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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 15 September 2010 12:38 am My gosh, that was a lot of fun at Citi Field on Tuesday night! R.A. Dickey with another complete game, Ruben Tejada skilled at bat and in the field, Nick Evans maintaining his momentum, Angel Pagan making like it was the first half of the season and Carlos Beltran making like it was the first half of his career.
My gosh, it was depressing at Citi Field on Tuesday night! There was nobody there. If not literally nobody, then incredibly close to it. Whoever was there made as little noise as possible, save for the bursts of energy that would emanate during the scoring of nine Mets runs and the completion of nine Dickey innings. The paid attendance isn’t worth citing. Let’s just say your row was your own and probably your section, too.
That’s not bad as far as fan comfort goes, but these things work better with a crowd. No crowd on Tuesday night. More like a klatch. Beds were made in advance and the lying in them was not unexpected. Still, vacant is vacant, and that business of how “there are 5,000 but they sound like 50,000” didn’t apply. If we were 5,000, we sounded like 500. That’ll happen at Empti Field.
But the game was full of good stuff. Oh, R.A., can’t you stick around this winter and have a snowball fight with us? With your 57 MPH knuckler, you’d be a more sporting opponent than Randy Johnson — and better company when we go sledding afterwards. And Ruben…where have you been lately? Oh right, nailed to the bench by the mad manager Manuel. Jerry accidentally wrote you into the lineup and you’re the second baseman again. I always love watching you field. Watching you hit was a boost to my fan esteem.
Nick Evans, walkoff hero of Monday night (which was acknowledged by absolutely nobody when he was announced in the lineup or when he came up to bat the first time) earned the right to keep playing at least one more game by crushing a home run to dead center. If Evans had been saving it up for months to show Manuel he still exists, the message should have been received — though with Jerry, the phone is usually turned off.
Pagan woke up and Beltran hit like a younger or perhaps just less injured man. It was just a crisp, crisp game on a crisp, crisp night. These Mets reminded me of the Mets who were once 2010 contenders. Didn’t hurt that the visiting Pirates reminded me of the Orioles and Indians from that same distant period when we were steaming hot.
Empti Field, however, is surely playing out the string. So many concessions were closed on Field and Promenade levels I’m surprised they weren’t boarded up. (Shake Shack, however, could form a line even if it was sentenced to life in solitary.) My friend Rob and I, extending our games attended streak to at least one in every season since 1995, found an open outpost upstairs. I asked for a hot dog and a knish. The knishes, the polite lady said, weren’t ready.
Ah, it was too nice a night to make a big deal of it, but it was five minutes to seven. What were they saving the knishes for — Simchat Torah? The other day, Stephanie and I got a similar answer in one of the swanky clubs we sampled. The menu said there was mushroom pizza available. That was a new one on us, so we asked for it. We were told it wasn’t ready. Just like the knish. Hmmm…perhaps the knish and the mushroom pizza, like Billy Paul and Mrs. Jones, got a thing going on.
Anyway, I went with the hot dog and pretzel instead; both were ready and both were excellent. Sometimes simple is best. Same for our seats. I asked at the box office a couple of weeks ago for two Promenade Reserved Infield, the second-least expensive tickets they had. They gave me Section 514, Row 11, about as good as I’ve ever had in this place. We could’ve moved down, I suppose, but the night and the view weren’t going to get any better.
It helps when you have all the room you want at a baseball game. That’s the hidden value of a Value night at Empti Field. That’s also the pity of it. Someday, September will be crowded and you won’t be able to sit where you want and the prevailing excuse at the concessions will likely be not that “it isn’t ready” but “we’ve run out of everything.”
And that, for all it implies about the possibilities inherent in September baseball, will be fantastic.
by Greg Prince on 14 September 2010 8:26 am For any Mets fan who survived 2009 by telling yourself it couldn’t get any worse, this one’s for you. It’s 2010, and, technically, it didn’t get any worse.
The 2009 Mets limped to the finish line with 70 wins — and required a three-game sweep of the Astros the final weekend to accumulate that many. The 2010 Mets, on the other hand, have blown by their most recent predecessors with nearly two weeks to go. These Mets can boast of 71 wins and…
…well, not much else at this point, but improvement is improvement. The Mets may not have learned anything about sharp management of their affairs, and they may be playing out the string in too-familiar Quadruple-A fashion, but…um…
Did I mention they now have more wins than they did last year?
For lifting the 2010 Mets to heights the 2009 Mets could only dream of, you can thank non-2009 Met Dillon Gee for taking the ball and giving the Mets six scoreless innings in return; non-2009 Met Hisanori Takahashi providing the Mets two more scoreless innings toward the end; non-2009 Met Ruben Tejada —a non-starter in Jerry Manuel’s addled mind — doubling to deep left with one out in the tenth; and 2010 non-entity Nick Evans pinch-singling into the third base hole while Tejada ran to score the game’s only run as the mysteriously indispensable Luis Hernandez took a breather.
Evans was a semi-essential component of the last Mets club to improve its previous year’s record by one game. That was in 2008 (89 wins), when young Nick emerged from the Binghamton bushes and gave the Mets a relatively competent performance across 50 pennant race games. With everything on the line two years ago, when the Mets needed to improve on their 2007 total (88 wins) by two games, Evans started in left and batted fifth, behind Carlos Delgado. The Mets lost, Shea Stadium closed and Nick Evans all but disappeared from view.
Nick — with 80 major league plate appearances since 9/28/08 — is supposed to be in the lineup tonight, starting in left for the first time in just over a year, filling in for entrenched incumbent Lucas Duda. It’s not all bad for Lucas, however; now that his average has sunk to .031, he is entitled to a discount at Baskin-Robbins. Tejada will also be granted the privilege of starting at second over Joe Morgan Luis Hernandez this evening. Now that the Mets have clinched a better record for 2010 than they had in 2009, I guess Jerry can afford to tinker with his set lineup.
The thrill of edging the 48-95 Pirates 1-0 in extra innings for a landmark 71st win will likely prove Evansescent in the scheme of things, but at least the hundreds who attended the game at Citi Field and dutifully reported to their Promenade locations were given a cheap thrill when they were waved down by Alex Anthony to fill in some of the empty seats in the expensive Field Level sections. The Mets could afford to be generous, as rain diminished whatever enthusiasm existed to begin with for a Mets-Pirates matchup in the middle of September. Announced paid attendance, which is generally fiction as regards bodies in the ballpark, was 24,384, an all-time low for a regularly scheduled Citi Field game (14,733 were on hand for Jon Niese’s June 10 one-hitter, but that was a makeup date).
