The blog for Mets fans
who like to read
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.
Got something to say? Leave a comment, or email us at faithandfear@gmail.com. (Sorry, but we have no interest in ads, sponsored content or guest posts.)
Need our RSS feed? It's here.
Visit our Facebook page, or drop by the personal pages for Greg and Jason.
Or follow us on Twitter: Here's Greg, and here's Jason.
|
by Greg Prince on 24 March 2011 8:29 pm Was on another Mets-arranged blogger conference call with Sandy Alderson tonight. Of course those are splendid opportunities for the likes of we who write about the Mets yet traditionally haven’t been considered Mets writers. Downside is you’re on the phone with 15, 20 other bloggers. They’re not downers by any means — to the contrary, they’re solid folks with solid blogs who ask very solid questions.
Too solid, maybe, for by the time I get to ask one question and one question only (per the rules), some questions that were burning a hole in my mind have already gotten asked. What fun is that? So when my turn came up, I scrapped my incisive queries on second base and Rule V in order to avoid redundancy. I went instead for the semi-philosophical, wondering aloud to the general manager of the New York Mets if he was feeling substantially less like an outsider than he did when he took the job and started answering questions from curious New York Mets writers, New York Mets fans and everybody else up here with a passion for the New York Mets.
Five months in, I’m still getting used to Sandy Alderson being the individual with his hands on the wheel of my fan fate. That’s not to say I miss Omar Minaya in any way, shape or form (you know what I’m sayin’?). It’s just that Sandy still has that new GM smell to me…not 100% Met, not quite broken in, not quite yet. Specifically, then, I wanted to know how much does he still feel like a stranger in a strange land — could there be any stranger land to a savvy baseball man than Metsopotamia? — or is the transition complete and are the New York Mets, for lack of a less dramatic term, Sandy Alderson’s team?
“There’s still a little getting-used-to-itness,” is how the general manager put it, going on to explain what a big help the concentrated nature of Spring Training is in melting away lingering unfamiliarity. The focus for six weeks is baseball, baseball and, as much as it can be when you’re talking about the Mets, nothing but baseball. Everybody’s together by necessity, thus it’s something of a de facto corporate retreat every day (my phrase, not his).
The major league staff is in one place. The PR staff is in one place. The training staff is in one place. Alderson gets to see more of the minor league staff than he will for the rest of he season. “Cross-fertilization” occurs and newness evolves into a comfort level. Everybody becomes “knit together” as a unit. This is all very positive to building an organization.
And, he added, it helps that in Port St. Lucie, “there’s not a lot to do.”
All these years, it never occurred to me the legendary dullness of what Marty Noble termed “Port St. Lonesome” was a Met asset. Maybe the problem was the Mets never treated it as one. Goodness knows clusters of Mets have found trouble hard by those swamps and pizza parlor parking lots. yet maybe Alderson and his lieutenants have unlocked a secret about the place where bowling is king when baseball is over. Maybe it’s great that the Mets are relatively isolated from the more intriguing aspects of civilization. Maybe they’re really getting to know each other and their craft that much better because that part of Florida has nothing much to recommend it.
This afternoon, the Mets pounded out 16 runs and 23 hits. Could it be an outgrowth of St. Lonesome’s godforsaken nature? Do they know each other’s tendencies extra well because few other interesting people cross their paths with distractions like lively conversation? Are they so bored from playing basically the same four teams that they’ve come to like and rely on each other more than the average team that plays in a hotbed of temptation like Kissimmee? What are they mixing into the shooters at Duffy’s and why has it given everybody a keener batting eye?
The chamber of commerce may not care for the characterization that there’s not a lot to do in St. Lucie, but Sandy Alderson’s endorsement may be the best advertisement I’ve ever heard for it.
Expansive transcript from the conference call, covering all the bases, available at MetsBlog and Amazin’ Avenue.
by Greg Prince on 24 March 2011 1:58 pm In addition to falling into the second base job (because legally you can’t just place an orange traffic cone between short and first), Brad Emaus seems to be the frontrunner for an award that is probably no more familiar to you than, well, Brad Emaus. He certainly qualifies as the favorite, which speaks less for Emaus and more for the lack of competition — sort of like second base.
