The blog for Mets fans
who like to read
ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
Got something to say? Leave a comment, or email us at faithandfear@gmail.com. (Sorry, but we have no interest in ads, sponsored content or guest posts.)
Need our RSS feed? It's here.
Visit our Facebook page, or drop by the personal pages for Greg and Jason.
Or follow us on Twitter: Here's Greg, and here's Jason.
|
by Greg Prince on 16 December 2010 9:43 am Bob Feller, as fast and as good as any pitcher who ever lived, never stopped sharing his immortality, right up until his death yesterday, at age 92. With no advance hype, Bob showed up at Shea Stadium on Ralph Kiner Night three years ago. Bob Feller was inducted into the Hall of Fame the year the Mets began playing baseball, in 1962. He had nothing to do with the Mets, ever, but he and Ralph were both 1955 Cleveland Indians, to say nothing of barnstorming buddies and eternal teammates on the All-World All-Stars (home games in Cooperstown, natch). Feller and Kiner materialized on the grass in Flushing to wave to us mere mortals in the 21st century. Bob may have been there to pay tribute to his friend Ralph, but the honor was all ours.
Joe Posnanski’s gem of a remembrance is making the rounds today, and by all means read it, but don’t limit yourself. Frank Deford crafted a marvelous profile of the lion in endless summer in 2005, and it, too, deserves your attention. Feller was 86 then, and the fastest pitcher ever showed no signs of slowing down.
This passage alone is worth the price of admission:
This is important: He never signs in black ink, only in blue. “Blue is the American League color, black the National League,” he explains with definitude, as, indeed, he makes most statements. “Ninety-nine percent of the people don’t know that.” Yes, what exactly accounts for that difference, the black and the blue? Well, Feller explains, when he first came up in the ’30s, the two leagues had different balls. The National League’s ball’s laces were black intertwined with the red, the American’s blue and red. Besides Feller, what man alive remembers that? But that is why, when Rapid Robert autographs, it is invariably in blue ink. (If you have an authentic Feller in black ink, it would be like a philatelist having a misprinted postage stamp.) And this is how he signs his name:
Best wishes,
Bob Feller
H O F ’62
To that point, Deford noted in the black ink of Sports Illustrated, Rapid Robert Feller had been a Hall of Famer longer than any Hall of Famer alive. He would go on to sign off on his H O F distinction for 48 years — that was on top of the 44 years he’d already lived before being officially certified One for the Ages.
Best wishes, Bob Feller. Best wishes, indeed.
by Greg Prince on 15 December 2010 4:59 pm Looking back, you could see that as the last moment when the sports business was at human scale, a club where everybody knew who was who.
—Richard Ben Cramer, Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life
Why wouldn’t you want to be around baseball in December? It’s so much better than everything else December has to offer.
Tuesday, December 14, offered biting winds, stubborn patches of snow and a fistful of Mets whose job for a couple of hours consisted of
1) Handing out gifts to kids.
2) Dispensing thoughts to writers.
That’s what I call a good Tuesday in December.
The Mets held their annual holiday party for children yesterday, the event best known specifically for Anna Benson giving new meaning to the word “elf” in December 2005 and, more generally, presaging some form of eventual doom for most every Met who dresses up as Santa Claus (like Kris Benson, traded to Baltimore in January 2006). As part of the Mets Bloggers Perceived Legitimacy Tour, I accepted an invitation to cover the festivities at Citi Field. I took it to mean there’d be some standing around and watching David Wright’s lap covered in tots, if not Anna Benson.
It was more than that. Spiritually, it was a lift. It was December and baseball people prowled the baseball premises as if it was June. I was on the 7 to Mets-Willets Point, a trip I don’t make as a rule after (early) October. I walked in the VIP entrance dubbed “Seaver” and couldn’t help but feel terrific.
Directed vaguely toward the Acela Club from an unusual starting point — hang a left, there’s an elevator somewhere — I rose to the Excelsior level and attempted to rise to the occasion. I opened the door to the swanky establishment that’s usually expertly guarded, and there was everybody…as much everybody as a baseball fan needed for a hint that this was no ordinary winter’s day in a deep and dark December. There was Marty Noble from mlb.com; Steve Popper from the Record; Andy “Speedo” Martino from the News; ESPN’s Adam Rubin in the lobby, but not lobbying anybody; Ed Coleman and Sweeny Murti from WFAN (Murti was on assignment for MLB Network); Channel 4’s Bruce Beck; Channel 11’s Lolita Lopez…
And that was just the media, or the people most people wouldn’t notice. I was there in blogging form, being even less noticeable, I suppose. I found my Mets contact, who told me what my kind and I would be doing for the rest of the day: not standing around watching kids gets presents, but standing around waiting for the players. We were Group Three — the bloggers (me; Steve Keane of The Eddie Kranepool Society; Matt Artus of Always Amazin’; Rob Castellano of Amazin’ Avenue (with his brother Mike working the video camera); and Jim Mancari from Mets Merized Online). My Mets contact didn’t call us Group Three, but that’s what we were. The Mets who would talk would rotate from Group One (print and radio) to Group Two (TV) to us, when they got to us.
So there’d be some waiting around, but not without a purpose.
As David Kringled and Ike Davis, Carlos Beltran Jason Bay elved — and while Mr. Met silently absorbed the children’s’ cheers — we waited behind a black curtain in the area of the Acela you can press your nose to if you’re in the Left Field Landing. The print people were fed Collins, the TV cameras Alderson. Then vice-versa. We had each other, along with an outstanding view of the field, which was glazed in frost, its cushiest home plate seats blanketed by a tarp. Baseball wasn’t out there Tuesday. It was in here.
After a few minutes that went on forever, we were presented with the jolly man all dressed in red and brimming with good tidings. No, not a stray elf, but the twentieth manager of the New York Mets.
That stuff you heard about Terry Collins being full of energy? It’s an understatement. If Terry Collins could have been safely drilled by British Petroleum, the Gulf of Mexico would be a cleaner body of water today. Terry Collins is all the energy source you could ever need.
He wore a holiday red shirt with a decorative tie to match. Given that Cliff Lee was in the air if not the room, somebody couldn’t help but kidding Terry that he was wearing Phillies’ colors.
Terry Collins refuted that instantly, on the off chance somebody meant it. It’s not Phillies red, he said. It’s Christmas red. It was selected pre-Lee. Terry Collins was not just energetic. He was prepared. And he had answers.
Terry Collins wasn’t scared of Cliff Lee and the Phillies, at least not exclusively. The Braves? They have daunting pitching, too, but nobody here is scared. Collins told us he’d address the past with his players — they’d had some collapses here, he knew — but it’s a “brand new day” in Flushing,
The brand new day the day before brought the naming of several brand new coaches, so I asked Terry how he would work with them, specifically, what does a manager delegate and what does he take upon himself? I like to ask questions about things in plain sight that nobody ever usually takes the time to explain, and Terry was happy to explain that he and his coaches are all in this together, and that if somebody sees something that isn’t necessarily his department, he’s gonna say something.
I don’t doubt Terry Collins knows his baseball or that he’s been waiting for a do-over off his awful Angels experience (which he brought up, indirectly, invoking names like Gary DiSarcina to illustrate injury epidemics that your opponents don’t feel sorry for you over), and goodness knows he’s got the energy…but listening to Terry Collins seemed surprisingly familiar to me despite having never met the man before. Then it hit me: Terry Collins is every peppy entrepreneur I ever interviewed at a trade show. I’d have a list of booths to cover, and now and then I’d get someone who really believed in his product. This is the best ready-to-drink tea on the market! This will have the finest distribution any new product could possibly have! We are pumped!
There’s worse things than having an entrepreneurial manager selling you on his team. Or himself.
I might have followed up about coaches, as I was wondering how much input a new manager has on staffing, especially in the brand new world in which this front office has a reputation for knowing what’s best, but Mets PR came by to cover Terry’s red shirt in a COLLINS 10 jersey and he was whisked away to pitch his wares elsewhere. Instantly, he was replaced in our midst by Sandy Alderson.
Maybe it was the bloggers conference call the previous Friday or his hour-plus with Mike Francesa Monday or that he has literally become the face of Amazin’/Alderson Avenue, but I’ve gotten very used to Sandy Alderson being around as Mets GM. In almost no time, he’s come to fit like a comfortable pair of shoes — no, make that a comfortable vest, like the vest Sandy seems to always wear when not manning a podium. Sandy was vested again Tuesday. Tanned, vested and ready, you might say (except for no particular sign of a tan).
It isn’t just the vest that makes Sandy an easy fit. He seems like a normal person. Omar didn’t. Steve Phillips didn’t. They always seemed to be performing when interviewed (granted, I made this judgment from a distance). Jim Duquette didn’t seem abnormal, but he also didn’t seem altogether at ease with talking to total strangers about the details of his profession. Alderson, in the early going, has. We were strangers and we wanted details, and he didn’t have to struggle to provide them. It was like we were talking to a person who didn’t mind talking back.
With Lee’s signing still haunting the proceedings, there was a question about pitching, and Sandy reiterated some points from the other night about looking for pitching, and how he figured there’d be better stock available later than now. Then he elaborated in a way I don’t think Minaya or Duquette or Phillips would have. The Mets, Alderson explained, would have to be “passive-aggressive” though they’d like to be “aggressive-aggressive”. He then likened the process to car-shopping, and how you test-drive a model, but sooner or later, you have to decide whether you’re actually going to buy.
For the first time in a lifetime spent monitoring the activities of Met general managers, I really got a sense of what must go through your head/gut when you’re making those decisions. I hated having to buy a car so much, I’m still driving a model purchased from before Brett Favre began his just-ended starting streak (unlike Favre, it can still go). Baseball players cost more than cars. And it’s not your money. The Mets wouldn’t be buying a Leemobile, but it was quite a commitment to sign a pitcher, I realized.
The pitching conversation masquerading as car talk revved my motor, so I asked a pitching question. What, I wanted to know, was the deal, with GMs who say they’re going to look for a “fifth starter”? Omar always said that and it drove me crazy. Thus, putting aside the Mets’ need to be contingency-oriented/passive-aggressive because there’s relatively little time remaining before Spring Training (I tend to overqualify my questions in the hope my interview subject won’t feel compelled to answer them twice), I wondered in as pleasant a way as possible whether this wasn’t just cheap loser talk for the most barely passable pitcher on the market and how do you build a rotation under optimal circumstances while avoiding “fifth-starter types”?
I ask questions like those in other businesses and I usually get a long stare followed by “I’m not totally sure I understand what you’re asking…” but Sandy compressed whatever confusion I may have elicited into a couple of seconds and flowed right into an answer. Yes, he smiled, that’s become “almost a cliché” among general managers; he’s had “two or three” clubs mention their desire for a “fifth starter” lately and that it’s basically code for not wanting to trade prospects to get a pitcher. On a broader philosophical spectrum, Sandy says he’s not likely to identify pitchers numerically as a 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 starter.
None of this means that the Mets won’t wind up with the most barely passable pitcher they can find, but I appreciated having a little GMspeak broken down for me. “So that’s what they mean when they say ‘we’re looking for a fifth starter…wow.” Another baseball fog had lifted inside my head.
One other nugget I noticed from Sandy: To a question about the emphasis the Mets might or might not put on speed, he noted “we” led the league in stolen bases last year. When Collins mentioned collapses, it was “they”. Neither of them was here for the situation in question, but it was a good lesson: Take ownership of the positive, don’t touch the negative.
Half-nugget from within the speed dialogue: Jose Reyes, according to Sandy, ought to get his on-base percentage up.
Alderson got whisked, and we started getting players. First up, Ike Davis, whom I had no idea how much I missed. Except in passing, I hadn’t thought a lot about Ike Davis since October 3. He was a name on a projected lineup for two months. Now, if only in civvies (draped by DAVIS 29), he was a Met again. A Met in the flesh, no more than three feet from me.
In December — a better month than it’s given credit for being.
How about Cliff Lee? Ike’s “not nervous” at having to face the most newsworthy lefty in the game.
How about Terry Collins? Doesn’t really know him, looks forward to playing for him, but he’s totally into his old Buffalo manager, Ken Oberkfell, coming aboard as bench coach. A great guy, says Ike — he has an “old-school mentality” (Ike’s 23; what wouldn’t be old school to him?).
