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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 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.
by Greg Prince on 6 September 2010 8:37 am Amid an eighteen-run Met explosion, how could there not be a few bangs, pops and whiffs off the bat of the object of my offensive obsession, