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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 7 October 2010 3:40 am Geez, Roy Halladay’s good. Or as one of my dear friends in all matters Mets put it, “Can’t believe you wanted him to pitch the no-hitter. F history, F the Phillies.”
Normally, yes, but this was something F’ing special. The Reds weren’t coming back. Games aren’t over until they’re over and all that, but it was pretty F’ing obvious Cincinnati could only dream of maintaining high hopes in this one. We’re nine outs, six outs, three outs from watching the only postseason no-hitter anybody has ever seen on color television. I know it’s the Phillies, I know we hate them in Yankeesque proportions, I know it’s anathema to not want anvils falling on every red-capped head at Citizens Bank Park — pitcher’s mound included — but it wasn’t like the Mets were gonna pick up a half-game in any of this.
Or, if I may invoke the 1992 election for the second time in a week, the first George Bush settled with minimal hesitation into his chair on the Truman Balcony to watch the fireworks show hailing the imminent inauguration of Bill Clinton, the man who was sending him packing from the White House. What the hell, the outgoing president said to a companion, we’ve got the best view in town for this.
Mets fans have grown accustomed to great views of postseason baseball on TV just as we have no-hitters beamed in from distant precincts. So if the two things we can’t have are right in front of us, we might as well sit back and enjoy as best we can.
I enjoyed watching Halladay close shop on the Reds. What an exclamation point on this lower-case year of the pitcher. What a game of catch he was having with Carlos Ruiz. It looked quite a bit like the night Armando Galarraga was dealing to the Indians, but those were the Indians. These were the Reds, from the hard-hitting portion of Ohio. This was the playoffs, for goodness sake. This was a brilliant pitcher who toiled in relative obscurity — also known as Canada — for more than a decade. Shouldn’t stepping up to the big stage make a fella a wee bit nervous?
Didn’t seem to bother Halladay. As the game wore on, he grew untouchable. The only Reds bat that remotely threatened his exquisiteness was a bat left on the ground. Brandon Phillips whacked Halladay’s last pitch a good 80 or 90 inches and his lumber threatened to tangle up immortality the way Jim Joyce got in the way of Galarraga’s. But stuff like that never seems to work against the Phillies, does it? Ruiz pounced on the ball, threw it to first and Halladay completed the no-hitter in as mussless, fussless fashion as one could imagine.
The man was so calm afterwards. Perhaps he was dazed or, more likely, he’s immensely professional. Halladay gave interview after interview indicating all the satisfaction of a man who had gotten his throwing in before running wind sprints in Clearwater in February. He didn’t seem unhappy (he’s not Steve Carlton) but he kept his emotions in check. Good move. It’s Game One. The Reds were through before they even started Wednesday, but even these short series can become long series, and Cincy — league leaders in home runs, runs scored, batting average and OPS — has been known to hit.
Just not off Roy Halladay, just not in Game One of this particular NLDS.
The Phillies were pretty good a year ago, but all they had by way of reliable starters was Cliff Lee (who’s still pretty good), and they traded him. Yet here they are, deeper than ever in the pitching department. Roy Halladay replaced Lee. Cole Hamels returned from his sabbatical of immaturity and, for good measure, they nabbed Roy Oswalt at the trading deadline. If the no-hit bid had been Hamels’ or Oswalt’s, I probably would have passed on history. Hamels has a big mouth. Oswalt once brushed back Cliff Floyd a little too feistily. Halladay? All I really knew about him before 2010 (beyond his numbers) was now and then I’d flip by YES when the Yankees were in Toronto and he’d be winning 6-1. I have nothing against this guy beyond his uniform and how good he is in it against us.
But, again, we’re not there. The only no-hitter we were a part of last night happened 35 years ago and, per usual, it didn’t actually happen. After the traditional October Twinplosion occurred on TBS, I discovered Mets Yearbook: 1975 was reairing on SNY. It was expert propaganda in its time and of course it holds up beautifully. Mike Vail, Roy Staiger, Mike Phillips, Ken Sanders…good lord, we’re going to be great in ’76! In the midst of all this spectacular futurizing, there’s Randy Tate, the fourth starter in a rotation that begins with Tom Seaver, Jon Matlack and Jerry Koosman. Tate was a 5-13 pitcher in his one and only major league season, running up an ERA of 4.45, but he did have his moments in 1975, just about all of them one night at Shea against Montreal.
As the highlight film elaborates and a shot of the scoreboard illustrates, Randy Tate has pitched a no-hitter through seven innings. The Shea crowd of 10,720 is applauding heartily as Tate strikes out his first batter, Jose Morales, in the top of the eighth. What the film doesn’t show is a 12-year-old version of myself, in the bathtub, hanging on Bob Murphy’s every word. No Mets pitcher has ever thrown a no-hitter, but young Randy Tate now stands five outs… And with that reality acknowledged over WNEW-AM, Jim Lyttle singles. There goes the no-hitter, but the Mets are still winning 3-0. Four batters later (Pepe Mangual, Jim Dwyer, Gary Carter and Mike Jorgensen — every one of them eventually a Met), Tate is on the wrong end of a 4-3 score. When the game is over, his record falls to 4-10.
But not to worry. Randy Tate, according to the 1975 highlight film, will be a big part of the Mets’ plans for years to come.
In a sense, he is. I’m still waiting for someone to pick up his final five outs. I’m still waiting for the first no-hitter in Mets history. Therefore, I’m still amenable to generally rooting for no-hitters that don’t do us direct damage in lieu of relishing one of our own. We have none of our own 35 years since Randy Tate couldn’t put away the Expos — eighth in the National League in home runs, tenth in runs scored and OPS, last in batting average.
It would have been pretty F’ing special if Randy Tate could have no-hit the Montreal Expos on August 4, 1975.
by Greg Prince on 5 October 2010 2:34 pm George H.W. Bush, one of six U.S. presidents to have served while a Wilpon has been running the Mets, once attempted to combat perceptions that he was oblivious to people’s problems by declaring, “Message: I care.” Bill Clinton, the president who succeeded him when that message proved unconvincing, famously empathized with Americans, “I feel your pain.”
Constituencies don’t want to hear that you get it. They want to know that you get it.
Fred Wilpon and Jeff Wilpon, as of yesterday, seem to get it.
Monday morning, the Band-Aid that inadequately covered the wounds inflicted by every Mets mishap that has transpired since the night of October 19, 2006 was ripped from the Body Metropolitan in one quick (if you’ll excuse the expression) yank. The manager was removed. The general manager was removed. As twinbills go, this was a double beheader sweep.
You of course recognize the concomitant firings of Omar Minaya and Jerry Manuel as a big story, but you may not realize that it’s essentially unprecedented in these parts. The Mets have dismissed skippers before and they’ve axed GMs before, but they’ve never done it on the same day before — never. Changes in front office and on-field administration have occurred in close proximity a couple of times, but they had never previously been coupled like this.
It’s not a trivial distinction.
I don’t believe the ownership of this baseball team, when given time to prepare, uses any words it hasn’t chosen extremely carefully. Fred Wilpon sat in front of a room full of cameras, microphones and notebooks Monday and said these past four years have been the most “painful” he’s experienced in the three decades he’s been an owner of the New York Mets. Jeff Wilpon added, “We failed.” Those words were designed to leave no room for interpretation. Neither were their actions.
There were no rationalizations, no paeans to patience in the face of a crying need for urgency. An organization that has reliably hobbled itself with half-measures…
• not sacking Davey Johnson when it was clear Frank Cashen was itching to deliver the pink slip;
• waiting so long to split GM duties between Joe McIlvaine and Al Harazin that McIlvaine slipped away to San Diego;
• replacing Harazin with McIlvaine seven weeks after Dallas Green replaced Jeff Torborg;
• supplanting McIlvaine with Steve Phillips while leaving McIlvaine’s manager, Bobby Valentine, firmly in place;
• allowing Phillips to undermine Valentine by taking away three of his coaches;
• bouncing Valentine while retaining Phillips;
• attempting to lure Minaya back from Montreal after one year away with an offer to share responsibilities with Jim Duquette;
• getting rid of Art Howe without actually sending him away;
• flying Willie Randolph across the country and giving him one more game before telling him at midnight local time (3 AM in New York) that he was being let go;
• and steering Minaya out of the spotlight after his embarrassing attack on Adam Rubin’s character, but letting him linger in his high-profile job for more than a year
…went the distance this time.
The next general manager won’t be saddled with a manager he didn’t hire. The next manager won’t have to wonder quite as much what dysfunctional situation he’s walking into. The next GM and the next manager will be coming in together, as close to arm-in-arm as they possibly could. It may not represent an instant formula for winning, but it’s worth trying.
