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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 28 January 2011 8:43 pm Before the latest round of Wilpon news erupted, I had been thinking about owning a baseball team. I don’t mean that in the “I had some spare zillions lying around and was looking to buy one,” but rather why people (very rich people) would do it. Usually owners come to the fore when there’s bad news or big decisions at hand. For example, when an owner starts meddling in the purview that is usually left to the GM or manager, it’s not unusual to hear a fan say, “Well, if I owned the team, I’d do whatever I wanted. After all, it’s my team!”
Sort of makes sense, sort of doesn’t for reasons that are pretty obvious. Yes, if you own the team, you can indeed do whatever you want, so if you think your roster needs another pitcher, or that there’s too much bunting being strategized in the dugout, it’s technically your call. But with rare exception, that sounds like a good way to make an organizational mess.
I think I’d own a team for one reason — to buy happiness. This is assuming I had enough money to buy what is commonly believed unbuyable. But I’m pretty sure that’s what people with loads of money tell the rest of us. Of course we can buy happiness, or at least purchase items that figure to make us happy…though from what I can tell, the Mets don’t make the Wilpons very happy. But that’s probably because we never see them in situations where happiness is the appropriate emotion to exude.
They’re firing a manager, they’re not happy. They’re firing a general manager, they’re not happy. They’re hiring replacements, the best they can put forth is a mix of concern and determination. They announce they’re building a new ballpark, they seem less happy than pleased with themselves. And when they have to explain, via conference call, that unfortunate circumstances have them looking for a buyer to pick up a minority share that they’ve never shown an inkling to sell, they don’t sound at all thrilled.
It’s not easy owning the Mets, apparently, and the owners seeming so unhappy whenever they make a public appearance wouldn’t figure to be much of an advertisement if you’re attempting to sell a stake in the New York National League franchise. Yet I have come across evidence that owning a baseball team can make a rich person practically ooze happiness.
Last week, I spent a little time in proximity to the current owner of the former New York National League franchise, known since 1958 as the San Francisco Giants, and known since November 1 as the world champion San Francisco Giants. Bill Neukom was in Manhattan on a goodwill mission. He brought the trophy the Giants earned in the 2010 World Series and the legend one of his predecessors stole following the 1957 season. Neither the trophy nor the legendary Willie Mays were back in New York for keeps, but Neukom and his people thought it would be a great thing to make both available to interested parties for a couple of midwinter days.
Neukom and his people were right. The trophy was a welcome sight to New Yorkers who, for one reason or another, still root for the Giants. That didn’t include me, but Willie Mays is another story. Willie Mays has always been another story where New York baseball is concerned. Willie Mays is, among other things, the link that allows the owner of a team that hasn’t played home games at 8th Avenue between 155th and 157th Streets in more than 53 years to bring his entourage and championship bauble back to the scene of sublime.
One week ago, Willie wowed an auditorium of Harlem schoolkids who go to class almost exactly on the spot where the Giants played home games for generations. Never mind that the Polo Grounds were torn down in 1964. Never mind that the children who composed his audience — and, for that matter, their parents — were too young to have seen Mays play any of his career, even the last two years of it (1972-73) as a New York Met. He’s Willie Mays, he was the best player the Polo Grounds ever housed, and in the context of his visit last week to P.S. 46, he not only was another story, he had another story.
Mays, the kids had learned, not only played baseball right there, he lived right around the corner. Those famous pictures of him swinging a stickball bat weren’t a PR stunt. That was what he did when he wasn’t taking on the National League as a legend-in-the-making. Kids would come to his door on St. Nicholas Place and ask Willie to join them in their game; Willie would say yes. I’d say “imagine that,” except you don’t have to. It really happened, and a bunch of kids in the 21st century got to hear about it first-hand. Talk about an enduring legacy. Mays was adopted by Harlem in 1951 and as he told the students of P.S. 46 (who had studied his life as part of a schoolwide project), he never stopped thinking of that neighborhood as his home.
Bill Neukom’s the man who brought him home. Brought Willie, brought the trophy, brought a ton of goodwill and brought an aura of genuine happiness to P.S. 46. The Giants owner, terrifically tweedy and resplendent in his trademark bowtie, didn’t try to compete with Willie in that auditorium, but reporters and the like found him in the front row when Willie’s talk was done. It wasn’t hard to spot the bowtie, or the beaming face.
Something struck me as I listened in on the tail end of his informal Q&A — nobody was “handling” Neukom, who made his zillions as a lawyer for Microsoft. He was standing around, talking about how wonderful all this was as if he was a person and those talking to him were other people. Processing this kind of approachability as something I wasn’t hallucinating, I decided to be a person about it myself and go up to him when the small knot of inquiring minds broke up.
And there I was, just chatting with the owner of a Major League Baseball franchise. It wasn’t anything official (I didn’t introduce myself as quasi-media) and it wasn’t anything deep. I simply communicated to him the one overriding observation I had formed in the preceding minutes.
“You must be having the time of your life.”
He was, he said. And it showed. Neukom — who, by the by, used to be a minority stakeholder in the team he now runs — spoke softly about feeling “humbled” by the reaction to the winning the World Series and the excitement that the Giants’ trophy tour had wrought in Northern California. The opportunity to come to New York and connect with those who remained Giants fans despite the transcontinental distance involved meant a lot to him. Neukom, as well as team president Larry Baer, were very careful and respectful about treading on the reigning local teams’ physical territory, even in January, even for something as harmless as a trophy exhibition. Baer said the Giants sought and were granted permission from the Mets (and Yankees) about bringing their act to New York. And Neukom wasn’t exactly trying to raid Manhattan for fans. This came off as an almost spiritual journey for the Giants, and Neukom was very happy to be giving his franchise’s history its due.
Caught up in the moment, perhaps, and because I was merely quasi-media (my Mets hoodie may have been visible underneath my winter coat), I was compelled to editorialize, and told the owner of the San Francisco Giants, “You do this stuff much better than the Mets do.” I meant the reaching out and caring about the past and understanding how it’s a platform for the present and future (not winning a World Series trophy, though that, too).
“Thank you,” Neukom responded. “That really means a lot.”
I saw Bill, Willie, their trophy and the rest of the San Francisco traveling party again the next morning. The occasion involved, you might say, the demographic polar opposite of meeting elementary school children and sharing a piece of the New York Giants legacy with them. This audience was mainly old-time Giants fans, the loyal and — if you ask me — incredibly forgiving folks who stuck by the Giants for more than a half-century despite the Giants abandoning them. That crime against baseball humanity was Horace Stoneham’s doing (with an assist from the diabolical Walter O’Malley), so I guess you can’t blame Neukom, who’s three owners removed from 1957, for there being San Francisco Giants.
If he couldn’t bring a bunch of seniors their baseball team where they fell in love with it — moving the Giants back to the PG is off the table — he did the next best thing last Saturday. Neukom set up members of the New York Baseball Giants Nostalgia Society (to which I belong as something of a latter-day fetishist) in a ballroom at the Hilton on Sixth Avenue with the following makegood:
• Willie Mays
• Buster Posey
• Joey Amalfitano
• Brian Sabean
• the World Series trophy
• continental breakfast, even
The bottom line from this act of black-and-orange generosity was an hour-plus of story-telling and marveling and mouths hanging open. I mean, c’mon, Willie Mays was in the room — could you avoid being agape? When it was announced each group member would be handed a copy of Willie’s authorized biography, and that Willie would autograph it…I’d plot it for you on a graph of some sort, but, really, it was off the charts.