Second base? This was my question because in my heart of hearts I want Ruben Tejada playing on Ike’s right come Opening Day. The sensible thing is to wish Tejada more seasoning, like a steak, but the best part of 2010 to me was watching those two sizzling before the season commenced to fizzling. I wasn’t seeking an endorsement of new-school Ruben (who turned 21 recently) but some insight on what a first baseman thinks of having so many different second basemen nearby. Ike has less than a year of service time, yet he’s already lined up alongside six different second basemen and more are supposed to be on the way. So Ike, does it matter?
To my mild surprise, it does, at least to Davis. “Every person plays it with a different character,” he said. Some are “quiet”. Some are “vocal”. If Ike had his druthers, he’d play next to a vocal second baseman. He likes the communication.
I never knew that was a consideration, though I can infer which under-contract second baseman seems a little too quiet.
Ike is not too quiet nor is he too loud. He’s just right (if not Wright). After five or six minutes of being part of a multi-blogger chat with him, I remembered my appraisal of him from midseason. I fell in baseball-love with this kid early on for how, like Sandy Alderson’s vest, he seemed to fit so perfectly. He was the rookie who was slapping and clapping and seemed seamlessly in the middle of things. At the time I noticed it, he was hitting up a storm, so who wouldn’t be happy? But on TV and from the stands, I got a sense of cool about the kid — not Arthur Fonzarelli aaaayyyy (talk about an old-school reference), but self-assuredness. I loved watching Ike Davis. I liked talking to Ike Davis. I will relish his return to a full Mets uniform in a couple of months.
Then he was gone and replaced by Carlos Beltran, and I must confess that if there was one Met who gave me a couple of seconds’ pause, as in OMG, CB RIGHT HERE!!!!, it was this one. Internally, I wasn’t cool at all that this was Carlos Beltran entering our ad hoc baseball circle. I was dumbfounded…CARLOS BELTRAN IS GOING TO TALK TO US! I was even impressed that Carlos Beltran’s mole showed up. I never noticed the mole until the smart-ass set pointed it out some years ago, but once you’re aware of it, you stay aware of it.
This also crossed my mind: I watched a Mets winter event much like this one not quite six years ago — introducing their new star center fielder — and I was struck that Carlos Beltran was a good-looking man, perhaps the best-looking Met I’d ever seen. It’s not a distinction I’d ever personally tracked, but not only were we getting power and speed and defense in January 2005…we were getting handsome.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Beltran’s mole. Beltran’s style. Beltran’s All-Star appearances and Silver Sluggers and Gold Gloves and all that glittered until he was injured in 2009. As I came back to earth and decided he’s a Met like Ike and everybody else here, I could think of only one thing to ask:
“How are you feeling?”
A player’s been hurt, that’s what you ask. Years ago I read A Player For A Moment, a great book by John Hough, Jr., a writer who was a Red Sox fan masquerading as a Red Sox reporter. This was before there were blogs, so it was even weirder for him then it was for us yesterday. The Red Sox manager, John McNamara, had no real use for him — or all that much for the regular writers. But one subject could always break the ice.
“What can I do for you, gentlemen?” he says softly.
“What the news on Crawford?” someone says.
These sessions almost always begin with a medical question. McNamara doesn’t mind medical questions, and it’s a way to get him talking, to get the conversation off the ground without ticking him off.
“Crawford’s on the DL,” McNamara says graciously. “He said he felt something like fire in his elbow when he threw in Seattle. He threw a slider, I think it was.”
Everyone scribbles. Some hold their thin notebooks in the cup of their palm; others bend down with their notebooks laid against their thighs.
“What the word on Stanley?” someone asks.
“Stanley’s throwing normal. He’s fine.”
Everyone takes it down, and after this cordial beginning silence shoulders up between the manager and his audience.
I thought of that exchange as Beltran answered how he was doing by telling us he was “doing good,” that he’s “not 100%” but he’s “better” than he was last year. He’s training hard, and it’s a good sign his knee is holding up.
Carlos was friendly while telling us this, but I figured this is one of the two things he’s been asked about all day — his health when it comes to playing ball, and whether he and the Mets are figuratively playing ball. The last GM did not distinguish himself when word came down about Beltran’s unauthorized surgery last winter. Wrapped within everyone’s curiosity about his relations with the organization that owes him one more whopping sum for one more season is where his knees are going to patrol: center as they always have, or right as might (might) make sense.
Two responses, delivered without rancor and amid confirming he’ll do what’s best for the team:
1) “I’m the center fielder of the New York Mets, I haven’t heard anything different.”
2) “I’m an employee of the New York Mets.”
There was a question about his running game maybe returning with the health of his knee. He’s not 22 anymore, he said.
Carlos Beltran isn’t yet 34. He’s still good-looking, but after six seasons of a seven-year contract, he seems so much older.
Next, Jason Bay, whose first question also had to be about health. To be honest, I’d almost forgotten about Jason Bay being a Met. He was concussed in July, a victim of the Dodger Stadium left field bullpen gate, and, in that “he’s day-to-day” world of Met injuries, was never seen again in 2010. When our PR contact mentioned “Ike and Carlos and Jason” would be here, I had to wrack my non-concussed brain.
Jason? Jason Who?
Good to be reminded of Jason Bay on Tuesday. We asked him if his head was back on straight. He’s over what ailed him, he said. All better now — hasn’t felt any aftereffects since September. The recovery was slow because they told him if he had headaches, stay away from the ballpark. He had a headache throughout August. It was bad enough to keep him from playing with his kids, let alone his teammates. I inquired into what approach he’d take toward left field walls, if that’s going to be different in light of his miserable experience, and he said it can’t be. It’s all “instinct” chasing fly balls. It’s not like a hamstring with which you can, theoretically, be careful. A ball needs to be chased and caught.
I hope that level head of his remains undisturbed not just because he’s a big part of any Met offense that’s going to be generated in 2011 (“it’s not about me hitting home runs, it’s about us winning games”) but because he issued the line of the day. Steve Keane asked about media and pressure and listed all the potential noisemakers in a player’s life — TV, print, blogs…at which point Jason interrupted him.
“You guys consider yourselves media?”
Jason Bay made me laugh.
On the other hand, David Wright, still dressed as Santa (sans hat), made me think. I’ve been rolling my eyes for years at the David-addiction everybody who is considered media seems to have. Based on available evidence (what I read and what I watch), the beat guys must stream straight to David’s locker after every game. And the Daveotronic 5000, by my reckoning, spewed quotes for every occasion. He wasn’t painfully bland about it, but he was just so…ubiquitous. I’ve wished for years somebody else could take the weight off David’s postgame shoulders. I thought they had assembled an ideal crew for that task last year, but Bay went out, Barajas and Francoeur were traded and by season’s end, it was David not so much against the world but left alone to cope with it.
Our final ten minutes, spent with David Wright, made me think that if I had a job that demanded I gather quotes from Mets, of course I’d go to this guy’s locker. David dripped niceness yesterday. He could have been dripping sweat from the Santa Claus outfit, since he’d been wearing it quite a while, but I’m pretty sure it was niceness. He’d been answering questions for kids on the other side of the curtain, he’d been answering questions for (undisputed) media in other clusters, now he was with us. And he didn’t break stride. We, who could do nothing for him, received the same kind of treatment he gave everybody.
Steve Garvey was said to be like that, but it was also discovered nice Steve Garvey was at least a bit of an act. Gary Carter was said to be like that, but Gary Carter, when you listened between the lines, transcended niceness into relentless self-promotion. My first-hand evidence is scant (it’s all from yesterday, sprinkled with here-and-there anecdotes I’ve picked up over the years), but I’d say David Wright seems genuinely nice.
That’s not a small thing, whatever outfit you’re in.
We had to ask Wright about the Phillies and Cliff Lee. He affirmed they’re good. We had to ask about Terry Collins and Sandy Alderson. He praised Terry’s “passion” and Sandy’s “vision”. I had to ask what it’s like to be on his third regime-change, having lived through Art to Willie, then Willie to Jerry, now Jerry to Terry.
“Four,” he said (nicely). “I was here for Art Howe.”
I didn’t argue the semantics between regimes and regime-changes, but that charmed me. Don’t forget Art Howe.
(As if we could.)
He mentioned feeling bad that good people lost their jobs because the team didn’t do well. When asked about Howard Johnson no longer being hitting coach, he doubled down on the sentiment: that HoJo meant a lot to his career. It wasn’t said with bitterness, but he wasn’t so quick to simply brush aside one coach for the other.
Somewhere as he talked, he mentioned “seven years,” as in seven years a Met, soon to be eight. Young David Wright was now in-his-prime David Wright. David Wright had indeed been here since Art Howe. He had indeed been here for the lousy Mets, the improving Mets, the super Mets, the devastatingly disappointing Mets, the deteriorating Mets and, sadly, the lousy Mets again. Nevertheless, here was the third baseman who halted forever the Mets Third Basemen Count (it’s 143 now, but nobody actively tracks it); the hitter who regularly drives in more than a hundred runs annually; the Met who will, 270 safeties from now, have more base hits than any Met in the half-century that there have been New York Mets. By first persevering and then excelling, David Wright has edged toward becoming one of the best Mets ever.
I asked him if he had any thoughts about being two seasons away, “God willing,” from the hit record.
He laughed as if I’d asked if he would like to spend more time on the bench. The record, held since 1976 by Ed Kranepool, is not on his radar. He never looks at his stats on the “JumboTron,” he said. Seriously — it was practically the craziest thing he’d ever heard!
So I reframed the question: You said yourself “seven years,” which is a long time, and you’re “one of the best players we’ve ever had here” (as I used first-person plural, I was quite gratified to not consider myself media). In so many words, I was asking, do you understand your place in the history of this organization?
First, he thanked me in a real taken-aback way that I (some dude off the street, for all he knew) would tell him he was one of the best Mets ever. And he did say “sometimes you have to pinch yourself” that you’re mentioned among all-time greats, including players he grew up idolizing himself as a Mets fan. But he made clear that he’s kind of “pessimistic” about his performance, that he dwells more on the hits he doesn’t get than the ones he does (which truly makes him a Mets fan).
He could have left it at that, but he kept going, referring to “unfinished business” for the team. He hasn’t won “anything” in his time here (though he did acknowledge the 2006 division title in passing), so there’s not that much to enjoy for him, no matter his personal accolades. The city, he judged, is not impressed by “individual performances,” and he didn’t blame them at all. At that moment, I could imagine him jumping into a cab, heading to LaGuardia and hopping a plane to St. Lucie, all without shedding his Father Christmas get-up.
I can see why the Mets ask David Wright to play Santa Claus. Nobody seems better suited to give of himself.
A manager, a general manager, four key players — the Mets gave us plenty. A year ago they wouldn’t have given us the time of day, but as Terry Collins said, it’s a brand new day. As I wound my way out of the Seaver gate and back to my mundane non-baseball existence down the 7 tracks, I was reminded by the wind off Flushing Bay that Tuesday was also a too damn cold day.
But you can’t have everything in the middle of December. Otherwise what would Santa do with himself come the 25th?
by Greg Prince on 14 December 2010 9:48 am Before heading out in short order to the Mets’ holiday party where I will eat their sweetmeats and drink their wine — part of the organization’s alleged co-opting of my judgment and objectivity — I need to digest this Cliff Lee news.
Oh, that did not go down easy.
Whenever it was that the Nationals laid a Washington Monument-high stack of cash at Jayson Werth’s doorstep, I told a friend, well, at least the Yankees didn’t get him. My buddy reminded me that (contract excesses aside) having one of the better hitters in baseball remain in your division to torment your pitchers nineteen times a year wasn’t really a preferable alternative. Yeah, I suppose, I said…but at least the Yankees didn’t get him.
I told myself the same about Lee when I first heard he was going to the Phillies last night. Then I nodded off. When I woke up, I realized Cliff Lee will be pitching for the Phillies in the same rotation as Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt, Cole Hamels, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Jim Konstanty and that computer-generated extra Roy Halladay they’re going to pick up at the trading deadline in exchange for Joe Blanton.
