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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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1999
SHEA STADIUM
FLUSHING, NEW YORK
GARY COHEN
The last of the ninth inning in the final regular-season game of the year. The Mets and Pirates locked in a one-one duel. The Mets needing a win to guarantee there will be a tomorrow.
Greg Hansell, a well-traveled twenty-eight year-old righthander, will pitch the bottom of the ninth for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and BOBBY Bonilla is going to be a pinch-hitter for the Mets, batting for Shane Halter. Halter had just come in to execute a double-switch and give the Mets defense in right field for the last inning, but now Bonilla comes up with a chance to win it, leading off in the last of the ninth inning.
Greg Hansell has pitched just about everywhere. He was once the property of the New York Mets, way back in 1990, pitching at Port St. Lucie. He was in Spring Training this year with the Giants, but now pitching for the Pirates in the bottom of the ninth.
The pitch to Bonilla — swing and a miss, he had his home run cut, trying to win it with one swing, but he swung through it, nothing and one.
Bobby Bonilla hitting at one-sixty-one, four home runs — they all came a long time ago. Batting lefthanded against the much-traveled righthander, Greg Hansell. Melvin Mora on deck.
The oh-one pitch…in the dirt, a changeup, one ball and one strike.
Kris Benson pitched seven FABULOUS innings, allowed an unearned run on seven hits. Jason Christiansen pitched the eighth, no runs and no hits. And now Greg Hansell pitching in the bottom of the ninth, Mets one, Pirates one.
The outfield a stride toward right, Young guarding the line at first. The one-one to Bonilla, a changeup, misses outside and low, two balls and a strike.
Bobby Bonilla, who spent such an important part of his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, trying to help facilitate the Mets against the Pirates here today.
BOB MURPHY
He could get reacquainted with a lot of old friends if he came through.
GARY COHEN
The two-one to Bonilla…pulled on the ground down to first base, right at Kevin Young, he’ll run it to the bag himself, and Bonilla retired for the first out of the ninth.
So Bonilla, with a big cut, grounds out weakly to first base, one man down, and Melvin Mora will come up for the first time.
Mora came on as a pinch-runner for an injured Rickey Henderson in the seventh inning. Bobby Valentine might be inclined to use a pinch-hitter here, except he’s starting to run out of players. He has only one outfielder left on his bench, and that’s Shawon Dunston, and he’ll need him to go to right field if we go the tenth inning, with Halter having left for the pinch-hitter, because Bonilla is not capable of playing in the field.
The Mets also have Jorge Toca, Mike Kinkade, Todd Pratt and Luis Lopez left on the bench.
A moment taken here, as the shortstop, Abraham Nuñez, reaches down to tie his shoe.
Melvin Mora hitting at one thirty-three on four hits in thirty times at bat.
One out and nobody on, last of the ninth, Edgardo Alfonzo on deck.
Hansell delivers, low and outside, one ball and no strikes.
Melvin Mora came up in a huge spot in the opening game of this series, Friday night, in the eighth inning.
The one-oh pitch…line drive right field FALLING FAST, that’ll be in there for a base hit! Mora turns at first and holds on THERE, throwing behind him now is BROWN, and Mora SCAMPERS back to the bag.
What a big base hit for MELVIN Mora! Only his FIFTH hit of the year, he went the other way and dunked it into right field, and now the Mets have the winning run aboard with one man out.
BOB MURPHY
I think Mora was thinking two-base hit. He went FLYING around the first base bag and realized he had to get the brakes on.
GARY COHEN
He had a lot of spin on that ball off the bat, and when it hit the grass, it almost bounced beyond Adrian Brown, and I think that’s what Mora saw, that Brown was going to have trouble picking it up. But Brown was able to field it cleanly and keep Mora at first base.
Well, here’s Alfonzo, an infield single and a walk, one-for-three officially. Flied out to right on a hit-and-run play his last time up.
Mora with good speed at first.
Here’s the pitch…fastball letter-high for a strike, nothing and one.
Alfonzo the batter, Olerud on deck, the Mets now have eight hits in the game, trying to win it in their final turn at bat, they’ve done it seventeen times this year, most recently on Friday night in the eleventh inning.
Everybody standing here at Shea, better than fifty-thousand on hand.