Sometime in the next week it is likely to be announced Emaus, or Lucas Duda, or maybe Pedro Beato or…can’t think of anybody else…has been voted recipient of the John J. Murphy Memorial Award, given annually to the top rookie in Mets camp.
I’ve been assured the award still gets announced, as it has most every year since 1972, but word doesn’t seem to readily seep out about it. Last year’s winner was…ya don’t remember, do ya? Don’t feel bad. I missed it entirely when it came down, and I pay attention to this stuff. The 2010 John J. Murphy Memorial Award, as voted on by the members of the media who cover Mets Spring Training like a tarp, was Ike Davis. Ike enjoyed a hellacious spring a year ago — batting .480, socking three homers, driving in ten runs — and won an all-expenses-paid trip to Buffalo to start the season.
When the Murphy — named for the general manager who helped build the 1969 World Series champs and died the following offseason — was first instituted, the winner received a Omega Dynamic wristwatch from the good folks at Clive Jewelers. It was a big enough deal that the New York Times reported not just the announcement that John Milner was the inaugural recipient, but the statistics that earned it (.296, 3 HR, 12 RBI) and the vote total (Hammer 8, Buzz Capra 2) that made it official.
It was never much more than a one-day blurb, befitting anything that happens in Spring Training. By the time the real season began, it was something for Ralph, Bob or Lindsey to mention a couple of times, and then it would be tucked into the press guide for posterity. Still, I always liked to learn who won it. It used to be a staple of late March and early April Met reportage.
Has it proved predictive of rookie success? Sometimes. Milner had a fine rookie campaign in 1972, though interestingly, his teammate Jon Matlack, who received no Murphy support in spring, won the National League Rookie of the Year Award (while Milner placed third). No offense to Clive Jewelers, but that’s a more impressive piece of hardware. Darryl Strawberry, who had to endure an Ikelike detour to the minors before taking the Senior Circuit by storm in 1983, pulled down the only Murphy-ROTY double win in Met history. Dwight Gooden, Rookie of the Year by November 1984, however, was aced out of the John J. Murphy in March by Ron Darling…who would go onto finish fifth in N.L. Rookie balloting.
Other Murphy winners who garnered Rookie of the Year support included Roger McDowell (1985) and Kevin Mitchell (1986) in addition to Davis. Conversely, some of the more noteworthy Mets rookie outings of the past four decades were overshadowed in the runup to Opening Day. Hubie Brooks’s 1981 was stellar (.307 batting average, third to Fernando Valenzuela and Tim Raines in Rookie of the Year balloting), but it was Tim Leary’s sensational spring that attracted Murphy voters (en route to his career-altering injury in the chill of Wrigley Field on Opening weekend of that fateful April). Gregg Jefferies won ROTY votes in both 1988 and 1989 yet in neither spring did he take home the Murphy, coming in behind Kevin Elster in ’88 and Mr. March himself, Darren Reed, in ’89. Jason Isringhausen would spring to rookie prominence in the summer of ’95, but it was Edgardo Alfonzo who carried the month of April the year Spring Training was strike-delayed. And when David Wright was first opening eyes in March 2004, it was the legendary Orber Moreno who put up what was judged the superior spring.
Moreno’s Murphy was presumably the only award the forsaken righthander ever won at the major league level (on the other hand, Orber pitched in 40 more games than I ever will). He beat out not only Wright but Kaz Matsui, which was probably a bad sign for Kaz — and if you’re thinking maybe Kaz wasn’t considered rookie enough for John J. Murphy voters because he wasn’t “really” a rookie, Japanese league veteran Tsuyoshi Shinjo won the award in 2001, as did Masato Yoshii in 1998.
Is Orber Moreno the most obscure John J. Murphy winner? Define obscure. These are the Mets, and their media horde has also been blinded by the Florida light provided by the likes of Mike Bruhert (1978), Mario Ramirez (1980), Doug Simons (the Emausish Rule V draftee who shared JJM jubilation with Pete Schourek in 1991; Ron Gardenhire and Charlie Puleo were the other co-winners, in 1982), Mike Draper (another Rule V’er, in 1993), Steve Bieser (1997) and fellow Subway Series hero Dae-Sung Koo (2005). Kelvin Chapman was so dazzling in St. Pete in March 1979 that he won not only the Murphy but the second base job, making him the last second baseman with zero major league experience to start for the Mets there since (presumably) Emaus. Kelvin proved not so hot at second in ’79, but redeemed his Murphyness five years later when he re-emerged from the discard bin to serve as Wally Backman’s effective platoon partner for parts of two contending seasons.
