1962 for a laugh. Traveling secretary Lou Niss roomed them together to cut down on the inevitable confusion, but it didn’t help Stengel, who as manager didn’t have to explain himself to anybody. When he wanted Bob L. Miller up in the bullpen, he simply rang coach Red Kress and asked for Nelson.
All Bob L. Miller asked for was a win. He went back to racking up decisions not long after being joined by Bob G. Miller. Alas, they were the same kind as they were before: losses. Miller ran his record to 0-12 before finally, in the Mets’ second-to-last game of their first season, prevailing 2-1 over the Cubs at Wrigley Field. Wrote George Vecsey in Joy in Mudville, “Having given so many unhappy interviews all season, he waited in front of his locker to tell the New York reporters how it felt to win a game finally.” Yet another alas: the Mets’ traveling press corps had abandoned the sunken Met ship to cover the sizzling Dodger-Giant pennant race on the West Coast. Miller had no one with whom he could share his happy ending.
So concluded the strange, mostly unfulfilling trip through inaugural Metsdom for Bob L. Miller. While Bob G. Miller simply retired, Bob L. Miller was traded to the Dodgers in the offseason for Tim Harkness and Larry Burright. He served as a journeyman reliever and spot-starter for the next eleven seasons, often on some very good teams. Miller pitched in five postseasons and was a member of two world champions, L.A. in 1965 and Pittsburgh in 1971. The Pirates, however, released him in Spring Training of 1973, so he latched on with the Padres. The Padres waived him in June, and he drifted to the Tigers. The Tigers were out of it by September, so they sold him to a contender that needed all the pitching it could get.
Bob L. Miller returned to the Mets late in the 1973 season, too late to be more than a footnote to the You Gotta Believe charge to the N.L. East title. Miller appeared in one game, an 8-5 loss to Montreal that, almost poetically considering the righthander’s 1962 storyline, broke the Mets’ seven-game winning streak. By then, however, they were safely in first place. He was ineligible for the playoffs against the Reds and World Series against the A’s.
It was easy to forget Miller was around the Mets’ second pennant-winner, but when they gathered in St. Petersburg to defend that title, Bob showed up, just as he had a dozen years earlier. No longer possessing the live right arm that had George Weiss digging deep into the player personnel kitty, Miller, 35, proved himself useful enough for Yogi Berra to keep as the proverbial grizzled veteran out of the pen. It was a comfortable enough role for somebody who was a little bewildered by the wonders of Stengel and expansion baseball when he was 23.
“I sat in the clubhouse with the press guide figuring out who the people were,” Miller remembered in 1974. “My uniform didn’t fit. This year it does.”
His won-lost record would look a lot better on him, too, even if the Mets themselves couldn’t say the same about theirs. Oh, they weren’t reliving 1962, but the successes of 1973 seemed just as far away as the ’74 Mets stumbled out of the gate losing 13 of their first 20. At Dodger Stadium on a Tuesday night at the end of April, Jerry Koosman appeared on his way to an easy win, staked to a 6-0 lead by the fifth. L.A., however, came roaring back, tying the game in the bottom of the eighth on a three-run homer by Steve Garvey. Berra took out Koosman, and brought in Miller, who kept the game tied at six.
In the top of the ninth, the Mets put two on versus screwballer Jim Brewer. Walt Alston brought in rubber-armed Mike Marshall to face John Milner with one out. Milner doubled, scoring Teddy Martinez and Cleon Jones. Thus, with an 8-6 lead, Miller went to work in the bottom of the ninth.
1962 seemed to be festering in Robert Lane Miller’s soul, for Bill Russell reached him for a leadoff triple. Bob struck out pinch-hitter Manny Mota but Davey Lopes was safe at first on a ground ball when Milner couldn’t handle Wayne Garrett’s throw from third. Miller (who may or may not have had his mail mixed up with Milner’s) couldn’t exactly be blamed had he allowed a thought similar to “Can’t anybody here play this game?” pass through his head. The next batter, Tom Paciorek, lined to Dave Schneck in right for the second out, but then Dodger left fielder Bill Buckner singled Lopes to third.
Ron Cey stepped in with the tying run 90 feet away, the winning run on first and the weight of delayed déjà vu nearly crashing down on Miller’s shoulders. Nevertheless, the vet composed himself and flied Cey to Don Hahn in center for the final out. The Mets won 8-7 and gave Bob L. Miller the first W of his second Met tenure mercifully quickly. It came in his ninth appearance of 1974, waaaaay ahead of his 1962 pace.
Said Ed Kranepool, who joined the Mets just in time to watch Miller to finish 1-12 the pitcher’s first time around, “He’s a lot smarter. Now it took him only twenty-something games to win. The last time it took five-and-a-half months.”