Hansell to the set, the oh-one to Alfonzo — line drive BASE HIT going into right field! Mora turns second! Mora will go to third! Brown picks it up. His throw will go to second base! The Mets have the winning run at third with one man down in the ninth!
Edgardo ALFONZO, an opposite-field SINGLE, back-to-back base hits by the two Venezuelans, MORA and ALFONZO, and now a fly ball can win the game for the New York Mets, and John Olerud is coming to the plate.
BOB MURPHY
Well, this is the moment right now.
GARY COHEN
They are ROCKING and they are ROLLING here in Flushing, they’re gonna WALK Olerud INTENTIONALLY and pitch to MIKE PIAZZA. Well, how about THAT?
BOB MURPHY
Boy, that’s a shocker.
GARY COHEN
Olerud will be INTENTIONALLY WALKED, they’ll fill the bases, set up the force everywhere and the double play possibility with Piazza coming up. There’s a righthander in the game in Hansell, and Gene Lamont would rather face Piazza than face Olerud.
BOB MURPHY
Well, there’s a chance, too, that Piazza might hit into a double play.
GARY COHEN
Of course there’s also that chance with Olerud, they’re one and two in the league in grounding into double plays. Right now the double play is in order, but they’re gonna walk Olerud anyway, and there’s ball four, and so it’s left in the hands of the Mets’ biggest bat.
Mike Piazza, with a chance to win it, in the final regular-season game, trying to guarantee the Mets another game in Nineteen Ninety-Nine.
Bases loaded, one out, bottom of the ninth, Mets one, Pirates one.
Here comes Gene Lamont, and he’s goin’ to the bullpen. We’ll take a break. One to one, last of the ninth, back in a moment on the WFAN Mets Radio Network.
[COMMERCIAL]
GARY COHEN
Gene Lamont brings in the veteran sidearming righthander Brad Clontz, who pitched briefly last year for the New York Mets, and Clontz will come in to face Mike Piazza with the bases loaded and one out in the bottom of the ninth with the Mets and Pirates tied one to one. This is a good idea by Lamont: Clontz is very tough on righthand hitters, and he’s done well against Piazza in the past. Mike is just ONE-for-six against this sidearmer.
BOB MURPHY
The Mets have speed at third base. If they can get a fly ball to the outfield, it should be over.
GARY COHEN
Well, the hope for the Pirates is they get Piazza to hit a ground ball at an infielder who would be able to turn a double play and get through the inning.
The infield will play halfway. The outfield will play only as deep as they can throw, a fly ball will win the game, with Mora standing at third base.
Alfonzo at second, Olerud at first.
Piazza stands in, oh-for-four on the afternoon.
Clontz is ready to go, pitching off the stretch. DEALS to Piazza. Low and outside, IT GETS AWAY! ONTO THE SCREEN!
MORA SCORES! THE METS WIN IT! THE METS WIN IT!
Mora is MOBBED by his teammates as he crosses home plate! Brad Clontz BOUNCED the first pitch up onto the SCREEN! Melvin Mora scores the winning RUN! The Mets win in game number one-hundred sixty-TWO, and the Mets will play again in Nineteen Ninety-NINE!
The Mets win it their final turn at bat, they win it two to one on a WILD PITCH by BRAD CLONTZ, and they’re going crazy here at Shea!
All the Mets out on the field, exchanging HIGH-FIVES and hugs. The Mets have played a hundred and sixty-two GAMES, they now lead the Wild Card by a half-a-game, waiting on CINCINNATI, scheduled to play in Milwaukee, waiting for the raindrops to cease, and it may be a long night before we know where the Mets are going, Bob, but now we know they’re goin’ somewhere.
BOB MURPHY
They’re goin’ somewhere, no doubt about it. The Mets will stay here until they see what happens in Milwaukee. They claim they’re going to have a window to play that game out there, and if only Milwaukee can beat Cincinnati, the Mets can go to their homes tonight and get a good night’s sleep, and leave tomorrow for Phoenix, Arizona.
GARY COHEN
Another EXCRUCIATING game here at Shea Stadium. The Mets were turned ASIDE and turned ASIDE and turned ASIDE, and they finally win it in the ninth, on base hits by Mora and Alfonzo, and a wild pitch to plate the WINNING run, and the Mets win it in their final turn at bat, their ninety-SIXTH win of the year.