Some Murphmeisters, as in the case of Strawberry and Davis, don’t make the team out of spring but make a mark later. Jose Reyes won the award in 2002 as a 18-year-old, but wouldn’t see the Mets for another year (nobody won the award in 2003, the second time in the bling’s history that happened; a labor-stoppage curtailed Spring Training in 1976, and no award was given then, either). Jon Niese, at 21, whetted Met appetites with a strong spring in 2008 then disappeared into the minors until September. Melvin Mora tore up St. Lucie in the March of ’99, but wasn’t truly ready for his closeup until October 3 of that magical year. Others who left a calling card the previous September — Lee Mazzilli in 1976, Anthony Young in 1991 — maintained their cup-of-coffee momentum and seized the Murph the following spring.
Only one winner of the John J. Murphy Memorial Award never saw game action in the regular season, not as a Met, not as anything. Yet he had more big hits than Ramirez, Reed and Chapman combined: the 2000 recipient of the award, Garth Brooks.
Yes, Spring Training games are taken so seriously within the industry that a celebrity who alighted in Mets camp on a goodwill, fundraising mission on behalf of his charitable foundation…a country music megastar who went 0-for-17 in exhibition games…was voted the top rookie in Mets camp.
Did it do any harm? Other than to the psyche of Jason Tyner and any other freshman hoping to make a meaningful impression that spring? Well, the Mets were so distracted by Brooks’s participation in their contests that they went out and won the National League pennant in 2000. Through his visibility in March ballgames, Brooks’s Touch ’Em All Foundation elicited the aid of 120 MLB players and millions more dollars for his philanthropic endeavors. Upon Brooks’s departure from St. Lucie, Bobby Valentine referred to Garth as “one of the most special people I’ve ever been around”.
Garth Brooks was a bigger attraction than Mike Piazza that March. He didn’t contribute to a single Mets win, but essentially nobody minded. He didn’t collect one lousy single, yet they were happy to present him with a trophy (prior to the Home Opener, no less). Hard-bitten writers and broadcasters looked past his 0-for-17 and went along 100% with the spirit of his briefly “being” a Met.
By next week, we’ll know the identity of this year’s John J. Murphy Memorial Award winner. And by the week after, we’ll have probably forgotten. In the meantime, in case you’re tempted to take any Grapefruit League result close to heart in the next several days, remember that Garth Brooks once won an award that Hubie Brooks didn’t, and it wasn’t a Grammy.
by Jason Fry on 23 March 2011 10:56 pm The idea that there can be losses that are also moral victories is a trap sentimental sports fans need to avoid: Nobody gets an extra win because they had an exceptional year in the LMV column. But chiefly in March, there is such a thing as a clarifying loss.
You know what I mean: You hear that the Mets have lost a spring-training game, and your first thought isn’t about the W-L record or the standings or the upcoming schedule. It’s to hope is that some scrub got pounded or made a frightful error. Let the blame fall on a poor schmo with a number in the 70s whose real clock doesn’t start for a couple of years yet, or on some moth-eaten veteran in camp for a sympathetic look-see, or on some replacement-level player who doesn’t particularly matter in the moderate scheme of things.
For instance, today: The Cardinals beat the Mets, 5-3, in a game I saw not one second of. R.A. Dickey did just fine, giving up one earned run in 5 1/3. The goat was Manny Acosta, helped out by Luis Hernandez, who made an error. Tim Byrdak pitched OK. And that’s a wrap, Mets fans.
Manny Acosta is eminently replaceable, a one-pitch reliever. Luis Hernandez is the kind of player so beloved by Omar Minaya that it’s a miracle he isn’t stuck with an option giving him $3 million if he has 11 at-bats. It’s never fun losing a game, but if you’re going to, best to have the loss be one in which on-the-bubble relievers and interchangeable middle infielders are the guys who lose it.
