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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I live for learning something I never knew about the Mets, especially the early Mets. Today I learned, thanks to a conversation at Crane Pool Forum, that Fleer made Mets cards in 1963. It wasn’t so much that I previously thought they didn’t; it’s that it never occurred to me one way or another whether they did.
Fleer made only three Mets cards in a set of 67 overall, the only three Mets cards they printed in their first incarnation as a baseball card producer. This was before Topps came to monopolize the industry in toto through the ’60s and ’70s. Each 1963 Fleer Met is pictured above, courtesy of The Virtual Card Collection by Dan Austin. They may not be the clearest reproductions, but I do find these Original Mets glorious in these particular cardboard incarnations.I love the poses, I love the uniforms, I especially love the backdrops. There are Roger Craig and Al Jackson being Mets at the Polo Grounds. And Hot Rod Kanehl, quite obviously, is posing inside Citi Field, in front of that brick wall you practically run into when you come up the Rotunda escalator.
Which doesn’t explain why he’s wearing a road uniform.
If you’re loving any and all baseball cards, Dave Murray has completed his countdown of Topps’ 60 Greatest, which by Mets Guy In Michigan’s reckoning are all Mets cards. Go figure! Better yet, go check them out. His Nos. 4, 2 and 1 happen to constitute my own Big Three. Nos. 5 and 6 offer incredible style. Cripes, even No. 8 is pretty great if you don’t think about it too hard.
This cold February day requires a box score to keep us warm. Thus, I shall toss upon the fire the box score from the first game of a twinight doubleheader at Shea Stadium, September 22, 1967, courtesy of Baseball Reference. It describes an 8-0 loss by the Mets to the Houston Astros, but I won’t hold that against it.
This box score appeals to me for four reasons in particular:
1. Jerry Koosman started. It was the second start of Koosman’s career. The first one, a 4-3 loss at Houston five days earlier, was encouraging: 2 runs, 6 hits (if 5 walks) in 7 innings. In a season that turned into an open tryout camp — 54 Mets saw action in 1967 — Kooz’s initial audition showed promise. The second one, unfortunately, showed nothing. After retiring the side in order in the first, Kooz lost control in the top. He walked Doug Rader to start the second inning. After Rusty Staub reached on a bunt (try to picture that), Bob Aspromonte walked to load the bases. Ron Brand walked to force Rader home with the first run of the game. Lee Bales singled home Staub. Aspromonte followed behind him when Tommy Davis mishandled Bales’s hit in left. It was 3-0, runners on first and second, nobody out — except Koosman, who was removed from the game at once by skipper Salty Parker, running his first game as interim manager upon perpetually beleaguered Wes Westrum’s resignation the day before.
2. Jerry Grote caught Jerry Koosman and presumably grumbled a lot at the three walks. He’d catch Cal Koonce, who would get out of the inning with no further damage, and then Bill Graham and Joe Grzenda, both of whom inflicted plenty of damage. It was 8-0 by the time Grote (batting .194) left in the seventh to rest up for the nightcap.
3. Jerry Buchek replaced Buddy Harrelson at short in the sixth. Buddy’d had a bad early evening, going 0-for-2 and committing an error on a grounder from Rader that led to a four-run fifth. Though the horse was long out of the barn and spotted galloping toward Corona, Buchek acquitted himself well, handling three ground balls, pivoting on a 3-6-1 double play in the ninth and singling in two at-bats.
4. Jerry Hinsley came on to pitch the final three innings after Greg Goossen pinch-hit for Grzenda in the sixth. He gave up three singles and walked one Astro but allowed no further scoring. This was Hinsley’s second appearance of the 1967 season; he hadn’t pitched for the Mets since 1964, when as the leading edge of the franchise’s Youth of America brigade, he made the big club out of Spring Training as a 19-year-old. Hinsley got into nine games that April and May, two as a starter. With an 0-2 record and an ERA of 8.22, Hinsley was soon enough shuffled off to Buffalo. He spent the rest of 1964, all of 1965 and 1966 and most of 1967 moored in the minors.