In the ninth inning, one run, two hits and two men left. The final score, here at Shea, on Fan Appreciation Day, the Mets two and the Pirates one. Back to talk about it in a moment on the WFAN Mets Radio Network.
All longtime Yankee icons are equally detestable, but some are less equally detestable than others. That’s my grudging way of expressing a Mets fan’s appreciation for Andy Pettitte, the longtime Yankees icon I detested marginally less than the others, on the occasion of his departure from baseball.
This is detesting less, not not detesting. A Mets fan’s appreciation for any longtime Yankee icon is going to be pretty severely limited by overwhelming extenuating circumstances.
I detested the mere sight of Andy Pettitte on the mound almost every October because it was a reminder that October became a routinely terrible month to be a Mets fan. The simple fact that I was watching a Yankees game indicated the Mets weren’t playing anymore. Starting in 1995, when Pettitte was a rookie and the Yankees in the postseason was a novelty, it was either them or no baseball. Later on I decided no baseball was sometimes a decent alternative, but for the first few years of the last Yankee dynasty, I stared quite a lot at Pettitte pitching in October.
And Pettitte stared back. He stared back starting with the second game of the 1995 ALDS and would do the same in every second game of every ALDS in which the Yankees participated through 2003. That was his thing — the second game, the No. 2 starter. He pitched behind David Cone (three times), David Wells, Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, rancid Roger Clemens (three times) and Mike Mussina. Some teams didn’t have the opportunity to set up their pitching for the postseason. The Yankees always did. The Yankees spent every September from ’96 on arranging their rotation just so. Whoever the designated ace was in a given year, he was backed up by Andy Pettitte.
I detested Pettitte for representing that kind of consistency and the way he served as a safety valve if something went wrong in any given Game One. Yet he generally avoided being labeled the ace of the Yankee staff. Just in terms of pecking order, it was hard to severely detest the nominal second-best pitcher in a rotation.
Don’t get me wrong, though. He won enough. He won more than enough. He won more postseason games (19) than anybody in the history of baseball. Even allowing for his rookie season coinciding with the year baseball expanded its playoffs to three rounds, and even understanding that it really, really helped to pitch for a team that reached at least that first playoff round every single year (due in part to his own efforts), that’s way too impressive not to detest if you’re watching it from the wrong side of October. In five of those first eight Pettitte seasons, the Yankees graduated from the ALDS to the ALCS and, always, to the World Series. When the Yankees competed for a pennant and a title, Pettitte always pitched in those rounds, too.
You know the basics from there: four World Series championships in that era. Pettitte started six games in the World Series of 1996, 1998, 1999 and 2000, and the Yankees won five of them. The last two starts were Games One and Five of the 2000 World Series. No need to remind you what team he pitched against on those dark October nights.
There’s little to like in any of that and everything to detest.
Yet I never quite detested Andy Pettitte on the level I detested his most iconic teammates. Detested his success; detested the success it brought his employer; detested that he got to keep pitching while none of the pitchers for whom I rooted from April to September had any mound appointments come very late October…except in 2000, and we’ve covered that.
Didn’t deeply detest Pettitte himself, though, not even in the baseball-detest sense. I’ve detested loads of Yankees. I detest the Yankee uniform. I detest the Yankee stadiums. I detest everything about the Yankees. But I detested Pettitte less.
How come? Allowing myself to think about Andy Pettitte now that he says he’s no longer pitching, I come up with the following reasons in no particular order.
• He left once. He walked away in December 2003 so he could pitch close to home and spend more time with his family. Nobody in public life ever says that and means it, but Pettitte apparently did (if only for three seasons). It meant dragging Clemens out of retirement so they could give each other foot massages at Minute Maid Park, but even that lingering image was worth it given the caterwauling his departure inspired in certain precincts of New York.
• He admitted he juiced. I’m not an HGH absolutist. I believe there’s room for interpretation and forgiveness. Pettitte had a somewhat silly defense (he used, but only a little, and only to get him back from injury — not to help him pitch…which was something he was able to do because he was back from injury) but he spit it out once he was cornered by the Mitchell Report, and his career went on without incident. It surely beats the way his old compadre has attempted to finagle the issue.