Just as improvement is improvement, a good deed is a good deed, even if it cost the Mets absolutely nothing to invite everybody to sit downstairs once it became abundantly clear downstairs would otherwise be a ghost town. I suppose it became abundantly clear months ago, when MON for Monday and PIT for Pittsburgh intersected amid the September portion of the pocket schedule. The Jets opening their new stadium (with a Same Old result) likely would have dampened physical attendance whether it rained or not. There’s a reason a series like this in stamped with the dreaded Value classification. It’s a dog whistle to the most slightly attuned fan that these games aren’t really worth your time or money — diehard company excepted; I’ll be at two of the next three games. (The only dog whistle I ever hear is METS! and I instinctively howl at the moon.)
Among the many insults perpetrated by Mets management toward Mets fans this 71-win-and-counting season is the BETTER SEATS LOWER PRICES campaign that pretends you’re being done by a favor by being offered tickets that start at $11. All things considered, eleven dollars for a Major League Baseball game — even a lonely, rainy Mets-Pirates game — seems fair. But the implication in those ads is that’s $11 per ticket (plus service charges and handing fees if you order via phone or Web) for what we, the Mets, consider the worst of our inventory: weeknight games against the lamest team we could find. Implicit in the deal, also, is you will sit as far from the action as we can put you, unless we recognize the folly of our overall pricing scheme and realize it’s kind of silly to isolate you up there.
In which case, come on down.
Value…interesting concept at Citi Field. If, for some reason, you envisioned September 13-16 against the Pirates as the series for you, and you decided this was the series when you’d like to break out of the de facto upper deck, what were your straight-up options? Put aside StubHub and take the Mets up on their BSLP offer. What else could you buy for this series that wasn’t the left and right field wings of Promenade? According to the ceaselessly fascinating Seating & Pricing guide on mets.com, the next least expensive seats are $15, Promenade Infield. There are some good views up there (just as there are in Promenade not Infield), but let’s say we’re being aspirational. This is the Pirates, we should be able to do better, right?
Next up is Pepsi Porch, a singular section of upper-level outfield bleachers with an intriguing perspective, where tickets for Mets-Pirates start at $24. Start? You mean there’s an end point? Indeed, there’s Pepsi Porch Gold, for $36. Those are for the first two rows of Pepsi Porch. So for twelve dollars more than Row 3, you get to sit in…Row 2. When the Brewers are here in two weeks — a Bronze set (which you have to have to come up with these prices) — the Row 3/Row 2 disparity will grow to sixteen bucks: $32 vs. $48.
Think about that: The Mets want you to sit in the outfield for a game against the Brewers for as much as $48 plus fees and charges. That’s per person. The same dynamic holds in Left Field Landing and Left Field Landing Gold: $32 for Rows 3 and back, $48 for Rows 2 and 1.
Included with Gold versions of Pepsi Porch and Left Field Landing but not with regular Pepsi Porch and Left Field Landing: access to the Caesars Club, where you get a voucher for a free…check that, you just get to come in and buy stuff if you want something.
The Mets are very big on Gold and, for that matter, Platinum, even if the night in question is framed as Bronze. They figured that by casting their lower rows on a given level in a more precious metal, they could ask for more paper. The Caesars Club seats, outside the airport lounge for which the Excelsior level is commonly known, can be pretty nice. How nice? Mets-Brewers in Caesars Club Bronze will run you $80 per ticket plus fees and charges. But if you wanted to sit in the first two rows, that would jump you to $96. For the Value-able Pirates series, Row 2 is a mere $72…a $12 step-up from Row 3.
Not included with any of these seats: a deep-tissue shoulder massage.
I could go on with this until we’re well into triple-digits, but you get the idea. And you see why there are so many empty seats at Citi Field for Mets-Pirates games and Mets-Brewers games and, for that matter, Mets-Phillies games like those Gold games played this past weekend. I was fortunate to come into a very nice ticket on Sunday. My Sunday ticket had no price listed on it, and I was very grateful to have it and use it, no questions asked. Curiosity, however, drove me to examine the Seating & Pricing chart to see what that ticket would have gone for had it been sold through standard channels.
It was conceived as a $204 ticket. A $204 ticket for one baseball game. The Mets created a pricing structure built on the idea that a very good ticket — not the absolute best in their portfolio, but a definite no-complaints seat — should or could fetch $204. Since most people go to games with other people, the idea was at least $408 would be spent for two tickets in this section. If it was a family of four that wanted four very nice seats, it would become $816.
For one baseball game. That was the thinking.
As Sunday’s funereal procession of Met outs ensued, I partook in a bit of getting up and walking around — Citi Field’s designed for that — and when I came back to my section, it didn’t seem to matter where I sat. There were, for the Gold game against our division rivals, plenty of empty seats. I plopped myself down at one point in a seat a row or two behind where my theoretical $204 seat sat. It was conceived with an asking price of $174. Nobody came along and told me I was sitting in his or her seat. It was unoccupied before I got there because it was unoccupied all day.
A little rain came toward the end of Sunday’s game. Sure would be nice to get out of it. Fortunately, the last several rows of my section were covered. I went back there, found an entire row of $144 seats that weren’t being used and waited out the inevitable final strikes from Roy Oswalt. The Mets were all wet, but I stayed dry.
$204…$174…$144…you don’t have to pay that to go to a Mets game, obviously, but the Mets thought somebody would. I’m sure somebody somewhere did. I’m sure even in this economy there are companies that gauged such seats as an investment or legitimate business expense. I’m sure there are individuals who really like those seats and can swing the payments. I’m sure that now and then somebody decides to splurge for a special occasion.
Yet it’s a baseball game. It’s a Mets game, one of 81 they play at Citi Field in a given year. Sometimes it’s Platinum, sometimes it’s Value, sometimes it’s one of three shades in between. But mostly it’s ridiculous.
Absolutely ridiculous.
I’m guessing the pricing of Citi Field tickets wasn’t pulled out of some Met executive’s deepest, darkest cavity. I’m guessing there was an examination of what other entertainment options were asking and getting and a study to determine what the market would bear. I’m guessing there was some semblance of logic applied to portraying certain games as hot tickets and others as bargain specials. I’m guessing somebody saw asking substantially more for Row 2 than Row 3 as clever as opposed to gouging. I’m guessing there’s a balance sheet somewhere in somebody’s office that proves this is supposed to make sense.