Everything before this did fail. And it was painful.
If Fred Wilpon carefully chose to call 2007 through 2010 the worst of the worst of a tenure that’s included oldies but goodies like 1993 and 2002, it may have been for effect (message: he cares), but it wasn’t without cause. The Mets have played worse under previous Wilpon-approved regimes, but in ways tangible and otherwise, they may never have been worse than they’ve been lately.
Somewhere on a legal pad at Citi Field, it’s quite possible someone jotted down the notation that 79-83 was the best losing record the Mets have ever posted; that at four games under .500 — a net difference of two — they weren’t really that far away; that they did contend until the All-Star break in 2010; and that we sure have had a run of bad luck that is bound to change. If everything’s gone this wrong for this long and we didn’t completely disintegrate into the Pittsburgh Pirates, then maybe we’re doing something right, and what we need to do is make a few adjustments and otherwise stay the course.
That would have been a half-measure. A half-assed measure, at that. It’s what I would have expected out of the Mets after 2009. It’s what we got. It led us in 2010 to the best losing record the Mets have ever posted.
Which isn’t progress. Which isn’t close to progress. Progress is admitting that the Mets have failed for four consecutive seasons. It’s not a selling point, but it is reality, and since selling points weren’t exactly filling the new ballpark, truthfulness as a first step toward genuine progress — along with maybe not failing in a fifth consecutive season — is most welcome.
I’m guessing what’s made 2007-2010 most painful to Fred Wilpon is that the Mets so seemed to be on the right track in 2005 and 2006. This — collapse, collapse; debacle, debacle — wasn’t supposed to happen to them again, certainly not so soon. Almost every team endures up cycles and down cycles. The Mets’ up cycle, however, stalled after only two seasons. In the four seasons that followed, the Mets averaged 81.5 wins per year, but nobody who has watched them closely (or even casually) since Called Strike Three could possibly call them winners over that span.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Omar Minaya was supposed to prevent this. A high payroll, supported by the revenue streams provided by a heavily viewed proprietary television network and a well-attended state-of-the-art 21st century stadium, was supposed to prevent this. 2006, when the Mets won the National League Eastern Division, SNY debuted and Citi Field began to rise, was supposed to be a launching point…a template. You would have figured your only October press conferences for years to come would be the kind MLB makes managers and starting pitchers do before and after postseason games.
The leading indicators and the great vibes that were in such evidence in October 2006 turned out, alas, to be an aberration. Everything that went wrong before 2005 and 2006 started going wrong again after 2005 and 2006. The New Mets were at best a passing phenomenon…a mirage. The Mets bought a bunch of the right players while they were still capable of performing at something approaching their best; they mixed them with the only two star players they’ve managed to produce in the past generation; and they sprinkled in a few key ancillary parts. The results were wonderful.
Then they were over with. On the surface, the Mets proceeded after October 19, 2006 in the same manner they had before. They weren’t afraid to spend, they sought complementary components, they continued to nurture their two homegrown stars. It just didn’t work as well. Then it worked hardly at all. The Mets who were going to be special deteriorated into disappointments, heartbreakers, buffoons and, at last, utter ordinariness. The afterglow of 2006 was snuffed out by the way 2007 ended. The midyear revival of 2008, under Manuel, evaporated as that season’s déjà vu conclusion doubled down on the previous year’s devastation. 2009 was an avalanche of awfulness that 2010 could never quite dig out from under.
Attendance remained strong in 2007 because 2006 raised the excitement level around Metsdom to stratospheric. The final season of Shea Stadium provided a one-time extraordinary boost to the gate in 2008, and 2009’s advance ticket sales couldn’t help but be plentiful with the debut of Citi Field. But the seats grew emptier and emptier as the annus horriblis ensued and they never refilled in 2010. The logical conclusion was the gaunt final month we just lived through in Flushing.
Nobody was home.
The back catalogue of Met disasters is voluminous, and the Tal-Met-ic scholars among us can spend hours debating and dissecting why any one of them was worse than all the others. But even if Fred Wilpon’s designation of this particular now-completed blue period as the most painful was a line massaged to let us know he feels our pain, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t an accurate assessment. The Mets as an organization really tried with this arrangement, this era. They really thought they had something. They did, for a while. 2006 was really something. As a veteran of the good times as well as the bad, I can vouch for 2006 as a member in good standing of the pantheon. Never let Yadier Molina’s last swing — or Carlos Beltran’s last take — obscure the joy that emanated continuously from those Mets that one magical season. It was a sensation so strong that while it was in effect, it would have been positively unfathomable to believe it would be the only magical season of its time.
But it was. Once the Reds, the Rangers, the Giants and the Braves take the field this week, there will have been 19 different baseball teams to have played a postseason baseball game since October 19, 2006, the night the Cardinals defeated the Mets for the National League pennant. Two nights later, the Cardinals were playing the Tigers in the World Series. One year later, an entirely different cast of characters was competing in the postseason. And so it’s gone until we’ve reached this point at which the following clubs are the only ones to not play a meaningful game in October after 10/19/06:
The Orioles. The Blue Jays. The Royals. The Mariners. The Athletics. The Padres. The Astros. The Marlins. The Nationals. The Pirates.
The Mets.
That’s the company we keep. Four years since the future couldn’t have appeared any brighter, we are consigned to the shade with the also-rans and the have-nots. We’re still a big-market team, we’re still a high-payroll team, but we are also a go-nowhere team.
Which is why Fred Wilpon and Jeff Wilpon had to go to their offices Monday and tell two men they hired and they liked that they would be relieved of their roles. It’s also why the Wilpons will have to figuratively leave the organization themselves to find a new general manager who, in turn, will have to find a new manager. That’s the way it has to be: new blood, fresh perspective, whatever you want to call it.
The Mets haven’t reached outside their own frame of reference for a head baseball man since Fred Wilpon and Nelson Doubleday reached out to Frank Cashen on February 21, 1980. Before that, the Mets, in the days of Payson and Grant, hadn’t picked an outsider to lead them since November 14, 1966, when they lured Bing Devine from St. Louis to succeed George Weiss. Weiss, hired as Mets president on March 14, 1961, also came from outside the organization, but he had to, as there was no Mets organization to that moment.
You might say there isn’t one now, at least not in the sense that the Mets are organized for what lies ahead in 2011. No general manager, no manager…I wouldn’t say “no problem,” but this is the necessary next step. This is the starting-over point. The Mets need to start over and they are, as Weiss’s most famous hire liked to say, commencing to do just that.
Even if the search for new leadership in the autumn of 2010 is not as invigorating as it might have felt on September 29, 1961 — the day Casey Stengel came on board; or makes being a Mets fan as thrilling as it was on this very date in 2006 — the evening Willie Randolph managed the team Omar Minaya constructed to a 2-0 NLDS lead over the Dodgers, it’s still pretty exciting. I don’t know who the GM will be and I don’t know who the manager will be, nor do I have a favorite for either spot beyond a fervent hope that the right people will be selected. I’m just gratified there will be a selection process. I’m relieved that the owners of the New York Mets recognized this had to be done.
Now, of course, I hope they don’t screw it up. Today, with nobody yet having made any obvious mistakes we know of in the selection process, I will cling to that hope. The Wilpons spoke their version of truth to pain, truth to failure yesterday. In an October when the Mets again have no games remaining, after a fourth consecutive season that guaranteed that paucity of meaningful baseball, it’s all we’ve got.
It’s something.
by Greg Prince on 4 October 2010 6:06 am Yo DJ, pump this party!
The song is called “I’m Gonna Get You,” a snappingly energetic dance number. I remember hearing it quite a bit on Z-100 in the summer of 1993 and enjoying it enough to purchase the 12-inch single. Very, very catchy. Listen to it for yourself here — if you’ve been attending Mets games since August of 2006, the intro should be at least passingly familiar to you.
Unless you mostly went this year, in which case you’ve almost never heard it.
The name of the artist? Bizarre Inc. And why would you hear Bizarre Inc. at a Mets home game? Because it’s the song to which Oliver Perez warms up.
Bizarre Inc. … perfect. Welcome and farewell to the 2010 Mets.
You want an incorporation of bizarre? Go to Closing Day, sit in the wind and the cold for fourteen innings, wait for the Mets to do something, to do anything. Then see them do the last anything you’ve been led to suspect they ever would: insert Oliver Perez into a tie game.
Yo DJ, pump this party!
