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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 25 September 2010 3:47 am The Mets have lost six in a row for the first time all season and have fallen five games below .500 for the first time all season. It is said you shouldn’t necessarily trust everything you see out of a team in September, yet I find it surprising we didn’t see this kind of downward spiral manifest in all its utter ugliness until now.
It’s also said you’re never as bad as you look when you’re losing. But the Mets have looked bad for a very long time; they just somehow once in a while avoided losing. That brand of luck appears to have been pulled from the shelf.
It will get worse before it can possibly get better. The Mets are likely to taste the nadir of their profession when the team they’ve considered their primary rival for the past four seasons clinches its fourth consecutive division title in their faces. It could happen Saturday night if the Braves lose their afternoon game in Washington. If not Saturday, then Sunday. The Phillies’ magic number is 2. After observing these two franchises for four seasons, to say nothing of nine innings Friday night, can you possibly doubt a clinching isn’t in the immediate offing?
The Phillies play to win, and they won. The Mets play until they don’t have to anymore. They have nine games remaining. If someone told them they could stay out on a field and plow through 81 consecutive innings to fulfill their contractual commitment, I honestly think they’d take a deep breath and bear down as much as they are capable of bearing down until they grounded into 243 outs if that’s what it would take to get their season over any quicker.
Among the many things one can find to irritate oneself from watching the Mets have the string played out around them these days, I took particular note of comments made by Jerry Manuel before Friday night’s inevitable loss. The subject was the impact a series like this — played in such a raucous atmosphere — might have on his young, impressionable players. Manuel went on about how it would be good for them to see what it’s like to compete inside the steaming cauldron that is Citizens Bank Park when a potential division-clinching is on the line.
It wasn’t so much Manuel agreeing with the premise, as posed by Kevin Burkhardt, that got me — it was that the Mets are suddenly going to learn about this now? Like this should be a novelty for them? They’re the New York Mets. They shouldn’t have to go to Philadelphia or anywhere to learn what it means to be hard-nosed or psyched up or whatever you want to call it. It wasn’t that long ago (though it feels like an eternity) when the Mets would occasionally blame a letdown in a place like Miami on their not being used to empty ballparks because they were so accustomed to more dynamic surroundings. The Mets would put a charge into Shea, Shea — we — would put a charge into the Mets and the collective energy level would reach as high as the Keyspan sign in left.
So now the Mets arrive from No Life Stadium, where they were swept in environs befitting their tepid pulse rate, and Philadelphia is supposed to provide some kind of lesson in how to get fired up. And they lose again anyway. The Mets don’t win when nobody (other than the Pirates) is on hand and nothing is at stake, and the Mets don’t win when they’re taking on a chronically motivated opponent in front of 45,000 red-clad brayers tased out of their minds on success.
Geez, whatever. Whatever the excuse of the night is, throw it on the pile.
Much was made afterwards Friday night about the hard, chippy slide Chase Utley took toward the body of Ruben Tejada in the fifth inning in the midst of a 5-4-3 double play. If this were an era in which the Mets also slide hard and chippily, it would have probably gone unnoticed, yet because the Mets lack familiarity with playing to win, it came off as unsporting or worse. Tejada, to his everlasting credit, not only turned the double play (despite a lousy throw from David Wright) but brushed the whole thing off as baseball being baseball.
If the Mets are pissed off about it, as their postgame quotes indicate, great. Go out and find the other team’s second baseman. And when you’ve done more than not saying “pardon me” by Mr. Utley on our way to high tea, keep it up elsewhere. You don’t have to start throwing elbows or knockdowns every other inning, but don’t treat getting riled up like it’s that suit you only put on for special occasions. Every game is supposed to be a special occasion. Every game is an occasion to get riled up. Every game is a game to play to win.
After Chase sent Ruben heels over head, the Mets “began yelling at Utley from the bench,” according to Andy Martino in the News. That I do find surprising, for it indicates the Mets actually watch the games they’re nominally playing.
If we’re sitting here in some future September examining yet another Mets win and we’re poring over quotes from battle-tested veterans like Tejada and Thole and Davis about how it all started for them that night in Philadelphia in 2010 — when they were rookies getting regularly pulverized and posterized until it dawned on them how the game was supposed to be played because they saw Chase Utley take nothing for granted…then I’ll believe the business about this being a good experience. For the time being, it’s just more of the same: The Phillies won and the Mets landed on their ass.
And if former second baseman and current Brooklyn Cyclones manager Wally Backman happened to be watching the postgame show, how far do you suppose he threw his TV when Wright said “cooler heads prevailed” and “we’ll re-evaluate the way we go into second base”? Enough with the cooler heads and the Committee to Re-Evaluate Slides, David Wright, chairman. Just shut up and take somebody out already.
As for R.A. Dickey, he could have pitched more effectively, but he had another MVP night when it came to offering analysis of why the Mets lost. Words and phrases R.A. used in a sentence as he stood by his locker answering questions:
• etiquette
• grotesque
• refined palate
• culture
• deem
• formidable
• Petri dish
• oblivion
• vortex
Granted, “that sure was a good no-hitter I just threw” would have sounded better than any of that, but barring unforeseen events like the Mets winning games the rest of the season, R.A. Dickey’s Every Fifth Day Impromptu SAT Prep Course is the best, last reason to stay tuned to this team.