Man, that’s a deep rotation.
Advocate for fair play that I consider myself, I’m still reflexively thrilled Cliff Lee didn’t take the mint and scurry to the Bronx despite Hal Steinbrenner’s promise to spit money at his wife. There’s something life-affirming that not every ballplayer yearns to be a Mark Teixeira-type robot fueled by millions upon zillions of Steinbucks. Not that Lee will be sweating mortgage payments in King of Prussia or wherever Philadelphia royalty holes up, but he took less than he was offered by the Empire to go where he presumably enjoyed himself the season before last. That, if you ignore the downside for us, is moderately admirable.
What kind of man enjoys being a Phillie is a whole other matter, but at least the Yankees didn’t get him.
It’s bad news for the Mets in that the merry band of Phillie moundsmen will account for the vast majority of nineteen starts against the swingin’ Hudge Heads. The good news, once the Yankees not getting him is factored out, hinges on petty thoughts about age and injury and overwhelming long-term commitments to unpredictable human body parts like arms and backs.
Really, there’s no tangible good news for 2011 except that 2012 will follow it. That’s the entirety of the Sandy Alderson appeal, that the Mets will be reconfigured for competitiveness a mere 163 games from now. Larding on megacontracts this offseason while the clock ticked stubbornly slowly on Perez and Castillo and even our beloved Beltran was not really a viable option. If we were one star pitcher away from meaningful games in April and other months, we wouldn’t have needed a new GM. The last guy knew how to throw multiple years and multiple millions at free agents. It didn’t work.
The overall effect of watching other teams wheel and deal at the Winter Meetings while ours sat back in what appeared droll amusement was to make me think we as Mets fans were being sent to bed without supper. The Aldersonian approach (before he conference-called sweet nothings into my ear) had me emotionally uneasy even if it struck me as logically sound. Sandy and his boys were an occupying force with their we’re new here, but we know what’s best for you demeanor. Others greeted them as liberators. I wasn’t so anxious to make with the rose petals.
Yet I’m honestly convinced what they’re doing — and not doing — is the correct course of action (or inaction). 2011 may be something of a lost cause, but it was probably going to be anyway. Waiting it out and clearing the books of massive commitments to the aged, infirm and inept while laying the groundwork to move forward and invest…it’s exciting. You just can’t put it on the cover of a pocket schedule. What’s the marketing theme going to be for this year: STAY HUNGRY?
I was revisiting one of my favorite gripes late last season for another friend, kvetching about Omar Minaya’s tendency to scour the bargain bin for “fifth starters,” as if the games put on the shoulders of his endless stream of Liván Hernandezes and Tim Reddings and Pat Misches were worth less in the standings than those entrusted to Johan Santana. My retroactive solution was we should’ve beefed up the pitching following 2008 by going after CC Sabathia. It would have been worth it.
Then how about Cliff Lee? my friend asked. It was the same principle, yet it didn’t sound right entering 2011. The Mets before 2009 seemed the right piece away from not just contending but winning. The Mets after 2010 seemed a mess that no single personnel infusion could help measurably, unless it was a general manager who wasn’t going to behave like Omar Minaya.
That we’ve got. Lee we don’t.
The Mets with $20+ million annually devoted to Lee for the next five, six, seven years…who knows what it would have wrought here? It wasn’t going to happen, it didn’t happen, it’s not happening. This year we’ll match Lee, Halladay, Hamels, Oswalt and Whoever with…not those guys. I keep trying to see a 2011 downside for the Phillies, like they won’t mesh, or their egos will get in the way, but then I remember it’s baseball, not basketball. They’ve already meshed in various combinations. They’re going to mesh fine.
Mesh vs. Misch. I know whose chances I like best in the short-term.
Long-term? All I can think about are those stories of the elderly Red Sox fans who hung on through the 2004 postseason, warding off the Great Beyond in a sustained effort to experience, at last, what had eluded them and their Nation since 1918. Not until the Sox won the World Series could they, per New England’s own Andy Dufresne, get busy dying.
STAY HUNGRY is one possible theme for 2011, though KEEP YOURSELF ALIVE might be more apt. Or LIVE THROUGH THIS, with the implicit promise that IT GETS BETTER.
It has to, eventually. I mean, c’mon, at least the Yankees didn’t get Cliff Lee.
by Greg Prince on 13 December 2010 3:00 pm Dave Hudgens has been named the Mets’ new hitting coach. Here, based on precedent, is how his tenure with the Mets will go.
Early in Spring Training, Hudgens will be the subject of a half-dozen positive profiles, each of which will focus on one of the more exotic elements of his experience (say, managing in Caracas) and will spotlight a key component of his philosophy, such as, “The first pitch is everything.” During this introductory phase, we will learn about some unique Hudgens drill, like having the hitter swing twice at the same pitch so the hitter gets a feel for which swing is the correct one. Terry Collins will vouch for how hard Hudgens works — “He’s tireless.” David Wright will second that — while not denigrating his good friend Howard Johnson, Wright will call Hudgens “a breath of fresh air” and mention how he’s really discovering things he never realized about his own approach now that “D-Hud” is here.
A week or so later, maybe after games start, some Met who struggled in 2010 will discover Hudgens is the tonic for what ails him. Jason Bay, perhaps, will admit he was clueless his first year in Flushing and that the dimensions of Citi Field “played with his head” (which will give everybody an obvious peg because of his concussion), but now D-Hud has worked with him to get him to “stay inside himself,” and it’s really bearing fruit. Hudgens will address Bay’s comments with nods to “confidence” and “having a game plan”. Wright will reiterate what a “terrific teacher” this coach is, and how it’s great that he gathers the middle-of-the-order hitters together for bull sessions and side bets once the rest of the team disperses. Wright will laugh that he always winds up paying off.
The season will start and we won’t hear another word about Hudgens until the Mets are shut out in consecutive games and go a week without scoring more than three runs in any one contest. The rumbling will begin that maybe Hudgens isn’t the right man for the job, but a frustrated Collins will assert that “nobody works harder than Dave” and a distraught Wright will second that testimony, placing the blame on himself. “It’s not D-Hud’s fault that I can’t get in a groove,” the third baseman will repeat on his way to the cage for extra swings the day after he left the bases loaded in the ninth inning.
The Mets will start hitting at some point. They’ll score an average of seven runs per game for five games in a row. The writers will each produce a “Hudgens’s philosophy is working” story. The coach will attribute the recent success to the time it takes for his “first pitch” message to get through. Bay, winning N.L. Player of the Week honors, will give all the credit to Hudgens. Collins will compliment the coach’s work ethic. Wright will be all smiles.
Then nobody will mention Dave Hudgens for the longest time until the next extended teamwide slump, sometime near the All-Star break. Callers to WFAN — half of whom will pronounce his name “Huggins” — will insist Hudgens has to go, that the Mets should hire somebody who understands that Citi Field is a big ballpark, that he has Bay all screwed up, that Wright looks nothing like he did when he was hitting to the opposite field earlier in the season. Mike Francesa will tell Collins he hates to have to ask again, but Terry, what about Dave? Collins will insist, as he did the week before (except more snippily), that nobody works harder than Dave Hudgens, that everybody here is working hard, and we’re gonna get through this, and “the buck stops with me.” That night on Mets Extra, Ed Coleman will be even more apologetic in his questioning as he asks Collins the same questions about Hudgens. Ed will mention three different times that the All-Star break “can’t come soon enough for this club.”
The Mets will hit well coming out of the break, and everybody will forget about Dave Hudgens…until they remember him the next time the Mets stop hitting. And this will go on until the offseason, when Dave Hudgens is reassigned within the organization and Darryl Strawberry is named his replacement. “I can’t wait to work with Straw,” Wright will affirm. “Nothing against D-Hud, but Darryl’s really done it at the big-league level.” Manager Ken Oberkfell will heartily attest to Darryl’s “outstanding” work ethic.
by Greg Prince on 11 December 2010 12:34 am See, Don? This is the way to behave.
—Roger Sterling
I once had to transcribe a lengthy interview with a top executive in the industry I covered. He concluded just about every answer to just about every question with a sentence that began, “At the end of the day…” The deeper into the tape I got, the more he said it.
Boy, did I wish that day would end as soon as possible.
After listening to that interview, I tended to pick up on the use of that phrase. I noticed a lot of high-powered people sprinkled it into their conversation, like a tic they couldn’t help. When he made his maiden appearance before the New York media in later October, Sandy Alderson revealed himself to be an “At the end of the day…” practitioner. Not as relentlessly as my transcription subject from years ago, but enough so it got my attention.
Six weeks later, at the literal end of the day, I got to hear what else Sandy Alderson has a penchant for saying.
It had to be at the end of the day because Sandy was speaking via conference call with a gaggle of Mets bloggers. With very few exceptions, the Mets blogger doesn’t make any kind of living from blogging the Mets. The Mets blogger’s day is filled with other professional commitments. Thus, the best time to gather us around the ol’ speakerphone is…at the end of the day.
Irony of ironies, we are at the beginning of a whole new day where Sandy Alderson and the Mets are concerned. If it hadn’t been obvious enough to observe it from a distance, it became happily apparent to the non-traditional media who were invited to take part in this forty-minute Q&A session.
How new is this day? For the Mets? For all who devote their concern to the Mets?
It’s very new. Not only were we never granted this opportunity when the last general manager held office, it never occurred to me that we might. If it didn’t occur to me, it’s hard to believe anybody in Flushing was thinking about it.
While the Mets’ systemic blogger outreach efforts predate the coming of Alderson, this Friday night session with writers who work day jobs was a stupendous leap forward for all concerned. It was big for us, naturally, as Jason and I and about a dozen other bloggers aren’t used to getting time with our team’s GM, but it was also big for the way the Mets do things now. They are led by a person who takes everything and everybody into account. He takes the media into account as part of the overall landscape that is within his purview as the head of Met baseball operations — and he counts the likes of us as media.
Yet it is also my impression (fed by his responses during the call) that he will not be steered to do what he doesn’t want to do by the media. Alderson understands New York is upholstered by back pages and that sports talk radio can drown out the horns on yellow cabs. This guy is clearly ready to communicate with the media hordes, but he gives no indication that he cares about appeasing them. I don’t sense Sandy Alderson will do whatever it takes to grab a back page or quell a loudmouth with a mic just because it’s December and there’s a lot of noise around town about how this guy…he’s not doing anything!
When that stuff starts showing up in the standings, maybe it will make a difference to Alderson. Until then, Sandy seems content to explain himself as clearly as possible and let the rest of us figure it out for ourselves.
Oh, and unless I missed it, I’m pretty sure he didn’t say “At the end of the day…” more than once.
***
Now, some impressions from Faith and Fear’s own Jason Fry:
Sandy Alderson is good at this stuff, but for me to say that demands further explanation, because I could describe someone like that and mean either of two very different things. I could mean “good at this stuff” as in “smooth and on message, talking a good game but not actually saying anything that would make waves.” Or I could mean “good at this stuff” as in “demonstrated a knack for being truthful and diplomatic, informative and also on message at the same time.”
Happily, when I say Alderson’s good at this stuff, I mean the latter.
Was there some news? Yes. The Mets have picked their slate of coaches, haven’t announced them yet because of administrative issues, and will probably have something to say Monday or Tuesday. As for the draft, he said that “I do believe we’ll be over slot, maybe more than occasionally. I think that a big-market club such as the Mets can only dominate through a successful player-development system. Nobody can sign 25 players for $150 million over six or seven years. We need to take advantage of our resources in all areas of player acquisition, including amateur scouting.”
(Huge, heartfelt hurrah there.)
Were any of the bits of news intentionally tossed our way to throw the bloggers a bone? No, or at least it didn’t feel that way. (And having been on both ends of such cynical exercises, I’d like to think I’d know.) We had a conversation. That conversation touched on a few areas where matters had progressed to the point that there was news, or Alderson’s discussion of his philosophy was sufficiently removed from the previous Mets’ status quo that it amounted to news.
And he was candid, at one point remarking dryly that most GMs don’t have to find an equipment manager when they arrive.