Oliver Perez entered the field of play at the top of the fourteenth inning. He was greeted predictably by the 2,000 or so tortured souls who remained into the fifth hour of the 162nd game of the season. He was a boo magnet as he stepped on the mound. After loosening up to Bizarre Inc. (why waste your time? you know you’re gonna be mine! you know you’re gonna be mine!) — he pumped that party as only Oliver Perez could.
You might say he pumped vitality into Citi Field the way Silly String used to liven up parties. The Mets and the Nats for the first thirteen innings was the bore war, perfectly indicative of what a majority of the previous 161 games had been when the Mets were one of the participants. Here’s the game recap as best as I can remember it:
• Somewhere along the way Washington scored a run.
• Later, the Mets scored a run.
• At all other intervals nothing else happened, unless you count Jerry Manuel — the imminently erstwhile Chief Logistics Officer for Bizarre Inc. — pulling his two star players from the game in the top of the ninth while the game’s outcome remained completely in doubt. Neither David Wright nor Jose Reyes was retiring after Sunday, neither had broken a cherished record, neither was the Pope or anything like that. Yet Jerry treated his two best players as if they were Hank Aaron and Cal Ripken at an All-Star Game.
Earth to Jerry: The game counted. It was 1-1. We could have used our two best players to theoretically help win it. That would have been nice. Instead, it was six innings of Mike Hessman and Joaquin Arias — fine fellows, no doubt, but not David Wright and Jose Reyes in a 1-1 game. Not even close.
Maybe the Mets still would have flailed without success for several more innings and hours with Jose and David remaining active, but I’d prefer watching my team go down with its best as opposed to the pronounced opposite.
Which brings us back to Ollie.
Yo DJ, pump this party!
In case you’ve forgotten who Oliver Perez is, he was a lefthanded pitcher of eternal promise and modest success prior to 2009. Then he was paid a king’s ransom to potentially build upon his modest success. Instead, he pitched poorly and behaved worse. When given an opportunity to temporarily rehone his skills at an outpost where he couldn’t do anybody undue damage, he declined. His contract said he didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want. He didn’t want a week or two or three in Buffalo (where he would have continued to have received his ridiculous ransom).
So Jerry Manuel stopped using him altogether, which was the path of least resistance. Ollie took up roster space, appeared in baseball games once in a blue moon and facilitated the lighting up of scoreboards from Arizona to Atlanta to (almost) Astoria on those rare occasions when he was asked, pretty please, do you think you could earn a bit of your ransom and maybe not suck in the process?
Not who you’d trust with maintaining a 1-1 tie in the 14th inning of the 162nd baseball game of your season, a game that meant only as much as any game means if a playoff spot isn’t involved. It was a professional endeavor. People paid money to enter Citi Field Sunday, they paid money for food and drink and maybe bought a fleece sweater or something to stay warm. Beyond the tangible, people invest their souls in the success of their team. Success in the broadest 2010 sense was unavailable and success in the narrow Game 162 sense was unguaranteed. But somewhere in the fine print there must be a promise that both teams will really and truly try to win every contest in which they compete.
The Nationals tried to win. They didn’t remove David Wright and Jose Reyes from their lineup and they didn’t insert Oliver Perez as their pitcher. Wish I could say the same of the Mets.
Yo DJ, pump this party!
Ollie teased us. He struck out Ian Desmond to lead off the fourteenth. With one out, we dared to dream that maybe the 27-day layoff since Oliver Perez last pitched wouldn’t adversely impact him and maybe he could get through one lousy inning.
Instead, we just got the lousy inning.
• Ollie hits Adam Kennedy.
• Kennedy steals second.
• Ollie walks Roger Bernadina.
• Ollie walks Wil Nieves.
• Ollie walks Justin Maxwell.
In case you’re wondering, Adam Kennedy was a .249 hitter in 2010; Roger Bernadina, .246; Wil Nieves, .203; and Justin Maxwell, an exceedingly cool .144. Their respective OPSes, in case batting averages aren’t your thing, were .654; .691; .554; and .593. Those aren’t threatening OPSes — those are SAT scores.
Ollie flunked his exam. Thirty pitches, five batters, one out, one hit by pitch, one stolen base, three walks and the magic final run to grease the exits to the offseason. His sudden benefactor Manuel — somehow the only manager in the history of expanded rosters to be short of relievers at the end of a season — stepped out of the dugout to pull him. The crowd (if you wanted to call us that) greeted him predictably, too.
Then Pat Misch, eight-inning starter from Friday night, throws three pitches and elicits a ground ball double play.
Bizarre Inc. all around.
What a weird team, and it was never better exemplified by the confluence of the pitcher who never deserved to pitch winding up pitching and the manager who has managed to remain in his post through two of the creepiest, crappiest, cruddiest consecutive seasons any Mets team has ever put up. 2009 was a horror show. 2010 was the lamest of crime dramas. The most glaring crime was Oliver Perez stealing $12 million. The drama was wondering what the hell Jerry Manuel was thinking.
It was bad and bizarre at Citi Field Sunday. It was dullsville, mostly, but then it was insulting. Out go your best players, in comes your worst nightmare. Oliver Perez finished 2010 and hopefully his Met career with an 0-5 record, a 6.80 ERA and the distinction of making Kenny Rogers’s final Met appearance appear outstanding by comparison.
But give Ollie this: he did get us interested when he took the ball, interested enough to be loudly revolted. You might think a desultory 2-1 loss spread out over four hours, fourteen minutes and fourteen innings might lull you into a coma. It didn’t. The mere sight of Ollie woke us from the last of our stupor, even if our offense eventually left us sleeping with our eyes open.
And that was the highlight of Closing Day 2010. How bizarre.
***
Shortly after Ruben Tejada flied out to end this wilted campaign, a highlight video rolled on CitiVision. It was pretty non-descript. I generally don’t like using that word because it seems designed to save writers the trouble of describing things, but there was no theme to it, no arc to it, no distinct musical cues to inform it — there was just shot after shot of Met after Met not failing in a home uniform in 2010.
The highlight video used to be a staple of Closing Day and it could give a Mets fan chills: “Here’s To The Winners” in 1985; “Back In The High Life Again” in 1988; “Reach” in 1997. Those were uplifting regular seasons set to soaring soundtracks. We stood and we cheered and I swear we even cried a little when they were over. I haven’t seen the Mets produce a video of that nature at the end of a regular season in quite a while. I suppose their seasons of late have produced too many outtakes and not enough actual highlights.
Still, I’m conditioned to think a great one is coming after the last out, so I create one in my mind. I can see that 2010 highlight video and it’s riveting. The footage is all my own (which is good, as it saves me from having to pay MLB a licensing fee).
In my video, I see the people with whom I spent a season at Citi Field. I see the warmth, the consideration, the conviviality, the fun I experienced with them. I see high-fives and hugs and hear a lot of laughter. I am caught up in the dialogue of how we would make our team play better and make our park work better and, inevitably, when we’re gonna do this again because we had such a good time here, didn’t we? I’m gripped by our common Met bond and I am astounded by how much love a 79-83 ballclub can generate among its devotees.
I see the great days and nights a ballpark gives you when you’re with the kind of people you like so well and find yourself caring about so much. I see it clear to the end, straight through a final weekend that lasted 33 often interminable innings but somehow didn’t go on quite long enough.
It never does.
I thank all those people who appear in my personal 2010 highlight montage for having been an integral part of my Mets season, and for allowing me at least a cameo in theirs.
by Greg Prince on 3 October 2010 9:00 am Six years ago today, the Mets were proactively pulling the plug on one era in hopes of jump-starting the next one. At Shea Stadium on Sunday, October 3, 2004, the Mets were severing ties with their manager, inaugurating a new front office administration and putting the latest in a string of disappointing seasons to bed.
Beyond the finality of sending off Todd Zeile, kissing off John Franco, waving off the Montreal Expos and — with limited affection and maximum awkwardness — blowing off Art Howe, we were welcoming Omar Minaya home to Queens. The former assistant general manager of the New York Mets took over the top job at the very tail end of 2004 as the team he had been running was expiring. Montreal was moving to Washington and here in New York, there wasn’t a moment to waste. Omar had to commence general managing at once.
As Closing Days pitting fourth- and fifth-place teams go, the one from six years ago was genuinely transcendent. Zeile homered on the final major league pitch he ever saw; Franco, in relief of Heath Bell, popped up Ryan Church with final Met pitch he ever threw; Endy Chavez made the final out any Expo would ever make; Joe Hietpas made his first, last and only appearance as Zeile’s defensive replacement behind the plate in the bottom of the ninth…Zeile hadn’t started and departed a game as catcher in fourteen seasons, but he ended his career catching one-third of an inning from the all-time leader in saves by a left-handed pitcher. The last time Todd Zeile was legitimately a catcher was 1990, the first year John Franco was a Met closer.