As if we don’t do this sort of thing everyday, Jason and I collaborated on a “Dear John” letter kissing the 2010 Mets goodbye at Yahoo! Sports’ Big League Stew. You can feel our scorn and read us spurn here.
by Greg Prince on 24 September 2010 9:25 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: Coors Field
HOME TEAM: Colorado Rockies
VISITS: 1
VISITED: August 17. 1995
CHRONOLOGY: 14th of 34
RANKING: 10th of 34
I’m flying high over Denver, Colorado, with America’s hottest team and we’re all about to soar…
Now we’re talking! Coors Field — Top 10, baby! Excitement! Excitement not just that we’ve reached rarefied air in our countdown (figuratively and literally), but we are at the center of the action! It’s the summer of 1995, and no place in baseball is more happening than LoDo.
LoDo, if you haven’t had the pleasure, is Lower Downtown Denver, perfectly chosen spot for Coors Field, the National League’s first legitimately new ballpark since 1977, maybe since 1962. I say “legitimately” in deference to the inauguration of two expansion teams in 1993 and the introduction to the senior circuit of two retrofitted football stadia to our National pastime, absurdly large Mile High Stadium and simply absurd Joe Robbie Stadium (a name with the staying power of a minute steak).
Mile High played a huge role in the development of the Rockies their two seasons, allowing the club to introduce itself to the region with authority. The Rockies drew 4,483,350 fans in 1993, a record that will absolutely never be broken. If novelty and size didn’t come with expiration dates, the Rockies might have never wanted to leave the Broncos’ old paddock. But that arrangement was just temporary. Baseball was coming to Denver and it was going to have a ballpark to make it feel at home.
And boy did it. Coors Field felt perfect on contact. The National League needed Coors Field. We were down 0-3 in the ballpark department by the mid-’90s, getting our ass kicked in the architectural All-Star Game. The American League had Camden Yards, Jacobs Field, the Ballpark in Arlington.
The National League had like six variations of Veterans Stadium.
If you skip back over where the Rockies squatted (and the Marlins continue to squat until 2012), the last new place any N.L. team opened was frigging Olympic Stadium. Before that, the spate of Vets. Before that, Shea, and before that, Dodger Stadium, the only thing in the league besides Wrigley actually built for baseball.
Ohmigod how we needed Coors Field. Denver needed it, too. My first trip there was in 1990, pre-Rockies. You know what the locals were campaigning for? Baseball! They wanted it. I can still see the t-shirt I brought home for a friend: If We Build It, Major League Baseball Will Come. “It” was a beautifully illustrated classic ballpark. That t-shirt combined a clumsy slogan and a busy design, but I loved darling sentiment. As extra large as the Broncos were out there, they wanted more than football.
And they got it. The Rockies came to town in the first National League expansion since 1969, drawing those unbelievable crowds (1993 Home Opener: 80,227) in unbelievably gruesome weather, but the Coloradoans didn’t care. First a ballclub. Then a field to match their dreams. They couldn’t and wouldn’t stay away.
Most major league cities weren’t enamored of their home team when the 1995 season commenced given that it was opening late because of the longest strike in the sport’s history. The pox on both their houses sentiment ran strong. Me, I was easy — the second replacement baseball was replaced by the real thing, I conjured short-term memory loss regarding labor vs. management and salivated for the Mets’ return as if conditioned by Doc Pavlov himself. Rockies fans were even easier. They waited two years for Coors Field to open, then another three weeks while a truncated Spring Training scrambled to completion and then blew off the aftereffects of a snowstorm to fill more than 47,000 seats in LoDo. The Rockies did not let their loving patrons down, winning a dramatic Opening Night in 14 innings, 11-9
Which sucked from our perspective, since the Mets were the opposition that long, cold evening, but otherwise it was hard not to get caught up in what was going on in LoDo. The Rockies brought bricks to the National League for the first time in the age of concrete. They strove to evoke Ebbets Field (but weren’t nuts about it like some owners I could mention). And they put their new ballpark to great use, racing out to a 7-1 start and, for a while, putting a stranglehold on first place — all in their third year.
These were the days of the Blake Street Bombers, when everybody admired the ballpark and marveled at the thin air and asked no questions about whether anything else was fueling that fusillade of home runs. It was simply a great if slightly aberrational story: Dante Bichette (who beat us in the opener; bastard), Larry Walker, Vinny Castilla and Andres Galarraga were in the midst of combining for 139 home runs. Altogether, the Rockies hit .282 in 1995, best in the league. Altogether, the Rockies pitched to a 4.97 ERA, worst in the league. Yet unfathomable hitting was making up for wretched pitching. The Rockies were hot — the hottest thing baseball had to offer.
In the middle of August, I donned my oven mitts and reached in to grab a slice for myself.
Synergy was the buzzword of that trip. The name of the ballpark: Coors Field. The locally based company that bought the naming rights: Coors Brewing. Product marketed by company: beer. Industry I covered like a tarpaulin in 1995: beverages.
You could see it like you could see the mountains all around you in Colorado. This was meant to be, me and Coors Field in its rookie year. It was destiny and a smart PR guy who put us together. What, you think they’d want to schedule a press visit to their brewery when the Rockies were out of town? You think I would go for that?
The beauty part was the Coors-Rockies relationship went beyond slapping a name atop the LoDo landmark. Coors Field was so of the moment that it came with its own microbrewery, SandLot Brewery. It was truly one of the great ideas of all-time, doubling as a ballpark attraction for the team and a working laboratory for the company (it’s where the Blue Moon brand was created). My gosh, just thinking of the name SandLot puts me back there, and I mean back there, because I got the insider’s tour: where they made the beer, how they made the beer and, most importantly, what the beer tasted like as it made its way from tank to tap handle.
I believe the technical term for the taste was “perfect”. I’m not a beer guy, really. I wrote about it, but not with any great aficionadoness if that’s a word…and after a few samples at SandLot, you can bet it was. I don’t know if it was simple thirst or the charge I got from being on the inside sipping from what the brewmasters call “the pigtail” after getting to enjoy the outside of Coors Field and witnessing LoDo come to life for a Rockies game, but I was so into that beer. Neither at a baseball game nor in a business situation had I ever gotten tipsy before. But here, at both, I definitely was.
And I didn’t mind.
After the finest and freshest beer I’ve ever savored — Squeeze Play Wheat, they called it — my handlers and I headed to our seats. What kind of seats do you suppose the folks from Coors rated at Coors Field? Damn good seats: eight rows behind the Rockies’ dugout. Pete Coors himself was four rows in front of us. Bret Saberhagen was four rows in front of him, leaning over the dugout railing and shooting the breeze with his new teammates. More center of the action stuff: Saberhagen was the big prize of the trading deadline, the kind of proven ace a serious contender reaches out to scoop up from some downtrodden team dying to shed payroll…which was us in 1995. We gave them Bret Saberhagen (for Juan Acevedo and the immortal Arnold Gooch). Saberhagen never much impressed me as a Met but seeing him as a Rockie, just eight rows away…wow!
That was probably the beer talking. But sobered up and settled in after a fashion, my wowness never dissipated as the night wore on. Coors Field felt as fresh as what SandLot was brewing. It was crisp and open and electric, like no place I’d been for baseball. The house was packed and engaged by its baseball team. Intelligently engaged. Three years in the bigs and these were major league fans. Not only did they cheer their Rockies as three-quarters of their Bombers lay waste to Cubs pitching, but they were savvy enough to scoreboard-watch. The Dodgers had edged ahead of the Rockies in the N.L. West, but they were losing in Cincinnati. When that game went final, a roar went forth that was as majestic as the Rocky Mountains.
Good idea building It. They came.
I could have fallen in serious like with the Rockies if I’d imbibed a little more. Rick Reilly had suggested (albeit fancifully) after the Opener that even a Mets fan just visiting Coors Field would be tempted to never leave the joint. I could see that. I wanted a piece of it to take home. I spent an inning in the team store picking out apparel and posters and postcards so I could remember Coors Field when I was back on Long Island wistfully remembering what it was like to be in the center of the action, caught up in a team that was instantly good, as opposed to the Mets who were relentlessly bad. And my hosts, who had probably treated a few guests to nights like these, presented me with parting gifts: a Rockies cap; a Coors Field baseball; an Inaugural Season beer glass with a Coors logo. I’m sure ethics would have told me to have graciously declined the goody bag. I’m sure I would have told ethics to have another Squeeze Play.
When my professional obligations were fulfilled the next day, I retired to my cozy room at the cozy hotel down the road from the brewery in Golden and watched the next Rockies game, which wasn’t going nearly as well for the home team as the one the night before. A brutal storm rolled through the area, causing a long rain delay at Coors Field. When play resumed, the park had lost most of its customers. One of the Rockie announcers hoped empty seats would never be so prevalent on any kind of regular basis. That, he said, would be a sad sight to behold.
The announcer’s fear eventually came to fruition. The 1995 Rockies rode their fab four sluggers to the Wild Card (they lost the division series to Atlanta, Bret Saberhagen getting clobbered in the finale), but they faded from contention immediately after that first magical season. Chronically piss-poor pitching, impossible altitude, diminished novelty…the Rockies crumbled into ordinariness almost immediately and Denver reverted to full-time football town for the next dozen years. Coors Field remained well-built, but fewer and fewer came. Across the National League, ballparks like it rose and nipped away at the uniqueness of it. Almost everybody has something like it now.
But Coors Field did it first, did it with style and showed me unprecedented hospitality in the process. I toast it still.
by Greg Prince on 24 September 2010 3:17 am Just when you thought you’d never again see a 1998 Met in the big leagues — no one who knew the rare pleasure of dressing in the same clubhouse as Tony Phillips, Ralph Milliard, Todd Haney, Willie Blair and Jorge Fabregas — up stepped Jay Payton to emerge as this season’s Longest Ago Met Still Active (LAMSA).
It got close there for five months, and it didn’t look like anyone would materialize to fill the about-to-be eternal void, but then again Jay always was something of a slow starter.
Payton bided his time this season at Triple-A Colorado Springs, recovering from shoulder surgery that kept him out all of 2009. Sound familiar? That was the unfair and unfortunate story of Payton’s oft-delayed rise through the Mets’ minor league system. He was a sandwich pick in the 1994 draft but didn’t reach the bigs until the rosters were expanded on September 1, 1998, and didn’t stick for good until the beginning of the 2000 season. He didn’t do much till June and didn’t really kick it in gear until August. But there Jay Payton was throughout October, starting center fielder in every game of the postseason for the National League champs.
Metwise, Payton peaked in his official rookie year (ranking third in N.L. voting), suffering yet another injury in 2001 and being sent packing at the trade deadline in 2002 for rotation stabilizer John Thomson. The Mets were 4½ games from the Wild Card lead when Payton left. Bolstered by Thomson, they finished approximately a hundred games out. Cause-and-effect or coincidence? Hard to say.
Jay took well to Coors Field — hit .473 there in 2002, .321 in 2003 — but then made the mistake of leaving as a free agent. He wandered through San Diego, Boston, Oakland and Baltimore before his right shoulder took him off the major league map in 2009. Last year, while Payton was rehabbing (“I didn’t want an injury to be the reason why I quit the game”), there were no 1998 Mets in MLB captivity. It escaped our notice since we were properly Metsmerized that there was still a 1997 Met — Jason Isringhausen — active as well as two 1995 and 1996 Mets — Izzy and Paul Byrd.
Those pitchers are done, but Payton, 37, is lately back in Denver, gray beard and all (how is it I’m 47, yet 37, when applied to a ballplayer, sounds old?). We congratulate him on his perseverance and I thank him personally for the events of September 13, 2000, when I was working just north of Astor Place and not particularly loving it. There was a day game at Shea and I took one of my curiously timed long lunches so I could go off somewhere sunny and listen to the broadcast in peace. A late-afternoon meeting loomed, but I willfully ignored it as long as I could so I could sit on a bench and stay tuned through a compelling pitchers duel: Mike Hampton vs. Jeff D’Amico. Hampton was good (8 IP, 4 H, 2 BB, 7 SO, 1 ER), future Met D’Amico slightly better (8 IP, 4 H, 1 BB, 10 SO, 0 ER).
D’Amico gave way to Curt Leskanic to start the ninth. Jay Payton doubled to lead off and, two outs later, scored on a Robin Ventura double. No way I could go back to the office now. I gave myself the tenth to see what would happen before giving in to the realities of office life. After Armando Benitez escaped the top of the inning unscathed, the Mets faced ex-Amazin’ Juan Acevedo. With one out, Mike Bordick singled to center; Joe McEwing did the same. Bubba Trammell popped up for the second out.
Then Jay Payton and…BOOM!
Three-run homer! The Mets win 4-1 and solidify their Wild Card lead. I am exultant in Washington Square Park, where shouting and giving phantom high-fives won’t draw any undue attention. Then I reluctantly race back for my meeting, floating from walkoff-winning and dragging from the realization I can’t sit outside any longer on a perfect end-of-summer day and luxuriate in Mets Extra.
I’m still on the mailing list for the magazine I edited in those days and a couple of the changes I suggested at that meeting ten years ago are still in effect. When an issue shows up here, I leaf through it disinterestedly, but sometimes I notice a section title I named in 2000 and think back not to the dreary meeting that birthed them but the tense day game that preceded it. Maybe Jay Payton inspired my apparent abiding brilliance. Or maybe I just like thinking about better Met Septembers than this one.
Chase Field in Phoenix served this week as LAMSA Hall, where the four Longest Ago Mets Still Active congregated for an impromptu Bobby Valentine Era reunion. The Rockies were fighting for their playoff lives with Payton, Melvin Mora (Met debut: May 30, 1999) and recent addition Octavio Dotel (Met debut: June 26, 1999) in purple and black. In the Arizona bullpen, Dotel tradee Mike Hampton (Met debut: March 29, 2000) stood ready to turn around switch-hitters and thwart lefties as needed.
Wednesday night, Mora staked Colorado to an early 3-0 lead on a shot over the left field wall, but the Rox couldn’t make it stand up; they were trailing 5-4 when Hampton — who, like Payton, seemed so done in the face of multiple injuries that he was available to join a half-dozen retired 2000 teammates at a Mets Alumni event in May — came on in the eighth and struck out leadoff batter Dexter Fowler. He also sounded like Payton when he was called up from Reno early this month: “I’m not ready to give it up, not ready to quit — it’s never been an option.”
Funny thing about those prime-time (1997-2001) Bobby Valentine Mets: the best of them never did quit easily, did they? If you’d like a tenth-anniversary reminder of their cheerfully obstinate nature, you are advised to check out Matthew Callan’s delightfully evocative In the Year 2000 series on Amazin’ Avenue.
Meanwhile, a look at where Jay Payton fits in on the LAMSA timeline…
LONGEST AGO MET STILL ACTIVE: Chronology
• Felix Mantilla, debuted as a Met, 4/11/1962; last game in the major leagues, 10/2/1966
• Al Jackson, 4/14/1962; 9/26/1969
• Chris Cannizzaro, 4/14/1962*; 9/28/1974
• Ed Kranepool, 9/22/1962; 9/30/1979
• Tug McGraw, 4/18/1965; 9/25/1984
• Nolan Ryan, 9/11/1966; 9/22/1993
• Jesse Orosco, 4/5/1979; 9/27/2003
• John Franco, 4/11/1990; 7/1/2005
• Jeff Kent, 8/28/1992; 9/27/2008
• Jason Isringhausen**, 7/17/1995; 6/13/2009
• Paul Byrd**, 7/28/1995; 10/3/2009
• Jay Payton**, 9/1/1998; 9/23/2010 (current)
* Cannizzaro was Jackson’s catcher on April 14, 1962, at the Polo Grounds, so for LAMSA purposes, he debuted as a Met after his pitcher.
**For much of 2009 and 2010 — with Isringhausen injured, Byrd sitting out and Payton working his way back — Melvin Mora (5/30/1999) held what turned out to be interim LAMSA status. As we learned first-hand in August, the 38-year-old Mora, despite striking out to end a furious Rockies comeback Thursday night, is as ageless as his most magical Met moment is timeless.
Complementing the Longest Ago Met Still Active designation is Last Met Standing: the final player from each Met season to wear a major league uniform in game action. Who had the longevity to outlast all his former teammates from a given year?
Let’s find out…
LAST MET STANDING: 1962-1998
1962-1964: Ed Kranepool (final MLB game: 9/30/1979)
1965: Tug McGraw (9/25/1984)
1966: Nolan Ryan (9/22/1993)
1967: Tom Seaver (9/19/1986)
1968-1971: Nolan Ryan (9/22/1993)
1972-1975: Tom Seaver (9/19/1986)
1976-1977: Lee Mazzilli (10/7/1989; ALCS)
1978: Alex Treviño (9/30/1990)
1979: Jesse Orosco (9/27/2003)
1980: Hubie Brooks (7/2/1994)
1981-1987: Jesse Orosco (9/27/2003)
1988-1989: David Cone (5/28/2003)
1990-1991: John Franco (7/1/2005)
1992-1994: Jeff Kent (9/27/2008)
1995-1996: Paul Byrd (10/3/2009)
1997: Jason Isringhausen (6/13/2009)
1998: Jay Payton (9/23/2010; current)
Still to be determined is who will be the Last Met Standing from the seasons immediately following 1998. The candidates come from those onetime Mets who played in the major leagues in 2010:
1999: Mora, Dotel, Payton
2000: Hampton, Mora, Payton
2001: Payton, Bruce Chen
The 2002 Mets, as generally disgraceful as they were, still managed to spawn a surprising number of major league survivors who have demonstrated staying power clear to this season: Payton; Chen; the regrettable Gary Matthews, Jr.; Scott Strickland (after a five-year absence); Ty Wigginton, Tyler Walker (whose five-game stint eight years ago completely escapes my usually airtight memory); Marco Scutaro; and the last Bobby Valentine Met to remain a Met as we prepare to end the Jerry Manuel era, Pedro Feliciano. Since Feliciano, 34, is a lefty, we can assume that if he remains healthy, he will remain employed by somebody somewhere for quite a while longer. Thus, that 2002 75-86 banner should fly safely from Pedro’s trusty left hand for not a few years to come.
2003 brought Jose Reyes to the big leagues, while 2004 saw the debut of David Wright. If we’re groping around for the last 2003 and 2004 Mets any sooner than the end of this decade at the earliest, then there’s something very wrong with the world.
by Greg Prince on 23 September 2010 7:41 am [T]he ending always comes at last
Endings always come too fast
They come too fast
But they pass too slow…
— Jimmy Webb
The Mets began this baseball season by playing the Florida Marlins. They suffered their first loss while playing the Florida Marlins. They absorbed their first serious body blow when they were swept by the Florida Marlins. They kick-started their best stretch of baseball by sweeping the Florida Marlins. Then they started drifting aimlessly out to sea while playing the Florida Marlins in Florida Marlin home games far from Florida. Wednesday night, they finished playing the Florida Marlins.
And they never stopped losing to the Florida Marlins.
I think it’s fair to say if I never see Gaby Sanchez, Dan Uggla, Mike Stanton or any of the Florida Marlins again, it will be too soon, though the Mets’ first game of 2011 will be against the Florida Marlins, and, by then, I’ll be carping that I can’t wait to see the Mets play anybody — even the godforsaken Florida Marlins.
The final Met loss of the penultimate season at Soilmaster Stadium, on what was technically the last night there was summer, would have been a memorable train wreck had anybody any reason to keep an eye on the tracks. This was the kind of game — fall way behind immediately; scratch and claw enough to make you believe redemption is getting loose in the on-deck circle; find a way to fall cruelly and viciously short at the end — you fume about for ages if it means anything in the standings or if it’s the middle of May or if you’re 15 years old and haven’t yet fully learned what the Mets will do to you if you watch them too often and too closely. As was, in as meaningless a context as the Mets are capable of providing them, it was still pretty bad.
 Seriously, this is what I think of every time they show Niese in profile. Jon Niese, pictured at left, got knocked silly in the first inning. Well, he knocked himself silly by walking three Marlins en route to digging the five-run hole from which my momma done tol’ me the Mets were never going to emerge. Overall, Niese has been a feelgood story for the 2010 Mets, but it feels now like he ought to take a seat as soon as possible. The kid from Defiance has defied the odds to a great extent this season, logging 165.1 innings to date, far more than we could have counted on coming off last year’s gruesome leg injury. It was to his credit that after the five-run first he bore down and was mostly effective until he left in the bottom of the sixth. But it would probably be to his detriment to ask much more out of him and his not-quite 24-year-old left arm.
Hopefully his final two starts — his because on the attrition-addled, Ollie-saddled Mets of September 2010, nobody else is available to take them — won’t represent some kind of workload tipping point per his long-term well-being. Maybe worrying about another dozen or so innings is unnecessary fretting, but he hasn’t been particularly effective in a month, and there’s more to Jon Niese’s Met future than the Brewers on Tuesday and the Nationals on the final Sunday.
There’s almost certainly nothing left to the Met future of Jerry Manuel beyond October 3 except one final press briefing in which he sheepishly grins, shakes his head and says something you’d laugh along with if you found anything about the team he leaves behind amusing. Of course he won’t be back next year. It’s an open secret, which nonetheless doesn’t make it polite to speak about in decibels above a whisper when Jerry’s in the room.
A few weeks ago Wally Backman seemed to be openly coveting Jerry’s job when he answered some questions for the Post. Last Sunday, Mike “Talk to the Back” Pelfrey couldn’t resist speculating what it might be like playing for Joe Torre if Joe Torre was managing the Mets. And Torre himself briefly let it be known he wouldn’t be averse to considering such an opportunity before “closing the door” on it when informed he appeared gauche being so openly amenable to taking another man’s job.
The last big game Jerry Manuel managed was, not surprisingly, against the Florida Marlins, two years ago next week. The Mets didn’t win that one either, though it’s tough to pin it on Jerry’s managing. Consensus had it Manuel came into a tough situation midway through 2008 and made the best of it, leading the club through a 40-19 revival at one point and guiding also-runners to almost-winners. When his status was shifted from interim to permanent, it was a popular choice.
Everything since then has gone horribly wrong under Manuel. He earned the shot in 2009 through what he had done to get to the end of 2008 in contending shape (I still have no idea how we led the Phillies as late as we did). He earned a chance at redemption in 2010 because 2009 didn’t seem a fair reflection of his skills in the wake of all his players’ injuries. 2010 is clearly the end of the line. He hasn’t motivated the Mets, he hasn’t strategized the Mets out of their continual malaise, he couldn’t slow the Mets’ post-Puerto Rico tumble from making its inevitable downhill descent.
On merit, Jerry Manuel doesn’t deserve to return. But he does deserve to go out as one of thirty major league managers — the kind who isn’t talked about or talked to as if he already isn’t there. I won’t feel bad when somebody else is managing the New York Mets (unless it’s Art Howe again), but I do feel bad that Manuel can’t get to the finish line without his dismissal being cavalierly treated as a foregone conclusion. When Willie Randolph’s managerial tenure was on the clock and Gary Carter publicly leapt at the chance to not just throw him under the bus but to back the bus up over his still employed body, it was a cringeworthy incident. There’s a code that says you don’t do that. It’s fine for the rest of us to grease the skids, as we’re just watching from a distance, but when you’re in a profession, it’s simply bad form to join a conga line intent on kicking a colleague to the curb.
“I don’t know” is a good all-purpose answer to give for the record when somebody asks about replacing a manager who’s already in office if you’re either a prospective replacement or one of the players who’s still being managed by that guy. And if you’re a person talking to that guy, take it easy on him. You can hear it in the voices of the Mets’ beat reporters when they question Manuel about almost anything, with the implication embedded in every inquiry about next year being you’re not going to be here but…
Every Wednesday, Jerry Manuel is paid to sit on the phone and chat with Mike Francesa (because who would voluntarily want to talk to him?). Francesa doesn’t need much prodding to come off as obnoxious and self-important, but yesterday he was amazingly matter-of-fact in his patronizing tone, referring to the Mets in the third-person plural to Jerry, as if he was talking about a team already skippered by somebody besides the person on the other end of the line. At one point, Manuel got very terse and asked, in essence, is it OK if I still use “we” here?
At that moment, even Mike Francesa sounded as if he felt shame. And if you can shame Mike Francesa, you must have some marketable skill, even if managing the Mets in 2011 isn’t it.
by Greg Prince on 22 September 2010 1:00 pm One of the sadder things about elimination day is how you now know you’re going to have to wait another year for the possibility — and nothing more — that you’ll finally get those things you spend the offseason wishing for and the balance of the season rooting for. Elimination comes along and you’re forced to set the clock forward. You haven’t gone four years since your last playoff appearance anymore; it’s five, because the theoretical soonest you can see playoffs appear for the first time since 2006 is 2011. That decade since the last time the Mets were in the World Series is now that decade (plus one). Actually winning it? Your Silver Anniversary Season Has Come.
Five years; eleven years; twenty-five years. We’ve done this too much, and we are compelled to do it too soon. “We shake hands till we see each other next season,” is what Coach Buttermaker in The Bad News Bears tells Amanda Whurlitzer ballplayers do when another year goes by. “Then we go fishing or hunting, make some personal appearances, get to know the wife and kids again.” True enough. Leaves gotta fall, pumpkin’s gotta frost, seasons gotta end. It’s fine that we do it eventually, if eventually means after a rollicking October and early November. It sucks that we, with eleven games remaining, are doing it for all intents and purposes now.
Again.
The competitive portion of the Mets’ season didn’t close shop when they lost their 77th game Tuesday night. That was what eliminated them mathematically. Spiritually they’ve been gone a long time. Spiritually, we’ve been gone a long time. When was the last time you found yourself absolutely gripped by a Mets game? Not just watching it, but absorbed in it, not letting go of it?
It’s been a while here, and I watch/listen to/attend virtually every Mets game. I pay less and less attention as the ramifications dry up and the numbness sets in, but I dutifully turn on the TV or radio pregame show at 6:30 and try to engage. I have to admit I don’t try that hard. The Mets don’t, so why should I?
Habit, however, isn’t eliminated as easily as the Mets, Last night, I wasn’t giving it my all, but when I had to run an errand in the neighborhood heading into the top of the eighth, I grabbed my portable radio for the duration of my absence from the couch. The Mets have been effectively out of contention since Tisha B’av, but the idea of going without them for a couple of blocks…anathema to my faith.
While I walked, David Wright walloped the homer that temporarily tied the game. In full view of whoever else might have been passing by at that instant, I raised a fist in the air. A fist to what? To 2-2? To potentially picking up ground on the Marlins? To another day of statistical life support?
I doubt it. It was, I suppose, a fist raised from muscle memory. Met hits a homer, I’m making extraordinary effort (relatively speaking) to follow it, I have been validated. Yay! My right arm probably also shot up to salute 42 seasons of this — 42 seasons of living and dying with the losing and the thing that’s the opposite of losing but I can’t remember at the moment what that is exactly. As seasons cease to sparkle and commence to fade, we don’t raise our fists for our team. We raise our fists for ourselves.
For those about to insist on walking to the drug store with a Mets game affixed in their ears, I salute me.
When the 2010 schedule was issued, I doubt I zeroed in on September 21 at Florida or September 14 versus Pittsburgh or anything that would be going on around now. It doesn’t work that way. When the preliminary 2011 schedule saw light last week, a lot of people I know tingled with excitement. Who are we playing Opening Day? Who are the Interleague opponents? Why is the All-Star Break FOUR days? I want to take my road trip HERE and HERE and, if I can swing it, HERE! Nobody dares squint hard at those orange and white boxes (presumably to be shaded metallically once the geniuses behind Better Seats Lower Prices get their grubby mitts on them) and envision one hollow September night after another after another.
Baseball’s all good before any of it’s played. Hard to believe our favorite sport our favorite team is drowning in drool this September is the same one that will amp us up in the days leading to April 1, 2011. We’ll dream of what might be and gloss over what has most recently been. We’ll tell each other all the things the rebirth of baseball means to us, completely forgetting it often means Septembers like that which drag interminably through seasons like 2010.
There’ll be plenty of time for reality to reintroduce itself in 2011. The clock has been set forward, but there’s no need to get ahead of ourselves too soon — or behind everybody but the Nationals yet again.
by Greg Prince on 22 September 2010 12:00 pm SNY gets back in the memory business Thursday evening at 6:30 with the debut of Mets Yearbook: 1967, celebrating the major league debuts of Joe Moock, Al Schmelz, Les Rohr, Billy Wynne and…I think I’m leaving somebody out. Oh, terrific, I can’t come up with the name.
 Easy to lose track of all those 1967 Mets, as there were a record 54 of them, or nearly two for each loss. Those Mets went 61-101, finished tenth and were led by two managers: the put-upon Wes Westrum and the eminently interim Salty Parker. I won’t pretend to be a Winik Brother, but I’m guessing there’ll be something toward the end about the guy whom the Mets acquired for another of their distinguished 1967 rookies, Bill Denehy.
Denehy, as I assume they teach in the schools, was the pitcher sent to the Washington Senators (along with a reported $50,000) as compensation for their manager Gil Hodges. Shocking that two years later, Hodges would lead the Mets from 101 losses to 100 wins and then some.
It’s not like Gil did it alone. He had some help, most prominently one of those pitchers who came up in ’67 — a righty. And that man’s name was…
Terrific. I forgot it again.
Ever wonder about the contents of those yearbooks whose cover images we feature? Read more about this one here.
by Jason Fry on 21 September 2010 11:30 pm Hate to break it to any of you who were keeping your October clear, but my co-blogger’s scenario has been thwarted, and the Mets have been eliminated from postseason play.
It’s fitting, somehow, that we’d be eliminated in a game that descended from taut but aggravating (rejuvenated Lucas Duda hitting an artillery shell of a home run but his teammates consistently being cut down at second base) to merely aggravating (David Wright stumbling in ungainly fashion over a double down the line, then breaking the wrong way on an infield error to put Mike Pelfrey in a hole, with Jose Reyes contributing a cosmetic but ghastly five-hole error of his own) to predictably tragic (Elmer Dessens, aka the Last Bullpen Toy Jerry Manuel Gets to Play With Till It Breaks, giving up a Gaby Sanchez home run that could have brought down a satellite).
Oh, and of course it was in Florida, against the consistently aggravating Marlins in their awful stadium, which should live on as a memorial to the millions of ulcers it’s bred in Mets fans. The only kindness was that they didn’t drag us to San Juan for our public execution.
Sigh.
Next year, by all indications, this club will have a different manager and a different general manager — which is entirely proper, given the recent run of disappointment and dysfunction and disaster and finally pervasive dullness. Whether the team will be run differently is another question entirely. It’s one that will be very much on all our minds this winter, and about which much more will be written by me and by Greg.
But if you’ll forgive me, after what feels like the eleventy-billionth dispiriting loss of the After Yadier era, it’s a question I can’t stand to think about right now.
* * *
The record will show that the night before the Mets’ season was handed from hospice worker to undertaker, I watched a baseball game from the kind of seat I probably will never sit in again: seven rows behind home plate, all food and (non-alcoholic) drink free, an army of people on hand to fetch things.
This seat, however, was in Yankee Stadium, courtesy of my friend Amanda, whom I hold in such high esteem that it only makes me grit my teeth moderately to write that she is simultaneously a rabid Yankee fan and a very fine person. Amanda and Wayne and I attended a game at Citi Field a while back, with Amanda amiably offering her observations of enemy territory; this was the sequel to that night, except when the three of us made these plans we had no idea that it would be the night the Yankees unveiled George Steinbrenner’s monument.
Arriving in the Bronx and finding myself surrounded by Yankee fans, I felt like Frodo when he and Sam were trudging across Mordor in their lame-ass orc disguises. This was silly, of course: If you don’t count the look of wary chagrin, I bore no outward sign of Mets allegiance. Yet I found myself moving furtively through the Yankee hordes, waiting to be exposed.
This didn’t happen — in fact, everyone connected to the Yankees was perfectly nice, including Joba Chamberlain’s father, of all people. (How did we meet him? Amanda is the kind of person who will befriend everyone in a room inside of 10 minutes and have a grand time doing so, which means this stuff happens to her.) After a bit of milling around, we got armbands and descended into the subterranean Legends Suite Club, which is two levels of dining rooms and bars and the kind of spread that might impress even Nero. I believe I started with sirloin, mashed potatoes with goat cheese and duck medallions, and moved from there to cheeses and figs and sushi. Later there were garlic fries involved, and much later coconut cream pie in mini-helmets, chocolate-dipped strawberries and assorted truffles. I realize that sounds like some absurd flight of fancy, but I’m not exaggerating. Hell, I probably left out a confit or something. At one point I found myself sitting in my padded, teak-armed seat drinking a Bellini. Why? Because I freaking could, that’s why.
It was the kind of other-side-of-the-velvet-rope night you very occasionally luck into in New York and soak up, knowing you’ll soon awaken and be back in normal life. The lone disadvantage (other than now being much fatter) was that I didn’t explore any other part of new Yankee Stadium, because that would have leaving a place where you thrust out a plate and people put wagyu beef on it. (To be fair, the club also offers plenty of normal ballpark fare.) Amanda and I agreed we’d come another night, sit in seats for mortals, and walk around. Until we do that I can’t offer any assessment of Yankee Stadium. The part where I spent my night was spectacular, but of course it was.
I did get to witness the dedication of Steinbrenner’s memorial, though, and it was … interesting. First of all, the Yankees do spectacle better than the Mets do, which isn’t particularly a surprise or something to be envied. It was intriguing to play Kremlinologist based on what the Yankees showed fans on video: Joe Torre got plenty of close-ups, but the A/V people kept returning to Don Mattingly, who was cheered rapturously. The team, Steinbrenner family members and dignitaries made their way out to Monument Park via the warning track, which seemed like a misstep to me: There would have been a lot more visual impact had the procession gone from home plate to center field. But besides the problem of golf carts encountering a pitcher’s mound, the roundabout route meant much more contact with fans, which I suppose is a point in the Yankees’ favor. (Aside: It’s odd to realize you can’t scream vile things at Bud Selig because he’ll not only hear you but know it was you.)
What struck me — and struck lots of other people — was how big Steinbrenner’s plaque is. It’s 35 square feet — far bigger than the plaques accorded Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle, to name just four. To me it looked ludicrous — and, frankly, ill-advised.
The Yankees have always been about exceptionalism — something I don’t mean as a compliment, though I understand why some of their fans consider it one. They’ve always stood out from the rest of baseball: When some veteran becomes a Yankee, it’s different than his becoming a Mariner or an Astro or even a Dodger or Red Sock. It’s the one franchise that diminishes its stars as it elevates them into the ranks of the bazillionaires — they wear the same uniform worn by all those men with plaques, with no name above the number, and have to prove themselves against all those forebears and all those rings (baby). Personally, I think all that adds up to an obnoxious cult, but it’s a pretty effective one even if I have no interest in being a member. I expected the Yankees to honor Steinbrenner with a memorial that would fit in with those accorded Ruth and Gehrig and Berra and Munson and the others; instead, they unveiled something big enough for the man to actually be buried in. And by doing that, the Yankees took the oldest, cheapest cliche about the Boss and made it true: He’ll forever be bigger than the team.
by Greg Prince on 21 September 2010 9:42 pm From the Department of the Painfully Obvious, the New York Mets have been eliminated from postseason contention following their 5-2 loss to the Florida Marlins. Time of death: 9:38 PM EDT, but really, they’ve been done since Puerto Rico. Record before San Juan: 43-32. Record from San Juan on: 31-45.
Autumnal equinox is tomorrow night. Very windy right now here where I am. Very barren where the Mets are. Late summer has never felt later.
by Greg Prince on 21 September 2010 7:32 pm Lucas Duda just blasted one out of Whatever It’s Called Stadium, his second homer, meaning Club Hessman loses yet another temporary member. Population of One Met Homer Village: 69 again.
If only it was ’69 again.
In other updating-type news, the war of attrition has claimed another victim: Bobby Parnell, out for the season with inflammation and stiffness in his pitching elbow. That’s four Mets who have been lost in September: Santana, Mejia, Hernandez, now Bobby. Also, Ollie Perez and Luis Castillo don’t seem to be available, ever.
Which is OK.
by Greg Prince on 20 September 2010 10:42 pm With our friends at Citizens Bank Park frantically waving white towels, the Atlanta Braves surrendered a 3-1 loss to the Philadelphia Phillies, reducing the Braves’ tenuous Wild Card lead over the New York Mets to a paltry 11½ games — 11 in the loss column. The Mets have 12 games remaining, Atlanta 11.
For the Mets to storm from behind and win the National League Wild Card, the following needs to occur:
• The Mets (74-76) must go 12-0.
• The Braves (86-75) must go 0-11.
• The Marlins (74-75) must go 3-0 against the Braves, 0-2 against the Mets; their other games are immaterial.
• The Reds (85-66) must go 3-0 against the Padres; their other games are immaterial.
• The Cardinals (77-72) must go at least 3-1 against the Rockies, no better than 5-4 against everybody else.
• The Rockies (82-67) must go 0-3 against the Giants, no better than 1-3 against the Cardinals, no better than 2-4 against everybody else.
• The Padres (83-66) must go 0-3 against the Giants, 0-3 against the Reds, no better than 2-5 against everybody else.
• The Giants (84-66) must go 3-0 against the Rockies, 3-0 against the Padres; their other games are immaterial.
Under this scenario, the Phillies, the Reds and the Giants will capture their respective division titles. The Mets and Braves will finish tied for the Wild Card at 86-76, necessitating a one-game playoff.
And the Mets will have to win that game to win the Wild Card at 87-76.
That’s all.
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