I’m not claiming this is science — spring training is entirely too small a sample size to be worthy of the term — but it’s clarifying. In all likelihood, that’s farewell Manny Acosta to the waiver wire, reducing the derby for last reliever to Izzy, Pat Misch and Blaine Boyer. And Hernandez’s gaffe should make Brad Emaus’s road clearer. Two fewer questions and a day closer to games that count.
You can have clarifying losses from April through October, too — of course. But those leave a mark. As losses go, I like these better.
by Greg Prince on 23 March 2011 6:22 am Even though Andy Martino asserts we’re racist, Mike Vaccaro implies we’re idiots and a market research company concludes we’re more fickle than Philadelphians, I still believe in us. I maintain bedrock faith in the faith of the Mets fan. I have a lifetime of experience as a Mets fan among Mets fans to back me up, but just as assuring, I have three examples handy of the depth and suppleness of the Mets fan mind at work.
You should have them, too.
Two annual publications and one commemorative book are out and I urge you to obtain all three: read them, absorb them, keep them close by, refer to them often. They’re not simply informative. They are, both in terms of quality and in the context of our times (or at least this week), revelatory.
What I like about Maple Street Press Mets Annual 2011; Amazin’ Avenue: The Mets 2011 Preview; and New York Mets: 50 Amazin’ Seasons is they are the brainchildren of Mets fans and largely the handicraft of Mets fans. The contents, therefore, are honest, analytical, entertaining, incisive and did I mention honest? That’s the thing about Mets fans. Give them free editorial rein and they don’t rah-rah you into sugar shock. Mets fans lack an amen corner. We’re too self-aware for that. Perhaps it’s why our best face isn’t always instantly interpreted by the world at large as one capable of smiling, laughing and enjoying our team over the very long haul.
We do. We really do. We just know too much to do it brainlessly and breezily. It’s why we write so much. It’s why what we, as a people, write is so often compelling to read. It’s what makes each of the editions alluded to here must-haves.
Maple Street and Amazin’ Avenue are season previews, per se, but don’t think their usefulness expires once Spring Training ends. The history sections alone make them keepers. It’s history processed and related by Mets fans for Mets fans. As is the case when Mets fans get together to talk, nothing is spoon-fed nor sanitized. You come away informed, not snowed. Amazin’ Avenue, in particular, dares to venture into the outside world a good bit for targeted third-party viewpoints of pressing Met issues and puts those perspectives to good use, but overall, whether it’s the state of the Mets in 2011 or what the hell the Mets were thinking in some other year, you have the sense that the editors have our interests at heart. In a cold, cruel, not always blue and orange universe, it’s a comforting feeling.
As for New York Mets: 50 Amazin’ Seasons, prepare to immerse yourself completely in a galaxy that is nothing but blue and orange (and, yes, a little black since 1998). To call it a coffee table book is to unnecessarily glorify coffee tables. This is a Mets book, through and through. This is practically the Mets Museum if you can’t make it out to Citi Field on a given evening. The reason it transcends attractive design (though it is attractively designed) is it was put together by a grade-A Mets fan who took not one iota of his assignment lightly.
Matthew Silverman has been through this terrain before, as the author of Mets Essential and 100 Things Mets Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die and editor of The Miracle Has Landed and, come to think of it, Maple Street Press Mets Annual. When you pick up this new volume, you realize it was all leading up to 50 Amazin’ Seasons, wherein every damn one of them is covered lovingly, thoughtfully and, yes, critically. Matt knows his stuff like few Mets fans I know, and he worries about his stuff enough to get it right. Inside this lavishly illustrated book, he practically recreates a half-century of good and bad, of hope and dismay, of, well, faith and fear. Matt absolutely gets what has made the Mets the Mets since their DNA commenced to coalescing with the departures of the Giants and Dodgers and he carries that ethos of “getting it” clear to the present.
I’m enhanced by having all three of these titles in my baseball library. You will be, too.