It makes none to me, no more than the extended tryouts given Lucas Duda and Luis Hernandez make, to put it in baseball terms.
Y’know, I love Mets baseball enough to have watched the Mets and Pirates Monday night with only brief excursions to check in on the Jets and Ravens, the Yankees and Rays and the Nadals and Djokovics because all those headline events are secondary in my book compared to the Mets and Pirates.
I love Mets baseball enough to celebrate a 71st win because it’s more than 70.
I love Mets baseball enough to have scared Avery the Cat off the couch when I whooped it over Nick Evans driving home Ruben Tejada in the tenth inning.
I love Mets baseball enough to accept just about every gracious invitation I’ve received these past two sodden years to Citi Field and to arrange not a few outings on my own.
I love Mets baseball enough that I have plans to see the 71-73 Mets six more times this season and am honestly wondering if I should go a seventh or eighth time besides because there will be no more chances to go at all pretty soon.
Sure enough, I love Mets baseball, but even someone with as much love for what they mean to me finds the way they market their tickets hateful. It’s arrogant and mean-spirited and I don’t blame anybody for leaving thousands and thousands of their seats empty game after game. The subpar product is one thing — lousy seasons happen to even well-run organizations. But the Gold and the Silver and all of that? The slicing and dicing of our blue and orange veins in the hope our wallets will bleed green? The pretense of doing us a big favor by selling us their worst seats for a reasonable price a big four times over the final four months of the season? The idea that the lowest ticket price for this weekend’s series against the Braves is $23 (plus fees and charges) because back in February it seemed like it might be an attractive matchup and if you can attract people, the next thing you do is shake them down for as much as you can get from them?
You’re not attracting fans with this way of doing business in 2010 and you won’t do it in 2011. You’re doing the opposite. You’re repelling them. The market is not bearing your delusional pricing structure. You’re in the second year of a new stadium and nobody cares. Whatever you envisioned with World Class Citi Field — and however lovely it is in spots — has not come to be. The scare everybody felt at the prospect of being left out as if these were the early ’90s and Citi Field was going to be jam-packed Camden Yards has passed. It got you through 70-92 2009 with 3.15 million tickets sold. Whatever the final record in year two, even though it will be better than it was in year one, you’ll be nowhere near 3.15 million tickets sold. And wherever you wind up in attendance after 81 games this year, chances are you won’t see it next year.
My most basic advice? Cut it out.
Cut out the Platinum, Gold and so on crap in 2011. What you’ve got isn’t glittering. Your Value setup wherein the left and right field seats are $11 and the ones in the middle are $15? Split the difference and make them all a lucky $13 for every game next year. Make your so-called Promenade boxes $18. Do what you want with your suites and übercushy home plate seats, but come to grips with the rest of your locations being fine and dandy but not Rockefeller & Vanderbilt and price accordingly. Price realistically. Remember that your customer, ultimately, is not some imaginary high-roller with $204 to drop at will, but the diehard Mets fan who comes out in the rain on a Monday night in September when there are objectively better things to watch on television so he or she can see his or her favorite team play and — hopefully — beat the Pirates.
Do more for that person than telling him or her that this one time, we’re gonna give you a break…but just this one time.
by Jason Fry on 12 September 2010 10:58 pm Things that went wrong in one Mets fan’s day:
* The Mets didn’t get a single runner to second base. What a dull, listless game this was. I remember Chris Carter nearly letting a ball go over his head in left and Jose Reyes smacking a single off Roy Oswalt. Everything else isn’t just forgotten — it didn’t register in the first place.
* Jerry Manuel continued to dare the Mets to fire him early, spouting insane nonsense about winning games as justification for sticking a Quadruple-A warm body in Luis Hernandez on the field while Ruben Tejada sits on the bench instead of continuing to learn lessons that could pay off in 2011. This has gone far beyond Jerry’s usual genial stupidity and become out-and-out dereliction of duty. By trying to smear lipstick on his pig of a record, Manuel is stealing wins from his successor and from 2011.
* There is no sign that anyone in the Mets’ dysfunctional joke of a front office is interested in stopping this. Perhaps their time is taken up by egging the press on in publicly shaming players, in hopes that will stop sportswriters and fans from remembering who gave those players dumb contracts in the first place. I differentiate between the treatment of Castillo and Perez and that afforded Beltran, by the way. Castillo and Perez were bullied by people who should man up and release them, but they had lousy excuses for being Walter Reed no-shows, so I’m not too worked up. Beltran had a reason for his absence, and what’s been done to him is character assassination that’s both shameful and self-defeating.
* Customer service continues to decay ominously at Citi Field, with concession lines moving at the speed of continental drift as workers shuffle around with glazed looks in their eyes. At one point Greg asked me, “When did this place turn back into Shea?” I just shook my head sadly.
* It rained. I’m trying to figure out how this is Jerry Manuel’s fault. He certainly didn’t help, how’s that?
* If going by noise, the crowd was perhaps 45% Phillies fans. I know a body count wouldn’t reflect that — it’s no particular surprise that fans of a team gunning for a division title and watching Oswalt made more noise than shell-shocked fans of a bad, boring, star-crossed disaster. But our row had more Phillies fans than Mets fans, and there were speckles of red everywhere you looked.
* As a bonus, the guy behind me was the single stupidest fan I’ve ever sat near who wasn’t wearing a Yankee hat. I didn’t mind that he was cheering full-throttle for the enemy — that’s his right. What got me was that he’d apparently never been to a game: On one utterly routine 6-3 groundout, he inhaled sharply as Wilson Valdez scooped up the ball, babbled “c’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon” as Valdez lobbed it over to beat a jogging Met, then exploded with joy when the ball plopped into Ryan Howard’s mitt. He did this for 27 outs. I wanted to strangle him, learn CPR, revive him, then strangle him again.
* The U.S. Open exists.
* Game 2 of the Cyclones’ New York-Penn League Championship Series was rained out, foiling my shot at seeing a climactic Game 3 in which the Cyclones could win a title. Game 3 will still happen if the Cyclones win Game 2, but it would be on Tuesday night, meaning I can’t go. Stupid Jerry Manuel.