ALSO QUITE HAPPY: On April 30, 1988, the Mets showed up at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati to play a baseball game and ended up surviving a circus atmosphere to take a 6-5 win. They were up 4-2 in the sixth when Reds starter Tom Browning was called for a balk, sending Mookie Wilson home from third. Browning took out his frustrations by hitting Tim Teufel with the next pitch, which in turn brought an angry Met contingent charging out of the visitors’ dugout. There was some pushing and shoving, as Browning and Darryl Strawberry were ejected. But that was just the warmup act. In the ninth, with the score tied at five, Reds closer John Franco walked Howard Johnson to lead off the inning. He was sacrificed to second by Kevin Elster and, one out later, scored on Mookie Wilson’s grounder to shortstop — Mookie was safe when Barry Larkin’s throw pulled Nick Esasky off the first base bag. HoJo was able to come around because Dave Pallone hesitated in making the safe call, a long enough pause that it kept Esasky from throwing home. Pallone’s slowness on the draw roused the ire of Cincy manager Pete Rose who came out to argue and then some. Rose ultimately shoved Pallone in the chest twice, which earned him an ejection (and an eventual 30-game suspension from National League president Bart Giamatti). Reds fans took their cue from Rose’s histrionics and began showering the field with all manner of objects. After a lengthy delay, from which Pallone didn’t return for what his fellow umps decided was his own safety, Randy Myers came on in the bottom of the ninth to save a frenzied Met victory.
by Jason Fry on 24 April 2011 11:37 pm If I’d asked you on Wednesday night if you were disappointed to think about a Mets-free Monday, you’d have said that wasn’t funny. We were 5-13, still reeling from watching rainouts or doubleheader losses, and the idea of meaningful games in May had become a sour joke.
Four days later, well, whaddya know? That day off looms as a huge disappointment. No Jason Bay swinging free and easy, with nary a sign of an intercostal muscle out of whack or his shoulders slumped under the weight of $66 million in expectations. No Carlos Beltran, in there every day and looking like a coolly professional assassin with the bat instead of an aging liability. No David Wright, gone from fishing at off-speed stuff out of the zone to whacking balls around and out of the yard. No Ike Davis trying to bring down a satellite or two. No starting pitcher looking blissfully competent and eating up innings that recently were left for anybody else.
No Mets on Monday? Say it ain’t so!
Because I hadn’t paid sufficient attention to my own calendar, I wound up keeping track of this one piecemeal — we had a brunch with Emily’s relatives, so I contented myself with sneaking looks between and during trips to the buffet. As I was shaking a server down for more mint jelly I saw it was Mets 2, D-Backs 0 — that was good, particularly seeing that a David Wright roundtripper had been responsible. Then, amazingly, 6-0 — that necessitated a quick under-the-table delve deeper into Gameday, and the happily unexpected news that Jason Pridie had hit a three-run bomb. (I don’t know how you spent your weekend, but I do know it wasn’t as good as Pridie’s.) And then Wright again, heroics noted during an Easter puppet show that Joshua mercifully lost interest in once he realized there was no more candy he could scrounge. By the time I got an earbud in on the way to the subway most of the fireworks were done and the task had shifted to cruising across the finish line before the Diamondbacks could regroup.
At home I caught a couple of batters on actual TV before deciding that catch-as-catch-can was working perfectly well and going out to plant a new crop of hostas with WFAN as accompaniment. The first game of the year heard in bits and pieces as life allows always makes me happy, too — it’s the moment you relax a little and realize baseball isn’t going away, that it will be here until it gets cold again, on the TV at home and up there above the bar and glimpsed through a window and whispering in your ear as you walk down the street.
It was only later that I felt a little foolish — weren’t these the same Mets that had left me in a state of numb fury not so long ago? I knew they weren’t really this good, this automatic now, so didn’t it stand to reason that they hadn’t really been that inept, that tragic then? Well, yeah — and for a few seconds I swore I’d try to remember that when the scales tip the other way and guys are dropping pop-ups and waving at ball four. But fandom, at its core, isn’t rational — particularly not in April when we’re all still getting used to this again.
by Greg Prince on 23 April 2011 11:06 pm Who can identify the last time or place anyone took a gold eagle or sovereign from his purse and slapped it on the table to pay for dinner? Who can identify the last company of archers sent into battle by a captain who still believed a well-drawn flight of arrows could overmatch a volley of bullets? Who can identify the last time a two-dollar bill was folded into a matchbox and passed to buy a vote?
—Theodore White, America in Search of Itself: The Making of the Presidents 1956-1980
Pass me that bottle and mind your own business.
—Harry Truman, as imagined by the Rainmakers, “Downstream”
You know what you don’t really see much anymore? Guy sneaking a flask into a ballgame. I don’t know that I’ve ever actually seen it. Maybe it happens all the time, but I’m thinking that’s a football thing. Or an alcoholic thing. Might have seemed like an excellent plan as recently as Wednesday night when the Mets were dropping their twelfth decision in fourteen appointments and everybody who wasn’t tethered to cough syrup (like myself) needed to be seeking relief in something stronger than free samples of Pepsi Max.
But we were so much older then. We’re younger than that now. We’re where we were in the heady period that spanned April 2 to April 5, those halcyon days of the first three-game winning streak of 2011. I can say first because — wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles — we have another, and it’s going on RIGHT NOW! It’s true. I’ve done the math, and by winning Thursday, Friday and Saturday without losing on any days that were added to the calendar when they were reworking the zodiac, it adds up to three consecutive wins.