You know how much it cost to get into that ballroom? Nothing of a monetary nature. The Giants were doing this because they knew New York Giants fans existed and congregated on a regular basis and that most of them continued their allegiance as San Francisco Giants fans. Neukom gave a little talk in which he tipped his cap to the Giants’ roots, how everything they are in San Francisco was built upon what took place in New York from 1883 through 1957, and how all he wanted was for the Giants fans in the room to keep it going: bring your kids and grandkids into the fold; bring your friends and neighbors, too.
OK, maybe technically he was recruiting on nominal Met soil by then, but I couldn’t blame him. Neukom, Baer and their staff had come to New York ostensibly for the Baseball Writers dinner that night. They could have flown in and flown out as one presumes others who swing by to pick up awards do. But they spread baseball cheer in January. There isn’t a lot of revenue to be harvested from stopping off at a school in Harlem, but Neukom’s team did that. The Polo Grounds vets invited into that Hilton ballroom aren’t going to suddenly order a ton more merchandise or plan cross-country trips to AT&T Park, but Neukom’s team gave them a great big thank you for hanging in there practically forever. The Giants would go on and display their trophy for long lines of San Fran expatriates and other Giant diehards twice last Saturday — other than the pride of saying “we won, we’re happy, we’re happy this makes you happy, this is for you, too,” there was nothing tangible to be gained from it. But Bill Neukom and his people did it anyway.
What a great reason to own a team.
I wrote two pieces for ESPN New York about the Giants revisiting their old borough last weekend. If so inclined, you can find them here and here.
And if you were wondering what to do on your next snow day, take a cue from Bruce Slutsky and grab a copy of Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets.
by Jason Fry on 27 January 2011 9:47 am One of the pleasures of the last few years has been Darryl Strawberry’s return to the Mets fold.
Straw left town under a pretty toxic cloud composed of his own problems, a nasty contract dispute, and our disappointment with the reality that he turned out to be Darryl Strawberry and not some amalgam of Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle and Hank Aaron. That cloud was only thickened by Darryl’s unerring ability to say the wrong thing: Remember the idiotic book he “wrote” with Art Rust Jr. in which he claimed playing at Shea had been like playing in Dred Scott Stadium in downtown Johannesburg? When Darryl got asked about that line, he had to fess up that he had no idea who Dred Scott was, though he did get partial credit for knowing Johannesburg was somewhere in Africa. That was pretty funny, but it didn’t exactly help. Neither did Straw’s precipitous decline with the Dodgers. Weirdly, we didn’t feel like he got what he deserved; rather, any instinct for vengeance faded away and left us feeling mournful. It had all gone wrong somehow, and maybe if Darryl hadn’t done this dumb thing and the Mets hadn’t dug in their heels and X and Y and Z hadn’t happened he never would have left, and the Mets wouldn’t have disintegrated and Darryl wouldn’t have descended … but we had and he had, and there we were.
And then he became a Yankee.
And then more happened. He had frightening bouts with cancer. He had problems with cocaine, and prostitutes, and cops with guns. Some of it was cruel fate that was out of his control, some of it was Darryl’s poor choices, a lot of it was so intertwined that it was impossible to say what had led to what. Eventually we kind of lost track of it all. Darryl was out there somewhere, a fallen Met like Doc, a man for whom you hoped the best while bracing for the worst.
Happily, the best seems to have won the day. Darryl appears (and one always says this rapping fingers on whatever wood is at hand) to have put his problems behind him. He appears (knock wood even more fervently) to have escaped cancer’s dreadful clutches. And the Mets have reclaimed him and he’s reclaimed us. He shows up at spring training in garish Port St. Lucie Mets garb and you’re struck by how good he looks for a guy nearing 50 — he’s a little thicker, but aren’t we all? He appears at Citi Field or some other Mets event and is adored and returns that adoration. He’s ours again, and though L.A. and the hurtful words and all the rest are still there, we have to reach for the resentment instead of having it instantly at hand. Increasingly, we honestly don’t remember.
Straw turns up a lot talking about ’86, which is always entertaining. For one thing, he’s candid where most athletes have trained themselves to be deliberately dull — thanks to my day job, I’ve watched working versions of the first two episodes of MSG’s forthcoming “Summer of ’86,” and Straw pulls no punches in discussing the ’86 Mets and their dust-ups on and off the field. What really gets me, though, is what a good time he has telling those tales. Faith and rehab and a good marriage seem to have taken Darryl Strawberry to a better place, where he can keep his many demons at bay, but he sure remembers cavorting with them, and the old raconteur isn’t exactly submerged. Darryl talks in terms of mistakes and cautionary tales, but you can see the twinkle in his eye as he takes you through the preamble. Man, everybody should really disapprove of this stuff. Hey, lemme tell you all about this one thing you should REALLY disapprove of. We were in Pittsburgh, and it was CRAZY….
All to the good. Darryl on the 2011 Mets, though, is something else.
For instance, Darryl thinks Wally Backman should have been Jerry Manuel’s replacement, not Terry Collins. That’s not a crazy position — Wally had a lot of success with the Cyclones, after all. But what’s Darryl’s reasoning: “Because he played on the ’86 Mets. Were you around when ’86 happened? He was one of our fiery players, a gutty type of guy who did everything. He would scrap, get on base and played the game the right way. When you see guys playing the game the right way, you know they understand the game.”
I’m no logician, but this strikes me as a little circular. Wally was an ’86 Met + the ’86 Mets won = Wally should be manager. Like an ex-beat cop or a war veteran, Darryl’s world is shrinking to a band of brothers, their increasingly mythic deeds, and inherent qualities that are best detectable in hindsight. (Remember we’re talking storytelling here: If Bob Stanley’s pitch doesn’t go to the backstop and Mookie grounds out, the ’86 Mets are a bunch of thugs who boozed a title out of their grasp.) The Mets gave Collins a contract that doesn’t block any manager’s path and did a fine job keeping Backman in the fold and steering him to Binghamton. As a Mets fan who will always regard Wally Backman as at least a minor demigod, I’m very happy about this. But now that it’s done, Darryl barging through the china shop breaking stuff isn’t helpful.
On the other hand, at least he’s around to break stuff. Writing this, I find I’ve changed my mind somewhat. Yes, Darryl Strawberry is being a distraction. But hey, he’s still around, wearing an orange and blue cap, and periodically saying things that make you sigh or roll your eyes or want to shake him. That’s familiar. It’s aggravating and amusing and, in the end, gratifying.
by Greg Prince on 24 January 2011 8:45 am The first time the New York Jets broke my heart was on a frigid Sunday in Cleveland, December 10, 1978. I was going to be making my high school acting debut five nights later in a production of Heaven Can Wait, as the minor character Inspector Williams, and as close to curtain as we were, the cast was called in for a Sunday rehearsal. Heaven Can Wait could have waited in my estimation, since the Jets game loomed as the most enormous football game played by a New York football team across the entirety of the 1970s.
There was a crush of teams contending for AFC playoff berths, and the Jets, at 8-6, were right there with them. Merely contending for the postseason so late in the NFL schedule was cause for Sunday afternoon fever in 1978. The Jets hadn’t been in the playoffs since December 20, 1969, when they lost to the Kansas City Chiefs 13-6 at Shea Stadium and officially relinquished their Super Bowl III crown. For the next nine seasons — right up to kickoff on that December 10 — the Giants and Jets between them were 88-163-1. Neither team ever went anywhere but home.