Things that went right in one Mets fan’s day:
* Jon Niese pitched well, got one of the Mets’ four hits, and drew a walk.
* I got to sit companionably for a bit with my co-blogger and Stephanie, his lovely, kind and patient wife.
* The sight of my kid in a green raincoat and screaming yellow blingy giveaway sunglasses. Imagine if “I’m Still Here” came with a flashback of Joaquin Phoenix in character, but as a seven-year-old. It looked like that. Made me laugh.
* The food’s still good. Carnitas = win.
* The game was boring and depressing, but it was over in a tidy two hours and 15 minutes.
by Greg Prince on 12 September 2010 12:06 am It’s great that Mike Pelfrey turned around his performance from Labor Day when he stunk out Nationals Park. He was, on Saturday at Citi Field, a breath of fresh air, holding the Phillies runless for seven innings. Pelf certainly held his own as long as he could, until the eighth when the Phillies began to nick away in earnest at his 4-0 lead. So Jerry Manuel comes out to get him, one of those few times I’m glad to see Jerry emerge from the dugout. Pelf was clearly done.
Funny thing, I flashed back to the early days of Manuel when everything he did was a breath of fresh air, including insisting the pitcher coming out remain on the mound long enough to greet the pitcher coming in. It was an encouraging sign of teamwork, and as long the 2008 Mets were winning, it seemed substantial. Now and then since then I’ve noticed the removed pitcher not remaining. Saturday I paid attention to the exchange to see if Jerry’s old edict still had legs.
Pelfrey indeed stayed and waited for Bobby Parnell. Hey, I thought, that’s the way to go, that’s the way for a starter to transition to a reliever, that’s the way for the Mets to work together toward a hard-earned win. Yet as I was forming that thought, Tim McCarver pointed out an uncomfortable truth.
Mike Pelfrey stood on the mound during the entire pitching change interlude with his back to Jerry Manuel. And when Parnell arrived at the mound, the ball was transferred to Bobby’s glove not by Jerry, but by Mike. All told, it constituted a breach of baseball “etiquette,” according to Tim.
If you want to talk etiquette, being left to listen to Tim McCarver and talking mannequin Matt Vasgersian for nine innings goes against the courtesy television networks used to show its viewers on Saturday afternoons. We used to be handed our baseball by the likes of Curt Gowdy, Tony Kubek, Vin Scully, Bob Costas (before his sanctimony gland exploded) and Sean McDonough. They were all class acts in their time, just as Tim McCarver ruled the airwaves in his time…which has mostly passed. Fox’s booth is a nightmare in broad daylight no matter who’s manning it on a given Saturday, and our old pal Timmy isn’t helping. McCarver long ago lost his analytical fastball and, unlike Tom Seaver in his White Sox days, doesn’t deliver much on just guts and guile.
But once in a while, Timmy can rear back and fire a most astute observation like he used to with aplomb, back when he was all-world on local and national broadcasts. In this case, in the eighth inning, he threw a perfect strike when he noticed and articulated the scene on the mound.
Just what the fudge was Mike Pelfrey doing out there with his back to Jerry Manuel?
Soon enough Mets ownership will turn its back on Jerry Manuel. His contract will expire and there will be no earthly reason to offer him another one. The fresh air from the summer of ’08 long ago went stale. Jerry manages without a clue almost every game — and before every game. Take the latest trend in lineups, the one that has made everyday staples of Lucas Duda and Luis Hernandez.
Duda is plainly overmatched at this stage of his nascent career. An .036 average speaks softly and indicates the kid has yet to carry any kind of stick. Still, if your goal is to size Duda up, well, OK, go ahead and get his measure (bring lots of tape). You’ve got Nick Evans sitting around most games until the sixth inning, but if you’ve made up your mind that Nick is yesterday’s news and Lucas is potentially an essential part of your future, what the hell, it’s September, we’re 11½ out with 20 to play…sure, go with Duda.
Sayeth Jerry, “I still believe he’s going to be a good hitter. It’s a matter of him getting a couple of hits in one game. I will try to find what I think are good matchups for him, but in the National League East it’s tough.”
But then how do you explain the sudden prevalence of Luis Hernandez? He could be the utility infielder of 2011…maybe. At first glance, he doesn’t seem all that uninterchangeable with — to use recent examples — Ramon Martinez or Wilson Valdez (the one we had, not the superstar Wilson Valdez on the Phillies) or Anderson Hernandez or Justin Turner or Joaquin Arias or whoever can be picked up at a moment’s notice. Still, he’s hit the ball well and he’s caught the ball well. Not much of a baserunner, judging by his getting himself doubled off second on a short pop to the outfield, but we all make mistakes. Somebody needs to scout Luis Hernandez a little…sure, play Hernandez.
Yet Jerry Manuel’s reasoning for wanting to trot this heretofore unknown quantity out to the infield day after day is Luis Hernandez gives the Mets a chance to win: “If we think we have people that are playing well, we’ve still got to try to win games. With some of the things we lack offensively, Hernandez gives us a good shot offensively.”
Ruben Tejada, your 20-year-old second baseman through the part of the season when the team was playing its best, won’t get the benefit of the extra reps provided by playing out the string. He had started to hit a bit before Hernandez showed up and became the latest object of Manuel’s fickle affections. Ruben may not be the ultimate answer at second (though I think he could be), yet he seems a more viable candidate to fill a key role on the 2011 Mets than Luis Hernandez does.
Who do you want seeing more major league pitching while there’s still time and nothing of great significance on the table in terms of standings: Luis Hernandez or Ruben Tejada? (Wow, what a question for this season to come down to.) If your answer is Hernandez and your reason is you perceive him capable of getting a few more hits than Tejada, then why grind Duda and his .036 down to the nub? Why not try a shot of Evans or Jesus Feliciano in left for a few consecutive games? I don’t know that either of those guys is your key to winning in the next three weeks, but is Duda? And, though I’d like the Mets to finish over .500, does it really matter?
Jerry’s mind turned his back on us long before we turned our collective back on him. He will deserve to go when the time comes, about ten minutes after the final out of the 162nd game of the year…no question, as the man himself likes to say.
But the man also deserves to be looked in the eye by his starting pitcher when he comes to the mound to remove him. I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes with Jerry Manuel and Mike Pelfrey — or in the head of Mike Pelfrey — but standing with his back to his manager in front of 35,000 fans and however many of us were watching on television…you don’t do that. You just don’t. I don’t care if Pelf was mad about being taken out of the game or is mad about Manuel calling him an enigma (which is a good word for it) or has issues over how the team is run. I don’t care that he knows there will be no long-term repercussions since Jerry is out of the manager’s office by no later than sundown October 3.