Semi-disclaimer: I wrote an article for Maple Street Press, as did Jason; we co-wrote another piece for Amazin’ Avenue. And Matthew was kind enough to acknowledge me in 50 Amazin’ Years. These glowing recommendations, however, are based on the entirety of the above works, surely not merely our contributions.
by Jason Fry on 21 March 2011 11:25 pm Back in mid-February, we all pretty much knew Luis Castillo and Oliver Perez were going to be released. Which, come mid-March, led some of us to wonder what the heck was taking so long — and to start concocting the usual woe-is-me Mets fan scenarios. The Wilpons won’t allow Sandy to eat those contracts. Slappy will hang around forever because Murphy and Emaus and Turner and Hernandez look so bad. Ollie will do just decently enough to make the roster, ensuring that he will suck harder than the mutant bastard child of Doug Sisk and Rich Rodriguez, while Jason Isringhausen signs on with the Yankees and pairs with Feliciano to be deadly setup men. We are dooooooomed.
Eh, whatever.
Maybe I’m just still starry-eyed that my team is no longer run by executives who made it rain with ridiculous option years, but I think Sandy & Co. knew exactly what they were doing, and handled the departure of Castillo and Perez capably and professionally. They had at least three constituencies to satisfy, and they managed to do right by all of them.
Fans. We were the easiest. We wanted Luis and Ollie gone, and as long as that got done before we started panicking en masse that maybe it wouldn’t get done, we were going to wind up satisfied. Everything before that point was noise, and not to be worried about. Heck, it gave us something to do: Fan anxiety helps pass the time when there’s nothing else to talk about except dead-arm periods and St. Patrick’s Day hats.
Ownership. The new regime communicated clearly to the first 637,240 people who asked that they were allowed to ditch bad contracts, and a certain firmness of tone to the answers strongly suggested that bad contracts would indeed be ditched. All the same, general managers in that position have a decidedly unenviable task when talking to ownership. “You know those truckloads of money you let my predecessor give to crappy players, making 100% of the media and 90% of the fans say that you’re dumb as a rock? I want to release those guys so everybody talks about how dumb you are all over again, and you’ll have to keep paying those crappy players to play for somebody else for basically nothing, and it’s possible they might have decent years and beat us and then everybody will say you’re even dumber.” Would you like to deliver that message? Me neither. The Alderson regime waited long enough so that the media didn’t instantly demand to know why Omar hadn’t been allowed to turf the Terrible Two, gave the Wilpons sufficiently long looks at Luis and Ollie to make it clear that they deserved what they were getting, and waited long enough for credible alternatives to suggest themselves. (It would be easier if some second baseman was tearing it up, but things aren’t always easy.)
Players. You think it’s easy being an incumbent Mets second baseman and knowing Brad Emaus is in camp at the urging of an Alderson lieutenant — Brad Emaus who has never done anything to make people at Citi Field boo him? Even if you aren’t an incumbent second baseman, you think it’s easy knowing you’re a product of the tainted old regime, and the new men in charge never saw you hit that walk-off or work extra in the cage or drill to improve your footwork? The new bosses gave Luis and Ollie every chance — something Luis may not have wanted to admit, but Perez did. They didn’t cut them loose for vengeful political reasons (though if I were Sandy, I would have bit my lip about Luis and fan reaction), they actually used them in spring training instead of half-heartedly running them out there alongside guys wearing pinned-on numbers, and they even did what they could to minimize the humiliation of being pink-slipped. Mets present and future will have taken note.
Yes, the Mets seem to have finally grasped the principle of sunk costs, and stopped wasting two roster spots. For which the cheers have been well-deserved. But they’ve also walked through a minefield and gotten to the other side unscathed. That deserves cheers too.
by Greg Prince on 21 March 2011 11:01 am Some Mets I can’t wait to see go. Roberto Alomar in 2003, T#m Gl@v!ne in 2007, Luis Castillo from June 12, 2009 to last Friday…those departures represented addition in my soul via subtraction from the squad. I didn’t much want to pull for them as Mets and I was eventually delivered from that basic responsibility of fandom. There simply came a juncture with all three when the mere sight of each in the uniform of the team I’d called my own since I was six years old saddened to sickened me. It transcended the “surely we can do better for a catcher than Brian Schneider” judgment, wherein you’d like to see a severely limited player replaced by a potentially higher-ceilinged one. You want to root for every Met, yet sometimes it just feels wrong to have to root for someone you have no rooting interest in.