• He was hilariously atrocious in Game Six of the 2001 World Series, the Fall Classic that proved baseball wasn’t always tortuous and unfair. Two innings pitched, six earned runs, the explanation later that he was tipping his pitches, all part of a soul-saving 15-2 Diamondbacks win, which set up the deliverance of Game Seven and the end of the Yankee chokehold on the sport. My favorite part, besides the result, was the excuse for blowing up under pressure, which I worked into a November 2001 song parody of which I was quite proud (set to the tune of the bravado bridge of “New York, New York” — 2:08 here): Andy Pet-TITTE/Tipped his pitches…/Jay-Wita-SICK/Us in Stitch-ES…
• He was similarly pounded in the second game of the 2002 ALDS, the marvelous four-game set against the Angels that proved the outcome of the 2001 World Series was not a fluke. Pettitte, at Yankee Stadium no less, gave up four runs in three innings, was removed before the fourth trailing 4-1, and the series was never the same thereafter.
• He was the losing pitcher to Josh Beckett in the deciding game of the 2003 World Series. Pettitte pitched well, but Beckett was untouchable. It was not only a great victory for Not The Yankees (personified for a week by the otherwise disreputable Florida Marlins) but a nice jab in the ribs of Conventional Wisdom. “Beckett can’t pitch on three days’ rest!” He did and succeeded enormously. “Pettitte will be unbeatable with everything on the line!” He wasn’t, which was quite rewarding for those of us who didn’t buy into everything we’d been told about inevitability.
• He was less heralded than a fellow 1995 lefty rookie in New York, Bill Pulsipher. Granted, the heralding did not prove accurate — Pettitte slightly outpitched Pulsipher across their respective major league careers, 259 regular-season and postseason wins combined to 13 — but I still get a kick out of my friend Joe’s preseason prediction from 1996 that Pulse would outshine the other guy and emerge as the city’s preeminent sophomore southpaw. Ah, faith…
• He brought his then seven-year-old son, Josh, into the dugout during a Yankees intrasquad game in Spring Training 2002 while Josh was wearing a Mets cap. This drove Herr Steinbrenner into a vintage rage, but Pettitte didn’t budge. Turned out the “Mets” in question were the kid’s youth league team in Texas. Josh wanted to wear his favorite cap and his dad wasn’t going to rip it off his head at anybody’s behest. The detestability factor lowered greatly after that.
• He kept the Yankees waiting almost every offseason of late, which led to a little Bronx squirming, which made for a nice sideshow. Pettitte signed four one-year contracts following his term with the Astros. Only once did it take him less than a month after declaring free agency to inevitably re-sign with the Yankees. And this year, he outdid himself, keeping the “will he or won’t he?” storyline alive into February. Well done, procrastinator provocateur!
• He started two of the greatest midseason wins in Mets history. We know Dave Mlicki triumphed in the very first Subway Series matchup on June 16, 1997, a 6-0 route-going whitewashing of the Yankees replayed every roughly every 72 hours on SNY, but it may not be instantly recalled that the losing pitcher was Andy Pettitte. He allowed three quick first-inning runs, capped by a double-steal executed to a tee by Butch Huskey (second base) and Todd Hundley (home!) and surrendered five earned runs in seven innings overall. Two years later at Shea, on July 10, 1999, Pettitte struggled through six innings (four earned runs) before handing a tenuous 5-4 lead to the Yankees bullpen. The afternoon would eventually pass from Mike Piazza (three-run homer, Mets lead 7-6) to Jorge Posada (boo-run homer, Mets trail 8-7) to Matt Franco, as in, “MATT FRANCO WITH A LINE DRIVE SINGLE TO RIGHT AND HE’S BEING MOBBED BY HIS TEAMMATES! Matt Franco, a two-run single off Mariano Rivera in the bottom of the ninth inning, and the Mets win it, nine to eight!” (Call courtesy of Gary Cohen and heaven.)
