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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 29 August 2010 5:33 am After the anesthetizingly somnambulant performance put on by the New York Mets Saturday night (which is to say they induced sleep while appearing to be immersed in it), we certainly hope our starting pitcher is all refreshed and ready to go Sunday. His pregame ritual is very specific, but then again, we’d expect nothing less from our very own R.A. Dickey.
He will prepare for the strike zone of C.B. Bucknor.
He will talk strategy with Josh Thole as if he’s Tom Seaver going over signs with J.C. Martin.
He will work on bunting during his B.P. Session.
He will ask the clubhouse kid to get him his good luck sandwich, a piping hot B.K. Baguette.
He will slather it, as superstition dictates, with a healthy dose of K.C. Masterpiece.
He will wash it down as he always does, with an ice cold can of R.C. Cola.
He will laugh when he remembers that routine he caught on cable the other night from D.L. Hughley.
He will check his calendar and notice how close we are to the 65th anniversary of V.J. Day.
He will look into, once the Mets get back to Washington, making a visit to a V.A. Hospital.
He will be happy when he hears the vets’ stories that he never had to pull K.P. Duty.
He will be truly humbled by the valor all these veterans showed and fascinated at how so many of the older gentlemen benefited from the help provided by the G.I. Bill.
He will ask if anyone there goes back far enough to fill him in on the details of the daring rescue of the crew of the P.T. 109.
He will realize that next to warfare, baseball is easy, yet he still feels his nerves rattling when he hears his name over the P.A. System.
He will try to calm down by listening to a playlist that includes some of his favorite artists:
• B.B. King
• K.T. Tunstall
• k.d. lang
• T.G. Sheppard
• B.W. Stevenson
• R.B. Greaves
• O.C. Smith
• C.W. McCall
• Z.Z. Top
• And the Monkees — he really digs “D.W. Washburn”.
He will join a few of his younger teammates for a quick round of E.A. Sports.
He will excuse himself to catch up on the Sunday papers, particularly that op-ed piece by E.J. Dionne.
He will put aside for later another interesting column, this one by E.R. Shipp.
He will plan, on the flight to Atlanta, to catch up on the latest in cinema by reading some recent reviews from A.O. Scott.
He will consent, despite not generally talking to the media on days he pitches, to that brief Eyewitness News interview with N.J. Burkett.
He will think to himself that this guy’s no P.J. O’Rourke.
He will wryly mention to nobody in particular that on this team, August is the cruellest month…and wait in vain for somebody else to bring up T.S. Eliot.
He will wonder if he gets to the eighth inning whether he should push to complete the game considering Frankie Rodriguez is on the D.Q List.
He will wish, a little, that he could at least hand the ball to a healthy J.J. Putz.
He will then recall something he was told one offseason by J.P. Ricciardi.
He will understand anew, per the former Blue Jays general manager’s advice, that you always have to trust the pitcher who follows you to the mound, even if it’s some journeyman like C.J. Nitkowski.
He will reason that you have little control in this game over what happens to you, and that even a Mark McGwire can be traded for a T.J. Matthews.
He will keep to himself his disappointment in the Mets’ offense, cheering himself with the tradeoff that at least he’s no longer pitching in the D.H. League.
He will wish the Mets didn’t make their bats look like that toothpick hanging from the mouth of the old Royals shortstop, U.L. Washington.
He will rue, however, that when the Mets come up to hit, they look as lost as sea as Gilligan and the Skipper on the S.S. Minnow.
He’s not a drinking man, but he could see where this lack of support could drive a pitcher to seek out an A.A. Meeting.
He will eventually count his blessings and decide he’s pretty lucky to be a New York Met, pitch on the Citi Field mound and occasionally catch a glimpse of his face up on that enormous H.D. Screen.
He will nevertheless reckon that if he could do anything, he’d climb into a time machine like the one conceived by H.G. Wells.
He will wonder what it would have been like to begin his career with a right arm that would let him throw as hard as J.R. Richard.
He will settle for knowing he did make it as a pitcher and did get to put on real baseball shoes the way he dreamed when he was a youngster lacing up his P.F. Flyers.
He will chuckle at the recollection of watching major leaguers on television in his youth and thinking he’d love a chance to strike out a real, live hitter like R.J. Reynolds.
He will relive those moments in the minors, still watch big leaguers in motel rooms, still hoping for the chance to face even a utilityman along the lines of F.P. Santangelo.
He will accept that he never really had the leverage to hold out for a megabucks deal like J.D. Drew.
He will take a quick look at his marginally athletic physique and make no mistake that he ever had a chance to try two sports professionally like D.J. Dozier.
He will be glad, after glancing at SportsCenter, that he never went into football, lest he wind up bloodied à la some latter-day Y.A. Tittle.
He will admit to daydreaming now and then of possessing speed and strength enough to have been Most Valuable Player in a Super Bowl like O.J. Anderson.
He will cringe when he imagines being in the middle of those old highlight films, trying to evade the wrath of the Steel Curtain, and failing to avoid the onrushing fury of L.C. Greenwood.
He will forget, too, any hoops aspirations he ever held, leaving such endeavors to the likes of A.C. Green.
He will stick with baseball, thank you very much, even if it’s never as neatly scripted as in those movies, such as Eight Men Out with D.B. Sweeney.
He will scoff at the notion that he’s some mystical character emerging from a field of corn, invented to create conflict in a scene straight out of W.P. Kinsella.
He will persevere in a real-life business where front-office moves often baffle him…for example, what were the Diamondbacks thinking when they gave their manager’s job to A.J. Hinch?
He will resist the temptation to question his own manager, though sometimes he has curb the instinct to revisit that incident on the West Coast trip when Jerry Manuel took him out against the L.A. Dodgers.
He will conduct himself with dignity, unlikely to pick up on the pie-smashing tradition begun by A.J. Burnett.
He will fail to find the humor in that; who does that guy think he is — W.C. Fields?
He will field his position as best he can, even if he’ll never be confused defensively with J.T. Snow.
He will treat his opponent with respect, whether he’s going up against a soft-tosser like himself or a flamethrower like C.C. Sabathia.
He will match up today versus Bud Norris, but he won’t behave any differently than if he were facing one of the other Houston pitchers…say, J.A. Happ.
He will, win or lose, answer questions honestly after the game, even if the reporters who follow the Mets aren’t exactly H.L. Mencken.
He will explain how he pitched, though he sometimes believes the media is prone to treating its finer points like it’s the final exam in A.P. Calculus.
He will doubt it’s as complex as the kind of political science theory espoused by V.O. Key.
He will feel as if they are stretching to make him into a superhero, some kind of character from D.C. Comics.
He will be, no matter the result, just a baseball player, not someone who’s ever going to have a monument designed for him by I.M. Pei.
He will roll his eyes a bit at how he is treated as an oddity for having taken his education seriously, as if baseball doesn’t go with an M.A. Degree.
He will shake his head the next time somebody asks him what it’s like to be a ballplayer who reads, as if playing a game for a living doesn’t mean you can pass an I.Q. Test.
He will not obsess on his image and isn’t about to hire a P.R. Firm.
He will not put on act, for when it comes to acting, he knows he is no E.G. Marshall.
He will always be who he is and if they want someone with a greater sense of style, he will suggest they go dig up C.Z. Guest.
He will not exactly sit by the phone waiting for a call from G.Q. Magazine.
He will, in today’s game, attempt the kind of surgical precision demonstrated by his favorite M*A*S*H character, B.J. Hunnicut.
He will hope he doesn’t put so many runners on base that it comes to resemble one of the show’s classic O.R. Scenes.
He will quell his innate desire to fire fastballs and take no prisoners, even if deep down he fancies himself sporting a Mohawk haircut, a ton of jewelry and an attitude that would better fit B.A. Baracus.
He will remind himself that the Mets aren’t The A-Team and to stop pretending he’s living in an old issue of T.V. Guide.
He will enjoy the spotlight until the season ends, and then revert to civilian life and head home to Tennessee, though it might be fun before saying goodbye to New York for the winter to see some sights — maybe take the U.N. Tour.
He will, he supposes, always be the embodiment of that quote he read somewhere…“There is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something” — E.B. White.
He will look forward to some time off, maybe gathering the family over the holidays and riding around in a beat-up V.W. Bus.
He will know he can afford a luxury camper now, but who has time to study for an R.V. License?
He will muse that it would be sweet to be out on the open road, tooling along, maybe listening to some X.M. Radio.
He will have to save those thoughts for another time, for he has to focus on the Houston Astros right now, and no matter where they are in the standings, it’s not like they’re some J.V. Team.
He will reassure himself that even without a pennant race, this is indeed the big time, and he’s come a long way from when he first got the attention of a coach in P.E. Class.
He will glance a copy of the updated scouting report on Astro tendencies as soon as it comes off the H.P. Printer.