Though I considered myself a Giants fan first, I had adopted the Jets in full that year because, honestly, I just wanted to see a New York team play an NFL playoff game sometime in my lifetime. The Giants hadn’t been in one since December 29, 1963, two days before my first birthday. I was several months shy of sports consciousness when the Jets won Super Bowl III on January 12, 1969, and had only the dimmest recollection of the AFL season that followed, the final one there’d ever be. Come 1970, the Jets were in the American Football Conference, where — save for an episode of The Brady Bunch and an oft-aired pantyhose commercial — they’d sink into a morass of Giant-like obscurity and futility.
That all seemed to be changing in 1978. The Jets changed their logo, their helmets, their jerseys…they even changed the terms of their lease with the city to allow them to play early-season games at Shea Stadium. Before making noise about moving to the Meadowlands, they were directed off stage, to road productions, until the Mets were done every September or, when we were lucky, October. I never really noticed because I wasn’t much of a Jets fan in the waning years of Joe Namath, when he was more celebrity than quarterback. But I did notice when, on September 3, 1978, I came home from my last trip to the beach for the summer and found my father watching the Jets beating the Dolphins at Shea to open their season. I had never noticed him watching the Jets before, either. He was the reason I was a Giants fan first, but now he was changing, too. He was into the Jets.
We both were. The Jets followed up their victory over the Dolphins with a late win over the Bills. They were 2-0, which may not sound like much, but in New York, during a football season in the 1970s, it was phenomenal. Nobody was ever 2-0 in September around here.
Sure enough, just as our hopes began to rise, the Jets fell to 2-3. But then, with starting quarterback Richard Todd lost to injury, Matt Robinson took his place and began leading the team to improbable victories. When you rooted for New York football teams in the era that winning was confined to distant outposts like Oakland, Dallas and Pittsburgh, all victories seemed improbable. Yet some of these were authentic stunners. Robinson’s signature game came at Mile High Stadium in Denver, where the Jets trailed the AFC champion Broncos 28-7 in the second quarter and stormed back to win 31-28. The winning score came on a 75-yard TD pass from Robinson to Wesley Walker.
That was the exciting part of being a Jets fan in 1978. The unnerving part was discovering in earnest what they were like when they couldn’t cap off exciting with successful. Two weeks after stunning the Broncos, the 6-5 Jets were on the verge of making a big move on a playoff spot. Trailing the Patriots at Shea by two lousy points, Pat Leahy lined up for the winning field goal, a 33-yard attempt with 31 seconds to go.
He didn’t make it. Don’t take my word for it. Take Pat Leahy’s:
“I missed it. I missed it. What can I say? I just missed it. It was close, but not through. I don’t know what to say. I just missed it.”
Close, but not through. That described the Jets with four games to go. They rebounded a week later to beat the Dolphins in Miami, then the Colts at Shea. That led them to 8-6 and the scramble for one of the two Wild Cards available. Cleveland was also scrambling, so this game against the Browns — which the papers were calling the most important the Jets had played since Super Bowl III — was a big deal for all concerned.
I returned home from Heaven Can Wait rehearsal that December afternoon and found my father in an uncommon football frenzy. The Browns had opened a 27-10 lead in the third quarter, but the Jets were fighting back. In a span of less than eight minutes, Robinson threw two touchdown passes, Leahy didn’t miss a field goal and Kevin Long scored on a one-yard run. With 76 ticks remaining on the clock, the Jets led 34-27 and were 1:16 from being 9-6. Dad and I were literally jumping up and down and hugging.
We rarely hugged. We never jumped up and down.
And what did we get in return for our unbridled enthusiasm? Brian Sipe hitting Calvin Hill in the end zone from 18 yards to tie it at 34 with 14 seconds left, and Don Cockroft nailing a 22-yard field goal at 3:07 of overtime to win it for the Browns 37-34. All of a sudden, the Jets’ thrilling season was over. A wild ride resulted in an extraordinarily disappointing finish.
When you adopt the Jets in full, that’s eventually how all your stories end.
As for the New York Giants — no, not those New York Giants — I invite you to follow me following around the greatest New York Giant (and pretty substantial New York Met) of them all at ESPN New York, from Friday in Harlem and Saturday in midtown.
by Greg Prince on 20 January 2011 3:35 pm Now that he’s signed and assuming he’s sound, Chris Young will become the first Young — not counting former Cy Youngs — to tip his cap to applause at a Mets Home Opener since Anthony Young did so eighteen years ago. We were all younger then, but the defining characteristic of AY’s career was middle-aged.
Young had lost his final fourteen decisions of 1992, which wasn’t exactly to his credit, but you could look past it to a point. The first seven losses (which followed a pair of April wins) were from when he was a starter. Manager Jeff Torborg pulled Anthony from the rotation in late June and threw him into the bullpen, where decisions can be something of a crapshoot. He soon found himself filling in as closer during John Franco’s midseason stay on the DL. If AY wasn’t compiling W’s, at least he wasn’t getting his S kicked.
Anthony Young was actually pretty decent in the summer of ’92. He racked up a dozen saves in a two-month span and entered September with an overall record of 2-9…an almost unnoticeable 0-2 since exiting the rotation. Young’s losing streak wasn’t over, but it could be said to have stabilized. It took a rash of September lousiness to restart, in earnest, the avalanche of AY L’s. He blew five saves and turned every one of them into losses on his own ledger, finishing 1992 at 2-14, the last fourteen coming in a row, putting him five short of Craig Anderson’s Met record for uninterrupted futility and nine away from Cliff Curtis’s most dubious major league mark, both of which he’d eventually surpass with sagging colors.
No, it wasn’t much fun to be Young and a Met at that particular juncture.
But that was 1992, which was granted an enormous mulligan on every Mets fan’s scorecard when 1993 rolled around. We showed up at Shea on April 5 and we applauded every Mets who tipped a cap our way that Opening Day, no matter how poorly they had acquitted themselves the season before. On a crisp, hopeful Monday like that, Anthony Young wasn’t about to be booed for having lost fourteen decisions in a row. No Met was openly reviled, and that included a starting lineup that time would reveal as 55.5% rogues gallery:
Coleman LF
Fernandez SS
Murray 1B
Bonilla RF
Johnson 3B
Orsulak CF
Kent 2B
Hundley C
Gooden P
We the home fans of Shea Stadium cheered Vince Coleman. That’s all you needed to know about our generous (or perhaps addled) state of mind. That’s all you needed to know about how good a year that was no more than a couple of weeks from definitively spiraling into what we now ruefully recall as Nineteen Ninety-Three looked at first sight. No Met could do wrong that April afternoon, not during the game in which Doc would four-hit the newborn Colorado Rockies 3-0, and certainly not during the pregame introductions.
Those were more of a highlight than usual, thanks to the presence of someone we couldn’t have expected to see up and around so soon after witnessing how he was laid out a mere eighteen weeks earlier. It looked bad on replay and the diagnosis that followed it was much worse.
The events of November 29, 1992, as reported by the Times’s Tim Smith in the next day’s paper:
The Jets’ miserable season lost most of its meaning 23 seconds into the third quarter of the team’s game with Kansas City at Giants Stadium this afternoon. At that moment, defensive end Dennis Byrd crashed to the field after a collision with a teammate, tackle Scott Mersereau, as they converged toward Chiefs quarterback Dave Krieg.
An eerie silence gripped the stadium as Jets doctors and trainers attended to Byrd for seven minutes. Hopes were raised when Byrd moved his left arm. A few of his teammates drifted over to talk to him and hold his hand, then slowly they began to realize just how seriously injured he was.