• He continually brought to mind one of my favorite Kids In The Hall sketches, the lesbian league softball game between Sappho’s Sluggers and Pandora’s Jox. Once per postseason start, at a point when Pettitte’s trademark stare from behind his glove was captured by Fox’s cameras (which was invariably), I was moved to comment to Stephanie, “Look! It’s Pandora’s Jox!” because there’s a fleeting moment in that sketch when Mark McKinney stares out from over his glove that makes me comment, “Look! It’s Andy Pettitte!” Admittedly, this is an esoteric reason to detest one Yankee icon marginally less than other Yankee icons, but it was part of the package. Compare and contrast Pettitte the Yankee with McKinney the Jox. And watch the sketch here (pause at 3:47 for full effect), because it’s more fun than stewing over what Fred Wilpon knew and when he might have known it.
• He seemed like not a bad guy and didn’t say anything overly obnoxious and there was always somebody around him who annoyed me far more. Trust me — that’s the highest praise I can offer any Yankee icon.
Say, wanna get even more depressed about the state of your favorite baseball team? Scrape the ice off your keyboard and visit the Times. There you can read all about how brilliant Fred Wilpon long ago decided Bernie Madoff was and how the Mets put a lot their money — which on some level had been our money before we exchanged it for a ticket or a cable subscription or a piece of licensed apparel or merchandise — in Madoff’s hands. Madoff, before his Ponzi scheme became known, was a sure thing in Wilpon’s eyes, so sure that when there was a matter of deferred compensation, the Mets took the funds they’d eventually have to pay out and placed it in Madoff’s care. From there, it would grow, because that Bernie Madoff, he was brilliant.
According to the Times, “the role Mr. Madoff played in the financial life of the ball club” was “substantial”.
When the Mets negotiated their larger contracts with star players — complex deals with signing bonuses and performance incentives — they sometimes adopted the strategy of placing deferred money owed the players with Mr. Madoff’s investment firm. They would have to pay the player, but the owners of the club would be able to make money for themselves in the meantime. There never seemed to be much doubt about that, according to several people with knowledge of the arrangements.
“Bernie was part of the business plan for the Mets,” a former employee of the club said.
Makes you feel warm and fuzzy all over, doesn’t it? Just like those assurances that whatever Wilpon had going on with Madoff, it had nothing to do with the Mets — they were totally separate.
Being a hardcore Mets fan, meanwhile, you no doubt focused like a laser on the phrase “deferred compensation” and thought of one person in particular. Yup, he is indeed, reportedly, attached to this, too:
Bobby Bonilla was among the players who had their deferred money put with Mr. Madoff, one former employee said.
God only knows how whatever the hell is going on in the sordid Madpon affair affects anybody and everybody who is remotely touched by it, but I’m going to assume Bobby Bonilla’s deferred payments will be fine. Of course they’ll be. Bobby Bonilla always makes out fine where taking Met money is concerned. As the former third baseman/right fielder/albatross told the Wall Street Journal last summer when the specter of his impending neverending payoff arose, “Hey, a blind squirrel can find an acorn.”
Stupendous. Bernie Madoff robbed people blind, Fred Wilpon’s stewardship of our beloved franchise careens toward an iceberg and we are gently reminded that from the nexus of their close relationship, Bobby Bonilla will be collecting $1.19 million worth of acorns per year starting this July and continuing — as every schoolchild knows — through 2035.
This arrangement was crafted so the Mets didn’t have to immediately pay Bonilla the $5.9 million they owed him for 2000…and, lest we forget, Bonilla was on the Mets for a second golden term (after having been such a prize from 1992 to 1995) because they couldn’t bring themselves to simply eat the final year of Mel Rojas’s anvil of a contract, which would have cost them not quite $4.6 million in 1999.
To unhappily recap, they swapped one theoretically untenable season of the dreadful Rojas (from a deal the Mets inherited when they traded for him, Turk Wendell and Brian McRae in 1997) to the Dodgers for two untenable seasons of the washed-up Bonilla. It was a classic case of bad contract for bad contract, though it didn’t require hindsight to divine the bad contract the Mets were accepting was sizably worse than the one they were jettisoning. The Mets committed $11.8 million to Bonilla in order to save themselves from paying Rojas $4.6 million.
Where was brilliant Bernie Madoff’s financial acumen then?