He will grab his glove, pound it a few times and maybe loosen it up with a dab of W.D. 40.
He will, at last, head to the bullpen to warm up, heeding the words of e.e. cummings:
It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
He will be our very own R.A. Dickey, New York Met. And to us this season, he has been absolutely A-O.K.
by Greg Prince on 28 August 2010 3:15 am I don’t know who the Mets’ closer is, and that’s fine. Bring in a guy to get three outs who you think can get three outs. And if he can’t get there to your satisfaction, bring in another guy to make it better.
There may not be fancy save totals or theatrical entrances, but there could be a win for the Mets at the end of such a bland rainbow. We got one of those Friday night. I’ll take it.
Silly me, I thought this game was going to be sloppy, endless affair. It wasn’t incredibly crisp, not the way you’d envision a 2-1 score implying, but it hummed along efficiently enough. Mike Pelfrey was shaky in the first, loading the bases full of Astros, but escaped. Nelson Figueroa (remember him?) wasn’t sharp, but he persevered after giving up one ugly tally in the first. Between the two 2009 Mets, the first inning took half-an-hour.
After that, a little more than two hours and mostly zeroes. Big Pelf put up nothing but, assisted by one sparkling play after another (Pagan, Castillo, Tejada, Davis, Beltran and the right arm of Jeff Francoeur all stood out). Figgy morphed into Nelson Gone Wild in the fourth, walking three batters and yielding another run, but otherwise the misplaced Brooklynite filed seven serviceable innings for Houston. Pelfrey didn’t seem overwhelming, but you couldn’t tell from the no runs he allowed in eight innings.
The ninth arrives and Pelfrey (124 pitches) hands it off to the closer. Or he would if we had one who wasn’t injured after (allegedly) perpetrating third-degree assault. Without the usual ninth-inning guy, it fell to…who exactly?
On this night, Jerry Manuel’s best idea to fill what had been Francisco Rodriguez’s slot was Bobby Parnell. It wasn’t a terrible idea, but it didn’t prove practical. Now when Astros hit balls on a line, they fell in. One Houstonian was retired but two wound up on base. So much for Parnell on Friday night.
In came Hisanori Takahashi, and in the best tradition of glamorous closers, he caused a genuine sensation.
The surge of emotion, however, was confined the section of the Pepsi Porch occupied by some folks on hand for Japanese Heritage Night. They were delighted to have their countryman in the game. The rest of Citi Field mostly sat and hoped for the best. We did that for Parnell and, I suppose, Rodriguez when he was a factor, but there was no light show, no overture. It was just Hisanori trying to end the story.
First, it wasn’t easy. Jason Michaels brought home a run. Now it wasn’t a combined shutout anymore. Now it wasn’t quite so breathable. It was a one-run game, one closer fill-in gone, the other not on the most solid of ground. Two on, one out.
Yet the Mets’ world did not come crashing down on Hisanori Takahashi. He had to nail down two outs and he did (weird balls & strikes umpiring helped, but it’s been known to hurt, so we won’t question Angel Campos too harshly). Angel Sanchez popped up and Tony Manzella looked at strike three and that was that in a good sense. No closer per se, but when BTO blares, nobody much notices that it was an understudy instead of a star takin’ care of business.
***
Some other observations to share from a second consecutive night at the ol’ ballpark…
• The Shea Stadium Apple’s placement in Mets Plaza remains brilliant, as brilliant as the Citi Field Apple beyond the center field remains dormant. I’ve designated ye olde Apple as a meeting spot several times in 2010 and everybody finds it with no fuss (as opposed to my no longer operable Gate E instructions that used to confuse people even though “first gate after the subway staircase, behind the ticket window, in that corner near the souvenir stand — to the right of the entrance” seemed clear enough to me). I waited for my lovely wife there for less than ten minutes and probably landed in the background of about twenty pictures. People love that Apple. I’m so glad the Mets diverted it from its Dumpster destiny in 2008 and relocated it from the Bullpen basement after 2009.
• Dwight Gooden’s Mets Hall of Fame plaque now correctly expresses his term of Met service: 1984-1994. It was noted here that it was initially wrong. It no longer is. Thank you, Mets, for ultimately getting that right.
• To the nice young man I met in April, I’m truly sorry for blanking on our original exchange when you approached me again Friday night. No, I’m not good with faces, but also it sometimes takes me a moment to crank myself up to speed on every asset in my memory bank (though plucking Cleon Jones’s 1971 batting average out of the air is a breeze; go figure). Thanks for saying hi four months ago, thanks for saying hi once more. It means a lot to me.
• Enjoyed another pregame beer with my new Australian friend, the guy from Thursday who was once told by Bobby Bonilla to “put it on my tab”. Wouldn’t we all love to have that option?
• Also met a nice couple from Wisconsin, half of whom I also knew previously only from online endeavors. The dude is originally from Illinois but had a grandfather in Connecticut who converted him to Metsdom early in life, and it stuck. Longtime Met devotion without having lived anywhere near Flushing would seem strange on the face of it, but not after learning a visiting Aussie became a Mets fan on the strength of Bobby Bonilla’s heretofore unreported graciousness. That’s strangeness personified.
• I ordered Stephanie a “regular” soft drink from the Cascarino’s stand on Field Level. I thought regular meant the cup in the middle. No, it’s the tiny cup on the left. I would have thought that was the “small,” because it literally is the smallest of the three. There is no small. there’s only “regular,” “medium” and whatever the huge one with Mr. Met’s picture is called. The tiny “regular” is $4.25. And though the correct beverage was dispensed into the requested cup for $4.25, the lady behind the counter referred to it by the wrong brand name, which seemed impossible to do since the name of the brand is emblazoned on the fountain, on the cup, all over a Party Patrol and atop a nearby Porch. But never bet against attention not being paid to the most basic of details anywhere the Mets are involved.
• With precious few exceptions (generally the Danny Meyer places), everyone who works a foodservice concession at Citi Field seems put upon by every single transaction in which they are compelled to participate. Asking what you want is a chore; getting it for you is a chore; taking your money is a chore; returning your change is a chore; saying either “thank you” or “you’re welcome” is a chore; interrupting a conversation with their co-workers is obviously not appreciated. It’s New York, it’s the Mets, it’s whatever excuse we apply to it, so we kind of accept it, but then you take a step back and realize this is customer service, yet it’s disinterested at best, shoddy and getting shoddier at worst. Do the Mets and Aramark only hire those who don’t want to work at Citi Field, or do the Mets and Aramark make working at Citi Field that dismal an experience?
• When did “Let’s Go Mets” become a defensive chant? Now and then at Shea it would start up in the top of an inning, and it was harmless enough, I supposed, but I’d always understood it as primarily a motivational tactic/suggestion aimed at our hitters. Now the A/V squad fires it up when we’re in the field. Not as inappropriate as reaching for it when we’re down by seven in the top of the ninth, but sort of alien in any circumstance in the bottom of the ninth. I’m not used to Hisanori Takahashi materializing at that juncture either, and that worked OK Friday, so we’ll see about this other thing.
• Stephanie is 5-0 at Citi Field this season, 7-0 lifetime. Let’s all meet her at the Apple.
by Greg Prince on 27 August 2010 2:00 pm 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: County Stadium
HOME TEAM: Milwaukee Brewers
VISITS: 1
VISITED: August 1, 1994
CHRONOLOGY: 12th of 34
RANKING: 13th of 34
My mother, had she ever made it to County Stadium, would have known what to call it. She would have broken out the Yiddish as she tended to do (American birth and upbringing notwithstanding) and declared it haimish.
She usually invoked that word when she wanted to express how down-to-earth something was. Not prust, as in “common,” which was something we were told not to act (spitting, for example, was admonished as prust) but haimish…homey — unpretentious.
County Stadium, Milwaukee. It was so comfortable, even the Yiddish language feels retroactively at home there.
 Gotta use past tense here. County Stadium is no more. I understand why, I guess. The program I bought the night of my single visit in 1994 contained an article pressing for a new facility with a “convertible” roof; it was a “necessity” if the Brewers were to remain “economically viable”. When Miller Park opened in 2001, I remember a quote from a thrilled then-Brewer Jeromy Burnitz, complaining that every day at County Stadium he had to slosh through puddles to get from the clubhouse to the field. Miller Park was built to prevent puddles and other unpleasantness. If you ply your trade in a ballpark, I can’t blame you for wanting the most hassle-free experience possible.
But I was just passing through Milwaukee one Monday night in August, and I loved County Stadium. It felt so right. What it did when I wasn’t there wasn’t any of my concern. I’m sorry it deteriorated or was perceived to have. I miss it, if only in the abstract. Baseball has enough state-of-the-art facilities. It could use a little more haimish.