It wasn’t that way with Ollie Perez. Mind you, I’m plenty happy that he’s been instructed to receive his $12 million at an address that isn’t the New York Mets clubhouse. I’m relieved that the new regime extricated itself from somebody else’s lingering mistake. I’m elated, really, that the “24 + 1” construction that became necessary last year when Ollie wouldn’t accept a Bobby Jones/Steve Trachsel-style fix-trip to the minors won’t occur this year. We may have lousy pitchers in the pen in 2011, but we won’t be shackled to them the point of utter uselessness.
Still, I’m not overcome by the urge to dash into Times Square and kiss the first pretty nurse I encounter now that Oliver Perez has been released. I liked Ollie — or wanted to — until he rejected taking the team-first tack of attempting to sort out his continual pitching woes at Buffalo for a few weeks. Would it have worked? We’ll never know. It surely didn’t work having him around cluttering up the roster. He surely couldn’t consistently get batters out for two full seasons. Whether he was acting out of insecurity or selfishness or principle, I lost most of my sympathy for his (well-compensated) plight when he wouldn’t try to partake of a latter-day Norfolk Miracle Cure.
Nevertheless, Perez showed up to camp this spring and I thought maybe he could get some of it back, provide a fraction of the effective innings he gave us in the desperate hours of October 2006 and then often enough in 2007 and 2008 so that he cashed in come 2009. He was never going to be a Mets starter again, but I bought into his potential as a reliever. He wasn’t so old. His success wasn’t so far removed from the present. He had been a lefty with baffling stuff. That’s always too enticing to dismiss cavalierly.
It didn’t happen for him, not how it had to. At his best this month, he flashed signs of adequacy. Then Saturday, facing successive righties on the Nationals, he provided a strain of rocket fuel that the engineers at nearby Cape Canaveral must have envied when trails of it appeared in the Space Coast sky. I have to confess I kind of involuntarily clapped when Jeff Frazier and Brian Bixler took him deep and deeper because I could hear the Band-Aid being ripped off in two easy swipes. It was inevitable Ollie would be going. Now the moment would have to be at hand.
Released from the Mets, Ollie can move on (if, in fact, his Blassification isn’t irreversible) and so can we. We are suddenly blessed with a team from which we’re not sitting around waiting for extractions. We’re not reminding each other and anybody who’ll listen that $18 million spent on Castillo and Perez is spent whether they’re here to soak it up or not. Two guys who aren’t them will be here instead. On the first actual day of spring, that’s as fresh a start as we can ask for.
The Mets might be better in 2011 than they were in 2010. They might be worse. They might be tangibly the same when 162 games are over. Right now, however, they feel different in a very good way. I’m beginning to get a grasp on this year’s model. Up until recently, the names that bubbled up from the bargain bin — Young, Capuano, Harris, Hairston, Byrdak — represented a blur of austere allocation and indifferent aspiration. Now they, combined with those who carry on from seasons past, are the Mets to me. There’s nobody here I’m wishing would get lost, which in itself is kind of new: new and most welcome. I haven’t liked not being behind everybody on my team. It’s not why I decided to have a team to call mine.
Let’s Go Mets. All of them.
by Jason Fry on 19 March 2011 12:18 pm For several years now Topps has released a set it calls Heritage, spotlighting modern players on card designs from the past.
Depending on how these have been handled, my reaction has varied from “that’s cool” to “that’s a cynical cash grab.” But 2011 Topps Heritage? It’s an absolute winner, because the approach to the cards and history — specifically Mets history — is pitch-perfect.
  First off, the cards themselves. They’re done in the wood-grain style of the ’62 cards, and produced using plain old cardstock. They aren’t glossy, or festooned with holograms, or otherwise Jetsonized in some unfortunate way. Yes, there are some acknowledgments of the modern age: They have a (subtle) Topps Heritage logo, they say New York Mets® instead of N.Y. Mets, and the backs have a bunch of lawyerese, a web address, and the logos of MLB and the MLBPA instead of the ’nuff-said © T. C. G. P R I N T E D I N U. S. A. of another age. But that’s admissible — when nostalgia won’t be satisfied with anything less than perfect recreation, it’s crossed the line into mania.