That was a passive-aggressive little hissyfit pulled by Pelfrey and it was uncalled for. In the realm of things I can only divine from a distance, it made me madder at Pelf than I was at the so-called treacherous three who didn’t visit Walter Reed the other day. Draw your own conclusions on that invented scandal, but that hospital trip was framed explicitly as a voluntary goodwill mission. Goodwill ideally should have been expended by all considering what Walter Reed is for and who is laid up in there, and a team ideally should act as a team in those situations (pending foundation meetings, et al), but it’s quite clear it wasn’t a mandatory expedition.
It is mandatory that you show your manager basic respect on the mound when he comes to get you. You face him and you hand him the ball. That’s not off-field stuff. That’s part and parcel of your business. Sulk in the dugout or beat up a Gatorade cooler or stuff a towel in your mouth after you take your leave. Throw your hissyfit in the runway or the clubhouse. There are ways and there are ways to do things. There is, per Tim McCarver as well as common sense, etiquette.
Mike Pelfrey pitched a good ballgame Saturday. He’s going to have to pitch more of them, whoever’s managing him next year. A lot will be piled onto that big back of his with Johan Santana recovering from shoulder surgery. Any day’s starter is the ace of the staff in my view, but it’s Pelf who stands to be first among aces come April. An ace wants to compete and not come out of a game and is prone to fuming with frustration when he can’t finish what he started, but an ace also does the right thing. Tom Seaver, Dwight Gooden, Al Leiter, Johan Santana…I don’t remember seeing any of them show such blatant disrespect to their manager, whoever managed them. I don’t remember seeing it from Oliver Perez, for crissake.
C’mon Pelf. Be as Big as we always say you are.
by Greg Prince on 11 September 2010 5:30 am Expression of resigned exasperation with latest result.
Acknowledgement that result doesn’t matter at this stage of season, yet it is always frustrating to encounter this sort of result.
Link to article spelling out game details.
Snarky aside.
Key example of what went wrong in game.
Assertion of saving grace, focusing on how this was just one game and player who committed key example of what went wrong in game will hopefully improve.
Snide allusion to disliked secondary player’s particularly poor performance.
Expression of resigned exasperation that big picture is as bleak as latest result.
Link to article about newest discouraging development.
Passing attempt to project what newest discouraging development means for foreseeable future.
Explicit admission that future can’t be foreseen but newest discouraging development is indeed discouraging.
Weaving together of various recent discouraging developments so as to suggest overarching discouraging trend that makes rooting for team difficult.
Allusion to most embarrassing recent discouraging development that constitutes most disturbing manifestation of trend.
Link to terrible article illustrating dimwitted coverage of recent discouraging development.
Link to good article serving as counterweight to dimwitted coverage.
Half-hearted analysis of most embarrassing recent discouraging development (undermined by personal conviction that most recent discouraging development was very much a non-story, yet not commenting on it at all after a few days doesn’t feel right, either).
Link to archived blog post to demonstrate longstanding pattern of discouraging developments.
Conclusion of analysis finding all parties are at least partially at fault (should include at least one point nobody else has made).
Assertion of enduring fondness for team in spite of all prevailing evidence that team has become too exasperating to inspire any fondness whatsoever.
Expression of dismay that season will soon be over in spite of latest result, recent discouraging developments and bleak big picture.
Link to archived blog post from when things were better to serve as reminder that things aren’t always this bad.
Gratuitous reference to Mike Hessman (optional).
by Greg Prince on 10 September 2010 9:14 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: Dodger Stadium
HOME TEAM: Los Angeles Dodgers
VISITS: 1
VISITED: June 22, 1996
CHRONOLOGY: 17th of 34
RANKING: 12th of 34
“I was in California. Everything is new, and it’s clean. The people are filled with hope.”
—Don Draper, 1963
Perhaps it was overexposure to “Who Will Save Your Soul?” the monster soft rock hit of the spring of 1996, but the word that hit me immediately upon settling into my seat at Dodger Stadium was jewel. “This place is a jewel,” I kept thinking. I may have even said it out loud.
 I don’t know if the Dodger soul can ever truly be saved, what with its theft from Brooklyn — an inside job — on October 8, 1957. Per Jewel, Walter O’Malley told the Borough of Churches that, in essence, 68 seasons as Brooklyn’s representative in the National League had been swell, sweetheart, but it was just one of those things. You can reflexively blame O’Malley; you can be fashionably revisionist and pin it on Robert Moses; you can shrug and reason that a westward move too attractive to pass up, but as long as you’re aware that the backstory of the Los Angeles Dodgers is that they used to be the Brooklyn Dodgers, you can never quite fully give anything they do your unabashed blessing. No, that soul will, at best, forever hang in limbo.
But I was on vacation the Saturday I alighted at Dodger Stadium, so I was willing to put ancient sins aside and simply revel in the sparkly bauble Walter O’Malley left behind.
Admission to Dodger Stadium served as the climax to the three-ballpark Southern California road trip I simultaneously dreaded and embraced. I wanted it, of course, but I feared the logistics from a driving standpoint, driving no longer being my thing by the summer of ’96, and L.A. being the capital of American car culture. But as noted in previous entries regarding that week’s sojourns to Anaheim and San Diego, I dealt with it and regained my automobile comfort level for as long as it took me to get to those ballparks. The Angels were Wednesday. The Padres were Thursday. By Saturday, it was no big thing for Stephanie and me, enjoying the courteous loan of my sister’s and brother-in-law’s apartment in Marina Del Rey, to jump on the Santa Monica Freeway and head east toward downtown Los Angeles.
Dodger Stadium’s biggest surprise was, in a way, its location. I knew the name Chavez Ravine from all the trips the Mets had taken out there, but I never quite grasped where in the context of L.A. it was. When you see the ballpark on TV, it seems splendidly isolated, nestled among hills, trees and parking. But it’s not. It’s right there in the heart of the nation’s second-largest metropolis…like it’s in the opening credits of L.A. Law or something. Yet when you’re at the stadium, you put all that behind you — literally. The trend in 1990s ballpark construction veered sharply toward showing you the city you were in while you were watching the game. It was a welcome trend. But creating an urban oasis for the pastoral pastime? That wasn’t so bad, either.