Milwaukee was the second stop on Stephanie’s and my most ambitious ballpark sojourn to date, the one that encompassed three parks in four days in two states. Other people have fired up their campers and done a lot more, but for us, it was pretty bold. It’s something I likely won’t ever repeat, at least not in the same format.
Sunday was new Comiskey. That was easy enough — we flew to Chicago the night before, we checked in downtown, we rode the subway to the South Side at the appropriate hour. Monday’s when it got ambitious. In the heart of downtown Chicago, we rented a car. That felt weird, since if I were in midtown Manhattan, it would never occur to me you could do that. For all I know, you can’t. But I had checked in advance, and discovered in Chicago, it wasn’t impossible. So we did it.
Checked out of the Inter-Continental, packed up the rental from Hertz and took off up I-94. I was 31 that summer. Not long after I turned 32, I developed suffocating driving anxieties. I’ve not actively sought out a highway since I was 38. So this now stands as truly a trip from another time. I drove from Chicago to Milwaukee. It seemed so simple then. It seems unimaginable now.
Straight shot between the two cities wasn’t more than a couple of hours, if that. We stopped along the way at the Mars Cheese Castle in Kenosha, Wisconsin. It was mandatory. How do you avoid something called Mars Cheese Castle? It’s a local landmark, one that I understand is presently in the process of being moved to make way for expansion of the Interstate. Just as I’d feel better if I knew County Stadium was still the home of the Brewers, I feel relieved learning Mars Cheese Castle will survive progress.
Funny, I don’t remember our buying any cheese. It was just enough to stop there.
But you can’t go all the way to Milwaukee and not immerse yourself in beer. Though I spent that entire trip grimacing into the camera every time we did something touristy because I didn’t want to look like such a tourist, we did the most touristy thing I could think of once we hit Milwaukee: we took a tour of the Miller Brewing Company. Mind you this was in the heyday of my beverage magazine career. I was paid to think about and know about and write about a company like Miller. It was work. Yet what do I seek out on vacation? Miller.
Go figure.
Great tour. Great beer. If you take a brewery tour and the beer isn’t great, something’s very wrong. Miller was all right.
And so was the single best restaurant we ever discovered in our ballpark travels, Edwardo’s in Wauwatosa. Wauwatosa was where we were staying for one night in Milwaukee, at the Exel Inn. Like Edwardo’s and the Mars Cheese Castle, that sticks in my mind (it, too, was haimish). The Exel was nothing special on the surface, but in the room it had a working refrigerator and microwave. That would come in handy after dinner because at the adjacent Edwardo’s, we ordered this incredible deep dish pizza we couldn’t come close to finishing. Ohmigod, it was so good!
It’s not our habit to eat dinner before going to a ballpark because part of the fun is trying the food at the game, but it had been a while since we had eaten — before skipping the Mars fare, our last meal had been uninspiring cheeseburgers (cheeseburgers!) at the legendary if morose Billy Goat Tavern, where they really had no fries — chips, just like the Olympia Cafe it inspired on SNL (and to think I didn’t want to seem like a tourist). So we were enticed by Edwardo’s and we weren’t wrong. They’re not kidding when they say they stuff a pizza. The meats, the cheeses, the mushrooms, the onions…what wasn’t in that thing?
Wow, that was good. It’s sixteen years ago and it’s still good. And still too much to finish. Thank goodness for that fridge and microwave at the Exel.
After indulging that much, our inclination was likely sit up and watch TV, but we had tickets for the Brewers and, only because they were on the schedule, the Yankees. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen The Other New York Team outside of New York. Just our luck, we were seated among about a dozen of their minions. If I didn’t know better, I’d think the lady who took my ticket order over the phone probably saw our mailing address and thought she was doing us a favor.
I’ll bet that’s what happened. That’s how friendly it felt at County Stadium, a dozen Yankees fans — and one tailgating parking lot douche who laughed at my Mets cap — notwithstanding. Good exterior to walk around. Good place to sit down and take in. Just a good night to be a baseball fan and at a baseball stadium, y’know?
The Brewers had been flat for a long time at that point. My only strong impression of County Stadium had come from TV, and that was from 1982 when they were winning the A.L. pennant and competing hard in the World Series. Back then you heard how rabid Brewers fans were. They weren’t so rabid in 1994 when they had been nowhere for a decade and would continue apace there for another decade. But they seemed nice. The place was nice. It had its touches. It hung up its 1982 flag in the concourse. It managed to squeeze a team store in on the aging premises, something Big Shea then lacked. Most famously (before the sausage races were instituted) it had a chalet for Bernie Brewer, the mascot who dunked himself in a mug of Milwaukee’s favorite beverage when a Brewer put one over the fence.
Bernie wasn’t busy on our night in town. The Yankees won pretty easily (what fun to be sitting among their Newmanesque traveling party). The only moment from the game that stands out in my memory was Melido Perez plunking Kevin Seitzer on the helmet. It looked pretty bad, and Seitzer came out of the game. I was glad when he made it to the All-Star Game a year later.
We, like our pizza, remained stuffed, but this was Milwaukee County Stadium. You don’t drive all the way up there from Chicago and not eat a little more. In the pre-gourmet days of ballparks, one of the only things I knew about stadium fare, from reading it years earlier in Inside Sports, was Milwaukee had bratwursts…”brats,” as I was determined to order ours to prove how non-touristy I was (in my Mets cap). And you had to try it with the “red sauce”. I seem to recall being told — nicely — at the sausage stand they were out of brats, which seems unfathomable for Milwaukee, so I went for another kind of tubed meat for us to split for sampling’s sake.
Whatever it was, it was very good. The sauce was all right, if not as legendary as it had been built up. The real winner was gluttony. Surely it’s the state bird of Wisconsin.
We liked County Stadium a lot. We didn’t care for being seated among Yankees fans (nor the score they were high-fiving) and we were tired and full and had the trip back to Chicago the next morning, so we took our leave not long after the seventh-inning stretch and a hearty round of “Beer Barrel Polka”. Like that Brewer barrel, we rolled out to our rental car, and then back to the Exel.
The pizza was still in the fridge. The microwave was functional. Thus, the pizza didn’t stay in the fridge long. We finished our leftovers while listening to the Brewers’ postgame show on the motel radio. The Mets, it was reported, fell to Milwaukee’s old team, the Braves, at Shea Stadium. The losing pitcher was recently recalled rookie Jason Jacome. They pronounced it “Juh-comb” as opposed to the correct “Hock-a-me”.
Which is the kind of noise you make when you polish off the last of your Edwardo’s.
by Greg Prince on 27 August 2010 7:15 am I love being a Mets fan, but I hate rooting for the Mets. I love being a Mets fan, but I hate supporting the Mets. I love being a Mets fan, but I hate investing any faith whatsoever in the Mets as a baseball team or as an organizational entity.
But I do love being a Mets fan. What a shame, sometimes, that the Mets are implicitly part of the deal.
I should be careful with that. There are Brooklyn Dodgers fans and Philadelphia A’s fans and Montreal Expos fans and, as I know very well from my own historical fetish, New York Giants fans who get by without a team. It’s a lot less fun that way. So, OK, I’m glad the Mets are still around.
But I hate everything they do to diminish themselves and, by extension, those of us who care deeply about them.
The Mets just finished losing two of three to the Florida Marlins, one of the umpteen teams ahead of them in the Wild Card standings. The Mets are in the Wild Card standings in the sense that they are a National League team not in first place. That’s the only involvement they can claim. That roll they could get on any minute, the one in which they, according to David Wright, could “get hot, rattle off five, six or seven in a row or a few weeks of winning series”?
I’ve yet to see evidence it exists in anything but deluded theory.
Yours truly certified the 2010 Mets as done for on August 8, 4:08 PM EDT. Since then, being the hopeless optimist every Mets fan can’t help but be (phrase borrowed from a splendid photographer), I’ve looked for a path back from the dead. There is none, not after playing sixteen games and losing half of them. Sooner or later, you gotta beat most everybody and you gotta pass somebody. The Mets have beaten the Rockies twice and the Pirates twice. But they’ve lost two of three to the Phillies, two of four to the Astros and now two of three to the Marlins. They are no worse recordwise than they were when they left Philadelphia (one under then, one under now), but they are also absolutely no better. And they’re not closing in on anybody.
They were in sixth place for the Wild Card on August 8, 7½ out.
They are in seventh place for the Wild Card on August 27, 7½ out.
They’ve passed nobody but they’ve let themselves be sideswiped by the Marlins.
The Marlins.
How does a Mets fan not seethe with contempt at that name? The Marlins who ended our 2007. The Marlins who ended our 2008. The Marlins who invited us down to Puerto Rico and found a way to begin to end our 2010. The Marlins who shed Metkillers Jorge Cantu and Cody Ross (while Chris Coghlan cleverly shed himself in a pie fight of his own making) and still took these last two.