Amid all that backglancing and foreshadowing, with Omar trotting in from the braintrust bullpen to take the ball from a struggling Jim Duquette, there was also the faint hum emanating from the sealed fate of Art Howe. He was as gone from the Mets as the Expos were from Montreal the moment Jeff Keppinger fielded Endy Chavez’s grounder to second and tossed it to Craig Brazell (filling in at first base for Mike Piazza). The Mets had enjoyed a surprisingly good stretch under Howe earlier in 2004 — 34-25 from May 1 through July 7, propelling them to within a game of first place — but their contender status proved fleeting. Nobody recalled the success by September. They only noticed the failure that had taken hold since.
Howe was fired before the season was over, but the Mets didn’t remove him from office for 17 more games, asking him to finish out the season despite his being the lamest of incapacitated ducks. Ownership took a typically clunky route to arrive at the correct ultimate decision, but either way, we knew for sure the next time we returned to Flushing to watch our team, somebody else would be managing it. Yet despite the finality in the air on Sunday, October 3, 2004, there was no acknowledgement of or reaction to the impending departure of Art Howe. Nothing on DiamondVision, nothing on the scoreboard, nothing from the stands.
Six years ago today, the Mets were doing what they’re about to do again. They’re even doing it while the team that used to be the Expos is in town.
This, then, is where we came in.
You could almost plot the path of the 2010 season on the same graph as 2004’s: there was an invigorating stretch of 39-24 baseball from April 19 through June 27; there was growing confidence or at least hope regarding the team’s ability to complete for a playoff spot; then there was a bottom that fell irrevocably out. In 2004, the Mets sputtered (16-22 from July 8 to August 21) until they simply went splat! (2-19 directly thereafter). The 2010 Mets’ extended moment of doom was a 7-17 sag between June 28 and July 25 that sucked all significant signs of life completely out of them. They’ve been sputtering ever since.
Just as Duquette (traded Scott Kazmir for Victor Zambrano) had to go, so does Minaya. Omar didn’t swap a top prospect for a pitcher of suspect health, but he did lavish extravagant, overlong contracts on Luis Castillo, Oliver Perez, Francisco Rodriguez and Jason Bay, each now a symbol of the 2004-style disaster the 2010 Mets have become. Just as Howe’s team evaporated when exposed to light, so did Jerry Manuel’s. Howe had to go, even if he was mysteriously invited to stick around a couple weeks longer. Manuel, meanwhile, says he hasn’t been told anything about his Met tenure beyond Sunday…which at this point him makes him the only person in the universe yet to be duly informed of this foregone conclusion.
Jerry knows just as we all know. When he created some bizarre rationalization for using R.A. Dickey out of the bullpen Saturday — “if anybody is here in the future, they can use his throw day to save an inning” — it was essentially his white flag in the face of the inevitable. Strange yet also appropriate that Dickey, whom we at Citi Field gave a nice ovation as soon as we saw him come on in unforeseen relief, would serve as vessel for Manuel’s and probably Minaya’s imminent bon voyage.
R.A.’s acquisition ranks as one of Omar’s greatest late-period successes, and nobody did more than Dickey to help keep Jerry’s ship from completely sinking as the promise of late spring gurgled into the reality of mid-summer. But R.A. emerged as a rotation mainstay primarily because Oliver Perez crapped out so absolutely thuddingly after Minaya threw too much money and too many years at him. Maybe Ollie is beyond handling, but Jerry quite clearly tired of trying. Perez was relegated so far to the back of the bullpen that on the second-to-last day of the season, when the manager needed somebody to soak up one lousy inning, he went with Dickey the starter, not Perez the pariah.
Jerry may have been kidding (in that Jerry way of his) that he might use R.A. again Sunday to create another curtain call opportunity for New York’s most beloved knuckleballer, but maybe what he’s doing is projecting. Maybe Manuel wonders where his ovation is. He took over a team in turmoil in June 2008, snapped them out of their tight-assed Willie Randolph funk for a spell, guided them to the cusp of redemption for the previous year’s collapse, fell just short of the finish line and then…well, nothing good. Jerry’s Mets foundered at the first hint of adversity in 2009 and couldn’t maintain their impressive first-half pace in 2010. No team looks particularly good when it’s not contending, but this team has specialized in looking atrocious for the bulk of two bitter seasons.
Still, while it was always something with these Mets — always some injury or controversy or overwhelming distraction — it generally wasn’t Manuel’s doing. His abysmal 2009 team lost 90 games. His less abysmal 2010 team might win 80 games. Somewhere in there, it could be interpreted that Jerry made his wisecracks and charmed reporters and took heat off his often inadequate roster and maybe he deserves some credit for the whole thing not being tangibly worse than it conceivably could have been. Perhaps that’s what Jerry will be thinking today.
He’ll be thinking it alone.
There will be no prefab storyline to stoke our sentimentality at Citi Field this afternoon. No Zeile, no Franco, no Expos. We’ll be seeing the last of various fringe Mets and we’ll be hoping we’re seeing the last of a couple of glaringly lost causes. Maybe someone will rate an extra hearty round of applause this Closing Day, but unless somebody actually does something noteworthy — like no-hit the Nationals — we’re probably not going to overdo the emotion.
We didn’t do it for Art Howe on a day that was wrought with sentimentality. We’re not about to do it for Jerry Manuel. It’s nothing personal. Unless it’s a Bobby Cox leaving on presumably his own terms, we don’t really do anything for managers. We expect them to manage our team to wins. When they don’t win, we expect them to get going. That’s all we’ll be looking for out of Jerry Manuel once the team that is about to be no longer his completes its business today.
Business. Nothing personal.
Omar Minaya will have no reason to appear in public this afternoon. GMs rarely step on the field in full view of the fans. Their professional life takes place behind the scenes. That’s where we heard six years ago that this guy was going to do great things for us.
And this is indeed where we came in: the Minaya era, begun for the record as the 2004 season burned off its last innings; begun in earnest as the succeeding offseason got underway; begun for keeps when the 2005 Mets assembled in Port St. Lucie for Spring Training. Our blog came into this world that very day, February 16, 2005. We, like the Mets, began limbering up for this distinct era that will forever be attached to the name of Omar Minaya.
This GM has been GM of the Mets longer than every one of his predecessors except Frank Cashen. We don’t really think of 1980 to 1991 as the Frank Cashen Era. The Omar Minaya Era, however, is different in that respect. Omar may have made his mark behind the scenes, but he did wander out onto the stage quite a lot. He was the one tabbed to change the culture of the Mets as 2004 became 2005, and that he did — in multiple ways.
The Mets became a consistent spender under Omar Minaya. They reignited their presence in the New York market under Omar Minaya. As one or two observers may have noted in the past six years, they gained a decidedly Latin tinge under Omar Minaya. And, instantly, they improved immensely under Omar Minaya.
Twelve more wins in 2005 than in 2004, with the general manager’s first significant acquisition, Pedro Martinez, generating heat as well as outs. Fourteen more wins in 2006 than in 2005, as the Omar Corps played an outsized role: Carlos Beltran, Carlos Delgado, Billy Wagner, Paul Lo Duca, Jose Valentin, Julio Franco, John Maine and that most lovable refugee of October 3, 2004, Endy Chavez. Fourteen more wins and an additional several weeks of Mets baseball, clear to October 19.
The Mets won a division and a round of playoffs. Then they almost won another. They said this guy was going to do great things for us, and he did. The Omar Minaya Era was yielding epic results after only two years in existence. There was little reason to believe the best wasn’t yet to come.
Omar was still a genius in early 2007. He made the cover of Sports Illustrated, hailed as a Mix Master, creator of the Melting-Pot Mets. His genius was more competitive than demographic. In the summer of 2006, he had turned the necessity of replacing the doomed Duaner Sanchez into a mother of a live young left arm belonging to Oliver Perez. Great move! In the run-up to 2007, he filled the void left behind by the perpetually hobbled Cliff Floyd by securing the dependable veteran bat of Moises Alou. Another great move! True, not everything he was doing could be classified in such lofty terms — Jon Adkins and Ben Johnson weren’t doing much after coming for washout reliever Heath Bell — but the Mets were in first again, they had great chemistry again and they were a lock to land in the playoffs again.