That’s eight off the team record and four from being what a more confident fan base might consider a noteworthy winning streak, but let us not killjoy this thing with logic. We’ve won three in a row. I’m not well-versed as regards illicit alcohol, but I would think that’s a reason to hoist your pints out in the open, not drown your sorrows via snuck-in containers.
A flask? Who sneaks in a flask?
The guy in front of me out in right field was who. Maybe there was a touch of irony intended. Dude was pretty young — legal certainly, but not of the flask demographic, which I would tab as someone pulling a fast one in 1954. He was part of a birthday group of about fifteen guys and gals who weren’t much trouble yet I would have consigned to a different section altogether had I had my druthers (which I rarely do in a public situation). Two guys took turns giving each other the finger all day, and not out of empathy for Bobby Parnell. It was that kind of birthday party. Not a 1-800-FLOWERS cake in sight.
Vodka was in the flask, I learned. I can see how it might have slipped by the battery of anti-flask barriers set up by management. This group brought their own food, and lots of it, and somewhere amid the capicola and deviled eggs, a flask could just get “lost”. Lotsa food, these people had. I always admire the people who err on the side of too much when they make their pregame deli trips. This guy, for example, was bearing several heroic sandwiches. One of the finger-givers worked on a big bag of Lay’s while one of his non-finger companions unfurled a budget-size sack of Rold Gold. That’s a movable ballpark feast. Best I could do was a turkey wrap from the King Kullen that I had the presence of mind to pick up Friday and save for Saturday, consuming it while waiting out the rain delay in a dark corner of the Promenade Club — or the Braniff Airlines departure lounge, as the regulars at LaGuardia know it by sight.
Not that Citi Field lacks for the culinary, but the economy inherent in the big bag of sandwiches, snacks and sealed containers is unbeatable. Perhaps that’s where the flask of vodka came in. How much is a beer at the ballpark? Haven’t partaken of my occasional Blue Point Toasted Lager as of yet this season, but the price of anything can get hefty by the cup. Flask of vodka? I didn’t have to fail microeconomics more than once to infer that’s a relative bargain.
The flask was passed around a bit, so its impact on the flask guy was diluted. Plus he alternated sips with a bottle of cranberry juice cocktail and a bottle of water. He may be a problem drinker in some facet of his life — I mean he brought a flask of vodka to a baseball game — but he wasn’t a problem today. A little annoying when he shouted “FIRE ’EM ALL!” after Frankie Rodriguez surrendered a single to Juan Miranda (who had the right to remain hitless), but not major Drunk in the Next Row type of hassle. Many were worse at Shea. Shea was Kelcy’s Bar compared to Citi Field. Must have been less expensive to get soused there, or perhaps all those Designated Driver golf shirt signup sheets really have proved a boon to safety and civility.
Now why, beyond your own demons for which you should seek counseling, would somebody feel it necessary to sneak a flask of vodka into a Saturday afternoon ballgame? I’m not using economy as a motive; that’s just a benefit. Two reasons as best as I can figure would go into taking this action:
1) Terrible weather.
2) Terrible baseball.
Granted, the day did not lurch to a promising start with all that rain, but it turned quite pleasant. My winter coat was the right outerwear before first pitch, excessive by the ninth inning. If the flask was brought along as protection against the elements, then it outlived its usefulness. On the other hand, you’ve brought the flask, what’s the point of not opening and draining it regardless of climate? Remember having your lunch packed in the fridge the night before, then waking up too sick to go to school? Didn’t you love eating your school lunch out of its brown bag at home?
The baseball, like the weather, improved as the day went along, too. The reasons not to drink…
• Dillon Gee’s six crackling innings of adequacy
• back-to-back bombs from Bay and Ike so powerful that Harry Truman would have thought long and hard before ordering them deployed;
• Josh Thole’s sincerely doofy grin when Tillman the Skateboarding Bulldog delivered the ceremonial first pitch to kick off Bark in the Park Day;
• Pedro “What Idiots Rule 5’d Him?” Beato and Jason Isringhausen rendering at least temporarily obsolete the dependence on high-leverage no-shows like Byrdak, Buchholz and Carrasco;
• and the all-important but oft-missing tack-on run, as delivered by Daniel “Bonehead” Murphy in the eighth
…surely outweighed the reasons why a Mets fan would want to drown multiple sorrows in smuggled vodka…
• Murphy earning the Bonehead sobriquet with characteristic defense that makes me hope very much that any bonehead can play second base;
• Miguel Montero’s demonstrated ability to wipe out half the planet’s population three times over with just one swing;
• the fact that Mets fans with dogs are welcome to parade around the Citi Field warning track but no similar invitation has been issued to Mets fans with banners;
• and a sense that too many Mets were left on base for eight innings and that K-Rod was putting too many Diamondbacks on base in the ninth inning and that ohmigod, let me get a hit off that flask.
But we won. We won our third in a row. We won our third game of the year when I was either in a bar near Citi Field, in a bar at Citi Field or fascinated by the actions of those I just as soon would have preferred spent their afternoon in a bar far away from Citi Field.
I guess I can drink to that.
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