The Marlins. Geez.
The Mets’ version of momentum was perfectly encapsulated in two consecutive innings in this series: the ninth of the second game and the first of the third. Both featured a home run from Mr. Clutch, David Wright. One drew the Mets closer to the Marlins, one put them out in front. The Mets didn’t score after the homer on Wednesday night but they were patting themselves mightily for having “fought back” (Jerry Manuel); seeing “good signs” (Jose Reyes, the other Mr. Clutch); and remaining in a state where “anything’s possible” (Wright) and “we’re going to be OK” (Manuel).
Nice moral victory for those Mets. It would do their hearts good to know that if you could carve a regulation game out of the baseball that was played between the fourth inning on Wednesday and the third inning on Thursday, they crushed the Marlins 7-2. Except it doesn’t work that way. After losing 5-4, they converted all that fighting back, et al into an 11-4 defeat.
Despite Wright’s two-run homer in the first. Despite building a 4-0 lead through three. Despite receiving a leadoff walk in every inning from the second through the seventh. Despite the momentum they claimed was in effect once they inched back on Wednesday from 5-1 to 5-4.
Nope. It didn’t take. The Marlins fell behind by four Thursday and came back for real. The Marlins scored seven in the top of the sixth much as, once upon a wretched time, they scored seven in the top of the first. That was September 30, 2007, a date that needs no introduction among Mets fans. The Marlins and September in Queens need no introduction among Mets fans either. If there’s a small favor to be had from last night, it’s that it was the last home game this year that would be graced by the visitors from Florida. This September will be the first since 2000 — before the unbalanced schedule became law — in which the Marlins don’t come ashore at Shea or Citi.
Barring, you know, a one-game playoff for the Wild Card, since we’re so not out of it.
The Marlins wrecked two Septembers in our midst. The took the shine off what was left of our August in our imaginations. Do the Mets even notice stuff like this? The Marlins seem to take special relish in doing in the Mets in New York. Hanley Ramirez is to the Mets in Flushing what Stan Musial was to the Dodgers in Flatbush. He went 10-for-15 in this series. He was, per usual, Han the Man. Any Mets pitcher make him a little uncomfortable? Any Marlin feel any Met’s wrath? Or are the Mets saving it all up for the Astros this weekend for when they get on that roll that’s going to carry them past all their merely academic competition?
By the time it was 11-4, in the ninth, it hardly mattered (it’s hardly mattered since the 2-9 West Coast trip, of course), but there was Wright again and there was another leadoff walk from the generous Marlin pitchers. Fine, David’s on first. Down seven, he is not being held on. You think he could run and take the base that was just begging to be taken? The Marlins couldn’t have shown more defensive indifference had they opted to play without gloves and jocks. But David waited…waited…waited…for Ike Davis to walk. I’ll bet David could have taken third from there, but more waiting ensued.
On the sixth pitch he saw from Jose Veras, Jeff Francoeur flied out to deep center.
Which was when Wright tagged up and raced to third.
Too little for anyone but Adam Rubin to read into, perhaps, but if you like your season-in-a-microcosm anecdotes, that one would do nicely. It was all there for the taking, but Wright didn’t take it. But once an out was recorded, let’s act like it’s urgent.
Not in the box score, the Mets A/V squad chose that moment when the Mets were attempting to rally from seven runs down with three outs left to attempt to rev up the remnants of our crowd. Without irony, the video board blared and drummed LET’S GO METS! LET’S GO METS!
You gotta be kidding. It was desolate as desolate could be at Citi Field on merit at that point, and the Video & Entertainment Services Department (or whatever marketing genius insists we be assaulted with loud electronic ticklers no matter how inappropriate the mood) thought we’d respond like trained seals. As if the problem Thursday night hadn’t been the score? As if all we needed was a little of that old team spirit? As if we’re really that dumb?
Oh wait, we are really that dumb. We’re Mets fans. We keep going to these games. We balance the ball on our nose so we can dig into our pockets and pay our way in. I suppose they do know their customers, even if there are fewer and fewer with every passing homestand.
That’s the shame of it. We’re great fans and we’re terrible fans. We’re great because we exhibit the kind of loyalty fans are ideally supposed to generate game after game, season after season. We’re terrible because we continue to enable farces like the 2007 Mets and the 2008 Mets and the 2009 Mets and — due respect to their 43-32 start — the 2010 Mets. We fume and we fuss, but we appear at Citi Field and we preach to the choir and we proselytize to the uncertain how You Gotta Believe and all that. We try to turn .500 deadwood into sturdy oaks of contention. We imbue good, sometimes very good, not often enough great players like Reyes and Wright with the qualities of superstardom. We buy this stuff, literally and figuratively.
We get our hearts ripped apart the final day of one season by a subpar division rival and we’re back a year later for a reenactment. And then plenty of us file in two years after that because it’s what we do. We take umbrage at bad contracts and bad strategy and bad reading of reality, but then we take the 7 or the LIRR or the Grand Central and we’re there all over again.
You don’t have to tell us LET’S GO METS! LET’S GO METS! We figured out how and when to do that long before there were video screens at ballparks.
On the way home, I was miserable about the Mets and couldn’t stand them. Yet you know where my head was by the time I walked in the door and recapped the previous several hours for my wife? “Hey, it was a lot of fun tonight!” And the sad part is it was. Thursday represented a gathering of some good online friends — more lifelong suckers modeling as much Metwear as they could layer in August — featuring one fellow traveler who traveled to the game not from Jersey or Connecticut or the Island, but from Australia. Whatcha doin’ in the States? I asked him. I’m here to see the Mets, he said, as if 10,000 miles is no more than the distance from Jackson Heights to Willets Point.
So of course we had a great time with this guy, this Australian Mets fan who took to the team in 1993 and cemented his bond because Bobby Bonilla bought him a drink at a nightclub in Manhattan.
How can you not say that’s not a great fan, that a fan base that engenders people of this caliber isn’t filled with great fans? How can you doubt our sincerity or purity or naïveté or whatever you want to call it? How are we supposed to abide brief boycotts or lead revolutions when we’re this enmeshed with this whole mess?
How can we not want to be at a Mets game when someone from freaking Australia wants to be at a Mets game?
Yes, a great time. Our group’s organizational mastermind sussed out a deal from McFadden’s — appetizers, drinks, surprisingly good seats (from a likely bountiful late-season inventory) for an astonishingly reasonable price — and we partook. Had a little pregame dinner al fresco across the street from the chop shops. It worked better than you’d think. We were having such a good time, eating, drinking, slicing birthday cake for two of our twelve that we didn’t get up to go inside Citi Field until after the game started.
The standings plainly said the opposite of what all our mouthpieces stoically or robotically declared. We knew we weren’t in a pennant race or a playoff chase, but we also knew, via one of the McFadden’s TVs we could see through the window from 126th Street, that Wright had homered in the first, that we were up 2-0, that we were having more fun than most people have, as a rule, on Thursday nights. Thus, we merrily made our way around the back of the stadium to the Stengel entrance. We could do that because our fairly fabulous tickets said we were entitled to use the VIP entrance of our choosing.
I think it’s great that the Mets repurposed three of their portals as tributes to the three legends for whom they (as opposed to MLB) retired numbers. I’d been inside the Hodges entrance a couple of times, and it was strong and powerful. I was inside the Seaver entrance last Saturday for the Billy Joel premiere, and it was Terrific. Now, the one I hadn’t passed through, the one for Casey Stengel. I wanted to see just how Amazin’ they made it.
It was the most Amazin’ of them all, which made the walk all way around from McFadden’s worthwhile in my book. Casey Stengel was, hands down, the most photogenic character in the history of the game, and he was never more irresistible to the lens than in his Met tenure. I melted at the pictures that lined the hallway to the elevator in right field. There was one of Casey and Willie Mays at the Polo Grounds with a bicycle…if you want to know how I’d decorate baseball heaven, I’d start with that photo.
Yet just before being granted admission to the Gates of Stengel, a well-dressed hostess asked sweetly enough, “VIP?” Clutching the magic ticket, I presented it so I could get the pawing and frisking over with quickly and move on to Casey. But I couldn’t help but think, what if we weren’t “VIP”?
Mind you, it’s the second inning by now. There’s no line of people at Stengel. There’s just us, a rollicking band of a dozen Mets fans high on life, a couple of beers and a 2-0 lead. We’ve made a little pilgrimage to see what is normally hidden from our view. We are enthusiastic to the point of spouting Metsie! Metsie! And you need, at this post-rush juncture of the evening, for us to prove that we belong at this gate? That we deserve to linger two minutes over framed photography and a bust of our first manager? That a clutch of people who not only understand who Casey Stengel was but revere him has official business with the Ol’ Perfesser?