We each got a question, with no pre-screening. When it was my turn, I asked Alderson what his impressions of New York fans (I meant to specify Mets fans — oh well) were before taking the job, and how they’d changed since his arrival. I chose that question for two reasons. First of all and most importantly, I genuinely wanted to know — I’ve always been interested in what players and front office folks know of fans’ lives and moods, and how much attention they pay to those things. Second, I admit I was curious to see what Alderson would do with a question that in my day job might get derided as a softball. His answer was interesting.
He said (as recorded in the comprehensive Amazin’ Avenue transcript):
“I think my impressions as an outside observer have been confirmed largely. Passionate fans. Loyal, passionate — baseball is important to them. I think New York is a baseball town and I’m really happy about that. That imposes certain obligations and some demands. Fans are very knowledgeable, but that keeps us on our toes. Ultimately that’s a good thing. I haven’t walked around the concourse during a game yet— I haven’t seen any fruits and vegetables — I’m sure that first-hand contact will become even more real when the season starts.
New York fans haven’t disappointed me yet, I know they’re passionate about their teams, particularly baseball teams. And that’s one of the things that drives us. We want the fans to be proud of the organization. That’s going to come from winning, that’s going to come from winning the right way, ultimately.”
He answered it, giving it as much weight as meatier questions about Moneyball or the amateur draft or how you audit an organization. He was entertaining in doing so. And then he brought it back to his plan for the organization.
And this was Alderson on talking with bloggers:
“I’m very familiar with the blogosphere and understand how it makes connections with fans. The various platforms for communication these days are different, more varied. People are going to form their own opinions, you all will form your own opinions, but at least if you’ve heard from me you’ll be able to do it on the basis of direct communication rather than something indirect or second-hand. I don’t mind spending the time. I think that’s part of what one buys into here in New York. In a sense, you guys probably reflect the most passionate elements of the fan base. If I’m right about that, it’s probably as important, or more important, to be in contact with you all than it is with any of the rest of the media.”
Beyond making the chosen audience pretty happy, that’s a succinct, smart summation of why bloggers are important and their perspective is valuable. His answer gave us credit (not that spending forty minutes with us and treating our questions seriously and respectfully didn’t do that already) but was also upfront about why the time spent is a valuable investment for the team.
Looking back at these thoughts, they seem dreadfully meta. I suppose that was inevitable: I think it’s fair to say that most of us on the call were simultaneously interested in taking the new GM’s measure and in understanding how this ongoing experiment with the Mets providing us access will unfold. Both the questions we asked and the impressions we gathered reflect that.
It’s also true that considering Omar Minaya’s handful of infamous flameouts before microphones, we’ve become keenly interested in how well the new GM handles communications on a tactical level. But I hope the transcript demonstrates that this was an enjoyable, interesting conversation in its own right. From the evidence, it would be a treat to talk baseball with Sandy Alderson in June or July as well, when we’re used to him and on-field matters are uppermost in all our minds. I’m pretty confident that would be candid, interesting, wide-ranging conversation too.
Here’s looking forward to it.
***
To what Jason said, I’ll add that as this wasn’t a call driven by a single news event, the questions from we telephonically assembled bloggers varied in specifics, but were of essentially two natures:
1) The construction of this Mets team/organization.
2) Us.
Can you blame us for the second? Nobody else asks about us — and by us, I mean the spectrum that includes Sandy’s thoughts on and reactions to New York fans, New York media, New York pressures and, yes, New York Mets bloggers. When we’re on our tenth conference call with the general manager of the New York Mets, I’ll bet we don’t ask Sandy Alderson, “So…whaddaya think about us?”
Which we didn’t, exactly, though I have to admit I kind of thought there’d be more of that. I thought of the episode of The Simpsons in which there’s a closeup of a ham radio and, in some foreign tongue (as relayed by subtitles), the voice on the other end uses his ham radio to transmit the following urgent message:
“I have a ham radio.”
Bloggers can be like that, especially when we’re brought together as “bloggers”. This was a novel experience — but not, based on Sandy’s demeanor, a novelty. We were worth forty minutes at the end of his day because he gets what we do, incorporating “the most passionate elements of the fan base” and acknowledging continual contact with us (given our role as conduit for Mets fans) as something at least as important as it will be with the rest of the media.
He could be buttering our popcorn, but I doubt it. Sandy Alderson doesn’t sound like a man bent on flattery or BS. The Mets never seemed much interested in flattering its bloggers, but BS they generally had for everybody under the previous regime. Sandy does not come off as having a lot of time for that. He comes from the reality-based community. Frankly, it takes some getting used to the idea that he and his kind are taking up residence among the Metsopotomians.
As for his other media/fan views:
• He’ll be on with Mike Francesa next week. If you haven’t been listening to Francesa, good for you. If you’re a Mets fan who can’t help yourself, you know Francesa’s been banging the “where’s the big news at?” drum pretty hard of late. Without calling Francesa a bloviating dope, Alderson expressed surprise that any Mets fans — generally a “sophisticated” bunch — would be “disappointed” by the club’s low-key approach these last few weeks considering it’s all well in line with what he’s been saying about the direction that would be taken for 2011.
• At the same time, he understands the disappointment of the past few years, and knows that the “near-term” support he feels he has from Mets fans will likely melt away with a poor start to the season.
• Communicating with media is much a part of his responsibilities as finding another pitcher or three: “It’s important they hear my point of view.” All the “platforms and outlets” in New York need to be serviced. Balancing the need to give individual beat reporters access versus promoting an atmosphere in which he isn’t seen as displaying “favoritism” is an issue. Managing the time, he allowed, is his challenge.
Turning to baseball:
• The Mets will not be operated “on a shoestring,” though this is a “difficult period” to negotiate given the contracts he’s inherited.
• The pitching market figures to grow more attractive as it gets later, and Alderson believes there will be better arms available to the Mets then as opposed to now.
• To a question posed by yours truly, regarding how confident he could be about judging and ultimately parting ways with certain players given his limited familiarity with the organization’s personnel to date, Alderson was surprisingly frank (at least according to the blogger who posed the question). Non-tendered Sean Green had injury issues and “did not pitch as well as expected”; non-tendered Chris Carter is a “limited player” who “can’t play center field” and is “not a great defensive player”; letting him go permits the Mets to “improve ourselves and clear a roster spot”. Free agent Pedro Feliciano, having rejected arbitration, is “still in the marketplace, but considering what he’s going to make,” letting him go was a “relatively easy decision.
• Alderson was satisfied there was enough insight among his lieutenants J.P. Ricciardi and Paul DePodesta, new scout Roy Smith and those who were around before they all showed up to make those calls not terribly vexing. The “lack of organizational knowledge,” however, may have shown up in “preparing for the Rule 5 draft,” in which the Mets lost pitching prospect Elvin Ramirez to the Nationals..
• I snuck in a followup about the emotion of telling a player he’s no longer part of a team. Is it easier if you’re new to this job? Does it get more difficult as you get to know the players? Or is it all strictly business? Sandy said it’s not that cold, and that he tries to maintain a “professional but friendly relationship” with his players. It can’t become “misleading” or “send the wrong message”. (Much of Alderson’s job, it seems, is predicated on avoiding the perception of favoritism, whether it’s toward reporters or outfielders.)
• We should look for a more consistent approach, minors to majors, in the Mets organization.
• “You don’t typically have to come in as general manager and hire a new equipment manager.” The Charlie Samuels scandal may be yet another embarrassment to the Mets, but it’s not Alderson’s.
The last question our GM received regarded his Marine experience and how it’s impacted him. “Be aggressive, with good judgment,” Sandy summed it, and if that’s the way he runs the Mets, that’s not a bad way to be at the end or beginning of any day.
***
Thanks to the Mets media relations staff for setting this up.
Thanks to every single blogging associate of ours who was a part of this. Every question — media, baseball, personal — was insightful and each yielded a revealing Alderson answer.
Many of our blolleagues have posted transcripts and/or writeups of the entire session. We encourage you to check them out:
• Always Amazin’
• Amazin’ Avenue
• Eddie Kranepool Society
• MetsBlog
• Metsgrrl
• Mets Merized Online
• Mets Today
• Mets Police
• NY Baseball Digest
• On The Black
• Optimistic Mets Fan
You get your turn to Ask Sandy on a mets.com Webcast on Monday. Learn more about it here.
by Greg Prince on 10 December 2010 5:36 pm I’ve got a new piece up at the Times‘s Bats blog concerning a stealth Met icon. Learn about Pedro Feliciano’s place in Mets — and baseball — history by clicking here.
by Greg Prince on 9 December 2010 2:04 pm My sister gave me the news thirty years ago this morning: John Lennon was murdered last night. My first thought was the next thing Suzan said:
“Now they’ll never get back together.”
Lennon’s assassination (which always sounded strange, in that politicians got “assassinated,” but what else could you call it?) was one of those events that just grew sadder and sadder as the week went on. The more it sunk in, the sadder it got. It grew beyond the realization that the Beatles reunion which I’d always vaguely hoped for was now out of the question. There would definitively be no more Beatles except for what they left behind, just as there would be no more John Lennon.
He had a hit on the radio in the weeks before, “(Just Like) Starting Over”. Now it was everywhere. Every solo record, every Beatles record filled the airwaves. Thousands flocked to the Dakota, the building in Manhattan where he lived and where he died at the hands of a disturbed individual whose name it hurts to type. They held candles and they sang in unison. They just kept coming, trying, I guess, to make him live in the best way they knew how.
In the week that unfolded, everything was John Lennon, the musician and the man. My relatively modest appreciation of his catalogue and my understanding of his legacy was deepened. It couldn’t help but be. Lennon was the lead story on every newscast, in every newspaper. It seems in the days after his assassination I heard every song John Lennon ever wrote and learned everything about him. I didn’t realize, until it was reported and repeated again and again, what a personal and professional milestone his new album — his and Yoko Ono’s, Double Fantasy — was supposed to be. Up to that morning when Suzan told me what happened, it was just another album whose name Casey Kasem might have mentioned during American Top 40. I honestly never noticed Lennon hadn’t recorded or released any new material in the previous half-decade. I never wondered what he was up to. That he had a new single out didn’t seem any stranger than Paul McCartney climbing the charts at a given moment in time.
Now that everything about John Lennon was coming at us in a torrent — he turned his life around; he had a young son; he was feeling optimistic about the future — it was worse than simply shaking your head over the untimely death of somebody whose songs you liked. The more you heard them, the more the cruel irony gnawed at you. “Give Peace A Chance”…the first time I heard it was less than two months before. It was used in a short-lived Broadway play we saw for my Survey of Drama class, Division Street. The play was about the death of ’60s idealism, and “Give Peace A Chance” was used in an almost taunting manner, with the modern-day pragmatists telling the hangers-on from another era to get over it and get going and stop already with hopelessly outmoded sloganeering.
That was in the middle of October, and I had no idea it was a John Lennon song. Now it played constantly, with unmistakable authorship and overtones. The man who stood for peace — who stayed in bed for peace, as the archival footage showed — had been shot to death.
I hear “Give Peace A Chance” now and I think of that week in December 1980. I hear “Imagine” or “Instant Karma” or “Strawberry Fields Forever” or “I Am The Walrus,” and I am transported to that last month when I was 17, the last year that I was in high school. I hear “(Just Like) Starting Over,” and I remember an instant when I walked down the hall, past the girls’ bathroom. Plain as day, I could hear a radio blaring from within:
Our life together
Is so precious together
We have grown
We have grown
Thirty years ago this week, for the worst reason fathomable, John Lennon was everywhere.
***
I’ve seen it several times and I might have seen it last night had I watched more of the thirtieth-anniversary coverage of John Lennon’s assassination. It was one of those things that jumps out from the background of a bigger picture if you’re so inclined to detect it.
The scene is the Dakota. The candlelight vigil is well underway. One woman catches my eye. She’s carrying some flowers, along with a newspaper — the Daily News. It must be from the night he was shot, because after it happened, the front and back pages were all about Lennon. This back page wasn’t.
I don’t remember the exact headline but if you noticed the newspaper, you couldn’t help but catch the key words:
Yanks Mets Dave
And the other New York story of December 1980 came flooding back to me. The Mets were trying to sign Dave Winfield.