That’s where the story takes its turn from the cover of the June 18, 2007 issue of Sports Illustrated to, most likely, the back pages of the New York tabloids shortly after October 3, 2010. There won’t be much of a window for the Mets to get that kind of coverage in the coming week. Another local baseball team will be taking up residence on the back pages for the foreseeable future.
The Mets will replace their manager. There will be some sort of shakeup involving their general manager. It will be noted that the Mets have strung together a couple of terrible seasons, that things had spiraled out of control under the previous management and that the team had faded into unacceptable utter obscurity in the market at large. Thus, a change will be explained as necessary. We will be told we are in dire need of kicking off a new era, and we will surely agree with that assessment.
Like I said, this is where we came in.
by Jason Fry on 2 October 2010 11:03 pm First things first: There are no statement games for teams that will finish under .500. If that applies to you, you’re not that good. You are by definition either a team that’s hopeless or one that needs to be different next year, meaning that no statement made will apply to the new crop of players wearing the uniform four and a half months from now.
So it is with the Mets: They are playing out the string in the playing-outest, the-stringest sense of the word, with a lame-duck GM and a lame-duck manager and, they hope, a lame-duck fan outlook. We know the 2011 Mets need to be different, and have known this for some time. They know the 2011 Mets need to be different, and we’re stuck waiting to find out whether their definition of different will align with ours.
The blessing of baseball is that there’s no reason that such games can’t be fun while being admittedly meaningless in the grand scheme of things, seeing how teams like the 2010 Mets are meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Fans of the Padres and Giants and Braves have lots to occupy themselves on this final Sunday; a substantial portion of the people who care about how the Nationals and the Mets are probably looking at this post right now. For which, on the one hand, thanks. But on another that we can all understand, rats.
So what mattered today? By my reckoning, two things.
The first was Lucas Duda’s eye-opening blast to right-center, an Adam Dunnesque, Ike Davistique blast that threatened the Shea Bridge. It was one of those balls that makes you stand up the moment it leaves the bat: Wayne Hagin was excited enough to narrate the play as it happened, and even if he’d been nodding off, the sound of the bat on the ball and the big reaction from the small crowd would have been enough to let you know something was happening. Duda started the season 1 for 34, a stretch of surpassing cruelty for any major-leaguer, and one of near-existential brutality for someone newly arrived in the big leagues. Watching Duda through his ordeal was painful — miserable. It was pathetic in the elder sense of the word — you felt deeply sorry for him and wanted it to end. But he took his lumps, and he endured, and now things are different. Now you half-expect Lucas Duda to drive a ball up the gap or over the wall.
Anyone who remembers Kevin Maas or Shane Spencer will know that you can’t pencil in Lucas Duda to be productive in 2011, or possibly ever. But anyone who can see another person in agony and feel for them and then see them persevere and succeed has to cheer for him. I don’t know if Lucas Duda will ever amount to anything; I do know that he if anyone ever asks him if he’s gone through hell and come out not just whole but perfectly fine, he can hold his head up and say, “Hell yeah I have.”
The other moment was David Wright’s. Wright was buzzed by Tyler Clippard, as he’s been buzzed by a huge number of pitchers since Matt Cain sent him to the disabled list during the living hell that was 2009. There is nothing at all wrong with this; pitchers make their living in part by exploiting whatever fear they find in hitters, and have done so for the 80-odd years since the dead-ball era. In fact, they’re a lot gentler now than they were then.
So Clippard buzzed Wright, sent him turning aside from the plate with eyes averted. Wright stepped back in. He was at 28 home runs and 100 RBIs, levels at which he has nothing to prove to anybody. He dug in. Clippard’s next pitch was a fastball that deserves no accompanying adjectives; Wright hit the shit out of it. It bounced off the second deck in left field. That was satisfying but not enormously surprising: David Wright can hit a ball a very long way. What was surprising was seeing Wright flip his bat away and walk toward first base, then settle into a Strawberry vs. Nipper trot. He came across home plate and received his congratulations not with a smile, but with a knit brow.
What does that mean for 2011? Who’s to say. I’d like to see David hit a final home run on Sunday, to walk out of 2010 with 30 on the year. But with one game remaining that’s basically roulette: He’ll get 20-odd pitches, maybe three or four to square up, and we’ll see. I do know that it was nice to see David Wright not being decent or stoic or can-do. He cared and he was pissed. That’s not the kind of thing that can be bottled and brought back out for 2011, but as a penultimate note for 2010, it was welcome.
by Greg Prince on 2 October 2010 4:48 am If a manager and a general manager fall in the forest of rumors and you don’t hear it, did it happen? If the buzz surrounding a potential double-dismissal drowns out the noise from a walkoff home run, did the dinger make a sound? And if you’re standing in a deserted dugout after batting practice has been cancelled, are you still watching one of the game’s best pinch-hitters put on a show?
Philosophical questions all, and not necessarily answerable. Maybe they’re not supposed to be. But I do know a few things more than I knew before I headed to Citi Field on Friday.
I do know it rained a lot on Friday morning — the rain that didn’t fall Thursday night arrived with a vengeance — and then it spritzed late Friday afternoon. The disruption in the calm after the storm is relevant because the Mets were hosting Blogger Night II. Since the first one (detailed here and here) represented such a great moment in communications outreach toward our branch of quasi-media, every effort was made to schedule a second one. Well, the second one kept getting rained out. This was the third attempt to have us return for BP. But because of the rain, there was no BP. If there’s no BP on the field, is there Blogger Night II?
I do know there was, thanks to some fast and professional thinking. Stripped of the opportunity to interview players before and after they took their swings, our Met contact produced a Met swinger for us, bringing Chris Carter out of the clubhouse and into our midst. We — Caryn Rose from Metsgrrl, Kerel Cooper from On The Black and I — took turns firing questions at him, and he handled them like he handles Derek Lowe (Chris Carter’s average versus Derek Lowe: .600).
I do know Chris Carter likes to “get a good sweat going” as part of his preparation for pinch-hitting. He’s watching everything, he’s moving everywhere, he’s “not idle”. Chris Carter has 18 pinch-hits this season. What else is there to say for him than Sweat’s Go Mets!
I do know Chris Carter thinks New York fans are “intelligent,” “passionate,” “understand the game” and “deserve a winner”. That’s nice of him to say, and I got the sense he believes it. Talk to Chris Carter for a few minutes, and you get the sense he doesn’t say anything he doesn’t believe.
I do know Chris Carter has his limits in his assessment of our brilliance. I asked what in particular we, as fans, might not understand about the game. If he were texting his answer, it would have been ROTFL! See, when we say things like “just throw strikes,” it tickles him a little because throwing strikes on command is kind of difficult. Throwing effective strikes on command is rather impossible. That’s why the Roy Halladays of the world are so rare — though against Chris Carter (2-for-2 off Halladay), he’s a dime a dozen.
I do know Chris Carter has a mind of our own. Before he returned to his preparation, I wondered who he liked in the coming playoffs: Halladay’s Phils? Lowe’s Braves? Someone else? Chris Carter suddenly lost all traces of ROTFL! and turned dead serious: “I just think Mets.”
I do know I like the way Chris Carter thinks.
I do know I had a good day speaking to Mets. I spoke to Carter, and that was terrific. I also spoke to Josh Thole, if we expand the definition of speaking to the smallest of small talk. This was when Kerel, Caryn and I were loitering in the empty dugout waiting for somebody or something to happen. The first person we saw who wasn’t a groundskeeper was Thole, emerging from the clubhouse to grab a bat so he could get his own sweat going in the indoor cage. As he walked by, I said, “Hi Josh,” which sounds like a West Wing drinking game in which you down a shot of Johnny Walker Blue every time Brad Whitford strides purposefully down the hall en route to the Oval Office, but I meant what I said. “Hi Josh.” And Josh Thole acknowledged me in kind with a slightly distracted “hello” in return.
I do know I approve of Josh Thole’s distractions. When I saw him under Blogger Night circumstances in July, he was the epitome of happy-go-lucky, bouncing a baseball from the track to the dugout to the clubhouse. It was sunny then. It was raining now. Josh Thole’s mood had turned with the weather. Or he was just busy. Whatever. Point is he took his swings in the cage and then he took the biggest swing of the night in the tenth. When Thole became the third Met catcher of the season to launch a walkoff home run, we could all say “Hi Josh,” and take our biggest swig of the night from the keg of glory.