What, I wondered, would have happened had my ticket said ENTER GATE JRR? Would have they really deprived true blue and orange acolytes — one from Australia, for crissake — an up-close glimpse?
I won’t say it ruined the moment for me, but it did give me pause because I’m pretty convinced, based on a lifetime of Mets fan experience, we would have been shooed away. We as Mets fans are always being shooed away. If we’re not shooed, we’re eyed suspiciously. Our seats, as it happened, were in Excelsior (Hail Caesar when you say that, pal). We had made it past Checkpoint A but at Checkpoint B, it’s “let me see your ticket.” When I was coming back from the restroom, it was more “let me see your ticket.” If there was courtesy, it was begrudging.
And this is on a level where we’re technically considered VIPs.
One game under .500 isn’t the worst of seasons. After 70-92 in 2009, anything marginally better would deserve to be treated as progress, at least until you commence to probing beneath the surface and realize what a holding action this season has been. The Mets couldn’t decide they were a contender and didn’t maneuver to make even a small move — a reliable reliever, a proven pinch-hitter — to improve their chances at the July 31 deadline. Yet they couldn’t decide they weren’t a contender, so they left the general manager who saddled them with Castillo and Perez (and, I hate to say it, a seventh year of Beltran) in his post and the manager who can’t commit to any player for more than two consecutive games in his post and yo-yo’d between youth movement and playing the largely disappointing vets. The sleazy Marlins plead poverty but rake in quite a profit. The big-market, high-payroll Mets…who the hell knows with them? They do spend in December, but it’s always on the ornament that weighs down the Christmas tree more than on what it would take to effectively enhance it.
It’s not a great starting point for 2011 and it hasn’t been a brilliant 2010. It’s a little disingenuous to pitch it as much more than, “We’re trying our best, we’ll try to do better, thank you for your patience.” But the Mets never operate that honestly. They’re Jack Nicholson snarling we can’t handle the truth, so they manufacture an alternate reality in which they pretend they’re something special.
They make much of one-run ninth-inning rallies when they’re down by two. They blast exhortations at us amid no-run ninth-inning rallies when they’re down by seven. They presume to be a bigger deal than the Florida Marlins when the Florida Marlins edge ahead of them in the present and have battered them when it counted in the past. They act as if only a select few of their patrons are Very Important People when they’d be well advised to treat every single one of us who still cares about them like gold.
Even on nights when their arbitrary pricing scheme labels as Silver a consequence-free contest whose sheen was a dingy shade of tin.
by Jason Fry on 26 August 2010 3:03 am The Mets lost a squeaker, as Jose Reyes smacked a ground ball to Gaby Sanchez with two outs in the ninth and the tying run on third. Damn — particularly with Angel Pagan having looked a bit leisurely on a ball off the wall that arguably led to a fatal extra Marlin run. Still, the Mets fought back and played well other than that blip, with Ike Davis tripling (Ike’s right — he’s not that slow once he gets moving) and Josh Thole chipping in two more hits and making a nifty tag play at the plate on a short hop. For the first time in a while, I was a bit surprised we lost, and didn’t want to throw anything after we did.
What makes me want to throw things? It’s the constant peddling of messages. Take a recent sampling:
1. From MetsBlog, regarding Omar Minaya’s chat with the media: “Minaya still thinks the team is in the playoff race, and says they are trying to win games and hopefully they have a run in them down the stretch.”
2. Jerry Manuel last week, saying his priority isn’t developing young players: “That’s not the case. The case is to win games and put what you think is the best team out there.” (Why? Because he thought the .500 Mets were within reach of a playoff spot.)
3. From the middle part of Adam Rubin’s three-part series on where the Mets are and where they might be going: “While a team official suggested the discussions have not yet advanced to this level, he acknowledged one possible course of action is to sell a youth movement to fans and trumpet the home-grown players.”
Sigh.
1. We’re not still in the playoff race.
2. We’re not still in the playoff race, so that should damn well be your priority.
3. ARRGGGGGHHHH!!!!
I’ve given up wondering why the Mets worry so much about what everybody might say about them, and so little about what they ought to do. It’s maddening, but it’s not going to change. A while back Greg observed that the Mets don’t bother locking barn doors at night, but worry terribly how they will be perceived should a horse be seen trotting down the highway the next morning. That pretty much nails it, alas.
So, in that vein: Fellas, quit trying to sell shit to me.
For casual fans, Citi Field is a nice place on a summer’s night whether the Mets are 10 games over .500 or 10 games under. It’s clean and nice and there are lots of bathrooms and you can get Shake Shack, Taqueria, or both. Whatever some of us in the fanbase may feel about attention paid to team history, that Ballpark on a Summer Night part is fixed. It ain’t Shea, so stop worrying about it. (Well, OK, the people you employ are getting rude and/or incompetent again. You could work on that. But the rest’s fine.)
That leaves the rest of us. I can read the standings. I know how our club stacks up against the Braves and the Phillies and the Giants and the Cardinals and the Rockies and the Dodgers and the Marlins. Don’t tell me we’re in the hunt when I had to write down that many names in late August. And I know who’s young and who’s old and who’s cheap and who’s expensive and who’s homegrown and who’s an import. If next year’s roster is young and cheap and homegrown, I’ll know it’s a youth movement. I won’t need anything trumpeted. I won’t appreciate anything trumpeted. “Ballgame tonight” will be enough, just like it always has been. I’ll make up my own mind regarding the rest, just like I always have.
You don’t need to sell to the first group of fans. You can’t sell to me and all the other people like me. So please, just stop selling.
You want a message that will work on me? Stop talking and do stuff. Get guys who cannot help this team off the roster, even if it means a financial hit and a couple of days of articles about what a waste of money they were. Get the guy who’s a horrible tactical manager out of the dugout in favor of someone who won’t do so much active harm. Get the GM who can’t seem to enter an offseason with a coherent plan out of his office in favor of someone who can. (And then get out of that guy’s face and let him work.) Figure out what’s most likely to win games down there on the field when a playoff spot is actually within reach, and make it happen.
Do that, and you don’t have to say a word. You could say nothing, and other teams would start hiring mimes and monks. Continue to get in your own way while failing to do that, and everything you say makes it worse.
by Jason Fry on 25 August 2010 1:52 am The audience may have dwindled to diehards who think Citi Field is marvelous on a misty, unseasonably cool evening and we hardcore devotees on our couches, but the Mets rewarded that smaller population of interested parties with a hell of a ballgame. It had Met pluck and verve and some Marlin pluck and verve too, along with a much-appreciated helping of dopey baseball on the enemy side, a shocking reversal, a stirring comeback and a somewhat melancholy denouement. Not bad for whatever you paid out there in Flushing or the investment of your time in the living room or the car.
The Marlins played a strange, upside-down game, one that turned twice on misplays by Cameron Maybin. First came Angel Pagan’s fifth-inning smash to center, played into three bases by Maybin. That was forgivable considering the conditions, but the eighth inning wasn’t: With two outs, Pagan smacked what was clearly a single into center. Except it wasn’t — when Maybin went after it with a somewhat leisurely approach, Pagan pounced, streaking for second and arriving safely. Whereupon — as had happened in the fifth — Carlos Beltran drove him home to tie the game at 5.
Offsetting Maybin’s lack of hustle (and a certifiably lousy night for ace Josh Johnson) was a surprising dollop of it from Hanley Ramirez, who’s inherited Miguel Cabrera’s status as the Worst Great Player in Baseball. (For some reason this role is often filled by a Marlin.) Ramirez’s lack of interest in the game he’s so superb at is routine and deplorable, but something got into him tonight: He had a full head of steam heading for first with two on and nobody out in the top of the seventh, which allowed him to just beat Ruben Tejada’s relay and avoid being the back end of a double play, setting up the three-run homer by Gaby Sanchez that ruined R.A. Dickey’s night. (By the way, if you ever want to explain to someone why a knuckleball that does absolutely nothing is a bad thing, cue up the video of Sanchez’s blast.) As a baseball fan, I’d of course rather see Ramirez play full-throttle; as a Mets fan, I much prefer it when he’s going through the motions.
The bottom of the ninth was a great bit of theater: Ike Davis snuck a little worm-killer past Will Ohman, depositing it in one of the only places Ike Davis can place a ball to yield an infield hit — and even then he was nearly out on a superb, stuntman-quality midair heave by Dan Uggla. Ike moved to second on Josh Thole’s second hit of the night, but with two outs, all was left to Luis Castillo — who promptly slapped a single over Uggla’s head.
This didn’t ensure a happy ending, as the things you can do during the time it takes Ike to run from second to home include mowing a good-sized lawn, reading a couple of chapters of Tolstoy, and possibly growing a beard worthy of a Brooklyn bartender. But young Mike Stanton’s howitzer arm is not yet perfectly calibrated: He had Ike dead to rights, but made his second bad throw of the night, Ike arrived safely, and we’d won.