Paralyzed in his lower body, Byrd was strapped to a specially designed board for players who suffer spinal injuries and placed onto a cart and taken off the field through the west end of the stadium. He was then taken to Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, where he went through a battery of neurological tests and X-rays.
Frank Ramos, a spokesman for the Jets, said late last night that Byrd had suffered a fractured C-5 vertebra, which is commonly known as a broken neck, and that “he is paralyzed from the waist down and has no use of his legs and partial use of his arms.” He added that it usually takes 48 to 72 hours for an essentially definitive prognosis on whether such paralysis would be permanent.
The collision with Mersereau meant the end of Dennis Byrd’s football career, but he didn’t stay down in any other sense of the word. Byrd went about the business of rehabilitating and recovering as best he could. Turned out the best he could was phenomenal. We who attended the 1993 Mets’ Opener saw it first-hand when Byrd walked — walked — to home plate and accepted a framed Mets jersey with his number, 90, on it and was saluted as a “Met for life”.
Though the Jets hadn’t played in Flushing since 1983, this wasn’t Byrd’s first trip to Shea Stadium. In August 1992, he served as a judge on Banner Day. Now it was only fitting the lineman be presented with a veritable banner of his own. BYRD 90, in blue and orange on a white field of pinstripes, would do nicely.
The presentation, the Mets said, was “a way of saying thank you to Dennis and his wife, Angela, for the courage, determination and fortitude that he has displayed.”
No player drew greater applause that day at Shea than the one football player on hand, particularly after he told us, in his own twist on the classic George Carlin routine regarding the differences between America’s favorite pastimes, “If it rains, we don’t have to play. And if I hit the ball over the fence, I get to walk around the bases.
“I can do that.”
It would be irresponsible to suggest Dennis Byrd’s words inspired the Mets that April afternoon. These were the 1993 Mets — they were capable of winning on 58 other occasions besides the Opener all by themselves. But still, what a pitch-perfect note from such a courageous defensive end. Of course the 1993 Mets won that day. Even the 1993 Mets of Coleman, Fernandez, Murray, Bonilla, Kent and Young (DNP on April 5; thirteen more consecutive losses in his immediate future) wouldn’t let down Dennis Byrd.
As you no doubt know, Byrd has been talking again in the last week. He mostly keeps to himself at his Oklahoma home, but he was so moved by his old football team’s efforts to make its way through the NFL playoffs that he sent its current coach the jersey he was wearing when he fell to the ground in November 1992. On the fifth anniversary of his career-ending hit, Rich Cimini of the Daily News visited Byrd in Owasso, Okla., and noticed that garment was the one thing there that was not like all the others:
[E]verything is neatly understated, with only one, partially hidden reminder of that fateful day. There it is, clumped like a dust rag on one of the shelves his last jersey. Green, with white letters and numbers.
BYRD, 90.
The front of the jersey is tattered, cut in half from top to bottom. The doctors sliced it off Byrd’s then-paralyzed body as they transported him via ambulance from Giants Stadium to Lenox Hill Hospital.
“This brings back a lot of memories,” said Byrd, holding the jersey against his chest. “If I spend time thinking about it, I can be there on that day. I can remember the events of that day better than any other day in my life.”
He paused, perhaps remembering what it was like to be BYRD, 90. Finally, a smile appeared on his still-boyish face.
“I guess they weren’t too concerned with neatness,” he said, studying the doctors’ tailoring.
One assumes Byrd hadn’t bothered to frame this jersey since Cimini saw it in 1997. Maybe it was still balled up when Byrd stuck it in an envelope and sent it to Rex Ryan before the Jets played the Patriots in the AFC divisional round this past Sunday. Whatever its state before Ryan received it, it certainly took on a new life prior the game in Foxborough. Ryan hung the jersey in the Jet locker room, had the team’s captains bring out a replica for the coin toss and somewhere in between, brought the man who used to wear BYRD 90 sixteen Sundays every fall to Foxborough to share his thoughts.
Dennis did the talking and the 2011 Jets listened intently. They uniformly reported Byrd and his jersey indeed inspired them before they went out and defeated their archrivals to advance to the AFC championship this Sunday in Pittsburgh…where Byrd himself will walk onto the field as honorary Jet captain. Wide receiver Braylon Edwards was particularly affected by Byrd’s talk. Addressing the media after the victory over the Patriots, Edwards focused on one particular sentiment Byrd expressed:
“‘I would trade anything for one play.’ He didn’t say ‘Another series.’ He didn’t say, ‘One game.’ He said…’One play.’ Do you know what one play is? One play lasts, maybe, six seconds on average. He’d trade his whole life for six seconds. That’s all it took for every guy in that room.”
When Jets 28 Patriots 21 went final, Edwards (who scored an important touchdown at New England but brought troubles of his own on himself earlier this season) could be seen performing celebratory backflips on the Gillette Stadium grass. Those inclined to view any grand Jet gesture as excessive might have taken offense. I took it as a favor to Byrd — Dennis probably felt like doing his own cartwheels after the game, but since that’s a little out of his range, let’s say Braylon picked up a teammate and completed the play for him.
It would be a great next chapter to this unexpected postseason sidebar if Byrd and his jersey were to join the Jets in Dallas two weeks from Sunday, but even in the world of the green and white, they have to play them one game at a time. Yet win or lose against the Steelers, isn’t it something that Dennis Byrd came off the bench on behalf of his old team? And isn’t it something that a tattered piece of cloth can hold so much meaning? “That jersey was an essential part of my recovery,” Byrd told Cimini (now with ESPN) before the game at New England. “It helped me get my life back.”
“It’s been on my heart for a long time to send the jersey back,” Byrd elaborated for Newsday’s Bob Glauber. “They had honored me by not re-issuing that number, and it’s a great honor. I wanted to return it and let it be what it is.”
For what it’s worth, no Met has played a regular-season game wearing No. 90, either.
by Jason Fry on 19 January 2011 3:56 am A pal asked me the other day how I felt about the Mets’ offseason, and I said I was happy. “But of course,” I added, “there’s accepting the fact that nothing much is going to happen.”
Fiscal responsibility is a laudable thing after a run of stupidity: It isn’t just Luis Castillo and Oliver Perez that piss me off, but thinking about K-Rod’s absurd vesting option, and Alex Cora’s absurd one, until finally even hearing the words “vesting option” makes me want to sneak over to Omar Minaya’s house and key his car. It’s a relief not to have to contend with any of that foolishness, even when it comes tinged with regrettable farewells. Seriously: Given that middle relievers are essentially spaghetti against a wall, would you have given Pedro Feliciano $8 million over two years?
But fiscal responsibility also isn’t any fun. It generates no entertaining stories, no funny Facebook pictures, nothing to whoop it up about. Raul Chavez? Taylor Tankersley? Willie Harris? Umm…yay?
Which brings us to Chris Capuano and Chris Young, the latter pending a not entirely pro forma physical. Both seem like smart moves: The risk is fairly low, the potential reward relatively high. Injuries put both of them on the side of the road for quite a while, but they did pitch with relative success in September. Neither’s getting a deal for more than a year, or a … (grits teeth) … vesting option. They’re there for back-of-the-rotation depth. The Mets won’t be putting everything on Dillon Gee or, God forbid, the Arsonist of Culiacan. Contrast this to, say, expecting everything to work out because of the presence of Ollie and John Maine.
(Excuse me while I sneak back to let the air out of Omar’s tires.)