I do know there’s no substitute for victory, but if you need one, proximity to players is pretty darn good. I’m not talking about us chatting up Chris Carter or me helping to focus Josh Thole. I mean how happy it makes any Mets fan to be in contact with a Met. While we bloggers stood and watched (and you really can observe a lot by watching), a championship team of Commack youth leaguers was led onto the damp warning track between home and the Mets dugout. There was nothing for them to do either, but they didn’t care; they were on the same field big leaguers use. And when they saw one — R.A. Dickey — they called him over with a hearty “HI R.A.!”
I do know I couldn’t be higher on R.A. Dickey after observing him make a beeline for those youth leaguers, signing autograph after autograph for every kid straining toward him from behind a barrier. I’d say I smiled a whole lot when R.A. Dickey made those kids’ day, except I assume R.A. Dickey would craft a better phrase to describe their reaction. A little later, we were tipped off that something special was going to happen in the Rotunda. To thank all those who trudged through the drizzle to bear witness to Mets, Nats and other things, the club sent Dickey, Mike Pelfrey and Jon Niese to say “Hi fans!” Think three uniformed ballplayers don’t draw a crowd and elicit excitement? Think again.
I do know Mets fans love their Mets, no matter how much we complain about the Mets. My example of the evening came when Niese lagged slightly behind the Pelfrey-Dickey entourage. While his fellow pitchers were surrounded by security and public relations, for an instant Niese was all by himself. A man walked up to him, patted him on the shoulder and told him, “Jon, great job!” Jon thanked him and the man moved on, but I contemplated the scene. It’s quite possible that same fan watched Niese the other night fizzle out against the Brewers the way he’s been fizzling against everybody of late. It was a long season for Niese and I think he ran out of gas. He hasn’t been great recently, and I’m thinking the guy who told him he was didn’t think so when he last saw him on TV. But screw that, y’know? There’s a Met, he was at least good earlier in the season, sometimes outstanding, and now he’s standing right next to a regular person. That indeed makes Jon Niese great…which is pretty sweet.
I do know from first-hand experience that those Delta Club Platinum/Gold seats you see on TV are, in fact, pretty sweet, too. In the spirit of “when it rains, it pours” (less weather reference than a nod to Thursday night’s 30 Rock) I got a call from a friend of mine who had an extra ticket Friday. I told him I was already going to be at Citi Field for Blogger Night II, but I’d hook up with him and maybe spend an inning with him. Turns out his extra ticket was one of those cushy seats we see so often unoccupied on SNY. I didn’t leave it unoccupied for long, and there is screen-capture evidence accompanying this article to prove it.
 At left in blue, observing a lot by watching from up close. I do know once you’re in the cushy seats, you spend more than an inning there. Apologies to my blolleagues Caryn and Kerel for kind of ditching them once I was invited to see how the other one-tenth of one percent lives. The Delta Club has a fantastic view of things like walkoff homers and home plate celebrations. It also has its own secret lounge that offers complimentary soft drinks and snacks (which seems appropriate given the cost of the seats). For example, they have help-yourself pretzels in there. At least they’re supposed to. I was in the secret lounge for a half-inning and — I’m not making this up — the pretzels weren’t ready. My de facto Citi Field consumer watchdog role doesn’t necessarily extend to the big-time swells sections, but I am compelled to report that no matter where you go in this Met life of ours, it seems inevitable that at some juncture, in some corner, the pretzels…or the knishes…or something isn’t ready.
I do know plenty of hot dogs, plenty of peanuts and plenty of hospitality was available in the secret lounge; don’t cry for the Delta Club, Argentina. And please remind me to time my future interviews with Chris Carter to coincide with surprise detours to the cushy seats. As Jenna told Liz, when it rains, it pours.
I don’t know exactly what’s going to become of Omar Minaya and Jerry Manuel. I really don’t, though the monitors featuring the pregame show blared the news that our skipper and his skipper are doomed. This is according to “sources”. There was no actual announcement about their fate, but “sources” say it’s coming. Other sources caution nothing has yet been decided, but if it’s coming, it will get here soon enough. At that point, it will be the biggest thing I notice. At this point, in the calm before that storm, I’m still noticing what a considerate sort Chris Carter is; what a promising swing Josh Thole has; what a cognizant soul R.A. Dickey possesses; what a good idea it was to introduce three starting pitchers to hundreds of arriving fans; how much grown-up baseball players mean to little kids; and how much little courtesies mean to grown-up baseball bloggers.
I do know it’s been a subpar season and that disappointments abound all about the Mets. But I also know we’re disappointed only because at any given moment we’re capable of the kind of elation that occurs strictly from being the kind of Mets fans Chris Carter swears we are.
Even if the elation isn’t ready.
by Greg Prince on 1 October 2010 1:34 am Go while the going is good
Knowing when to leave
May be the smartest thing
Anyone can learn
Go…
—Burt Bacharach
Mr. G was wrong. The grand upperclassman of New York weather forecasters said it was going to rain cats and dogs over the Metropolitan area Thursday and that Citi Field would be one big poodle. His colleagues agreed and the murky skies didn’t offer much rebuttal. My friend Sharon and I caucused the meteorological matter and came away convinced Irv Gikofsky wouldn’t lie to us.
Thus, despite holding tickets for the hotly awaited Mets-Brewers duel to the depths, discretion became the better part of fandom and we decided to take a pass. They’re not gonna play, we agreed, and even if they do, it was going to be five miserable innings of dancing through raindrops until the deluge came. We’d better not go.
So we didn’t go, yet it didn’t rain. There was no deluge, unless you count the torrent of Met misplays. That made Thursday night my first phantom game at Citi Field — the announced attendance says I was there, reality says otherwise. Reality and the announced attendance (24,661) are barely acquainted.
On one hand, I’m never listening to a weather forecaster again, at least if a baseball game is on the line and a tornado isn’t. Dillon Gee may have lost, but he acquitted himself better than Mr. G. Sharon was nice enough to invite me, I was delighted to accept and I’m sorry our arrangements imploded in the face of a faulty Doppler radar.
On the other hand, if you were going to miss one game you were sure you were attending in 2010, this one would have been tied for first with about 50 others. While I was home during the “action,” I nodded off briefly. If I were at the game, I would have fallen dead asleep.
 The 2010 Mets: Your season has overstayed its welcome. If I can borrow a third hand, geez, I’m tired of this Mets season. It’s the thing that wouldn’t leave, even though I know it’s headed for the exits in less than 72 hours.
As early as next week, I’ll go through those horrible offseason pangs of wishing for Mets baseball when 7:10 PM rolls around, no matter how much it’s raining, no matter how much it’s snowing. But let’s be clear — as clear as this particular night is windy: I will not be wishing for the 2010 season to rematerialize. This season has to go away and go away now.
This season has to be sent to a farm upstate to play with the 2009 season.
I’m beginning to have my doubts about the need for a 162-game schedule. This Met season, like last Met season, was truly too damn long. I’m not saying that just because they now permanently share losing records as a depressing common denominator. Other than last weekend when it seemed mildly important that we keep the Phillies from clinching for a couple of days, the Mets have had nothing to play for, and it’s shown. Once in a while, there’s been an encouraging pitching performance or a key ninth-inning hit and it’s provided five minutes of happy distraction. Otherwise, the phrase that keeps coming to mind is “amorphous blob”. The past six weeks or two months or maybe the whole second half has felt shapeless and formless. Games start, games finish, the Mets are involved in some undefined way, nothing actually happens.
This is the part of baseball Ken Burns never bothers to tell you about (perhaps because he’s too busy telling you about the Red Sox).
I’ve lived through losing seasons before this current spate of them — I think two is enough to qualify as a spate by now — and they don’t all feel this empty. Some years you get a player worth following to the end, and his at-bats or turns in the rotation make you forget how unmemorable the rest of it is. Some years you sense a change coming for the better, so you reason away the losses as a down payment on a brighter tomorrow. And then there are the years that just won’t go away. That’s what this year blobbed into ages ago.
This one is three eyeblinks from expiring. Knee-jerk sadness notwithstanding, it can’t vanish soon enough. I’ll miss baseball because baseball is what I do when given the opportunity to choose. I’ll miss the Mets and Mets games because that’s where I live spiritually. But this particular set of Mets and Mets games has been devoid of a reason for being since before the flood.
In a way, it’s too bad it didn’t rain Thursday night. This season needs washing away at once.
Maybe the perfect Mets bobblehead would cheer us up. Mark Simon of ESPN New York took a survey and shares the responses — including mine — right here.
by Greg Prince on 30 September 2010 12:24 am The makeup doubleheader begins at 4:10, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms at 5:40, filling the late afternoon and the early evening, and then as soon as Manny Acosta comes in, it stops and leaves you to face the nightcap alone.