***
Nelson Doubleday and Fred Wilpon took control of the Mets in January. They hired Frank Cashen in February. There was no time to meaningfully rebuild or even tweak the major league roster for 1980. Playing the hand they were dealt, the Mets strengthened their advertising (“The Magic Is Back”) and their facility (new seats and an outfield paint job at Shea) and otherwise tried to get by on patience, goodwill and whatever Mark Bomback’s right arm could get them. It worked for a while — the Mets flirted with .500 into mid-August — before a lack of depth and talent doomed them to their usual dispiriting finish: fifth place, 67 wins, 95 losses.
It was relative progress from the late 1970s, but it wasn’t going to sate anybody for long. These new owners and their highly regarded GM were going to have to make the kind of moves from which their predecessors had shied as either a matter of conviction or penuriousness. No more Grant, no more McDonald, not more de Roulets. From now on, the Mets would have to operate like the New York franchise in the National League was supposed to.
They would have to substantially improve their product, and they’d have to spend to do it. They’d have to go after free agents…they’d have to go after the big fish of the 1980-81 offseason.
They’d have to go after Dave Winfield.
***
There were teams that seriously considered free agents and then there were the Mets. That was our big-market franchise in advance of 1977, 1978, 1979 and 1980. While others relied (or perhaps overrelied) on the injection of stars into their lineup or rotation, the Mets kept their hands in their pockets for the first four years that teams could sign standout players from the open market. The Yankees nabbed Reggie Jackson and then inked Goose Gossage. The Phillies solidified their ranks with Pete Rose. The Astros brought Texas-born Nolan Ryan home. Those were the prize catches of the first four “re-entry drafts,” as they were known. There were loads of other big names that went to lots of other teams.
But not to the Mets. The Mets reeled in two guppies, both in the 1977-78 class: infielder/outfielder Elliott Maddox and middle reliever Tom Hausman. Each contributed to the midseason surge of 1980, but the bottom line was still 67-95 and most every expense spared when it came to getting with how the last quarter of the 20th century would function.
Attendance was up in 1980; it couldn’t help but rebound from the final year of de Roulet disrepair in 1979, when it was a shameful 788,905. Still, rising to not quite 1.2 million could hardly be called a victory in New York, not for a franchise that a decade earlier drew almost 2.7 million, not when the other franchise in town was drawing better than 2.6 million. The goodwill and the patience was expiring (and Bomback was about to be traded). Doubleday and Wilpon could not afford to not spend. Certainly they had to shop like they meant it. And there was no way they could ignore Dave Winfield.
Dave Winfield had an off year in 1980 — 20 home runs, 87 runs batted in, .276 batting average, 89 runs scored, 23 stolen bases and every one of 162 games played — yet he would have easily been the best player on the Mets. He was quite obviously the best player on the Padres. In 1979, he may have been the best player in all of baseball: 34 HR, 118 RBI, a .953 OPS, even if nobody knew what that was at the time. Winfield was that rare baseball player who could do everything, offensively and defensively. When managers and coaches began voting him Gold Gloves in 1979, it wasn’t out of habit. It was because no outfielder got to more balls, caught more balls and threw balls with more authority. He was 6’ 6” tall, yet he could fly. He was imposing. He was accomplished. And when he became a free agent in the fall of 1980, he was only 29.
The best player on the 1980 Mets? Dave Winfield would have been the best player the Mets ever had. Of course they had to go after him.
***
“We are prepared to do whatever is necessary to be a contender,” Wilpon told the Times’s Murray Chass in July, before names of prospective free agents could be officially bandied about. “If a free agent is available — if our baseball people determine that that is a person we need and want — the Met organization will go after that free agent.”
Come November, Winfield was the Mets’ No. 1 target. He would be their first pick in the re-entry draft (a formality under the rules of the day) and someone they set to courting as soon as they could. With the process just getting underway, Cashen graciously penned a fairly lighthearted piece for the Times describing the serious business of waving an almost blank check at an enormously athletic young man:
Look but don’t touch. Express interest but don’t mention money. Somehow, in the proceedings that followed, it was difficult to know who would buy and who would sell. A stranger to the mix would be puzzled but no less than the participants.
A ballplayer once described it best: Visiting with ownership prior to the draft is like spending an evening with a beautiful and willing woman and never mentioning love.
The courting was on in earnest, with Doubleday’s and Wilpon’s baseball people giving it their all. Cashen would, over the course of his 12-season tenure as Met GM, become known as someone who eschewed free agency, but in the fall of 1980, he was, by necessity, up for anything.
The question was always before me: Would the Mets be active in the re-entry draft?
The re-entry draft, I was to say then and repeat it so often during the summer, was one of several ways open to a general manager to rebuild a ball club. The improvement of your young players is one, replacement from a budding farm system still another. Judicious trading would help and, of course, there was that comparatively new spectacle — the re-entry draft.
No one of these can be ignored, I said, quickly pointing out that when you have finished last three years in a row, you cannot ignore any of the avenues open to improve the team.
***
The Mets tried. They really tried. They offered what Cashen termed “the highest money package ever made to a player”. It was reported as $12 million over eight years, though Winfield claimed, “Money is not the overriding factor.” Big Dave’s San Diego teams had failed to contend since he came to the majors in 1973 (including 1977, when they invested in big-name free agents Rollie Fingers and Gene Tenace). The Mets were instructed they’d have to show signs of putting together a better team that they previously fielded for Winfield to want to join.
“I was stifled,” Winfield told the Associated Press before deciding where to play in 1981 and the years beyond. “Rarely did I come to bat with men on base. Pitchers always could pitch around me.”
The 1980 Mets had, infamously, totaled 61 home runs among them. Ten of them had been struck by Claudell Washington in a little more than half-a-season, and those had gone unexpectedly out the door to Atlanta in November. Claudell, himself a free agent, was assumed safely in the fold for ’81. He wasn’t, and he hadn’t yet been replaced. All the Mets could offer Winfield in lieu of a platform for imminent winning was New York and an immense paycheck.
Another team could give him that and a lot more. Dave Winfield signed with the defending American League East champion Yankees: ten years for an eventual (thanks to cost-of-living increases) $23 million.
The Mets tried, but maybe they were never going to succeed at this particular contest. “Steinbrenner is determined not to let the Mets grab Winfield from under his nose,” a source said before the free agent’s final decision was made. In those years, George’s nose — particularly when connected to his wallet — was a most formidable obstacle.
***
Cashen didn’t wind up empty-handed when it came to decorated San Diego Padres. On December 15, 1980, the same day Winfield agreed to his record pact with the Yankees (and three days after utilityman Bob Bailor had been acquired from Toronto), the Mets sent John Pacella and Jose Moreno to the Padres for former Cy Young award winner Randy Jones. Jones hadn’t been anything close to a top pitcher since 1976, the year the southpaw edged Jerry Koosman for honors as the best hurler in the National League. The next day, Cashen, addressing what he saw as a glaring Met weakness — “a team without character in its left-handed pinch-hitting” — signed former Met Rusty Staub as a free agent. He then added another layer of depth to the bench with another experienced lefty pinch-hitter, free agent Mike Cubbage. After the new year, Cashen signed his third free agent, and another lefty pitcher to go along with Jones, veteran Dave Roberts.
Some new bodies, same old team. Cashen couldn’t be done restructuring. So as Spring Training was getting underway, he sent June 14, 1980 walkoff hero Steve Henderson to the Cubs for another recidivist Met, Dave Kingman. Kingman had hit 48 home runs in 1979, but just 18 in an injury-shortened 1980. Plus he was the same Dave Kingman who was known for resisting the urge to be charming when he was last a New York Met, in 1977.
Almost none of it helped. The Mets were 17-34 when the 1981 players strike shut down baseball for eight weeks. Then, with a clean slate — the one-time-only “second season” — Cashen’s moves still didn’t help that much. Version 2.0 of the 1981 Mets demi-contended into September but ultimately fell out of the mini-race and went 24-28. Kingman hit home runs. Staub lined pinch-hits. Bailor filled in nicely. The Mets were still going nowhere.
Meanwhile, Dave Winfield was going to the playoffs and ultimately the World Series with the Yankees. He would hit hardly at all in the Bombers’ Fall Classic loss to the Dodgers and later be dubbed by his employer as clutchless Mr. May.
The Mets could have used a player who excelled in any month.
***
It’s tempting to wonder what might have happened had Winfield seen past the money and the bluster thrown around by George Steinbrenner and opted to become the building block of a potential Met powerhouse. Kingman probably wouldn’t have come back and George Foster would have been passed up in 1982, but Winfield in one corner and a young Darryl Strawberry — with less pressure on his inexperienced shoulders — in another, with Cashen’s minor leagues bearing fruit all over the diamond…is the Mets’ development accelerated? Do free agents look better to Cashen? Does he still trade for Hernandez? For Carter? Is there more than one World Series in the 1980s Mets future?
You can’t say, but we do know the Mets won one more World Series during the span that Winfield was under contract to the Yankees than Winfield did. We also know Doubleday and Wilpon never hired small-time fixers to gather dirt on their star players. George Steinbrenner’s engagement of Howie Spira to help incriminate Dave Winfield (who was suing Steinbrenner over a $300,000 payment to his foundation), got “The Boss” suspended from baseball in the early 1990s. While Winfield sought refuge with the California Angels — en route to winning a World Series with the Blue Jays, registering his 3,000th hit with the Twins and wearing a Padres cap on his inevitable Hall of Fame plaque — the Yankees constructed a new championship era without George’s input.
It might be more intriguing to wonder what might have happened to the Yankees had Dave Winfield gone to the Mets. Maybe Steinbrenner never develops a detrimental obsession with making a superstar look bad; maybe he’s never suspended; maybe their dynasty of the 1990s never takes root.
We’ll never know.
***
It’s thirty years since the Mets tried to buy their way up in the standings. There were no takers for what they were selling. Foster, a year later, would accept their money (through a swap with the Reds), and it didn’t work that well, but it was seen as an important first step toward Met respectability. In the first half of the ’80s, Cashen went at team-building through the other methods he outlined in the Times: a few of his young players began to blossom; more came up through the farm system; and still more were brought on board via judicious trade. In his November 1980 article, Cashen promised one way or another, “The Mets are coming. The Mets are coming.” When the Mets finally arrived as a champion-in-full six years later, big-money free agency was not a factor.
And now? There are no big-money free agents coming the Mets’ way in December 2010. They’ve signed their share in the past half-dozen years to mixed results. Whatever individual successes free agency has yielded them, the composite box score shows the Mets’ player acquisition strategy has left the franchise uncomfortably distant from legitimate contention.
So this December, we as Mets fans behave counterintuitively. In 1980, coming off a season in which our team finished next to last, we were dying for our owners to throw a few bucks around. Today, in a similar position, we don’t mind that they don’t. In fact, we prefer it. Jayson Werth goes for big money. The Mets don’t bite. Carl Crawford signs a huge contract. The Mets aren’t involved. Cliff Lee remains available. The Mets don’t look, don’t touch and don’t express interest. We cheer on Sandy Alderson as he doesn’t spend. We nod at D.J. Carrasco and Ronny Paulino and Boof Bonser and whatever the Rule 5 draft shakes out, and we don’t say boo.
The Mets weren’t materially better in 1981 than they were in 1980. Our patience and our goodwill was stretched a little further. We rooted for Dave Roberts and Randy Jones instead of John Pacella and Mark Bomback, and we hoped that whatever it was Frank Cashen was working on long-term paid off soon enough.
What will April to October of 2011 bring? We don’t yet know, just as we don’t know if 2011 will serve as the bumpy on-ramp to a smoother ride for 2012 and thereafter. But in these very cold final days of 2010, I can’t say it’s terribly exciting to live through yet another December when the Mets are detectable only in the background.
by Greg Prince on 6 December 2010 11:33 am Reality isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but it eventually gets the best of us all, baseball teams included. After reality overtook the New York Mets as decisively as the Phillies, Braves and Marlins have since the last time the Mets contended, it seems as if the Mets themselves have finally gotten select doses of reality.
In light of the net progress represented by their ongoing eye-opening, Faith and Fear in Flushing chooses as its Nikon Camera Player of the Year — the award bestowed to the entity or concept that best symbolizes the year in Metsdom — Realization.
This, the Mets organization has acknowledged through their actions in a series of telling if not necessarily connected situations, is what’s going on around us…we may as well realize it, deal with it and move on.
The temptation is to say it took them long enough. It’s tempting because it is accurate. At the end of the 2009 season, the Mets transmitted every impression they were insular and out of touch with the circumstances that were defining their reality. They didn’t seem to hear their fan base; they didn’t seem to notice the standings; they seemed intent on existing in their own diminishing state of being.
They’ve changed their approach on several fronts, surely for the better in some cases, hopefully for the best in terms of what we can’t yet fully measure. All told, the Mets may have slowly U-turned toward a happier destiny.
There’s a long way to go before Metropolitan nirvana fully materializes, but it’s better to be heading incrementally in that direction than floating helplessly away from it.
Following are six instances in 2010 — presented in chronological order — in which our baseball team stopped doing what it had been doing to its undeniable detriment and took a different tack after realizing there was no winning in staying the course.
1) The Mets Hall of Fame & Museum Opens
If opening a new stadium with the barest of nods to the team-in-residence’s past was a boneheaded move (compounded by the overwhelming de facto homage to another team altogether), the Mets’ rectification of that original sin stands as Citi Field’s play of the year. The Mets Hall of Fame & Museum is everything a Mets fan and baseball fan could ask for. It shines an accurate light on the franchise’s colorful and textured history; it tells a complete (if mostly success-skewed) story to visitors in easily digestible chapters; it offers lessons remedial and advanced to fans of all Met-knowledge levels; and it puts anybody showing up for a Mets game in a great mood for the day or night at hand.
There might be a bit too much space devoted to selling high-end Objets d’art (what’s with the pricey decadent batting helmets?) and it’s a little obnoxious that you have to bull your way through almost all of the team store to exit, but those logistics don’t detract from the overall presentation. Impartation of information has never felt sunnier. The Mets, in this space, have rarely come across warmer.
In the same vein, the eight-year absence of Mets Hall of Fame selection and induction came to an end in 2010, and what a welcome sight it was to see four new members of the Hall receive the recognition they long ago deserved. Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Davey Johnson and Frank Cashen formed a formidable class and were the exact right group to kickstart what will hopefully be an ongoing tradition in the summers to come.
2) Ike Davis Replaces Mike Jacobs
Perhaps it was inevitable. Perhaps it was just a paper move, keeping top prospect Ike Davis, who had earned the starting first base job in St. Lucie, at Triple-A to start the season. Limit the kid’s service time, maintain control of him longer: that’s how these things are explained.
But what a message the Mets sent by trying to kill time at first with an over-the-hill Mike Jacobs for two full weeks of the 2010 season. That position was supposed to be Daniel Murphy’s for the short term (a questionable enough decision considering Davis emerged as the clear choice in Spring Training), but Murphy got hurt and the Mets turned to Jacobs to begin the season, a period in which the Mets went 4-8. Six starts at first for Jacobs, five for Fernando Tatis, one for the instantly forgettable Frank Catalanotto (in which the pride of Smithtown mysteriously batted cleanup)…all while Davis was tearing up the International League, with an OPS of 1.136 in his first ten games.
Ike sparked the Mets upon his April 19 recall, helping to key a 10-1 run and a rise into first-half contention that was unimaginable with Jacobs soaking up plate appearances. If the Mets didn’t maintain the 39-24 pace of Davis’s first two months in the majors, his presence at least provided him his necessary big-league baptism and the rest of us a chance to hope. Neither was insignificant.
The Mets were caught a little in-between in the first half of the season. If 2010 was going to be a year devoted to rebuilding, then there was no reason to not give Davis every possible shot to succeed. If 2010 was going to be viewed as a genuine opportunity to compete, there was nothing about sticking with Jacobs (or Tatis) that was going to help that cause. There was little to recommend Mike Jacobs, and it took the Mets not months but weeks to figure that out.
It took a little longer to give up on the viability of Gary Matthews, and then a few others who didn’t fit into sharp long-term planning, but the Jacobs/Davis tangle was the most vexing to sit through and the most satisfying to watch get sorted. Ike’s promotion and Mike’s designation for assignment was a bellwether for Met progress.
3) Mets Reach Out to Bloggers
Admittedly this is a boutique concern within the greater universe of Mets priorities, and certainly something of more specific interest to the likes of yours truly than to all Mets-lovers, but I wouldn’t undersell its significance. What are we Mets bloggers except fans who channel their passion with constancy, intensity and an audience? Very few of us make any kind of living from wielding this particular megaphone. We express ourselves about the Mets because we care too much not to. You read us and interact accordingly for the same basic reason.
Those who write these blogs and those who read them form a critical mass of what in marketing are called heavy users. The loosely knit blogging community — which very much encompasses the reader population (you there on the other side of this screen included) — are the Mets fans who are going to watch the most Mets games, who are going to attend the most Mets games, who are likely to invest in the most Mets stuff and are most readily going to offer their opinions, their applause and their criticism of everything about the Mets.
Somewhere in the past year, the Mets picked up on what had become a thriving segment of the media that covers their product. We started our blog in 2005. It wasn’t until 2008 that we learned anybody associated with the Mets knew (or acknowledged) we existed. It wasn’t until 2010 that anybody tapped us on the shoulder in an official capacity. By traditional media standards, it wasn’t much: press releases e-mailed to us; limited credentials issued to cover batting practice a couple of times; and the assurance that if we had a question, somebody somewhere would try to answer it. This would be no big deal to the guy at the Times or the News or ESPN New York. It was a huge deal to us, because we are not traditional media. We’re fans. None of us, I suspect, started our blogs as an entrée to working for the Times or the News or ESPN. We do it because we’re into the Mets in ways that transcend professional niceties like a paycheck. We’re into the Mets in ways that beat reporters probably couldn’t fathom while trying to meet their deadlines.
The relationship between our community and the Mets organization is a work-in-progress on both ends. I’d like to think because there is a relationship that I’m learning a few things that will inform what I write and that you’re a little better served as a result. But that’s the detached media analyst in me speaking. The fan in me thinks it’s cool I got to go on the field a couple of times, got to interview a couple of players, got to write about the experience because it was something different. But the thing is I’m still a fan. I don’t really want to have “sources” and cultivate “access”. I like that the Mets reached out to me and about a dozen of my blolleagues — talk to us, you’re talking to every Mets fan who reads our work. I suppose the same equation goes for talking to beat reporters, but with us, the proverbial middleman is eliminated. We process what we see, hear and learn as fans. Otherwise, because it’s not our job, we wouldn’t be doing it.
It couldn’t hurt, I’m almost certain.
4) Omar Minaya and Jerry Manuel Are Shown the Door
This was the most obvious manifestation of the realizations that defined 2010. The general manager whose machinations had once led an organization to the cusp of greatness was no longer receiving the benefit of the doubt. The manager whose teams’ shortcomings didn’t all necessarily land on his shoulders was allocated, at last, a good share of blame for all that had gone wrong on his watch.
Nobody was making much of a brief for retaining Minaya or Manuel for 2011. But few were banging the drums on their behalf after 2009, and they received full votes of confidence from ownership. To be fair (even though I had no desire to see either of them again after the disaster of ’09), it wasn’t out of the question that they couldn’t have joined forces to revive the franchise’s fortunes in 2010. They were given the opportunity. Revival didn’t occur. They were removed. It had to be done, and it was done.
That’s not always how it goes with the Mets. Let’s be glad this time it was.
5) Mets Recalibrate Ticket Prices
While the new general manager took off on his lengthy search for a new manager, the Mets went to great pains to announce they were cutting ticket prices. Some ticket prices, not all ticket prices. Some they’d be raising, but not that much. Others would be reclassified for a better buy. It may not have presented a perfect solution for everybody’s pocketbook or desires, but it was, I believe, a huge moment for the organization. It was when humility was penciled into the starting lineup as hubris was sent to the bench.
For two seasons of Citi Field, the Mets have positioned their ballpark as something we are lucky that they let us enjoy. They’ve priced their tickets accordingly. When it sunk in that the park was good, not great, and that the team was bad, not good, the tickets went largely unsold and/or unused. Facing a season in which competitive aspirations will likely be modest, the Mets realized their inventory needed to be moved in a more realistic manner. So the pricing came down…in many cases.
I don’t expect 2011’s marketing theme to be “We’re Not Very Good, But Come Out Anyway.” I understand there’s probably a segment of fans that just as soon have their hopes raised in December rather than have their immediate future honestly portrayed. But the Mets did the right and realistic thing by inching away from that overbearing vibe of We’re Great, Everything We Do Is Great, Give Us Your Money In Vast Quantities Immediately. It didn’t work. It hasn’t worked since 2006. It’s taken until 2010 to admit it wasn’t working. What matters is it’s been admitted.
They’ve improved the pricing. They seem intent on genuinely improving the product. The business will follow. Offering a better ballclub is a far more promising proposition than strongly implying we have one and you’re the idiots for not grasping it.
6) Sandy Alderson Sets the Stage for 2011
Hisanori Takahashi’s versatility as a starter, a middle reliever and a closer was the brightest pitching surprise of 2010 this side of R.A. Dickey. Pedro Feliciano’s been the pitching equivalent of a theater’s ghost light — always on. Chris Carter showed signs of developing into a lefty pinch-hitter deluxe in the dependable mold of Kranepool, Staub and Harris. Sean Green is still young, still live-armed and turned in some very decent outings toward season’s end. And John Maine started the last postseason win the Mets ever celebrated.
They all had something to recommend them for 2011, yet they’ve all been let go by Sandy Alderson since he became the head of baseball operations for the New York Mets. What’s more, Alderson has declared that two of the roster’s cornerstone players entering next year, Dickey and Jose Reyes, will not be approached for contract extensions in the coming months. And, oh yes, don’t expect any big-name, big-money signings any time soon.
You know what? Great. Not because I don’t want good players on the Mets, or players I like to stay with the Mets, but because Sandy Alderson deserves every chance to ascertain what this team needs. If it means saying goodbye to one of the staples of Met life in Feliciano because Alderson doesn’t want to commit too many years to his well-worn pitching arm; or not being swayed to an expensive, multiyear commitment to Takahashi based on a relatively small sample; or writing off one of the good guys in Carter because maybe we can do better than a one-dimensional batter taking up 1/25th of the roster; or not nailing down a careerlong agreement with my favorite player in Reyes because who knows if we’ve seen the best of Jose, I can live with that.
The Mets need more whole than parts. There have been some nice parts who played some nice games these past few years, but it hasn’t added up to anything positive along the Mets’ bottom line. Similarly, I was juiced to welcome Jason Bay last winter and Francisco Rodriguez the winter before that, but I don’t always have to have a new toy for Christmas (especially considering how quickly both of those items turned defective).
It’s not thrilling to think of the Mets in terms of budgets and financial maneuverability, but it is their reality for 2011. Constructing an optimal jettison strategy for Luis Castillo and Oliver Perez is part of the Mets’ agenda. I’d be happier if Alderson would simply make them disappear this instant, but there is logic to getting them to Spring Training and seeing what they can do and who they might entice. If this sounds like a double-standard…we’d be steaming at Omar for not dumping them once and for all…that’s OK, too. Omar expended his benefit of the doubt. Sandy’s has only just begun.
This isn’t a perpetual bargain with the current powers that be, mind you. If everything a year from now amounts to poor-mouthing and rationalizing and cutting ties with beloved figures, and it all come out as some mutated form of Moneyball executed for saving’s sake, then Alderson & Co. will be held to the same standards as Minaya’s or any other regime. For now, though, the new front office represents the most crucial Met realization: that what came before wasn’t making the Mets better and that it’s time to try something else that stands a chance of doing exactly that.
It’s as if Realpolitik has replaced magical thinking.
FAITH AND FEAR’S PREVIOUS
NIKON CAMERA PLAYERS OF THE YEAR
2005: The WFAN broadcast team of Gary Cohen and Howie Rose
2006: Shea Stadium
2007: Uncertainty
2008: The 162-Game Schedule
2009: Two Hands
RELATED ARTICLES WORTH YOUR TIME
A behind-the-scenes tour of the Mets Hall of Fame, by Bleacher/Report’s Ash Marshall, here.