Still, fiscal responsibility won’t be much comfort when the Phillies are beating the tar out of us — to say nothing of the Braves and Marlins. Nor can I imagine either Greg or me beginning a post with “It’s a shame Chris Young’s velocity doesn’t look like it will ever return — but that smart contract makes me feel like we’re winners anyway.” Can there anything much to enjoy from a year of refilling the piggybank and staying out of bars and boutiques?
Well, yes. There’s baseball itself of course, which is not to be overlooked given that it’s January and a particularly miserable January at that. If you told me Jerry Manuel had been rehired for a day and was sending the Luis Hernandez All-Stars out for an encore against the Nationals, I’d clear my calendar and watch avidly. It’s true that I’d be disgusted and booing everyone in sight by the third inning, but the point stands.
But maybe there’s more than that. Can’t we get lucky for once? Can’t we find a jewel in the scrap heap? Show up at the baseball version of Antiques Roadshow and be told that “this vintage Capuano is a rare find — there’s a little damage on the upper left, but it’s been expertly repaired. And you’re saying you bought this at a garage sale?”
Looking back at 20-odd years of Met dumpster-diving, most of the names depress me. Remember Pete Smith? Mel Rojas? John Hudek? Rick Wilkins? Allen Watson? Mike Bordick? Pedro Astacio? Jeff D’Amico? James Baldwin? Scott Erickson? Karim Garcia and Shane Spencer? Danny Graves? Kaz Ishii? Jose Lima? Ben Johnson? Chan Ho Fucking Park? Scott Schoeneweis? Ricardo Rincon? Matt Wise? Livan Hernandez? Jeremy Reed? J.J. “No Physical” Putz? Mike Jacobs II? It’s a sad parade, one mostly notable for its ability to revive long-dormant complaining.
Yet looking back isn’t universally tragic. There was Brian Bohanon. Rick Reed. Darren Oliver. Jose Valentin. Nelson Figueroa. Heck, there was R.A. Dickey. Even Kenny Rogers was pretty good until finally he wasn’t. Some of those pickups even go on the Minaya ledger — sorry about the key marks and the flat tires, O. (Eh. Not really.) Is it a measure of my faith in Sandy Alderson that I can’t help thinking we might get lucky? That Capuano and Young might be good for more than giving Dickey someone to discuss the merits of higher education vs. autodidactism with between starts? (Somehow I don’t think Mike Pelfrey’s up for that kind of thing.) That we might be praising Scott Hairston as our invaluable fourth outfielder come September? Saying “that sure was an awesome Willie Harris catch” without throwing things across the room?
We could get lucky, right? Right?
by Greg Prince on 15 January 2011 2:30 am INT. LIVING ROOM — AFTERNOON
AS ENDORA WATCHES TELEVISION FROM AN EASY CHAIR, OBLIVIOUS TO HER SON-IN-LAW’S PAINED EXPRESSION, DARRIN PUTS DOWN THE SPORTS SECTION OF HIS NEWSPAPER ON THE COUCH WHERE HE SITS. HE SIGHS AND COMPLAINS TO SAMANTHA (SITTING NEXT TO HIM), “That darn Willie Harris did it to us again last night. If only we could get him to stop killing the Mets!” SAMANTHA, DECIDING TO DO DARRIN A BIG FAVOR, TWITCHES HER NOSE, AND WILLIE HARRIS APPEARS IN THEIR LIVING ROOM DECKED OUT IN A FULL METS UNIFORM. ALL SPRING TO THEIR FEET TO GREET THEIR BEWILDERED VISITOR.
DARRIN (exasperated)
SAM!
SAMANTHA
Well, you said you didn’t want him beating the Mets anymore…
WILLIE HARRIS
Excuse me, but what am I doing here?
SAMANTHA
Oh hi, Mr. Harris. Welcome to the New York Mets!
WILLIE HARRIS
The Mets? But I’m a Washington National! And we’re supposed to be in L.A. playing the Dodgers tonight!
SAMANTHA
Not anymore. You’re taking on the Cardinals at Citi Field. Terry Collins has you batting seventh and playing left.
WILLIE HARRIS
Does Jim Riggleman know?
DARRIN
Sam! Willie Harris can’t become a Met just because you twitched your nose!
SAMANTHA (SHEEPISHLY)
Actually, honey, he just did.
WILLIE HARRIS (STILL BEWILDERED)
Excuse me again — I’m on the Mets now because you twitched your nose?
SAMANTHA
That’s right!
WILLIE HARRIS
And instead of making one great catch after another that every Mets fan absorbs like a dagger to the heart, I’m supposed to make great catches that they’ll cheer?
SAMANTHA
Right again!
ENDORA (DISDAINFULLY AMUSED)
I can see why this one bothers you so much, Derwood. It’s not that he makes catches. He just catches on a lot quicker than you do. You could take a lesson from him. You’re rather slow, you know.
DARRIN
Endora!
SAMANTHA
Mother! Not now!
ENDORA
Go ahead, Derwood. Why don’t you tell our guest all the things you said you’d do to him if you ever got your hands on him?
DARRIN
Please, Endora. That was just the frustration of watching Mr. Harris play such fantastic defense against the Mets talking.
ENDORA
Is that why you promised…what was it again? Oh yes, that you’d “wring Willie Harris’s scrawny little neck” if he was ever within five feet of you. He’s right here, Derwood, and his neck appears perfectly untouched!
DARRIN
You’ll have to forgive the disturbed ravings of my mother-in-law, Mr. Harris. She doesn’t know baseball.
ENDORA
And you don’t know anything.
DARRIN
SAM!
SAMANTHA
Both of you, stop it! We can settle this later. Right now we have to get Willie to the ballpark.
WILLIE HARRIS
Man, I gotta talk to my agent.
SAMANTHA TWITCHES HER NOSE. SHE, DARRIN, ENDORA AND WILLIE HARRIS ALL DISAPPEAR FROM THE STEPHENS LIVING ROOM, INSTANTLY REMATERIALIZING IN THE HOME TEAM DUGOUT AT CITI FIELD WHERE THEY ENCOUNTER A PERFECTLY CALM R.A. DICKEY, WHO BARELY LOOKS UP FROM HIS BOOK.
WILLIE HARRIS
Hey R.A.
R.A. DICKEY
Oh, hi Willie.
WILLIE HARRIS
You don’t seem all that surprised to see me in a Mets uniform, or these strange people who brought me here.
R.A. DICKEY
Willie, spend a little time around the Mets, and you’ll find yourself exponentially unsurprised by all the otherwise incomprehensible hijinks that transpire in this place.
WILLIE HARRIS
That’s quite the vocabulary you’ve got there.
R.A. DICKEY
And that’s some defense you play against us. After seeing the video of those catches, you’d have to tell me these folks with you are witches to really get a rise out of me.
WILLIE HARRIS
I think two of them are, R.A.
R.A. DICKEY
Really? So that’s how you make those catches, huh?
WILLIE HARRIS
Hey, if it was witchcraft, I would have batted higher than .183 last year.
SAMANTHA
Mr. Dickey, I’d appreciate it if we could keep this “witch” thing just between us.
R.A. DICKEY
Your secret’s safe with me, lady. Just don’t tell Terry I’m missing an ulnar collateral ligament. I don’t think he’d understand I can still throw a knuckleball without one.
SAMANTHA
It’s a deal!
R.A. DICKEY
Shoot, it’s bad enough he’s been hollering at us to give “110 percent”. Chris Capuano keeps trying to tell him that’s a mathematical impossibility, but he won’t listen.