So where was the melancholy part? It came on the replay. I always enjoy watching the replay of the batter who drove in a walk-off run: He’ll round first, but the businesslike demeanor is already slipping, as what really matters is what’s going on with his teammate heading home. You see the batter turned brief runner applauding, or the pointing to God, or the fist pump, and the hug from the first-base coach, and then there’s the happy scrum of half a team delivering head pounds before escorting the hero to the celebratory postgame spread.
Except tonight Castillo rounded first, turned toward home, watched Ike score and barely reacted. He displayed all the satisfaction of a man who’d completed a transaction at an ATM. His teammates were happy for him, with Dickey speaking movingly and empathetically of what he’s gone through, but you could see quite clearly that Luis was not happy for himself, not even at the moment when he’d just won a baseball game. He is no longer capable of that happiness, as it doesn’t outweigh the reality of everything else: He’s no longer a starter, was never a fan favorite, and has become an uneasy mix of mentor and problem for an organization that wishes he belonged to someone else.
It was a marvelous game and a thrilling win, but that made for a bad aftertaste.
by Greg Prince on 24 August 2010 7:51 am “Bless you Henry Blake, your work here will never be forgotten.”
That line, delivered sans jocularity by Father Mulcahy in “Abyssinia, Henry,” the March 1975 episode of M*A*S*H that bade goodbye to the 4077th’s departing commanding officer — and actor McLean Stevenson — echoed through my mind Sunday after learning Rod Barajas was suddenly an ex-Met. Colonel Blake’s farewell was an emotional scene, but come the following September, M*A*S*H was starting another season, with a new CO (Harry Morgan as Sherman T. Potter) and the Korean War endured another eight seasons on CBS. Henry Blake was mentioned a few times for dramatic effect between 1975 and 1983, but otherwise, one suspects, his work was largely forgotten.
That’s TV for ya.
Rod Barajas? His immediate fate appears happier than that of Colonel Blake (shot down over the sea of Japan) or McLean Stevenson’s sitcom career (NBC’s The McLean Stevenson Show, a quickly cancelled precursor to the more memorable for being forgettable Hello, Larry). Rod Barajas gets to go play for his favorite team from when he was a kid. The Dodgers aren’t any closer to legitimately contending than the Mets at the moment, but they don’t have a rookie backstop they’re attempting to break in. They have Russell Martin, but he’s hurt. If Rod Barajas has to, à la Crash Davis, finish out the season, L.A. is an ideal landing spot for him.
His work here, however, will soon be forgotten. That’s not an indictment of Rod Barajas, New York Met. It’s just a fact of baseball fan life. We tune in for the new season, we meet the new cast of characters and we become engrossed in their storylines. For Rod Barajas, there were several choice scenes:
• Late signee of last resort in Spring Training
• Mentor to the kid who’s destined to take his job
• Starting catcher on Opening Day
• Team’s leading home run hitter for most of two months
• Hero of a couple of fantastic finishes
• Essential element of the improved clubhouse chemistry
• Dependable postgame quote/human interest fount
• Nurturer of a maturing pitching staff
• Conceivable All-Star candidate
Then Rod Barajas begins to be written out of the cast. An endless slump decreases his role. He disappears onto the Disabled List. You forget he’s even on the show anymore. Penultimately, he returns for a brief cameo that unleashes wails of anguish over why we’re even wasting a roster spot on Rod Barajas when we’ve got Josh Thole, who needs to start as much as he can, what’s wrong with the Mets, anyway?
Then the final scene: waiver claim…Los Angeles…hugs and handshakes…Abyssinia, Rod.
Cue commercial.
Gosh, that was fast, but not utterly unpredictable. Seems to me there are a few Rod Barajases (Barajii?) on the Mets every year, guys who are here for longer than a cup of Andy Green coffee but not nearly long enough to merit a Very Special Episode of goodbye, farewell and amen. Rod Barajas’s Met trajectory was that of, say, Gary Sheffield’s. Or Ryan Church’s. Or Moises Alou’s. Or Damion Easley’s. Or Shawn Green’s. Or Paul Lo Duca’s. Or Jose Valentin’s. Or Xavier Nady’s. Or Doug Mientkiewicz’s. Or Mike Cameron’s. Or Richard Hidalgo’s. Or John Valentin’s. Or Darryl Hamilton’s. Or Brian McRae’s. Or Carlos Baerga’s. Or, soon enough, Jeff Francoeur’s.
You get the idea. An established big leaguer. Not a star, at least not anymore. Not the focal point of the team, but is granted substantial playing time. Usually starts, but sometimes sits for extended periods. Gets a big hit or a string of them. The cry goes up that we need more of him. How can Bobby or Art or Willie or Jerry be so stupid to not play this guy? Then he stops hitting or makes a poor play. His numbers go in the tank. The cry goes up that we need less of him. How can Bobby or Art or Willie or Jerry be so stupid to keep playing this guy?
Maybe it’s less than a year. Maybe it’s a year or parts of two or three seasons. The guy is inserted into our vocabulary on a going basis. We think about the guy. The guy is our concern. The guy is a Met, a part of the family, so to speak. We have debates about the guy. We speak of the guy in terms real and hypothetical. We move him up in the batting order. We move him to the bench. We place our trust and our prospects for short-term happiness in the guy. We grow disappointed in the guy. We want the guy out of here.
Then the guy is gone. Good riddance, generally, or at best, oh, that’s fine, we had to make that move. Life goes on. The Mets go on, just like M*A*S*H did. Colonel Potter replaces Colonel Blake. B.J. replaces Trapper John. Francoeur replaces Church who replaced Green who replaced Nady who replaced Cameron who replaced Hidalgo, none of whom effectively replaced any of those who could never replace Darryl Strawberry, which is another story.
Yes, another story. The Mets always have another story. For a few months, one of their ongoing stories was Rod Barajas. He homered to beat the Reds. He homered to beat the Giants. He had a large and adorable family, according to Newsday. He didn’t care for Arizona’s immigration law, according to the Times. He caught Jon Niese’s one-hitter but had a tough time handling R.A. Dickey’s knuckler. He wasn’t the best Met, but he was a good one. He was part of the conversation, at first in quite the favorable light, then less so.
It happens every year. It’s baseball. It’s funny that we almost never notice how common it is. We go from barely aware of Rod Barajas to relatively obsessed with Rod Barajas to not batting an eye when Rod Barajas is dispatched from our midst. We care about Rod Barajas until we don’t, or until he gives us little we consider worth caring about. When Rod Barajas was outhomering every catcher in the National League, we were smitten. When he stopped homering and then stopped hitting altogether, we lost interest. When he went on the DL for nearly a month after straining his oblique, we weren’t all that heartbroken, bastards that we are. We wanted to see Thole. We wanted to see hope. We had seen enough of Rod Barajas.
So Rod has taken his final Met flight and moved on. We got our wish with Thole. We got not quite five months of Barajas. Will we remember him for April and May and the home runs and the broad smile and the solidity and stability he gave the Mets behind the plate? Or will we remember June and July and the depressingly dwindling OPS and the rallies whose life support apparatus he unfailingly unplugged? Will he be the guy we recall for providing an unexpected boost to our good fortune when it was tangibly good, or a symptom of bad roster management when it all went sour?
Will we remember Rod Barajas was here in 2010, or mindlessly move him to 2009/2011? Will he morph into the guy who didn’t do much after taking Papelbon deep? (No, that was Omir Santos.) The journeyman backup Santana liked throwing to? (No, that was Henry Blanco.) The guy whose passed ball cost us that big game down the stretch? (No, but when Mets fans sputter over how everything always happens to us, nonexistent crimes are inevitably assigned to unwitting perpetrators.) Will his name be invoked the next time the Mets are short a catcher and somebody suggests it would sure be nice if we could bring in a Rod Barajas type to get us through the rough patch? Or is he destined for cautionary tale, as in “the Mets are making the same clueless mistake they made when they relied too heavily on Rod Barajas”?
Or will Rod Barajas be remembered much at all? Seventy-four Mets games. Sixty-seven Mets starts. Eleven home runs in April and May. One home run from June to August. Not a bad catcher. Not a great catcher. Here and gone. How long before a diehard Mets fan who brings up as an example or an aside the name “Rod Barajas” has to explain to a less committed neighbor at Citi Field who that was? Or how long before somebody can’t quite spit out from the tip of his tongue, “you know, that catcher who was here for a while, the one who hit the home runs until he didn’t?” Probably not that long, I’m guessing.