A happy season-ending interaction with one of the departed Mets, by Susan Laney Spector of Perfect Pitch, here.
An outstanding take on why sports teams have to take sports bloggers seriously, by one of the best sports bloggers I know, here.
by Greg Prince on 3 December 2010 10:40 am Welcome to Flashback Friday: Take Me Out to 34 Ballparks, a celebration, critique and countdown of every major league ballpark one baseball fan has been fortunate enough to visit in a lifetime of going to ballgames.
BALLPARK: Tiger Stadium
HOME TEAM: Detroit Tigers
VISITS: 1
VISITED: June 30, 1997
CHRONOLOGY: 19th of 34
RANKING: 3rd of 34
Across from Tiger Stadium, Mr. Smallwood stops at a liquor store owned, he says, by his brother-in-law, a little Fort Knox of steel mesh and heavy bullet-proof glass. Across the avenue the big stadium hulks up white and lifeless. A message on its marquee says simply, “Sorry Folks. Have a Good One.”
—Frank Bascombe, The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford
In April 1988, the Tiger Stadium Fan Club literally gathered around its ballpark to give it a 1,200-person group hug. The occasion was the stadium’s 76th birthday, but the impetus was preservation to ensure it would enjoy many more. The Tiger Stadium Fan Club existed to keep Tiger Stadium from being replaced, torn down and banished to memory.
After visiting the object of their affection nine years later, I could completely understand their mission. Had they wanted to re-enact the scene in 1997, I would not have let go of Tiger Stadium, either. I would have gladly inserted myself within a human chain to keep it alive as long as it could stand. And you might have had to have pried me away from it with a court order and then some.
I am not nor have I ever been a Detroit Tigers fan. But count me as a spiritual member of any organization dedicated to Tiger Stadium. I would have hugged her had it occurred to me as feasible. For what it’s worth, I kissed her goodbye on my way out.
Literally.
Tiger Stadium. Sweet, embraceable you. I guess all we had was a one-night stand, but you still bring a smile to my face and a pang to my heart. It was all I could do to see you once, before it was decided you had to go. I’m sure glad I got there just in time.
***
Statistically speaking, my date with Tiger Stadium was the 203rd-to-last game in its 88-season history, so there was a little time left, but not enough. That I knew. I didn’t know all that much about Tiger Stadium otherwise, except that if I was ever going to see it before it let the cats out, I’d have to haul ass and bone up, in that order.
The hauling, as was so often the case over the course of a decade-and-a-half, was facilitated by my vocation as a beverage magazine writer. In the summer of 1997, Stephanie was a newly graduated MSW — she had taken two years from her social work career to get a degree in social work so she could be officially called a social worker (go figure). Our ballpark trips, hence, tended to be more finagled than planned during that period, and finagling ballpark trips through work had become a finely honed practice for me.
First step: Find a sanctioned reason to be in Detroit.
Had I written for a car magazine, that would have been simple, except I know little about cars and can barely stand to drive. There were, nonetheless, a couple of decent beverage prospects in the Detroit metro area, but they themselves weren’t enough to merit a full-blown professional visit. That’s where the city of Milwaukee came in.
Miller Brewing was hosting a press event on a Thursday and Friday. That was totally sanctionable. I volunteered my services to cover it and then let it be known in the office that there were some outstanding companies to visit in nearby Detroit if I stayed the weekend in the Midwest. How nearby is Detroit to Milwaukee? I have no idea, but I was operating on the New Yorker’s View of the World and knew my editor would do the same.
And, though I didn’t mention this loudly where I worked, 25 other New Yorkers were heading to Motown. This was the first year of Interleague play, and the genius schedulemakers gave the world the matchup for which it had no idea it had been panting: the Mets of the National League East versus the Tigers then of the American League East.
The agenda was set:
• Fly to Milwaukee Thursday afternoon.
• Listen attentively to Miller Thursday night and all day Friday.
• Fly rude Northwest Airlines to Detroit Saturday.
• Visit with a Troy, Mich.-based juice company Monday afternoon.
• Spend quality time with a downtown Detroit craft brewer Tuesday morning.
• Fly home right after.
And since we’re in the vicinity anyway, it would be a shame to pass up the Mets and Tigers at the legendary corner of Michigan and Trumbull Monday night, right? And since I was traveling on official editorial business, I could purchase an extra LGA-MKE-DTW-LGA ticket for Stephanie on my own dime without it being too much of a burden. I’d also pick up the Mets-Tigers tickets, sport that I am.
That, my friends, was a plan.
***
The Brewers were on the road during our brief Wisconsin stay (which normally I would have held against Miller, but I’d already seen County Stadium), yet suffice it to say that once my work there was done, Brewtown served its purpose as the viaduct through which we’d reach our key destination without my piling up bills or burning off precious vacation time. We arrived in Detroit on Saturday, rented a car — despite my driving hiccups, I didn’t see how I could alight in the Motor City and not handle a Ford — and set up camp in adjacent Dearborn.
As part of our non-beverage/non-baseball weekend interlude, we hit a local mall and it was there, at Waldenbooks, that I started to bone up in earnest. Other than a few bullet points, I did not consider myself adequately informed about the Tigers or Tiger Stadium, so I purchased several volumes to bring me up to speed. I don’t do this in every city, but with the team having been around so long and the park being around not much longer, I decided I owed both that much.
Beyond exploring the exploits of Tigers from Ty to Trammell, most of what I took away from my crash course of reading put me off a bit despite the trouble I went to find my way to Detroit. I had a vague idea about riots thirty years before and the urban blight accelerated in its wake, but my self-imposed homework got me a little nervous in the present day.
From Detroit Tigers: Club and Community, 1945-1995 by Patrick Harrigan:
• “Local television shows made crime their lead story, day after day, night after night. One could easily conclude that everyone in Detroit was either a criminal or victim and that anyone venturing into the city from suburban havens did so at extreme risk.”
• “Violence increased in the stands and around Tiger Stadium as well. […] The image of Detroit was that of a violent city. Each episode seemed to confirm that imagine in the popular mind.”
• “[T]he notion of Tiger Stadium as an unsafe place to visit became part of the mythology surrounding Detroit.”
Um, I wondered, they don’t still have riots around here, do they? I needn’t have worried about being mobbed or looted my one night at Tiger Stadium (and it wasn’t like a World Series celebration was about to go awry), but the despair that had wracked the city since the 1960s was still very much in evidence. You couldn’t avoid it if you looked around even a little.
Too much sociology for one baseball fan seeking out one baseball game.
***
Monday, as scheduled, we showed up somewhere off 16 Mile Road in Troy, at the juice company offices, me as reporter, Stephanie, per earlier jury-rigged journeys, as photographer. (“A small outfit like us rating a reporter and a photographer? My goodness!”) The interview, the pictures and the lunch — seafood and a good bit of it — was successful enough, though just after we parted ways with our subject, it began to storm. For the first time in my life, I saw lightning strike a utility pole transformer. Damn thing was practically eviscerated on the spot.
I hoped it wasn’t an omen for Monday night.
***
The skies calmed and the only thing it was raining when we arrived at Tiger Stadium was a surprising dose of familiarity.
“You’re Mets fans? WE’RE Mets fans! Mets are doin’ great, right? They’re not gonna lose another game all year!”
The first people we ran into after parking in a lot across Michigan Avenue from the ballpark were, as they helpfully identified themselves, Mets fans. A couple of college-age or thereabouts kids, probably at the same stage of their lives that I was the first time I journeyed to Fenway. Their enthusiasm was understandable, as this was 1997, the year the Bobby Valentine Mets broke free of their predecessors’ stubborn misery and insinuated themselves into Wild Card contention. I was pretty pumped up about them myself, if not quite as optimistic that they’d finish 128-34.
Surely the Mets were an attraction for us on this trip. I witnessed their first-ever Interleague game, versus the Red Sox, seventeen days earlier at Shea and I was still high from taking in, on Channel 9, their rousing Subway Series victory two weeks ago — Dave Mlicki Night in the Bronx. The Interleague curiosity tour continued here.
But when I turned around and saw where the Mets would be playing…this bright, white baseball fortress that had withstood all that progress had thrown its way for generations…I have to admit that my Mets, smack in the middle of what had already developed into one of my all-time favorite Met seasons, took a back seat in my priorities. For the next several hours I’d be all about Tiger Stadium.
Figuratively and literally.
***
Corktown, as the neighborhood there had long been known, didn’t appear to be much of a neighborhood anymore. A Tiger game was in the offing, yet there was almost nothing going on around it. The drive in from Dearborn had revealed the same — closed stores, vacant buildings, bad times more stubborn than Bud Harrelson’s, Jeff Torborg’s and Dallas Green’s Mets combined had provided. Even the roads, which you’d intuitively figure would be among the best in the nation given the prevalence of the auto industry, were, given the depleted tax base, the worst I’d ever traversed.
But again, enough with the sociology. Focus — historic ballpark right in front of you.
***
Tiger Stadium was built in 1912 as Navin Field. It became Briggs Stadium in 1935 and wasn’t Tiger Stadium until 1961. It was still here, still where the Tigers played baseball. This was 1997…stunning to consider there was a straight line that led back to 1912. For that matter, they’d been playing baseball at this corner since 1896, at Bennett Park…even more stunning. There was a plaque down Trumbull Avenue hailing Ty Cobb — Greatest Tiger of All; A Genius in Spikes. Ty Cobb doesn’t get such good PR these days, but he did hit .368 as a Tiger from 1905 to 1926 (before finishing up as a Philadelphia Athletic and lowering his lifetime average a couple of points after a couple of years). The Cobb plaque was installed in 1963. Just the plaque had been up longer than all of Shea Stadium.
Ty Cobb played here. Hank Greenberg, of whom Ralph Kiner always spoke so fondly, played here. Hundreds and hundreds of Tigers I’d never heard of, and hundreds more I had, played here. The Tigers would play here tonight. They’d play the Mets.
As I comprehended those realities, there appeared every likelihood Ty Cobb’s old ballpark would hit .400 for me.
***
There is a recurring if fleeting slight note of discord in my marriage concerning starting times of baseball games we are to attend together. Let’s say there’s one for which we hold tickets and the first pitch is scheduled for a little past 7 o’clock. I’ll be asked by my wife when we’re going to leave for the ballpark. Well, I’ll say, I’d like to get there around six…
“Six? Why so early?”
“Because I want to get there.”
Sound logic, right?
For Tiger Stadium, this undercurrent of patience-testing was suspended from the marital conversation. Stephanie got why we were in Detroit, and it wasn’t for juice in the afternoon and beer the next morning. Arriving early was endorsed heartily. Part of it was forged by a mutual desire to not get lost on the way to the middle of this particular city (though tooling straight east on Michigan Avenue from Dearborn made that impossible), but most of it was an understanding that if you only get one night inside Tiger Stadium, you make it count.
I saw a game at Tiger Stadium, but it was secondary to what I saw at Tiger Stadium before the game began. I saw Tiger Stadium, as much of it as I could. Every pregame minute was precious to me, so I wrapped myself up in every one of them. I was so very antsy to explore, Stephanie didn’t even try to keep up. She suggested I take the camera and go off into the Tiger wilds, as it were.
***
This must have been what was on the other side of Ray Kinsella’s corn in Field of Dreams. Not an ideal analogy, since Ray had a letter-perfect baseball diamond in full view of his house, but the deeper I delved into Tiger Stadium — strolling from our lower-level seats on the third base side all the way around toward right — the more I felt I was onto something that only a few lucky spirits could see.
This wasn’t Detroit. This was heaven. This really was. This was a 1912 ballpark coming to life for a 1997 ballgame. This was green grass and blue paint and blue seats and orange seats (though not as many as the blue and not as orange as Shea’s) coalescing beneath a milky white sky. It wasn’t raining but it never fully cleared up, which was all right. Late-day, late-June sun was unnecessary. Tiger Stadium deserved the majesty an unthreatening overcast sky lent it.