ENDORA
You with the beard and that charming accent — you throw a “knuckleball”?
R.A. DICKEY
Yes ma’am.
ENDORA
Then you should really get along with Derwood here. He’s what you mortals call a “knucklehead”.
DARRIN
Endora, I’ve got a good mind…
ENDORA
I wouldn’t swear to that in a court of law.
SAMANTHA
Please, mother! Darrin! Not in the Mets’ dugout!
R.A. DICKEY
Willie, man, maybe you should talk to your agent.
CUE UPROARIOUS LAUGHTER
by Greg Prince on 14 January 2011 3:26 am For several hours Thursday I grappled with a modest identity crisis. My lifelong affiliation with the Capricorn party was cast into doubt by an astrological development that claimed I was actually a Sagittarius. I haven’t eyeballed my horoscope in decades, yet being a Capricorn — goat horns and all — has always been as much a part of who I am as being a Mets fan — goat horns and all. This realignment of stars was reportedly the result of the earth’s rotation wobbling, just like the Mets’ last May when their rotation spun on a shaky axis of Maine and Perez. Whatever the cause, the zodiac’s reset button had been pushed. It was all disturbingly different from when my sign was initially communicated to me…which was when I was six, right around the time I learned I was a Mets fan.
Now what I knew wasn’t true? I wasn’t a Capricorn? I was a Sagittarius? Or Sagittarian? What exactly was I now called? And what in hell was going on in the heavens? For all I truly knew, the standings I read when I was six years old were as retroactively inaccurate as the horoscope page.
For all I knew, I was really an Expos fan.
Somewhere across the Thursday evening sky, I changed my mind. If the cosmos had traded me from the Caps to the Saggies, who was I to not report? The hell with the goats. I was — once I looked it up — an archer, and damn proud of it.
Then I read another story that said, essentially, never mind. The realigned zodiac was for real, or as real as the zodiac gets, but because we live in the hemisphere where we live, we could all return safely to our previously assigned constellations.
Hence, just as I was deeply mulling my new identity as a Sagittarian (“mainly concerned with philosophy, higher education and global thinking”), I shifted right back to my familiar role on Team Capricorn (“introvert” — and I’d rather not say a word more than I have to).
Reassuringly, I never stopped being a Mets fan. They could shuffle the Libras, the Virgos and the Gemini from one calendar page to the next; they could shorten Scorpio to six days; and they could even roll out the new sign of Ophiuchus (which, if I recall correctly, is the sound I made when Luis Castillo dropped that pop fly), and that part of me wouldn’t change. Fans don’t get traded.
Players, however, do. They get waived, released, non-tendered, designated for assignment and sometimes they play out their options and leave as free agents. When I was granted the opportunity to exchange a few words with one Met some three months ago, I came away with the impression that the only option he wanted was to stay a Met.
The option, however, was not in Chris Carter’s hands.
A new regime swept in, and one of its first tangible moves was sweeping out Carter, a skilled specialist on a team badly in need of talented generalists. He gave the Mets what Frank Cashen would have called “character in their left-handed pinch-hitting,” 19 times in 58 at-bats (.328) to be exact. It was the stuff of Staub, but on Sandy Alderson’s Mets, good old latter-day, one-dimensional Rusty might not stick, either (1985 OBP of .400 notwithstanding).
Chris Carter couldn’t have seemed less animalistic — save for all humans technically being animals — when I met him, no matter how we all delighted in calling him the Animal for how ferociously he prepared in advance of his infrequent playing assignments. Chris, however, held a different identity dear as the 2010 season ended. As our brief early October conversation wound down, I asked him what I considered a benign enough question: who did he like in the upcoming National League playoffs? The look in his eyes indicated sheer animalism had taken hold. Chris Carter clearly had no interest in choosing among Phillies, Braves, Reds or Giants, not even for small talk’s sake.
“I just think Mets,” he said.
Nowadays, presumably, Chris Carter contemplates Rays, Rays and nothing but Rays. Last week he signed a minor league deal with the reigning American League East champs, an outfit suddenly beset by a Metsload of openings given their own Aldersonian budget issues. I sincerely hope the minor league tag is strictly bookkeeping and that he makes the Tampa Bay club this spring. Though I spoke to Carter in a quasi-professional capacity that particular Blogger Night, I was just thinking Mets fan. That’s my identity, that’s my star sign. When a Mets player turned so darn serious on the subject of being a Mets player, it was fair to say I didn’t need to read my horoscope to tell me I was about to experience much joy.
Three months later, that Mets player who thought just Mets isn’t a Met anymore. It may be a reasonable and ultimately helpful baseball decision, and there may be a net Met gain where 2011 roster composition is concerned. But gosh, to meet a Met who had his mind set on “Met” — even if Carter wasn’t a Met a whole lot longer than I was a Sagittarian — and then to realize his setting, like that of almost every Met, was merely temporary…
Sometimes the fault lies not in our stars, but in our attachments.
by Greg Prince on 12 January 2011 11:48 am Alertly amending an alphabetically affable arrangement of purely professional pitchers, the Mets might move from spring-sorting to summer-sampling Taylor Tankersley’s talents. The sizable southpaw and heretofore hot hurler jauntily joins Boof Bonser and Chris Capuano for therapeutic throwing when rosters report this forthcoming February.
(Thanks to rightly regarded reader Chad Ochoseis for transmitting timely tip.)
by Greg Prince on 9 January 2011 6:48 pm Saturday I woke up with two overriding concerns: sports and the weather. Would the Jets beat the Colts, and was it gonna snow? Only the Jets and the Colts could determine the outcome of that AFC Wild Card game. Nobody could do a damn thing about the weather.
That always amazes me. We have all this sophisticated technology to tell us if a blizzard is bearing down on us yet we can’t do a thing to stop it. The best we can get from those who are telling us what we’re in for is “stay off the roads” or maybe “wear a hat.” It was true two weeks ago when New York was pounded by the most recent Storm of the Century (seems we get one every couple of years) and it was true in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed New Orleans.
Katrina is when this line of thinking first occurred to me. They said something was coming, it came, and there was no stopping it. Then, after the storm itself had moved on, the aftereffects devastated a city. Later, somebody said by way of criticizing official reaction to what Katrina wrought that all it did was rain and a city nearly drowned. That might have been an intentional oversimplification of what happened in New Orleans, but yeah — weather happened, and it couldn’t be stopped, even if everything that unraveled after the rain was a different story.
I thought about that on Saturday, after seeing it wasn’t snowing and before the Jets and Colts kicked off, in light of two things transpiring on TV. One was the NFC Wild Card game between the Seahawks and Saints. Seattle won, which meant New Orleans was dethroned as Super Bowl champs. The big story there was the Seahawks, possessors of a fluky 7-9 division championship, shockingly moving on to the next round. The Saints, meanwhile, had become certifiably last year’s news.
But what news they had been.
Even if you weren’t a dyed-in-the-wool Who Dat? asker, you had to admire what the Saints meant to New Orleans as it began to rebuild from Katrina. A football team could only do so much, but you couldn’t have done better for the lifting of spirits or the symbolism of resolve. It was professional sports at its best.
All things being equal, you’d rather have rooted for the Saints last Super Bowl for mundane reasons like they hadn’t won one before; or the cut of Drew Brees’s jib appealed to you; or you found the colors of the New Orleans uniforms aesthetically pleasing (or you lived there for a little while a long time ago and your affection for the town never wavered). You’d rather there not have been a tragedy — you would have done fine deciding the Saints were worth your time on football terms alone. Somehow, though, that extra layer of temporary allegiance many of us felt for the Saints all traced back to the weather, and how the weather is one of those things you know is coming but can’t do anything about.