Bobby Bonilla lacked both productivity and common human decency in 1999, eating up roster space, his manager’s patience and, presumably, a disproportionate share of the clubhouse spread. No way could Bobby V be asked to indulge Bobby Bo in 2000. But just making the mistake go away would have been too unclever for the Wilpon administration. That’s where the deferred compensation came in, that’s where almost $30 million will go out over the next 25 years, and now we learn that somehow Bernie Madoff was a part of this scheme, too.
Oh, and Oliver Perez and Luis Castillo are still under contract and expected to don Mets uniforms in a couple of weeks. Maybe they would have been granted the dazzling deferment package Bonilla has made famous had Madoff magic still been available to the Mets. Alas, that door was closed when Madoff’s massive malfeasance came to light the winter Perez was re-signed for $36 million over three years, which coincided with the universal realization that the $18.75 million Castillo was owed for 2009, 2010 and 2011 was not what you’d call a savvy investment.
Now and then I’ve read thoughtful explanations of how Bobby Bonilla being paid by the Mets for a quarter-century, long after he played his last hand of hearts at Turner Field, wasn’t such a bad financial deal for the Mets (which the Times article indicates in the first passage quoted above). And in the context of the 1999-2000 offseason, given the Mets’ reflexively hesitant approach to adding payroll during that era, putting off Bonilla’s payments way into the future — no matter how astronomical they would appear to the untrained eye — gave Steve Phillips perceived short-term flexibility. Issuing seven-figure checks to Bobby Bonilla clear into his seventies is an obvious punchline, but there was, I’ve been assured, a scintilla of logic to it.
But geez, y’know? Bobby Bonilla adds to his riches via a check cut by the Mets every year for 25 years; Bernard Madoff was reportedly the conduit to execute this sludgiest of slush funds; and none of this imbues us with anything resembling confidence regarding the future of this operation for however long Fred Wilpon is running it.
Makes the ice storm outside look pleasant by comparison.
Well, half of it anyway — I’ll be speaking at Varsity Letters’ fifth-anniversary reading/celebration/bash, as part of a pretty awesome lineup of sportswriters: Henry Abbott, Katie Baker, Alex Belth, Ben Cohen, Joe Drape, Chuck Klosterman, Will Leitch, Amy K. Nelson, Jeff Pearlman, Dan Shanoff, Emma Span, Sam Walker and Michael Weinreb. We’re each reading for three minutes — I’m going to talk about being in the stands for the 10-run inning against the Braves.
It’s at (Le) Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street between Sullivan and Thompson, this Thursday, Feb. 3 at 7:30 p.m. If you’re in the vicinity, or up for braving the ice/snow/sleet/cold/wolves, please stop by!
For more details, click here. And for brief interviews with the whole lineup, click here. I take the opportunity to be randomly bitter about the Yankees. As if that’s a surprise.
The Mets’ announcement of the return of 1987 emergency starting pitcher Don Schulze to the organization as a special Spring Training instructor was undermined when the team’s new clubhouse manager, Kevin Kierst, could rustle up only the H and the U for Schulze’s pinstriped No. 25 jersey. In light of the Mets ownership group’s recently revealed financial straits, observers wonder if the team will have the necessary resources to purchase enough letters to dress its players and coaches in accordance with strictly enforced National League uniform standards in 2011.
A Mets spokesman denied the missing S, C, L, Z and E in SCHULZE are related to the Bernie Madoff affair, citing instead former Mets clubhouse manager Charlie Samuels’s penchant for “gambling the shirts off our backs, including many of their alphanumeric elements.” The spokesman added, “We’ll have almost every letter at our disposal — and multiples of each vowel — by the beginning of our exhibition schedule…our season opener in Miami at the latest.”
However it came about, the letter shortfall would explain the presence of a so-called “mystery player” spotted working out around third base this past weekend in Port St. Lucie. One local resident visiting the Mets’ training complex to take in informal early fielding drills was heard to wonder, “Who the hell is IG 5?”
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Piazza: Catcher, Slugger, Icon, Star by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers.
Amazin' Again: How the 2015 New York Mets Brought the Magic Back to Queens by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers.
Volume I of The Happiest Recap: 50+ Years of the New York Mets As Told in 500+ Amazin' Wins by Greg Prince is available in print and for Kindle on Amazon.
Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History by Greg Prince (foreword by Jason Fry), is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers.