Keep in mind, the Mets have had only nine Jerrys play for them in their entire history — not counting 1966 pitcher Gerry Arrigo; 1975 catcher Jerry Moses, whose brief Met tenure failed to net him one iota of playing time; nor, obviously, 2008-10 manager Jerry Manuel. Nine Jerrys, and 44.4% of them peppered Salty Parker’s debut.
In case you’re wondering — and I’d be disappointed if you weren’t — the others, all post-1967, were, in chronological order, Jerry May (backup catcher, 1973), Jerry Cram (relief pitcher, 1974-75), Jerry Morales (marginal spare outfielder, 1980), Jerry Martin (ineffective pinch-hitter, 1984) and Jerry DiPoto (unreliable reliever, 1995-96). The falloff in Jerry quality since the joyful days of Koosman and Grote speaks for itself, but the falloff in volume of Jerrys makes me think Jerry has peaked as a boy’s name in this country.
And you know what? It has. In 2009, it was the 371st most-popular baby boy name given in the United States, plunging from No. 319 in 2008. Plot that on a graph and it probably parallels the line that indicates the plunge the Mets took under Jerry Manuel during the same period.
But there was a time when parents really wanted Jerrys. According to the Social Security Administration, Jerry was the No. 14 name for baby boys born in the U.S. in 1940 and 1941. Then we went to war, and Jerry fell into steady decline. It was last a Top 20 name in 1947, a Top 50 name in 1971 and a Top 100 name in 1982. (And it never ranked higher than No. 194 during the years Seinfeld was a bona fide hit.) Demographically, the composition of the 1967 Mets Jerry much makes sense: Buchek, Grote and Koosman were all born in 1942, when Jerry was still going strong, at No. 16. By comparison, Jerry the Last — DiPoto — was born in 1968, when Jerry had slipped out of the Top 40 for good.
By then, Jerry Koosman and Jerry Grote were establishing themselves as Met mainstays — 1968 National League All-Stars, in fact. Jerry Buchek, meanwhile, was completing his second season as a Met utilityman, though he never again had as great a day as September 22, 1967…the second game of that twinight doubleheader versus the Astros. The Mets recovered big-time from the 8-0 whitewashing, and their nightcap shortstop was the main reason.
Trailing 4-2 in the bottom of the eighth, Jerry Buchek launched a two-out, three-run homer off Carroll Sembera to give the Mets a 5-4 lead. Being the ultimately 61-101 1967 Mets, it proved a short-lived edge. Jack Fisher, phased out of the rotation after serving as a Met starting stalwart since 1964, was pitching in relief of Dick Selma (who had been pitching in relief of starter Tug McGraw, who had struck out 10 Astros in 6 innings). Fisher got two Astro outs and was one batter from recording his second Met save in four seasons when catcher Dave Adlesh singled home Staub from second to knot the score at five.
The Mets would go quietly in their half of the ninth. In the Houston tenth, Ron Taylor would give up three line drives, but each was caught in the infield. Then, in the home tenth, with two Mets down, Bob Johnson doubled, Cleon Jones walked and Jerry Buchek stepped up and blasted his second two-out, three-run homer of the game, this one a walkoff job. The Mets won 8-5, giving Parker his first managerial triumph (Salty would finish out the 1967 season 4-7 before giving way to Gil Hodges). Buchek’s six RBI amounted to a personal peak. He’d spend most of the following year on the Met bench before being traded to the Cardinals in December 1968.
Though Jerry Buchek might seem to have suffered from unfortunate timing, missing spending 1969 in the company of Jerry Koosman and Jerry Grote in pursuit of the then-unimaginable, it surely beat the career trajectory experienced by Jerry Hinsley. When he mopped up those final three innings in the first game of September 22, 1967, he didn’t know he was getting, at age 22, his last shot at the majors.
Jerry Hinsley wouldn’t pitch for the Mets again. He wouldn’t pitch above Triple-A again for anybody. The Mets gave him his first big chance before he was ready, making him “the Mets’ first beardless wonder,” as Bill Ryczek put it in The Amazing Mets, 1962-1969. In retrospect, he was never ready.