It was the other thing that was transpiring on TV on Saturday that made me think about such storms in this context. A gunman opened fire in a crowd that had gathered to meet Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords outside a Safeway in Tucson. Giffords and thirteen others were seriously wounded, six were killed. One of the deceased is a nine-year-old girl who, it turns out, was the granddaughter of former Mets manager Dallas Green.
This wasn’t the weather. This wasn’t “Mother Nature” of “an act of God” or something that forms in an ocean and appears on Doppler radar, and whose impact you can brace for but can’t hope to halt. This was the act of a person…a horrifyingly disturbed person whose precise motives are being sorted out as we speak.
Was the gunman stirred by hateful political rhetoric toward the congresswoman and those causes she has supported? One can draw his or her own conclusions. Based on preliminary evidence, it doesn’t seem to require a great leap to make those connections. It might not have been a given politician’s or movement’s explicit agenda that sent the 22-year-old suspect over the edge, but I believe it’s fair to infer an atmosphere in which those who stand on the other side of a debate are routinely “targeted” and angrily “put in the crosshairs” — even if the imagery is all metaphorical — is not the healthiest of environments for anybody.
I don’t think that kind of ramping up of grievance in any discourse is an encouraging development for society, and that includes when it happens in sports.
One of my favorite things in the world is expressing my opinions on the Mets and baseball in this space and then reading the feedback. I appreciate that there’s feedback at all. I prefer, quite frankly, when it’s positive feedback — when somebody agrees with my points — but I respect the negative feedback, too, provided it’s offered civilly. It usually is at Faith and Fear.
I read a lot of sports blogs and sports sites, those that are so-called mainstream (those produced by large media concerns) and those that are so-called independent (like us) and those that lie somewhere in between, and I can tell you without any intention of flattering you that you’re one of the finest audiences that exists in this realm. No kidding. You might not love everything we write or every stance we take, and you might not agree with each other on a given subject, but you’re almost always classy about it. You’re consistently respectful of what other people have to say. Hell, even our most frequent visiting “troll,” representing another fan base no less, makes a point of identifying himself as “well meaning”. This is rare, and we appreciate it.
A few months ago, one of my posts was linked to by a much larger baseball site outside the immediate Mets universe. I welcomed it because it meant more traffic for us — nice for the ego, a chance for exposure to readers who didn’t know we existed — but I also dreaded it because it brought with it a stream of comments that felt as if they’d landed from another planet. In that post, I had referred, as I do routinely, to the Mets as “we,” which didn’t go over big with this particular non-Mets audience…which is OK, except one of the commenters saw fit to punctuate his remark toward me with “you silly retard.”
As I edited out that little button from this one-time-only visitor, I thought, “Why would somebody feel the need to write that?” Even if you were intellectually offended by the idea that a fan considers himself one with his team, why toss that in there? I see that sort of language all the time on other sites. It’s such a routine part of what’s become acceptable online sports dialogue, yet I just don’t get it. Why the automatic vitriol? Why the resorting to name-calling? It’s not enough to make a cogent argument and let your logic speak for itself?
I mentioned the other day my disappointment with the progressive deterioration of the Hall of Fame debate. I first noticed it a few years ago on a board I frequent. I dipped my toe into the discussion by promoting the cause of Dave Concepcion. Somebody disagreed with me. His reasoning? “Dave Concepcion sucked.” I didn’t respond because it was absurd. It wasn’t “Dave Concepcion’s numbers aren’t quite Hall of Fame caliber” or “the metrics you’re using aren’t a true reflection of Dave Concepcion’s career which, on balance, isn’t Cooperstown-worthy.” It was Dave Concepcion sucked and perhaps I did, too.
That’s Algonquin Round Table material compared to the current state of Hall of Fame give-and-take. Even as the cases for or against a particular player’s induction seem more sophisticated, the vitriol attached to them grows more acrid and more personal every December and January, as if the essential message of every counterthrust is, “I’ve gone to the trouble of figuring this out for you, you must be stupid if you can’t see it my way.”
Last week ESPN printed the ballots of its voting writers. One of them was revealed to be, by most measures, a little on the dubious side — specifically, it included a check mark for B.J. Surhoff. Not surprisingly, given the tenor of conversation these days, it wasn’t taken as curious or quirky or a severe outlier, but as a crime against baseball. What the hell is wrong with this clown? and words to that effect streamed out of every Internet baseball pore because one writer in 581 announced he’d thrown one vote to one player who was eligible to be voted for.
The writer eventually explained his thought process via ESPN chat. He covered Surhoff in high school and told him not only would he make the majors but that “someday, I’d be voting for him for the Hall of Fame.” Someday came, and he followed through.
I think it’s instructive to add the writer’s addendum:
The reaction to that astounds me. I expected people who didn’t know the story to question that vote. But the sheer level of nastiness, the anger, amazes me. I really didn’t think BJ would get elected. I’d be surprised if he got another vote besides mine. And I’m fine with that. BJ was a very good player and a good guy (check out the work he’s done for autism, sparked by his autistic son). He earned the fulfillment of that 35-year-old promise. And who, exactly did that hurt? If voting for BJ cost someone who deserved entry, I wouldn’t have done it. And if the rules said that everybody who got one vote got in, then I definitely wouldn’t have done it. But it didn’t.
One stray vote for B.J. Surhoff doesn’t bother me. What gets me is the idea that people attacked this guy so virulently for voting for B.J. Surhoff as if the writer didn’t understand exactly what was going on, as if it hadn’t occurred to him that there are 581 voters and one of his check marks wasn’t going to tumble the apple cart of immortality. The two consensus favorites going into the announcement of the election, Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyleven, got in with that guy’s ballot supporting Surhoff (and not supporting either of them, which is his right). Others who didn’t get elected this time around weren’t deprived of induction because of his isolated vote for Surhoff.
You can say the writer brings a values system to bear that doesn’t jibe with yours and politely offer an alternative. You can question the screening process that puts a B.J. Surhoff or a Lenny Harris or other players who aren’t ever going to be elected to the Hall of Fame into play. You can suggest a new composition for the electorate, one that isn’t limited to ten-year members of the BBWAA. But do you really have to pile on the “this guy is an idiot” train?
Sports isn’t supposed to be politics/government. It’s supposed to be unalloyed fun. Yet we know it’s not. Nothing you care about as much as you care about your team is quite so simple that you take it with a proverbial grain of salt when things don’t go your way. In our more sober moments we wouldn’t demand somebody “kill” somebody for the crime of inserting the wrong pitcher or throwing the wrong pitch or writing years later that that pitcher should be in the Hall of Fame. Nevertheless, we get caught up in it and hopefully have the perspective to know we’re ramping up where we don’t need to.
But it gets harder to tell that we do know that. It becomes very difficult when the prevailing tone in so many places makes people being harshly dismissed as “morons” utterly unsurprising. It seems it should be easy enough to decelerate such diatribing. It seems people’s passions can be calibrated to a setting where one can take on the gist of an argument without reflexively belittling and/or demonizing the person proffering the opposing viewpoint.