Nice to be surprised by Dodger Stadium, though I don’t think I ever went into a ballpark for the first time with more preconceived notions about it or its fans. A quarter-century of being fed the same lines repeatedly will cement your notions in advance, and goodness knows Ralph, Lindsey, Bob and their successors hit the same notes over and over over the Met years:
• Dodger fans show up late.
• Dodger fans don’t pay attention to the game.
• Dodger fans leave early.
But the Met announcers had also always made much of the beauty of the ballpark, that it was, at a time when this wasn’t the rule, constructed for baseball and nothing else. It was a universally shared sentiment. Roger Kahn, who knew a little something about Dodger stadia, appraised it as such in his 1976 pulsetaking, A Season in the Sun:
“Dodger Stadium is a triumph of baseball design. The grass is real. The shape proclaims baseball.”
I was ready to have that preconceived notion confirmed and I wasn’t disappointed. Yes, that shape. It was absolutely perfect. Nowhere else I had been — modern classic or vintage masterpiece — seemed as spot-on in terms of appearing ready for its baseball closeup. The old salesman adage about underpromising and overdelivering was on immensely satisfying display at Dodger Stadium. A jewel?
A diamond.
Even today when visiting broadcasters set up shop in Chavez Ravine they heap praise on how the place is so clean, how a stadium opened in 1962 still looks so modern, how it’s kept up like nothing else. You can curse O’Malley for Bumnapping Brooklyn’s team and Bumrushing Brooklyn’s trust, but you have to grudgingly tip your cap in his direction (down below) for setting an incredible standard with Dodger Stadium. Not that the standard was much followed. Shea came to be a mere two years later and generated more grunge than Seattle at the height of Nirvana. None of Dodger Stadium’s contemporaries held their promise as long, and no park from the ’60s and ’70s was ever nearly as promising.
Damn that O’Malley, getting exactly what he wanted in Los Angeles and making it work to near perfection for decades, even long after he was gone. They gave him the land, he built his own palace and it’s thrived for nearly a half-century. Would that have happened in the downtown Brooklyn location he craved? Could have he created his own kind of miracle in Flushing had he been open to Moses’s crazy notion that the Dodgers could move to Queens? Would have leasing from the city allowed him the flexibility to build as he envisioned in an era when multipurpose facilities were fancied as a sporting panacea?
We’ll never know, and to be honest, I wasn’t thinking about it on our Saturday night at Dodger Stadium. I just knew it was, as Steve Garvey told Roger Kahn in 1976, date night. Garvey analyzed the different kinds of crowds the Dodgers drew depending on the date. Friday crowds were loudest — and harshest if you played badly. Sunday afternoons were for families and positivity. Monday and Tuesday night “you get the fans who really know baseball.” We had our own Garveyesque classification:
“Saturday. Date night. That just about what it sounds. Medium. If the guy and the girl are getting along, they’re with you. If he spills mustard on her skirt, it’s something else.”
I don’t know if the All-Star first baseman’s analysis held precisely to form two decades hence, but Stephanie and I consciously dated the Dodgers on our Saturday night downtown. We’re always with the home team as long as the visitors aren’t the Mets, but I decided to go all in. I went for the legendary Dodger Dog (no mustard spilled). I nodded approvingly when a customer at a souvenir stand asked if he could buy an Astros cap (Houston being that night’s opponent) and was told in no uncertain terms, “This is Dodger Stadium. We only sell Dodger caps.” I bought a Think Blue t-shirt in honor of THINK BLUE week as proclaimed by the HOLLYWOOD-inspired letters on the Elysian Hills over the outfield fence. And I cheered heartily as youthful Dodger superstar Mike Piazza homered and caught a complete game shutout.
Ramon Martinez vs. Shane Reynolds offered us some vintage Dodger Stadium pitching — maybe not Gooden vs. Valenzuela or Koufax vs. Hendley, but exactly the kind of thing for which I showed up early and stayed past the end. Yet another of those articles of faith I’d absorbed on Channel 9: the mound is higher out here than anywhere else. Of course the pitching’s outstanding. Of course I was into it.
And of course the L.A. crowd got there when it got there and left when it left. In my two hours and twenty-four minutes of temp Dodger rooting (albeit while wearing my Mets cap), I couldn’t adjust to the local custom of ignoring the game at hand. As a beach ball bounced merrily through our section, I briefly betrayed my Brooklyn birth certificate and snarled, “Ramon Martinez is pitching a shutout — watch the game!”
But the Los Angelenos didn’t listen. They were getting by fine without me and they would continue to do so once I flew home and reverted to my sense of vague antipathy toward them. Dodger fans gotta be Dodger fans, I guess, and I imagine they’re only more so in this accursed epoch of the constantly deployed personal digital device that nobody is capable of laying off in the middle of a baseball game. Still, I think I was glad I saw Dodger fans acting as I’d been led to believe they would. What’s the point of schlepping across the country and not seeing what you expect?
The Los Angeles Dodgers I’d grown up slightly envying were reaching the last mile of their own singular freeway when we made our 1996 pilgrimage. Less than a week after we’d left L.A. (and my Southern California driving chops left me for good), manager Tommy Lasorda suffered a mild heart attack and was replaced on an interim basis for a month by Bill Russell before stepping down from the job he’d held twenty years. Lasorda took it over at the end of 1976 — the year of Kahn’s Season in the Sun visit — from Walter Alston, who took it over in Brooklyn in 1954 — the year Kahn left the Dodger beat at the Herald Tribune. An O’Malley, Walter’s son Peter, was still running the club in 1996, but a sale was imminent. I was reminded this week by Lee Jenkins’ dissection of the Frank and Jamie McCourt divorce mess in Sports Illustrated that when Peter O’Malley was in charge, he held the line on ticket prices for a very long time. The article made me remember that Dodger tickets were substantially cheaper than Angel tickets and Padre tickets on our trip…and, at the risk of buying into overbearing myths, these were the Dodgers we were talking about.
If the Los Angeles Dodgers cultivated a pristine image worthy of pre-divorce Steve Garvey, it didn’t endure without a foundation of genuine merit. Those Dodgers, original sin against Flatbush notwithstanding, were something special when I was a kid. They didn’t win their division every year — and didn’t win two World Series I really wanted them to win in 1977 and 1978 — but they were probably, as Kahn said they themselves were fond of telling you circa 1976, “the best organization in baseball”.