Not altogether unlike young Dwight Gooden in 1984 and young Jenrry Mejia in 2009, Hinsley dazzled his manager in exhibition games in 1964. His Florida performance led Casey Stengel to argue to George Weiss that he had to have Jerry Hinsley on his team, even though the kid was barely 19, even though he had thrown zero minor league innings previously. The Mets had drafted Hinsley off the Pirates’ minor league roster when you could do that pretty easily. He had been a highly regarded high school phenom whom the Mets liked enough to keep an eye on his availability. Stengel liked him enough to give him first start in May.
Hinsley was lit up by the Cardinals, but Casey would give him the ball again, against the Giants. It came, however, with a caveat. He had to knock down Willie Mays in the first inning; it was a finable offense if he didn’t. So Hinsley, the 19-year-old rookie, sent Mays, the premier superstar in the sport, sprawling as directed.
“Mays was so intimidated,” Ryczek wrote, “he was barely able to struggle to his feet and hit a triple.”
Willie told Hinsley the next day that a) you need a couple of years in this league before you can throw at the likes of me; b) you should throw at a batter’s back if you mean to hit him; but c) you throw at his head if your intent is just to knock him down.
“I said, ‘Thank you, Mr. Mays,’” Hinsley recalled for Ryczek. “I’ll remember that.”
Hinsley didn’t get much opportunity to put Willie Mays’s advice to practical use for the Mets. He saw no more starts and only two more relief appearances before he was dispatched to the minors. While pitching for Double-A Williamsport in 1965, a line drive from Red Sox prospect Reggie Smith broke his jaw (karma’s repayment for knocking down Mays?). He told Ryczek his pitching wasn’t affected, but while 1966 Jacksonville Suns teammates like Tom Seaver were getting called up to New York, Hinsley continued to toil in the minors. His return to Shea came, finally, on September 8, 1967, with two difficult innings versus St. Louis. Then, the doubleheader opener, September 22, against the Astros.
Then that was it.
Jerry Hinsley’s last batter faced was Houston pitcher Mike Cuellar…the same Mike Cuellar who would, as a Baltimore Oriole, throw the first pitch of the first World Series game the Mets would ever play just over two years later. Jerry Hinsley, 24 (not quite five months younger than Tom Seaver), was a distant speck in the Mets’ rearview mirror by October 11, 1969. He pitched in the Mets organization in 1968, followed with a couple of years in Cleveland’s, and then pitched for Jacksonville again when the Suns were an unaffiliated Southern League franchise in 1971. Alas, Jerry Hinsley’s professional ledger lapses at age 26 — a shame on many levels, though one in particular when you stare at enough box scores in an effort to keep warm:
Jerry Hinsley never pitched in a winning game in the majors.
He pitched in eleven games for the Mets and the Mets lost all of them. That’s an 0-11 Met record when Jerry Hinsley’s name shows up in the box score. According to the Baseball Musings Day by Day Database, only one other Met shares that precise dubious distinction: Joe Grzenda…the same Joe Grzenda whom Jerry Hinsley relieved in the first game of the Mets-Astros twinight doubleheader of September 22, 1967. And only one Met exceeds that mark of team futility; only one Met, with a team record of 0-14, managed to cram more unalleviated losing into his battered Met portfolio.
That was yet another Jerry — Jerry Cram, who, on August 11, 1974, relieved in a game started by Jerry Koosman. Both pitchers were caught by Jerry Grote, who presumably grumbled quite a lot as the Mets fell behind 10-0 en route to losing 10-4 to the Reds at Shea. It was the last time the Mets crammed as many as three Jerrys into a single box score.
Which, as established above, remains one Jerry shy of the team record.
Update: Audio! Now you can say TLDL instead of TLDR!
Thought I’d post what I read at Varsity Letters’ fifth-anniversary shindig last week, for posterity but mostly because it’s a reflection on a Mets game we’d be better off to recall more often, particularly in these trying days. Odds are you’ll recognize it at once — and as you might imagine, we’ve written about it before. And no doubt we will do so again.
The 500th Time I Realized Baseball Is Mankind’s Greatest Achievement
My phone rings. It’s my friend Megan, calling from somewhere in the vast reaches of Shea’s upper deck.