That’s baseball for ya.
by Jason Fry on 22 August 2010 11:55 pm Johan Santana has started 27 games this year. Here are the runs the Mets have scored for him in those 27 starts: 7, 2, 2, 5, 4, 5, 5, 1, 2, 6, 0, 1, 2, 7, 0, 0, 1, 3, 3, 4, 6, 7, 1, 1, 4, 3, 1.
Santana has won 10 games with an ERA of 2.97. He’s been mostly marvelous since July, while his teammates have been decidedly unmarvelous. With better run support in those 13 games in which the Mets scored no runs, one run or two runs (just under half of his starts, for Pete’s sake), Santana could easily be north of 15 wins and thinking about 20. Instead, he’s the guy you want to apologize to on behalf of his Gandhi-esque teammates, aka the Slumber Company.
Today was no exception: Johan didn’t give up a hit until the fifth, and between it being Johan and those being the Pirates, you thought maybe today was that impossible day that would make 2010 OK, forever enshrining it as the year we shed our ridiculous “Did you know…” asterisk. It wasn’t of course (it never is), thanks to Pedro Alvarez and a single to lead off the fifth. It wasn’t even a shutout, thanks to a home run by old friend Lastings Milledge. And it wasn’t even a win, thanks to another home run by Jose Tabata and the Mets’ conscientious-objector status with bats in their hands. With Ike Davis on first in the ninth, Chris Carter almost became a happy exception and almost rescued Santana with a sharp pinch-hit at-bat, whacking two balls just foul down the left-field line before driving Milledge almost to the right-field fence. But it wasn’t to be — once again, Johan lost through no particular fault of his own.
An oddity pointed out by David Waldstein of the New York Times, in the kind of beat writing I adore: The Mets were traveling with a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers. As Waldstein explains, Rod Barajas was claimed by the Dodgers on waivers late this morning, too late to get to his new team’s game. Since the Dodgers are off tomorrow, Barajas was told to go back to New York on the Mets’ charter and meet his new teammates in Milwaukee on Tuesday. So he sat around wearing Mets gear watching the Mets play on the clubhouse TV, ate the Mets’ postgame spread, went to the airport on the Mets’ bus and flew home on the Mets’ plane. Will someone bill the Dodgers for that, or is it baseball courtesy? It’s certainly odd, to say the very least.
Here’s wishing Barajas the best out in L.A. — the reign of God Barajas may have been limited to April and May, but it was still plenty enjoyable even if June, July and August were disasters. Best wishes aside, the catching job rightly belongs to Josh Thole now, both for the big strides he’s made in 2010 and the bigger responsibilities he’ll be asked to shoulder in 2011. It would have been ridiculous to give at-bats and catching assignments Thole needs to someone who isn’t in the Mets’ plans. It also would have been Very Jerry, as the sad final days of 2009 will remind us. (Hey, look! It’s Fernando Tatis!) In recent days Jerry Manuel has stopped saying absurd things about putting the best team on the field and being in a pennant race, and let the kids freaking play already. Whether that was Jerry coming to his senses or someone higher up in the Mets hierarchy helping him get there, I’m glad to see it happen. I also caught myself wondering what took so damn long, but these days that’s life as a Mets fan, isn’t it?
by Jason Fry on 21 August 2010 11:22 pm One of the pleasures of this up-and-down season has been the work of Jon Niese. Like everybody else, his 2009 was wrecked by injuries — in his case a horrifying tear of a hamstring clean off the bone. Niese went down like he’d been shot, and it was probably June of this year before I stopped wincing every time he had to run hard or jump for a ball. But he’s been just fine, knock wood, and over the course of the year he’s ascended from young pitcher who might be lights-out and might get his brains beat in to pitcher you generally trust, and occasionally have to remember is still learning.
The standout sequence of the night came against opposing starter James McDonald, who could be pretty good himself one day, except he’s a Pirate and so you assume something awful will happen to him. Niese started McDonald off with a fastball for strike one, followed that with a sharp curve for strike two, then erased him with a change-up for strike three, using each piece of his repertoire perfectly and in calm succession.
In saying something awful will undoubtedly happen to McDonald, I speak without condescension or malice. I grew up admiring the We Are Family Pirates, and respected and feared the formidable Pirate squads that ran neck and neck with the Mets in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The first great game I ever attended at Shea was this late 1990 showdown with the Pirates, with Dwight Gooden beating Doug Drabek and Darryl Strawberry throwing out Barry Bonds at the plate and hitting a three-run homer — if not Darryl’s last hurrah as a Met, pretty close to it. I was a bandwagon Braves fan in 1991 and 1992 (recall then they weren’t yet Road Runner to our Wile E. Coyote — they weren’t even in our division), and was jubilant when Sid Bream beat Bonds’ throw by a micron to end the Bucs’ 1992 season. But minutes later I watched Andy Van Slyke sitting on the outfield grass and felt my happiness leak away. Van Slyke seemed paralyzed, physically unable to get up and cross the field and go into the clubhouse and take off his uniform. I felt like something awful had happened, and it had. Bonds — who’d told Van Slyke to fuck himself when the centerfielder suggested he move in a bit against Francisco Cabrera — would leave over the winter, as would Drabek, and the Pirates would collapse. They haven’t had a winning season since Bream was safe — the Mets’ victory on Friday night guaranteed their 18th straight losing campaign. Think about that: The last time Pirates fans rooted for a winning team was three Bush administrations ago.
The Pirates are approaching 150 years of tradition, have good fans and a great park. They deserve better than this. Frankly, every franchise except the Yankees deserves better than this, the longest string of futility in the history of North American pro sports. We’ve had our agonies, sure, but they don’t compare to any of that. Or just consider tonight: The Pirates faithful showed up for the first game after being assured of another sub-.500 season, sat in the rain surrounded by yowling Mets fans, watched their team get pulled off the field in the top of the sixth and then were told that they’d lost. Pirates fans are tough hombres.
One more vignette from tonight: At one point Emily and I were giggling over Keith’s opinion of the replica Pittsburgh Crawfords uniforms, which if memory serves was delivered via an inimitable Keith construction: “I don’t believe I care for that collar.” I remarked that if Keith had his own reality-TV show, I would watch it every night. And then I realized that he does, and I do.
Oh, and I still hate Roger Clemens.
by Jason Fry on 21 August 2010 2:48 am First things first: The Mets beat the Pirates without particularly breaking a sweat, and in Pittsburgh, no less. Unlike Greg, I’ve never been to PNC. I’d love to go someday. Last summer, I was even fantasizing about going this summer. And I would, except for not having enough money or time, and the fact that horrible things tend to happen to the Mets when they’re there. (Here’s an anguished post to that effect from last summer.) For a night, though, it was all good. The Mets hit early and often, Mike Pelfrey was pretty good despite throwing up between innings, and the kids not only got to play but played pretty damn well, with Ike Davis and Josh Thole and Ruben Tejada and Bobby Parnell and semi-kid Chris Carter all contributing. Doesn’t mean we won’t all be boarding the Retread Express again tomorrow (Destination: Nowhere!) but we can always hope.
Anyway, that was tonight. But during the day, I was walking around with a smile on my face for a different reason.
Let’s pause here a moment.
One of the many great things about baseball is it’s a way to teach my kid about values. Not the on-the-field variety, though that’s important too, but how to be a decent fan. Why you applaud, albeit reluctantly, when the other guys make a great play. Why you don’t cheer injuries, or say you want So and So to die or get a D-cell to the head or have anything else injurious befall them just because they’re a member of Team X. You know, basic civilizing stuff. Sometimes that spirit even gets communicated in a blog post. Which is a good thing.
This, however, isn’t going to be one of those blog posts.
I have hated Roger Clemens for a long time, even before that thing happened that you’re also thinking of. I hated him for spray-painting his initials in our bullpen (after asking out of Game 6). I hated him for his ludicrous, unprofessional tantrum on the mound back in 1990. I hated him for being the embodiment of the modern mercenary athlete. I hated him for being a headhunter who hid behind the skirts of the designated hitter. I hated him for the relentless cloud of self-aggrandizement that he generated around himself. I hated him for his basic douchiness — who the fuck names all his children after a scorebook notation for a strikeout? I hated him for his elemental phoniness — Clemens lived in Ohio until he was a teenager, and his Ornery Texan act is bullshit. I hated him for his uniquely awful combination of painful stupidity and enormous self-absorption. (Though I don’t hate him as much as Bill Simmons does — witness this epic takedown, one of my favorite pieces of sportswriting.)
And then, well, you remember. Mike Piazza owned Clemens so thoroughly he deserved to have his name tattooed on the Rocket’s ass. In June 2000, he’d blasted a grand slam to dead center at Yankee Stadium off Clemens, part of a no-doubt-about-it ass-kicking (nine runs over five innings) that ended with Clemens getting booed off the mound by whatever was left of Mook Nation. The next time they saw each other was a month later, for the nightcap of a split doubleheader, one game at Shea and one at Yankee Stadium. (The day game wasn’t fun either: The Yankees won behind Dwight Gooden, and Yankees coach Lee Mazzilli coaxed an interference call on Todd Zeile out of some rookie ump. All that was missing to make our sense of betrayal complete was Tom Seaver making his way through the stands personally slapping each Mets fan across the face.)