The Dodger Way. Dodger Dogs. Topping 2 million in attendance annually when that was an achievement. The first team to top 3 million. Those celebrity seats behind home plate. Vin Scully. Vero Beach. Danny Kaye. Koufax and Drysdale in retirement but talked about as if they were still in rotation. Fernandomania in full bloom. Cey, Russell, Lopes and Garvey together almost forever. Alston and Lasorda, the two polar opposite managers who spanned more than four decades between them. The parade of Rookies of the Year, particularly that Piazza kid.
Those were the L.A. Dodgers I came to see. Roger Kahn wrote in The Boys of Summer that a reporter needs to subscribe to the maxim, “Do not preconceive.” I did anyway. I wasn’t disappointed. Nowadays the Dodgers seem like just another team. They were sold to nefarious Fox. Fox sold them to the combustible McCourts. They plaster ads all over their premises just like anybody else. They run through managers just like anybody else. They stopped producing Rookies of the Year after Todd Hollandsworth was deemed the best of an underwhelming freshman lot in ’96. They traded Mike Piazza…and thank goodness they did.
I’m glad I got the last gasp of the L.A. Dodgers I’d fancied from afar; the L.A. Dodgers I sort of looked up to in the middle of the 1970s; the L.A. Dodgers I’d never fully blamed for the disappearance of the Brooklyn Dodgers because I hadn’t done all that much reading on them until the late 1980s when I finally picked up and dove into the copy of The Boys of Summer I’d purchased for 50 cents at a college flea market five years before. That was when I began to fully comprehend the crime against humanity perpetrated by Walter O’Malley in 1957 (even if it and Horace Stoneham’s loathsome complicity are ultimately the two main reasons we have the Mets). The Dodgers I knew best were the Dodgers from A Season In The Sun, the version Kahn visited when they were at their L.A. peak.
This morning, of the ’70s, Dodger Stadium lay empty. The aisles and seats had been swept clear of litter and gum, deposited by the 52,469 customers the night before. Toward the right lay the ball field, green and white and a reddish tan. To the left, from O’Malley’s office, lay hills that had been barren. They are irrigated and showed the green of watered pines.
“What a pleasant office you have,” I said.
“Not so pleasant,” O’Malley said. “Outside my window there’s a groundskeeper standing in center field with a hose, and I wonder, if he’s going to use a hose, why the hell did I put $600,000 into an underground sprinkler system?”
“Why does he use a hose?”
“Because we brought him out from Brooklyn and he used a hose there,” the owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers announced, impatiently.
Walter O’Malley died in 1979. Chances are nobody who was alive in Brooklyn in 1957 would even think of using a hose on him where he likely wound up.
Speaking of Brooklyn ballclubs, congratulations to our very own Cyclones for defeating the Jamestown Jammers and making it to the New York-Penn League Championship Series this weekend. Now go tame those Tri-City ValleyCats!
by Greg Prince on 8 September 2010 7:39 pm Midweek afternoons were not made for watching baseball, which is why when the two get together, their appeal is so undeniable. Today was the final time in 2010 you needed several hours in the middle of your weekday to fully enjoy your Mets. Twenty-two games remain, some of them in weekend daylight, the rest commencing as the sun goes down. None will intrude on your midweek afternoons.
Too bad. It’s not necessarily convenient, but what a welcome intrusion the weekday day game always is. Don’t you love that your favorite thing can just happen in the middle of a Wednesday? Maybe you can’t give it your full attention, maybe you wind up missing the whole thing, but whatever you derive from it is unlike anything you get from most of your normal day-to-day machinations. For that matter, a Mets-Nationals game on the afternoon of September 8 is going to top the same contest if it were being held at night. At night, a September showdown between the fourth-place Mets and the fifth-place Nats, even one the Mets win, dares you to ignore it. During the day, though…that’s a day game. The Mets are playing a day game? That’s right! Man, I gotta check the score! Who’s pitching again?
It isn’t much, this last chunk of 2010 Mets baseball, but its status as better than nothing peaks on a day when it wanders into your afternoon, as if it made an appointment with you months ago. You work during the day. You go to school during the day. You have things to do during the day. Yet Mets baseball has decided to inflict itself upon your routine. You let it in, and for a little while the end of the season doesn’t loom. For a little while, it’s still summer. There’s still the sense it won’t get dark early and it won’t be cold soon. It’s baseball outside during the day, just like it was when you first encountered it in the street or on the playground or in your imagination.
Midweek afternoons were not made for watching baseball. But maybe they should’ve been.
by Jason Fry on 7 September 2010 11:06 pm Maybe you thought this was the night.
And why not? The baseball gods enjoy a good laugh as much as any other cosmic entities, so why wouldn’t Dillon Gee — he of the Triple-A ERA near 5.00 and the penchant for gopher balls — do what Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan and Jerry Koosman and Jon Matlack and Dwight Gooden and Ron Darling and Sid Fernandez and David Cone and Frank Viola and Bret Saberhagen and Al Leiter and Rick Reed and Mike Hampton and T#m Gl@v!ne and Pedro Martinez and Johan Santana could not? Why couldn’t Dillon Gee take the mound on a September evening in D.C. and leave it as a Mets hero for eternity? Wouldn’t that be just like baseball, to double down on the Mets out of caprice, and finally give a no-hitter to a Met in his major-league debut?
I’ve taught the Mets countdown tradition (which perhaps may double as the perpetuation of the Mets no-hitter curse) to Joshua: You count down by threes after each inning until a hit is recorded. “Twenty-four to go!” “Twenty-one to go!” And so forth, until a white ball bounds gleefully and nose-thumbingly across an expanse of green grass and you moan, “Another night….” Somewhere in the fourth inning you start thinking about what the next number is, because you’re beginning to depart from the script. In the fifth inning the balance shifts to fewer outs remaining to get than outs safely recorded. I’ve always wondered what happens when you get to the ninth: Do you shift to “two to go” and then “one to go,” mirroring the Bernstein/Fry tradition of holding up fingers for outs as if we were fielders? Do you maintain superstitious silence? Do you scream at Gary Cohen for noting the no-hitter with every other syllable? I’ve never had reason to find out, but suspect I know the answer: Should “three to go” territory arrive, I’ll have crammed myself under the coffee table and be writhing and groaning with every pitch.