“Your team sucks,” she says
She isn’t being mean. It’s true. It’s June 30, 2000. The night before, John Rocker returned to Shea for the first time after his inventory of the denizens of the 7 train for SI. We booed him and the Mets lost. Now it’s the middle of the eighth and the Mets are down 8-1. Those are the Braves. They’re only three games up in the East, but it feels like 30. I’m in the mezzanine next to my wife Emily and my friends Greg and Danielle. I’ve stopped booing. Greg has stopped complaining. Emily has stopped fuming. Danielle is reading the New Yorker, turning each page with angry little flips to demonstrate that she is not watching. All we want, given the apparent absence of other possibilities, is for it to be over.
Derek Bell singles, but Edgardo Alfonzo flies out. Mike Piazza singles. Robin Ventura grounds out to score a run. It’s cosmetic and we all know it – one of those too little, too late runs you almost resent. Todd Zeile singles and it’s 8-3. Still cosmetic. Jay Payton singles. Benny Agbayani walks. Bases loaded. We begin to stir.
We begin to stir — but we’re Mets fans. We are hurt and haunted and not falling for it this time. We know if we dare to believe, something bad will happen. Kenny Rogers will throw ball four. Bobby Bonilla will appear. Whatever it is, it will be awful and we will kick ourselves because we knew better.
But we’re Mets fans. We can’t help ourselves. Danielle is trying to burrow into her New Yorker. Emily is alternately urging on and berating our team. Greg is … yes, Greg is methodically chewing a Pepsi cup. I don’t know what I’m doing. I keep getting out of my seat and flopping back into it. I’m making noises. I don’t know what they are, exactly. But still – a grand slam here and we’d be … almost tied.
Mark Johnson doesn’t hit a grand slam. But he walks. It’s 8-4. Now a grand slam really would tie it. Melvin Mora doesn’t hit one either. He walks. It’s 8-5. Derek Bell is up again. And he … walks. It’s 8-6.
On the obvious, Team That Scores More Runs Wins hand, this is encouraging. On the other hand, this is the slowest of slow-motion rallies ever seen. It’s taking us 10 or 11 pitches to inch closer to a destination we probably won’t reach.
I find myself on my feet, denying everything at the top of my lungs. As Alfonzo comes to the plate, I confide in Greg that of course he understands they won’t actually do this, that everything will come to naught. I don’t mean it — I’m just trying the reverse-jinx, looking to stay the hands of the baseball gods. Greg fixes me with a look of betrayal, of real fury, and I realize too late that he’s struck his own cosmic bargain, the terms of which I’ve just violated.
Alfonzo singles through the hole. One run scores. Two runs score. It’s 8-8, two men on and two men out, with Mike Piazza beginning his dinosaur trudge to the plate.
Now, for once, all of us scarred, despairing Mets fans live up to our ancient credo. Ya gotta believe, and we do. Forty thousand of us are standing and screaming as Piazza goes through his routine, almost gingerly drawing the bat up and cocking it at the shoulder.
On one level, what happens next lacks all drama. There is no agonizingly extended at bat with close pitches and foul tips and just staying alive and finally squaring one up. Piazza hits the first pitch thrown by Terry Mulholland over the fence. It’s a line drive, instantly and obviously gone.
On every other level, it’s quite dramatic. All the accumulated tension of the last 20 minutes is released in a second. We are screaming and hugging each other and screaming and hugging the people next to us who are screaming and hugging the people next to them. I feel my stomach dip and look around to see Shea itself is flexing, the decks rising and falling as we leap up and down on top of them. Given Shea, I know this is a bad thing. Then I go back to screaming and hugging, even though I can’t breathe. It’s entirely possible that the old stadium will fall down. It’s entirely possible that I will have a heart attack. But now I know other things are possible, too — like the Mets cold-cocking the Braves with a 10-run eighth inning. I may be having a heart attack, and the stadium may fall down, but right now I’m so happy that I don’t care.
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.
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.
I live for learning something I never knew about the Mets, especially the early Mets. Today I learned, thanks to a conversation at Crane Pool Forum, that Fleer made Mets cards in 1963. It wasn’t so much that I previously thought they didn’t; it’s that it never occurred to me one way or another whether they did.