The images are great too — they have that simultaneously static yet rich painterly quality of old Topps cards, and the poses are static, not action frames captured with a close-to-lightspeed modern shutter. The backs are wonderfully reproduced, too, with statistics boiled down to a brusque YEAR and LIFE and the little cartoons terrific recreations of a half-century-old style. (If you’re curious why Topps originally opted for YEAR instead of 1961, the answer was so holdover packs of ’62 cards might still sell in ’63.)
But here’s where it starts getting really good. There are 16 Mets in the ’11 Heritage set, plus two Rookie Parade cards featuring Jenrry Mejia and Mike Nickeas (first Met card!) as disembodied heads alongside those of other aspiring pitchers and catchers. Of the 16 Mets, nine are hatless, staring past the camera with the red badges of cap marks on their foreheads and vaguely sheepish expressions. Only one of the guys in a cap is visible to the waist.
The hatless shot is an old Topps standby, taken so a Topps artist could mock up a new uniform (sometimes with comical results) in case of a trade or some other move. There are hatless guys on other teams in ’11 Heritage, but a hasty and admittedly unscientific look around eBay finds many more hatless Mets.
This almost certainly isn’t a mistake or a statistical quirk: It’s Topps knowing its history, and offering an additional homage to 1962. Then, of course, the Mets were a brand-new team, with a dearth of photographs of players in heretofore-unseen blue and orange. Topps had to populate its Mets set with shots of guys in their old uniforms, and that was easiest if hatless shots were used. The ’62 Topps set has 21 guys and three Rookie Parade cards. Of the 21, 16 are hatless, three are wearing hats with the team logos removed, one guy (Al Jackson) wears a Mets hat, and one guy (Ed Bouchee) appears in full uniform. (For the trivia-minded, Don Zimmer wears a Mets hat on a Cin. Reds card, while Bobby Gene Smith wears Mets gear on a Cardinal card, but his cap is angled so you can’t see the NY.)
The percentages aren’t exact, but Topps has got the spirit wonderfully right. After I decided I loved the set, I spent 20 minutes irritably hunting around on eBay and the web looking for the Mets team card. Had Topps forgotten it? No, they hadn’t — I was the forgetful one. The ’62 Mets hadn’t had a team card. And so neither do the ’11 Mets.
Appropriately then, my hat’s off to them.
(Happy aside: The ’11 Heritage set, like us, also lacks Luis Castillo.)
by Greg Prince on 18 March 2011 11:45 am  Kiss me! Luis Castillo has been released! By noon on Friday almost every man, woman and child in Metsopotamia was sure the war on second base was over. But most felt that they already lived through a sort of V-E-4 week, and across the great Roosevelt Avenue of Queens there was only a little cheering. In Woodside a housewife telephoned a newspaper: “Shall I go ahead and bake a pie for tomorrow?” In Astoria, N.Y., as in most of the Metropolitan Area’s towns and villages, it was another Friday and another washday. But on this Friday, Astoria got the news that four more second basemen were still in a battle.
In Manhattan, the most effervescent Metsopotamia borough, the carnival sights and sounds bubbled spontaneously, then subsided, then fizzed again. For a while on Friday, torn paper and ticker tape by the ton fluttered from skyscrapers, and the streets turned white. Half a million people clotted Times Square, sober and undemonstrative, waiting for somebody to start the fun. Nobody did.
The people milled for five hours, until in late afternoon Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s voice barked over a loudspeaker: “Go home … or return to your jobs.” Most of the people drifted away. The flags over Citi Field, half-staffed since the Wilpons began seeking minority partners, fluttered limply.
In the interest of accuracy, the above is a doctored description from Time magazine, May 1945, detailing America’s reaction to V-E Day as World War II neared an end. The news that’s just come down regarding the release of Luis Castillo may not be viewed in some quarters as quite so momentous, yet it does feel epic. One is tempted to note Castillo’s occupation of second base in Flushing lasted about as long as America’s involvement in the European Theatre, but let’s maintain some sense of proportion here.
Luis Castillo: not a scourge, not a villain, surely not a war criminal, just an overpaid, underperforming second baseman who (save for being in the right place at the right time with the rightest contract imaginable) couldn’t catch a break in New York. He certainly couldn’t catch a pop fly in the Bronx.