It is, I admit, a bit of a stretch to go from a tragic shooting that may (may) have been stirred by a drumbeat of overheated rhetoric to wondering why people can’t be nicer to each other when disagreeing over how good a ballplayer was. Yet as I turned my Saturday attention to the Jets beating the Colts, I couldn’t help but think that unlike the weather, it’s the sort of thing we can do something about.
by Greg Prince on 5 January 2011 6:13 pm That eleventh Met in the Hall of Fame we didn’t order has arrived anyway. What the hell, congratulations Roberto Alomar, second baseman in these parts for a year-and-a-half when the team wasn’t very good and he didn’t appear to try very hard. Cases can be made for his wearing a Blue Jays cap, an Orioles cap or an Indians cap on his plaque, but as a Mets fan, I’m obviously biased: I think he should wear a ski mask over his face to represent how adroitly he stole money for 219 games in 2002 and 2003.
We got to revel in our unanticipated Sheadenfreude last year when Robber Alomar was surprisingly passed over on the first ballot. Most of that was probably from his briefly giving a spit in the direction of umpire John Hirschbeck, but I’d like to think that just enough writers who watched him fax it in as a Met were offended by the ample lack of professionalism the man demonstrated day in and day out. Alomar may have been spiraling into the downside of his career when he arrived at Shea, but that didn’t mean he had to accelerate the process by voluntarily slowing down and being a less than ideal teammate while doing so.
But as bygones do what bygones will do, Roberto’s a Hall of Famer now, and not without merit when the full panorama is taken in. Alomar was a spectacular second baseman and a terrific hitter from 1988 to 2001, a single day of great expectorations in 1996 notwithstanding. He may have been one of the biggest letdowns in Met history (him or George Foster, take your sorry pick) but there was more to his career than Flushing the last part of it away. The spirit of congratulations demands we remember the good times, which were, quite frankly, after we acquired him and before he played for us. Let’s leave Roberto Alomar, New York Met and son of a New York Met (Sandy sipped a cup of iced coffee with us in 1967), with this achingly hopeful quote from the opening of Spring Training in 2002, courtesy of the New York Times:
“Finally I get a chance to wear this uniform. I’m excited. It’s like being a little kid again.”
From there, so as not to be a Met blanket about it, let’s pretend that everything had turned out fine.
If Robbie Alomar had landed as a Met and then become the performance equivalent of Carlos Baerga — not very good but still hustling, still mentoring, still apparently giving a damn — I’d feel a lot sunnier that the newest Hall of Famer will have a NEW YORK (N.L.) notation inscribed into his hardware. As for the actual Baerga, ours from 1996 to 1998, he trotted onto the ballot this year and has been trotted right off it. Not a single vote from the Baseball Writers Association of America: 0-for-581. For a handful of years in Cleveland, Baerga was hot stuff. Then he joined the Mets.
Funny how that works.
Also shut out completely was Lenny Harris, a Met in 1998 and again in 2000-2001. I read more than few snarks and snorts about his presence on the ballot not being worth the ink used to print it, yet I was happy to see him there. Eighteen seasons and a major league record 212 pinch-hits (setting the mark in his last moments as a Met), plus a lot of that Great Teammate stuff. I think it’s worth one line if no check marks.
Al Leiter received four votes in what will be his only time considered for what they call immortality. Surely he got them from four writers who enjoyed his quotes and his company. If a pitcher could talk his way into Cooperstown, I’m convinced Leiter would be on the podium this summer. It’s enough that he threw a few dozen Hall of Fame-caliber games as a Met from 1998 through 2004. There’s a plaque with his name on it waiting to be bronzed, but its destination is just off the Jackie Robinson Rotunda. Nothing wrong with that.
I was surprised John Olerud collected only four votes. If I had a ballot, I would have marked off Olerud on mine — it’s a reflex reaction. Just as the thought of Roberto Alomar turns me sour, I become surprisingly sweet and not a little gooey when I conjure an image of John Olerud in a Met uniform topped by a Met hard hat. As recently stated, I’d check every box available if John Olerud was the name next to it. With a high OBP that traveled with him from Toronto to Queens to Seattle, I thought Oly would break through a little more with the sabermetric-minded, but without mammoth first base power, I guess something was lost in translation. Sorry Johnny O, but we’ll always have 1997 to 1999.
Not exactly cruel but kind of unusual was the fate of the final Met on the ballot in 2011, John Franco. A player needed 29 votes to remain in contention for 2012. Franco received 27: more than I expected, not enough to keep on jogging in from this particular bullpen. Tough to come so close, but all it was going to buy John was time. He wasn’t getting in or getting near Cooperstown. From 1990 to 2001 and, following Tommy John surgery, 2003 to 2004, there was nibbling (his) and there was squirming (ours), yet ultimately it could not be denied John Franco did all he could do as a Met reliever. He was asked to close games most of his career, and he generally sealed them — not always tight as a drum, but generally enough to keep the air out.
John Franco finished up with the most saves compiled by any lefthander and remains two ahead of the supposedly retired Billy Wagner. He’s fourth overall, behind Trevor Hoffman, Mariano Rivera and Lee Smith. Smith stays balloted year after year but probably won’t make it. Hoffman’s a who-knows candidate when he’s ready and Rivera, of course, would be inducted right now if the rules allowed it. The voting writers don’t seem impressed by saves but they know a “great” reliever when they see one. As the long, hard and finally successful slog of Bert Blyleven perhaps proves, the “he doesn’t feel like a Hall of Famer” argument is running out of steam for starting pitchers, but the snap judgment call where relievers are concerned is still OK. John Franco didn’t feel like a Hall of Famer, except he did what he was supposed to do pretty darn well for a very long time and did it better than most.
Though I welcome this January baseball diversion, I’m still down on the Hall of Fame as an institution and figure to remain so until Mike Piazza is up for election in two years, at which point I will hypocritically obsess on his chances. Why so down? Same old complaint: Too much Walter O’Malley and Bowie Kuhn; not enough Gil Hodges and Buck O’Neil and, for that matter, Keith Hernandez. Plus a newer complaint: For weeks leading up to the announcement of new members, I’ve noticed almost everybody who writes or talks about the Hall of Fame morphs into an intolerant jerk when faced with any kind of opposing opinion.
I find almost every argument for or against a given player compelling on some level. I enjoy learning advanced statistical calculations that prove a player more or less worthy than I might have otherwise thought. At the same time, I can relate to instinctual choices based on educated observation and recall of particular “clutch” moments in a given career. I think there’s something to be said for feeling like you were watching an all-time great. I think there’s also something to be said for brushing aside the cobwebs and discovering a more nuanced perspective through which to make a decision if indeed you are entrusted with a vote.
But inevitably columns and comments demand we choose sides as if the fate of the free world hangs in the balance alongside Jack Morris’s Cooperstown credentials. I love baseball, but I just can’t get that worked up over this stuff. I’ll get worked up over Piazza, I’m sure, but if he’s made to wait a year or three, or somebody mistakenly portrays him for eternity in an L.A. cap, well, he’ll still be Mike Piazza, New York Mets legend to me. Gil Hodges is that. So is Keith Hernandez. So is John Olerud. I’m going to continue to think Lee Smith was a ferocious reliever I didn’t want any Met facing no matter what the BBWAA deems. I’m not letting go of my conviction that Dale Murphy at his peak was one of the best players I ever saw or that Tim Raines could beat my team in more ways than I care to count. And however he bulked up, I won’t forget the summer of Mark McGwire as an awe-inspiring spectacle.
Put them in the Hall. Don’t put them in the Hall. But don’t call each other names while making your points. It doesn’t help your cause, unless your cause is coming off as an ass and/or running for Congress.
Thanks to all who let me know they received and enjoyed a copy of Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets over the holidays. Joe Janish of Mets Today offers up a nice review here.
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