We stayed dry, but we were drenched in mood. In those precious minutes before the game, Tiger Stadium was solemn and dignified. Its posts and girders had seen it all, even if they blocked who knows how many fans from seeing everything. Nobody would ever build a ballpark with precisely these kinds of obstructions today, but they made perfect sense here. The posts held up the upper deck, and the upper deck was right on top of the lower deck. Everybody was leaning into the field.
Nothing about Tiger Stadium needed to be a rumor. That famous porch in right field loomed near enough to pat you on the back. Those light towers…I remembered Reggie Jackson smashing a ball off one of the transformers in the ’71 All-Star Game — the National League was practically eviscerated on the spot. The retired number signs may have been recent, but two of the three honorees were ancient. Kaline, 6, I remember from my childhood (I was quite proud of myself at eleven years old for noticing Al Kaline was both a Detroit Tiger and a battery type); Gehringer (2) and Greenberg (5) were names from Baseball Digest mostly. This is where they played. Later in the summer of 1997, the Tigers were going to get around to retiring 16 for Hal Newhouser, a.k.a. Prince Hal.
Hal Newhouser was from the war years and just after. My baseball-averse father (who probably asked “why so early?”) was dragged by his father (who probably answered “because I want to get there”) to Yankee Stadium on Memorial Day 1945 for a doubleheader between the Yankees and the Tigers and saw Hal Newhouser pitch the second game. My father sat shvitzing and presumably unimpressed among 70,906 that day and drank, he told me, more sarsaparilla than he would ultimately care for in an effort to keep cool. That became, by choice, his last baseball game at Yankee Stadium.
Yankee Stadium from 1945 was barely the same Yankee Stadium when Dave Mlicki held forth in 1997, yet the Briggs Stadium to which Prince Hal Newhouser came home after the Tigers’ extended eastern swing that May and June was still exactly where Prince Hal Newhouser’s old club played ball five-plus decades later. And I was inside it, slurping up its muted ambiance, its twilight dignity and its reassuring blues like it was ice-cold sarsaparilla on the hottest Memorial Day in memory.
***
Oh, and then there were the Mets in their blue NEW YORK warmup jerseys. I was so busy and happy snapping pictures of the roof and the beams and all that cobalt shading that the Mets wandering around for batting practice almost escaped my notice. But at Tiger Stadium, everything is in reach…even your favorite team wandering far from home.
First Met I see: pitching coach Bob Apodaca, schlepping an equipment bag. I click. Next: red hot ace Bobby Jones, 12-4 and due at next week’s All-Star game in Cleveland. He’s one of the few recognizable Mets on our stealth contenders, so he draws a cluster of autograph-seekers. I click anyway. Not a great shot.
Backing off from Jonesmania, I wander a little more and another Met trudges down the right field line toward the diamond undisturbed. I recognize him. He’s Cory Lidle, dependable rookie reliever and emergency spot starter. I saw him start eight days ago at Shea against the Pirates. He wasn’t good at it, but the Mets won, so I think nothing but good thoughts of Cory Lidle.
There’s him and there’s me and there’s nobody else within thirty yards of us (at least nobody else who’s interested in a rookie reliever with a low profile). So I hustle down through the grandstand and disturb him near the railing in short right.
“Cory! Cory! Can I get a picture?”
Cory Lidle shrugged. Looked like he could have done without it, but he stopped and stood in place. I wouldn’t say he posed. I snapped.
“Thanks! Thanks! Great pitching, man! Great pitching!”
“Thanks.”
He seemed slightly but sincerely appreciative. It was all I could have asked for.
Cory Lidle returned to his trudging. I floated just a little higher.
***
When I got back to our seats, I couldn’t shut up about what I saw. I got such great pictures! I got the right field porch! And the retired numbers! And those poles! And Bob Apodaca! And Bobby Jones, though not so good! AND I TALKED TO CORY LIDLE!
I was, for the record, 34 years old, but I had never approached a Met prior to a Mets game before, let alone gotten an up-close and personal portrait.
Ohmigod, this place is great! Isn’t it great?!
Stephanie liked it plenty. She did a little looking around while I was gone and was glad I liked it so much, but what she’d really like right about now, as BP was ending and the grounds crew was manicuring and what crowd there would be — barely 15,000 (Interleague fever mysteriously subsiding) — was filling in, was something to eat. I volunteered to get it. It was a chance to see more of the place.
I stood in a concession line in the relatively new Tiger Plaza that aligned with Michigan Avenue while the national anthem played, which made me a little self-conscious. Instinctively, I took off my cap. Nobody else did, so I put it back on. Seems if you can’t see the flagpole in center filed, you’re not really obligated to acknowledge the bombs bursting in air, et al. Once I ordered and paid for our dinner (I opted for pizza given my gastrointestinal issues with hot dogs in those days…and given that you couldn’t miss Little Caesars at Tiger Stadium since the Little Caesars mogul owned the team), I hustled back to our seats. I didn’t want to miss a minute more of staring at that field.
My rush was so pronounced, that I accidentally kicked a neighbor’s frozen rum punch concoction out of its cup and onto the ground. I was profusely apologetic — more so than necessary, probably, because I was wearing a Mets cap and I didn’t want to draw too much ire from those violent home team fans. No violence occurred, but I did race back to the concourse to buy the man a fresh punch.
***
The game was not a good one from the perspective of Mets fans who traveled from New York through Milwaukee to attend. The Tigers scored two off Mark Clark in the first and never looked back. Tiger starter Justin Thompson toyed with the suddenly tame Mets. Detroit’s lead stretched to 5-0 by the fifth and was blown open with five more in the sixth.
I can’t say I didn’t mind or didn’t care. The Mets had entered the night two behind the Marlins for the Wild Card lead and we were about to lose ground. Yet let’s just say if you’re going to watch your team go down in flames, doing so at a gorgeous 85-year-old ballpark against an opponent for whom you hold absolutely no animus — and from whose fans none flows toward you and your cap — this is the ideal situation for it.
So we were losing 10-0. So what? There’d be other Mets games. This was it for us and Tiger Stadium. This place…it was a place. It was of Detroit, of course, yet it could have been in its own city on the map. Tiger Stadium was too substantial to be so close to defunctitude. It was bigger than its generational peers, surely more hulking than darling Wrigley and lyric Fenway, but it was no less precious.
How could this place where we were watching a baseball game as fans had watched baseball games for 85 seasons previous to this one not be that place any longer?
***
With the score out of hand, we decided to do a bit of mutual exploring upstairs. Let’s see what it looks like from there. It looked great as night fell on the upper deck. It seemed more exciting up there, too. Probably had something to do with the home run that was launched off Joe Crawford during our cameo. A standing ovation ensued, which struck me as a pretty intense reaction for taking the game from 10-0 to 12-0. I was so not paying attention to the events on the field that I hadn’t noticed the home run was hit by Bobby Higginson, and that it was his third of the night. Higginson would score four runs in all and collect seven RBI, including a grand slam that also somehow evaded my scorn. The Tigers would roar to a 14-0 victory over the Mets.
Like I said, so what?
***
We ducked out a little ahead of the crowd, in the eighth, not because of the Mets’ deficit and not because we were bored with the ballpark. Driving at night is even worse for me than driving in daylight, and the idea of having to navigate a rental car in a jumble of exiting vehicles made me even more tense than usual, so I wanted to beat the traffic not for convenience sake, but for my own easily rattled nerves.
I walked out of Tiger Stadium for the last time. We had just met and now I’d be leaving. Talk about a whirlwind romance — three hours and then I’m hitting the pavement…wham, bam, thank you Bobby Higginson. I had been a stranger in these parts at six o’clock. It wasn’t much after nine now, yet I was already signed up, at least mentally, as a lifelong member of the Tiger Stadium Fan Club.
Sweet, embraceable Tiger Stadium…I could have hugged her, I really could have, but I was about 1,199 spiritual brethren shy of executing it effectively, thus I opted for the next best display of affection: my lips to my three middle right fingers, my three middle right fingers to her regal ivory exterior. Goodbye, old girl, I told her in tones low enough so as not to be heard by anyone, not even Stephanie. I’m glad we got to meet.
***
The Tigers swept the Mets that week, finished out 1997, 1998 and 1999 at Tiger Stadium and then put the building and 6,873 regular-season games played there behind them. They moved to one of those modern retro palaces that’s attractive enough on television but broke my heart every time I saw video of it for its first five years. The Tiger organization made noises about how it needed what became known as Comerica Park to be competitive. In their fourth season there, the Tigers lost 119 games.
I shouldn’t tell other teams or towns their business, but how do you just walk away from Tiger Stadium? Whatever its antiquities, whatever challenges its location presented, it survived 88 seasons, and it thrived whenever its ballclub provided a show worthy of its setting. I still can’t get over how something so beautiful became so abandoned. Tiger Stadium stood unoccupied for a decade before they got around to tearing it down. Now and again there’d be a picture of it all by its lonesome — no game today, no game tonight, no game tomorrow — and I wondered what the hell was wrong with everybody.
What does it say about a country that as a matter of course turns its back on its Tiger Stadiums? How is it that you have something so perfect for baseball, yet baseball people couldn’t figure out how to brand it like it was Fenway or Wrigley, so they just moved out and took up residence in a structure that, whatever its bells, whistles and whatnot, might as well have been called Generica Park?
One of these years we’ll get out there again and check out Comerica and I imagine it’ll be lovely. Yet I’ll never go to Tiger Stadium again. Nobody will.
I still can’t get over that.
Another irreplaceable Michigan treasure, Dave Murray, presents another installment of the Topps 60 Greatest Cards of All Time, Nos. 20-11, here.
by Greg Prince on 2 December 2010 12:56 pm Blame my predilection for allowing particular dates to stick to my brain for knowing this, but it was twenty years ago tomorrow — December 3, 1990 — that I last typed anything more substantive than a mailing address on an electric typewriter.
Not just any typewriter, but the Brother model I was given by my sister as a high school graduation present. I lugged it to college and, much to the consternation of various roommates and dormitory neighbors, clack-clack-clacked my way to a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communications, with a minor in History. When four years were up, I lugged it back home and took up my professional writing career on it. I’d type my stories and Express Mail them to editors or slip them into a briefcase and drop them off at magazine offices in the city or on Long Island. My copy was marked up (not too harshly, I hope) and passed along to typesetters. That’s the way it was done.
Then it wasn’t. I’d occasionally be asked to drop by this or that publication and write my story on-site on one of their computers. It would really help, I was told. Oh sure, I said, no problem. Then I transitioned from freelancing to a staff job, where, except for addressing the occasional envelope (because nobody could ever figure out how to work that with the printer), we did everything on our desktop computers…first a Cado (from which I once watched the words on my screen literally blow up, with smoke rising from the monitor), then, as if to finally get with modernity, a Mac.
By then, the Brother typewriter wasn’t called on much, except if I was home from the job, sick or something, and I wanted to get some work done. I did not own a computer yet, so it was clack or nothing. Twenty years ago tomorrow, a combination of car trouble and encroaching illness kept me on the couch. But I had this story that had to go to our art department the next day, so as long as I had my notes with me, I set up my old typewriter on my even older typewriter stand (inherited from my father’s office once he gave up the space) and typed my piece. Next day, I was back in the office and typed it again on the computer.
That was it for my Brother. It was back in its case, cord detached, placed aside the typewriter stand which we used for our phone and answering machine in our first apartment. When we moved, we repurposed the typewriter stand in our new kitchen as the staging area for our toaster oven, while the typewriter slid into a dark corner in a back room that we never used for much beyond storage. Fast-forward a dozen years, when it was time to move again, and one of the last items whose destiny was left for me to decide was the Brother.
The typewriter stand was on the curb. The toaster oven had long ago heated its final pot pie. Our last answering machine was giving way to voice mail. We owned a computer. I stared at the typewriter for a minute. I thought of what it meant to me, how it ushered me into adulthood as much as any single inanimate object could. I contemplated where it took me and why it had been the ideal graduation gift 23 years earlier.
Then I threw it out. What the hell was I going to do with an electric typewriter in the 21st century? If I ran into a computer problem, I could type on this…and then what? Mail the piece of paper to the Internet? It just lost its utility. Time marched on. Something that was a key part of what I had attempted and achieved no longer had a place in my life.
In that spirit, good luck John Maine.
|
|