Luis Castillo: vouched for, practically up to the moment it was reported the Mets were surrendering to common sense, as a decent fellow who didn’t deserve to be disdained so vociferously. A former colleague of mine who grew up during World War II used to remind me that “hate is for Hitler.” Well…yeah. I didn’t hate Luis Castillo. I disliked his being signed to the MegaMillions Jackpot and waited for the day someone would redraw the roster so he wouldn’t be on it anymore. And now it is done.
When I first found out, I wanted to bolt straight into Times Square and kiss the first pretty nurse I saw, but then I remembered that (besides being married) the iconic image to which I refer occurred in response to V-J Day, three months after V-E Day. That was when the war was over in Japan, thus over for good. Here on V-E-4 Day, we can rejoice that Luis Castillo is no longer in the running to play second base for the New York Mets in 2011, but it’s not like we have achieved peace in our time, either.
Murphy…Emaus…Hernandez…Turner. Right now, it reads like a platoon of earnest grunts who are about to be ambushed by an enemy barrage of breaking balls out of the zone and sharp grounders in the hole.
Godspeed, boys. Godspeed.
by Greg Prince on 17 March 2011 12:52 pm  Sharon Chapman took the FAFIF wristband to the Top of the Rock (by stairs!) in February. March 17 seems like an ideal day to recall Met reliever extraordinaire Tug McGraw, who was known to enjoy every day like it was St. Patrick’s Day. Our friend Sharon Chapman has done a phenomenal job of keeping his memory alive by running in several events as a member of Team McGraw, raising funds for the Tug McGraw Foundation’s fight against brain cancer. She’ll be running that way again this season in Philadelphia (of all places) during the Broad Street Run on May 1. As well, Sharon will be sporting the same cap Tug wore from 1965 through 1974 and her Faith and Fear wristband, which makes us a little extra proud. Read more about the great work of the Tug McGraw Foundation here and donate whatever you can, if you can, here.
In the meantime, we wish Sharon the luck of the Irish and everybody else this weekend in the New York City Half Marathon.
by Jason Fry on 16 March 2011 1:20 am Depending on what you read, Johan Santana either remains on pace for a return in July or is actually already dead and the Mets are just covering it up.
Oliver Perez, meanwhile, continues to show unmistakable symptoms of being still around, a malady the Mets should probably cure.
Stillarounditis also continues to be exhibited by Luis Castillo, who hasn’t been medevac’d out of here mostly because no one else has shown any particular talent for playing second base. Not Daniel Murphy, the People’s Cherce despite an uncertain pedigree. Not Brad Emaus, who arrived with a Ricciardi stamp of approval but hasn’t hit. Not Luis Hernandez, appointed the starter by the New York Post but not apparently by Terry Collins. Not Jordany Valdespin, because the Mets appear to have learned their lesson about wasting a year of development, particularly for young players whose names are hell to spellcheck. Not Ruben Tejada, whose skills with the leather aren’t matched (yet) by utility with a length of ash. Not Justin Turner, Nick Evans’ed last year for no apparent reason.
If second base is the disease, we don’t seem to be getting any closer to the cure.
And heck, Willie Harris and Ike Davis have even been in traffic accidents.
As for the club’s financial health, don’t ask.
But lest you think Alderson & Co. have inherited not only bad contracts but also the grim little black cloud that’s followed the Mets around since September 2007, look west, at the other Florida coast.
This is what’s happened to the Phillies so far this spring:
Chase Utley — bad knee, is yet to appear in a spring-training game.
Domonic Brown — broken hamate bone (a bone that only exists to sideline baseball players), surgery, out for a month.
Brad Lidge — biceps tendinitis.
Placido Polanco — hyperextended elbow.
And Cliff Lee and Antonio Bastardo shut down their offseason regimens at certain points before camp.
None of this is desperate news for the Phillies just yet. Their pitching staff is still enviably deep and strong. And they battled a rash of injuries early in 2010 and came through it all just fine. But if what was happening in Clearwater was happening in Port St. Lucie, we’d be near-deaf from the lamentations and thuds of chest-beating, and getting ready to boo the trainers again.
Bad stuff happens to everybody. Even teams that aren’t the Mets.
|
|