You counted on it, relied on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of a transient 7-6 lead alive, and then just when the opener is all defeat, when you need it to go away most, it drags interminably into a second game.
Last night, September 29, a Wednesday before a Thursday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it just went on and on and on. Then it stopped, and our chances of finishing with a winning record were gone.
The 2010 Mets leave you numb. They were designed to leave you numb.
(Apologies to A. Bartlett Giamatti, though I doubt he’d have been so elegiac had he spent nearly seven hours paying attention to this particular team on this particular day.)
by Greg Prince on 29 September 2010 9:26 am On September 28, 2010, Ruben Tejada came to bat in the bottom of the ninth inning with a pair of runners on base and the Mets down 3-2 to the Milwaukee Brewers. He belted a double to deep left field. Ike Davis scored from third. Pinch-runner Luis Castillo chugged home from first. The Mets, already mathematically eliminated from contention, won 4-3.
Now consider the essentials of the aforementioned scenario:
• Last week of the season.
• Mets out of the race.
• Bottom of the ninth.
• Mets trail.
• Rookie swings.
• Mets win.
Do you know how many times before last night these precise circumstances aligned and culminated in such a favorable Met result?
Never. It never happened before. Never has a rookie come up in the bottom of the ninth at the tail end of a kaput season with the Mets behind and put them ahead. Of all the walkoff wins the Mets could hope for in a non-contending context, this has to be the most uplifting type of walkoff win imaginable.
If you still have any imagination left when a season is so foregone.
This is a new type of walkoff, so it requires a new name, one reflecting all it potentially represents. I know! Let’s call it…
The Ruben™: A heaping helping of hope sandwiched between two slices of despair.
Better yet, serve it open-faced so as to see only the hope.
The Ruben™ — gosh, I feel like Homer Simpson after he discovered a meal between breakfast and brunch.
***
Congratulations to the National League Central Division champion Cincinnati Reds, qualifiers for the postseason for the first time since 1995. As if those fifteen years weren’t long enough, the Reds snapped another lengthy streak of a dubious nature. On October 4, 1999, Cincinnati had a chance to make the postseason as N.L. Wild Card with a win in what is alternately referred to as a one-game playoff or a play-in. Either way, they lost….to the Mets, of course, 5-0 on an Al Leiter two-hit gem. Their ensuing eleven-year wait was longer than any other one-game/play-in loser in the divisional era has had to endure to overcome the sting of almost making it.
1978: Boston Red Sox lose to New York Yankees
1986: Boston Red Sox next make playoffs 8 YEARS LATER
1980: Houston Astros lose to Los Angeles Dodgers
1981: Houston Astros next make playoffs 1 YEAR LATER
1995: California Angels lose to Seattle Mariners
2002: Anaheim Angels next make playoffs 7 YEARS LATER
1998: San Francisco Giants lose to Chicago Cubs
2000: San Francisco Giants next make playoffs 2 YEARS LATER
1999: Cincinnati Reds lose to New York Mets
2010: Cincinnati Reds next make playoffs 11 YEARS LATER
2007: San Diego Padres lose to Colorado Rockies
SAN DIEGO PADRES STILL WAITING; 3 YEARS AS OF 2010
2008: Minnesota Twins lose to Chicago White Sox
2009: Minnesota Twins next make playoffs 1 YEAR LATER
2009: Detroit Tigers lose to Minnesota Twins
DETROIT TIGERS STILL WAITING; 2 YEARS AS OF 2011
Even if you throw in losing teams from pre-divisional tiebreakers, the Reds waited longer to reach — and surpass — the postseason precipice than almost everybody who came up short before them.
The 1946 Brooklyn Dodgers were avenged 1 year after their heartbreak against the St. Louis Cardinals, as were the 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers following their legendary defeat at the hands of the New York Giants.
The 1959 Milwaukee Braves needed 10 years, a move south and the slicing of the National League into two divisions to get over their loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers. By then, they were the 1969 Atlanta Braves, losers of the first National League Championship Series (to the New York Mets).
The 1962 Los Angeles Dodgers lost a devastating tiebreaker series to the San Francisco Giants — or did they? The devastation was plowed under 1 year later in the 1963 World Series as the Dodgers swept the Yankees in four straight.
The 1948 Boston Red Sox, however, waited longer than anybody to be dug out of their tiebreaker hole. They lost a one-game playoff to the Cleveland Indians and didn’t have their defeat avenged until 1967 — 19 years later.
Anyway, I’m happy that the Reds have finally shaken off that loss to the 1999 New York Mets. Cincy shouldn’t feel bad it took them this long. The Atlanta Braves have never been the same juggernaut since the Mets battled them to a bittersweet end in that season’s NLCS.
***
Congratulations are also in order for the Texas Rangers, A.L. West champs and postseason participants for the first time since 1999. Who says a team can’t win anything with Alex Cora and Jeff Francoeur on its roster? Come to think of it, two teams have traded for Jeff Francoeur and one is in the playoffs. Two teams have traded away Jeff Francoeur, and if Atlanta holds on to its slim Wild Card lead over San Diego, it can also be said that one team that has dispatched Jeff Francoeur is in the playoffs.
Then there’s the Mets, who traded for Jeff Francoeur and traded away Jeff Francoeur, yet all they’ve got on their plate at this moment is a Ruben™.
Aside from our erstwhile right fielder and utility infielder/team leader; two of our former relievers, Darren O’Day and Darren Oliver; our almost catcher, Bengie Molina; two of our alumni who are now two of their coaches, Clint Hurdle and Mike Maddux; and the Never Met superstar whom we could have had for a relative free agent song when he could still play the outfield, Vladimir Guerrero (oh, and our young fireballing righty turned their team president, Lynn Nolan Ryan), we share something else of a contemporary nature with the Texas Rangers. And, in a way, it spools back more than two decades.
6/2/1987: Mets draft Tim Bogar.
3/31/1997: Mets trade Tim Bogar to the Houston Astros for Luis Lopez.
1/21/2000: Mets trade Luis Lopez to the Milwaukee Brewers for Bill Pulsipher.
6/2/2000: Mets trade Bill Pulsipher to the Arizona Diamondbacks for Lenny Harris.
1/21/2002: Mets trade Lenny Harris to Milwaukee for Jeromy Burnitz (part of a three-team, eleven-player transaction).
7/14/2003: Mets trade Jeromy Burnitz to the Los Angeles Dodgers for Victor Diaz.
8/30/2006: Mets trade Victor Diaz to Texas for Mike Nickeas.
Nickeas then burrowed into deepest minor league obscurity until making his surprise major league debut with the Mets on September 4, 2010. He returned to obscurity after his most recent appearance, on September 6, 2010, but at least he’s obscure on a major league roster. I saw him among the revelers congratulating Ruben Tejada last night on his Ruben™.
Victor Diaz, if you’re wondering, isn’t in the Texas organization or with any MLB club any longer. He spent his summer playing for Rojos del Aguila de Veracruz, leading the Mexican League in home runs (29) and runs batted in (96). As a Met rookie on September 25, 2004, another season in which the Mets were out of it, he hit a three-run homer in the bottom of ninth inning to tie the contending Cubs and send the game to extra innings. Another Met rookie, Craig Brazell, homered to win it in the eleventh. Because it wasn’t a ninth-inning, come-from-behind, one-swing win, and it wasn’t the last week of the season, we can’t call it a Ruben™ — but it was close enough to Rubenesque.
The same might be said of Victor Diaz’s physique; his figures look pretty good south of the border.
Incidentally, Bill Pulsipher, who is somehow still not yet 37 years old, went 5-1 in 11 appearances for the Somerset Patriots of the Atlantic League this season. He also won his only start in the playoffs. Like Diaz, he put up good numbers in the minors in 2010.
Like Diaz, he’d trade them in a heartbeat for where Mike Nickeas is this week.
As long as we’re on the subject of ancient Met trade threads, you know that guy on Toronto who’s hits 52 home runs? We had him. We really did. We had Jose Bautista. I had no idea until I read about it on Studious Metsimus.
That’s an impressive Met history lesson right there. Maybe Ed Leyro (and Joey) should guide tours of Citi Field.
***
More congratulations, to the playoff-clinching, first-place Tampa Bay Rays. And here’s to their ownership attempting to defuse controversy by giving away 20,000 tickets to their final regular-season home game tonight. The Rays are drawing flies even as they are compiling what is, at present, baseball’s best record. The fan in me says it’s disgraceful that 12,446 showed up one night with a playoff spot imminent and that 17,891 came the next night when it was secured. The human being in me, however, never tells other people how to spend their money, particularly in a sad economy.