Gee got to “12 to go” before running afoul of the inevitable Willie Harris, who I really think spends Christmas Eve popping down the chimneys of Met-fan homes and taking away toys. One misplaced fastball, and Gee was turning around in consternation, watching his no-hitter and shutout get fielded by a spectator. Then, after seven innings and 86 pitches he was sitting on the bench, removed by Jerry Manuel for reasons that remain mysterious as of this writing. (I assume it was the old “manager wants young pitcher to leave with a good feeling” reason, as articulated by Ron Darling and assailed by Gary Cohen and a cranky Keith Hernandez. I’m usually on the Gary/Keith end of the spectrum where this old saw is concerned, but I admit that I then inevitably think of Paul Wilson’s sixth major-league start being reduced to ashes by Sammy Sosa.) Whatever the reason, Gee was out, but the Mets relievers tidied up without an excess of fuss, and a quick, quietly satisfying game was concluded.
So no, Dillon Gee wasn’t the second coming of Bumpus Jones. Looking ahead, those pesky minor-league numbers would strongly counsel against expecting him to be the next Tom Seaver. One of the hard lessons taught by age is that garbage-time starts are the beer goggles of baseball love affairs: Pat Misch looked pretty good late last year, after all, and the only Met to throw a complete game in his big-league debut was the immortal Dick Rusteck. Though to be fair, Rusteck hurt his arm. And why couldn’t Gee be the next Rick Reed, relying on guile and location and rising from unheralded to beloved in the space of a couple of months? Come to think of it, don’t we all love R.A. Dickey for more than his sad-eyed eloquence?
Having watched the Mets decline into fall, it’s easy to forget that our team has had its share of good luck, too. Sometimes we pull a Hall of Famer out of a hat, or are favored by a black cat, or have a right-fielder’s desperate dive come up with the ball, or watch a banjo-hitting reserve stroke two World Series home runs, or watch the ball come off the wall just so, or have a batter jackknife out of a pitch’s path at the perfect time, or watch a little trickling grounder get by Buckner, or have a catcher sense that not one but two runners are inbound. We’ve had successful gambles. We’ve even witnessed a miracle or two. It’s just that none of those miracles involves a game starting and 27 enemy batters recording outs before one records a hit.
by Greg Prince on 7 September 2010 8:41 pm Any way we can get Nyjer Morgan to turn his wrath on Willie Harris?
by Jason Fry on 6 September 2010 9:25 pm I missed all of yesterday’s outburst against the Cubs, monitoring it in dribs and drabs while saying farewell to summer at Coney Island and watching the Brooklyn Cyclones win their season finale, which they used as a tuneup for the playoffs. (If you’re near New York City, instead of enduring horrible baseball, go see the Cyclones — playoff tickets are available, and this looks like a team with some bona fide prospects on it.) Anyway, I saw the Mets had scored 10, gave a little silent cheer, and then shook my head patronizingly about 15 minutes later when the guy in the row in front of me announced they’d scored 18. Let’s not get carried away, I thought, then checked my cellphone again. Wow, wouldja look at that?
I missed the first inning of today’s game because I wasn’t paying attention, but after what happened at Wrigley Field, I wasn’t particularly surprised to find the Mets already up 2-0. Or when they added another run two innings later. I even allowed myself to be briefly annoyed that after a summer of lurching spastically down the road like a 16-year-old with a learner’s permit and a stick shift, the Mets had finally found third or even fourth gear. Watch them go on a run, I thought. Just to annoy me.
But no, all of a sudden the Mets looked around, realized they were the post-San Juan Mets of 2010, and they weren’t supposed to be doing what they were doing. With two outs in the top of the third, the Mets had three hits. With 27 outs in the bottom of everything, they still had three hits. And meanwhile, nobody could pitch. Mike Pelfrey came unraveled in a horrible fourth inning, and afterwards the Mets principals were predictably at odds about what the problems were: Pelfrey said he just couldn’t throw his fastball for strikes, Jerry Manuel said he lost focus, and Dan Warthen helpfully chipped in that Pelfrey had gone off to La-La Land. Raul Valdes, just returned from Buffalo, came in and was horrible. Sean Green, last seen being battered by Dan Uggla in the second game of the season, came in and was horrible. Pat Misch, who’s been mostly horrible, bucked the trend by retiring a batter. Ryota Igarashi — who definitely deserves consideration as one of the more horrible Mets busts — came in and was horrible. Oliver Perez, who can never return from being Oliver Perez, came in and was Oliver Perez.
And then, mercifully, it was over. Soon we’ll say the same about this strange fizzle of a season.
And yet, with two outs in the top of the ninth, I left off listening to Wayne Hagin slop paint on the word picture with his trademark clunky, tardy strokes and strolled over to the set. Why? Because Mike Nickeas, soccer scion, was up in search of his first big-league hit, and even in the worst of times I’m a sucker for a first big-league hit.
But watching Nickeas try to be the first Met in 20 plate appearances to get a hit, I had an unwelcome flashback to the final game of the 2003 season. Back then, there were two outs in the ninth and the Mets were down 4-0 to the Marlins, having collected three hits on the afternoon. All that stood between them and winter was Mike Glavine, looking at what turned out to be his final chance to go into the Baseball Encyclopedia with a ‘1’ under the H column. Glavine singled, which depending on how you felt either kept the season alive or interfered with a staggeringly terrible year’s being mercifully euthanized. (Because you’re curious despite yourself, Raul Gonzalez then reached on an error and Vance Wilson was rung up on a called strike three. None of the three would ever play for the Mets again.)
I remembered that I’d actually cheered for Mike Glavine’s hit, for a number of reasons. Because I’m a Mets fan, obviously. Because even though 2003 had been a horror show, one of the few seasons in which I actively loathed my ballclub, being mad at the Mets was better than winter. Because my dislike for T#m Gl@v!ne’s alibis and subtle shifting of blame hadn’t yet curdled into naked animosity. Because none of that was his brother’s fault. And as previously noted, because I’m a sucker for a first big-league hit.
Standing there watching Mike Nickeas peer at the pitcher, I tried to remember all those becauses, and not get distracted by how harebrained it was letting Mike Glavine be a Met in the first place. But it was already stuck in my head: Mike Glavine, hideous baseball, dopey decision-making, 2003. By force of will I made myself fast-forward to 2010, and watched Mike Nickeas strike out.
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