Anyway, Clemens’ first pitch to Piazza in the nightcap hit Mike square in the NY on his helmet. It wasn’t a fastball between the numbers, or one meant to send a hitter stumbling backwards. It was a head shot fueled by embarrassment and animal rage, one that could have ended Piazza’s career if it had been a couple of inches lower. The sight of Piazza lying in the dirt, semi-conscious, remains one of the most horrifying things I can remember as a Mets fan. And the aftermath was infuriating, starting with Glendon Rusch’s pattycake payback off Tino Martinez’s rear end. The Mets did win the next night, with Todd Pratt playing the entire game red-faced with rage, but Piazza didn’t go to the All-Star Game, Joe Torre made fatuous excuses for his pitcher, and all of us were left dreaming of payback.
And so of course they faced each other in the World Series — and Clemens, having seemingly gone insane, fielded Piazza’s broken bat and fired it into the catcher’s path. Being upright this time, Piazza was able to take umbrage at that, asking Clemens repeatedly what his problem was. He didn’t get much of an answer, and Clemens didn’t offer one in postgame interviews either, babbling about competitiveness and emotions. Joe Posnanski uses that as the opening of a great examination of how Clemens’ brain works, if I may stretch the definition of “brain” and “works.” This was John Franco’s take: “I think he knew what he was doing all along, but I’m sure he’s going to come up with an excuse again. Just like last time.” (By the way, God bless John Franco.)
Clemens wasn’t ejected. With the Mets down 1-0 in the World Series, fisticuffs were ill-advised. And karma stayed her hand. The Mets lost the World Series to the fucking Yankees, with Piazza making the final out. Two years later, Clemens came to Shea Stadium and the Mets beat him. In fact, he pitched horribly — Piazza took him deep, as did Shawn Estes, and Rey Ordonez scampered home with a run when Clemens neglected to cover home. But our exaction of vengeance turned into a bag-on-the-head moment. The assignment of hitting Clemens with a pitch fell to the luckless, hapless Estes, who looked like he might cry by the 25,000th time he was asked what he would do. At the big moment, Estes wound up, threw, and … well, the ball went behind Clemens. Clemens looked angry but also faintly amused, and Bobby Valentine made a fool out of himself in the dugout demanding another shot at vengeance until Franco told him to knock it off. As victories go, it was weirdly hollow.
If you’ve been around these parts a while, you know all this. I’m just trying to get you back in the right frame of mind. If you’re agitated, seething, maybe have some spit flecks on the monitor, then I’ve done my job.
Anyway, Clemens pitched for the Yankees through the end of 2003 and was all but fellated by fans everywhere (including, to my disgust, in Fenway Park) on his hideous retirement tour. Then he unretired to pitch for the Astros through a series of craven, ludicrous pro-rated deals that included not having to go on road trips when he wasn’t going to pitch. Piazza, ironically, was his catcher in the 2004 All-Star Game, and on some level I remain deeply disappointed that Mike didn’t sucker-punch him on the mound. Clemens retired again after 2006, then showed up in George Steinbrenner’s box in May 2007 and told Yankee Stadium he was coming back, with Suzyn Waldman practically having an orgasm. Happily, he was pedestrian in 2007 and finally retired for good. He’d proved mortal in the end, with his legs no longer able to stand up to the demands of being a power pitcher, but he walked away with 354 wins, seven Cy Young awards, two World Series rings, a date with Cooperstown and my fuming that he’d never paid a price for any of the vile things he’d done or been. I knew I’d have to hear about him for the rest of my life as the embodiment of the tough pitcher, intense competitor, gamer, winner, etc. It was all completely sickening and awful and it made me want to scream.
I am capable of being remarkably vindictive, and if in October 2007 you’d asked me to arrange a three-year plan in which terrible things would happen to Roger Clemens, I’m sure I would have been very creative. But even if you’d allowed me my wildest flights of fantasy, I doubt I would have come up with this:
* Clemens gets named 82 times in the Mitchell Report, thanks mainly to interviews with Brian McNamee, a former Yankees trainer and “strength coach” with a decidedly checkered past. Among the tidbits: McNamee injected Clemens in the buttocks at the pitcher’s SkyDome apartment, Clemens referred to his buttocks as his “booty,” and he developed an abscess on the aforementioned booty from a bad injection. (Yeah, I know there are PED accusations about Piazza, too. This isn’t one of those Being Logical posts.)
* Clemens hires a lawyer, the noxious Rusty Hardin, and begins a ludicrous tour of media outlets denying everything. He makes a fool of himself with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, then files a defamation suit against McNamee. Every furious denial and tongue-twister explanation does more to connect “steroids” and “Roger Clemens” in everybody’s mind.
* Emails between Clemens and McNamee reveal, to nobody’s particular surprise, that Clemens can’t spell (“my sister are pissed about this dumb ass arcticle”). Besides referring to a Los Angeles Times reporter as a “dushbag,” he signs his emails “22.”
* Clemens holds a mildly insane press conference in which he and Hardin play a tape recording of a rambling phone conversation between Clemens and McNamee. Clemens looks pleased with himself while the recording plays, obviously thinking he’s some kind of simian Nancy Drew, and completely misses the fact that McNamee isn’t backing away from his story in the least. The tape doesn’t convince any listeners, but it apparently convinces McNamee that the Rocket isn’t to be trusted. He decides it time to hand the authorities syringes and gauze he claims to have saved from injecting Clemens.
* Clemens, after being repeatedly given the chance to reconsider, appears before a Congressional committee with McNamee and denies everything. To say he isn’t particularly convincing is an understatement; it’s downright amusing to watch him stumble through testimony, throw his own wife and late mother under the bus, and sort of realize — to the extent that Roger Clemens is capable of realizing anything — that you can’t intimidate members of Congress by throwing baseballs at their heads.
* In his big day before the Congressmen, Clemens is deep-sixed by testimony offered by no less than Andy Pettitte, who testified under oath that Clemens told him about being injected by McNamee with HGH. Pettitte admits his own PED use, corroborating a big chunk of McNamee’s story. He seems genuinely agonized about what he did, telling investigators that he doesn’t want to talk about it, but “I have to live with myself. And one day, I have to give an account to God — and not to nobody else — of what I’ve done in my life.” Clemens is left to stammer that Pettitte “misremembers.”
* Clemens’ testimony is so convincing that Congress recommends that the Justice Department investigate whether he lied under oath.
* The Roger Clemens Institute for Sports Medicine decides it needs a new name.
* The Daily News reports that Clemens had an affair with country-music singer Mindy McCready, whose biggest hit was “Guys Do It All the Time.” But wait — the affair began when she was 15 and Clemens saw her singing in a karaoke contest in a Florida bar. As Hardin screams about another defamation suit, McCready is asked about the story and says she can’t refute any of it. The only good news for Clemens is McCready later says they met when she was 16, not 15, and the relationship didn’t become sexual until she was 21, thus elevating Clemens’ conduct from criminal to just really, really creepy. The McCready revelations are followed by a string of reports of other extramarital affairs that’s not quite Tiger Woods-worthy, but still pretty jaw-dropping.
* McNamee wins round after round against Clemens in court, with the Rocket continuing his hysterical jihad despite looking more and more stupid and spending more and more money.
* A federal grand jury indicts Clemens for making false statements to Congress.
Wow. I suppose I might have wished for Clemens to also be revealed as an Al Qaeda supporter, but other than that, I really couldn’t have asked for a more complete humiliation, with the added bonus that a lot of the damage has been self-inflicted. Clemens could have fessed up to, say, a mistake in coming back from injury. He could have told a carefully selected 10% of the story. He would have been briefly chided, forgiven, and then lauded again. Instead, he has aimed both barrels at his own feet over and over again, blasting his own reputation to bits. He’s become the crazy uncle of the steroid era, the tinfoil-hat relative everyone’s embarrassed by and doesn’t want to have over to the house.
Clemens left baseball as a Hall of Famer in waiting; while I’m sure he’ll get in one day, it won’t be for a long time, and when it happens it’ll be with an invisible but endlessly debated asterisk. He left baseball as a combination of John Wayne and Walter Johnson; now, he’s that guy who got infatuated with an underage country singer and made a fool out of himself denying a mountain of evidence and suing people. Will people remember that he was a great pitcher? Sure — and, much as I hate to admit it, they should. But they’ll also remember the rest, thanks in large part to Clemens’ own crazy behavior.
And they’ll think, “Man, was that guy ever a dushbag.”
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