Evan Longoria and David Price expressed their frustration at receiving sparse visible support at Tropicana Field. Can’t say I blame them for feeling that way, but you don’t win customers to your cause by shaming them, certainly not when you personally outgross your physical fan base on any given night.
Still, you have to give away 20,000 tickets to get people to come see the best team in baseball? That’s frightening for the future of Tampa Bay baseball, which saddens me a little, as I went to college in the area, albeit too long ago for it to be highly relevant to the current state of affairs down there. There were no Rays in my day. There weren’t even Devil Rays. But there were Rowdies — the Tampa Bay Rowdies of the NASL. Professional soccer was on its last legs, and there were $5 tickets being sold on campus for a weeknight game at Tampa Stadium against the Toronto Blizzard. I bought one, mostly because the offer included a 98 ROCK t-shirt. No playoff spot was on the line, it was dull as could be, yet the Rowdies and the Blizzard drew about 16,000…or almost as many as the Rays got for winning their division.
I’ve read dozens of comments on the Tampa Tribune and St. Petersburg Times Web sites as to why attendance is so low. The theories/gripes are generally these:
1) The stadium’s too inaccessible. The Rays shouldn’t be playing all the way over in St. Pete. Build a new stadium in Tampa. (This is presented against the backdrop of a simmering threatdown in which the Rays keep fear alive and hint they might pack up and vamoose altogether if they don’t get a better ballpark on better terms for them.)
2) Why should I pay all that money — money that’s tight to begin with — to go to a game at a lousy stadium that’s far away when I can watch on TV?
3) Too many people in Tampa-St. Pete are from somewhere else and have remained loyal to their teams, making it difficult for a 13-year-old franchise to take root.
On the first point: I’ve never been to the Trop, but I understand its location is far from desirable. Your call if you don’t want to make the schlep.
On the second point: universal complaint, perfectly legitimate; cable bills are high enough, might as well get some use out of it.
On the third point…I sort of get it even if I sort of don’t.
I lived in Tampa for four years and never developed any affinity for the Rowdies, the Bucs of the NFL or the Bandits of the USFL, who were a big deal during their brief existence (Burt Reynolds owned a piece of the team, Jerry Reed recorded an unforgettable theme song and Loni Anderson posed for a very popular poster — trust me when I say this was early 1980s Tampa Bay heaven). If I had stayed after graduation, I doubt I would have converted to any of the local teams. Had I still been a Tampan in 1998, I might have adopted the Devil Rays as my A.L. club, but I can’t fathom ever having transferred my primary rooting interest to them from the Mets.
Yet in a metropolitan area of more than 2.7 million people, you’re going to tell me all you have are transplanted New Yorkers, New Englanders, Midwesterners and others who were never won over to the home team? Nobody who grew up in Hillsborough or Pinellas County immune to the charms of teams from somewhere else? There are such creatures as native Floridians, believe it or not. And what about a good, old-fashioned bandwagon? The Rays are rolling..no hop-ons?
During my time in the Tampa Bay region, Major League Baseball was a dream. The dream came true. For a decade, the D-Rays were a nightmare, yet now the Rays are surreally good. I can understand 12,000, if that many, for the Mets and Brewers these nights, but for the Rays and a playoff spot? Kind of a special occasion, I would think. Granted, it was a Silver game by the Rays’ reckoning (versus the Orioles…sounds Bronze to me), but unless you’re a certain other American League East team which has now qualified for the postseason 49 frigging times, how often do nights like these come along?
The Mets clinched postseason berths at Shea five times. Here was their paid attendance for those blessed events:
1969: 54,928
1986: 47,823
1988: 45,274
2000: 48,858
2006: 46,729
Remember, the first three were actual turnstile counts and didn’t include comps. The latter two were tickets sold, but I can assure you from having been on hand, in ’00 and ’06 that Shea felt very, very full both nights.
Maybe it’s Big Apples and Florida oranges to compare New York and Tampa Bay. I could point out the Mets were newer in 1969 than the Rays are now, but that would be specious. The Mets were no ordinary expansion franchise. They were filling a void left by two long-lived National League clubs that had been gone a mere four seasons, whereas the Tampa Bay Devil Rays were marking previously uncharted territory at the time of their birth. Passion’s another difference. We’re New York. They’re Tampa Bay. There’s a good chance we’re going to chafe at that comparison in a few weeks, pending the ALCS matchup, but it’s true.
Just ask Jerry Manuel, which is what Mike Francesa did on Tuesday in what was, in all likelihood, the final weekly afternoon drivetime chat Manuel will give WFAN in his capacity as Mets manager. Francesa asked him if New York was what he expected. Here’s Manuel’s answer:
I didn’t realize how great the passion was here. I didn’t realize how knowledgeable the fan was here. This is, to me, the Mecca of baseball.
If Jerry weren’t on the clock, I imagine the Post would run a front page headline highlighting that “Mecca” remark and demanding to know why the Mets hate America. That aside, yes, of course, he’s right, and not because his portrayal flatters us. Baseball is what we do in New York. If we had any reasonable chance of doing it in Queens beyond this Sunday, we’d be doing it like crazy all week this week at Citi Field. The Mets reported 24,666 were in attendance last night for Ruben Tejada’s Ruben™. The Mets are funny that way.
Nevertheless, we had more invisible fans in the park Tuesday than the Rays did in reality Monday, and the Rays are playing for much more.
Boy am I glad I didn’t stay in Tampa.
by Jason Fry on 28 September 2010 11:29 pm If I’d told you back in March that September 28’s game would come down to whether somebody named John Axford could survive ninth-inning confrontations with Ike Davis, Nick Evans, Josh Thole and Ruben Tejada, you probably would have deduced that September 28’s game wouldn’t mean very much. And you would have been right, for this was Brewers-Mets, for a complete absence of marbles: one hitherto anonymous porn-stached young closer against a quartet of guys who were Plan Bs for the Mets at the beginning of 2010. (Though OK, Evans would love to be a Plan B in an organization that until a couple of weeks ago had forgotten he existed. You need Greek letters to express how far down the ladder of plans poor Nick had fallen.)
But the great thing about baseball is that it can still be a lot of fun even when it doesn’t matter in the slightest. The Mets and Brewers let the string play out speedily between their fingers, trading mammoth shots from Corey Hart and David Wright. One of my favorite replays in Mets history is watching Gary Carter’s eyes pop when he sees a fat pitch from Al Nipper one October night at Fenway Park — he looks, to quote Joe Garagiola’s rather odd remark, “like somebody stuck a quarter in his nose.” I flashed back to that when Wright turned saucer-eyed at the sight of a Randy Wolf meatball approaching, a meatball he promptly blasted down the left-field line to touch down a satisfying distance past the Great Wall of Flushing. (If you’re scoring at home, for God’s sake stop — but yes, those were his 97th and 98th RBIs of the year.) Hart has few discernable facial expressions beneath his ridiculous facial hair — he looks like a D&D character drawn by a junior-high kid — but he would have been forgiven an ear-to-ear grin after Mike Pelfrey offered him a fat fastball that he smashed over the center-field fence with such violence that it bounced the length of the batter’s eye.
Still, it’s possible neither ball was struck as hard as the one Ike Davis hit leading off the ninth. But Citi Field being Citi Field, that one just clanked off a fence 416 feet away for a double. Evans struck out chasing an eyebrow-high fastball and slunk back to the dugout in misery; Thole dropped a grotesque little mistake hit into the outfield that left him grinning in embarrassment; and then Tejada dispensed with all but the required drama by rocketing Axford’s first (and last) pitch up the left-field alley to win the game. Hooray Mets!
Did this immortal contest raise questions that will haunt us for months? No, not a one — at best we got momentarily diverting issues. What inspired Keith and Ron to try out being homers for a half-inning (Keith’s squeal of “Go fair!” on a little foul squibber was the funniest), and why was Gary so grimly determined to drag them, like guilty schoolboys, back to more serious commentary? Why couldn’t Jerry Manuel let Pelfrey try to escape his own eighth-inning mess, given the utter nothingness of what was at stake? Is Tejada’s recent string of excellent at-bats is evidence he’s turned a developmental corner, or just garbage time in action?
No matter, really. We got two out-of-it teams bashing away at each other as the last wisps of summer dissolved. It meant absolutely nothing, and it sure was fun to watch.
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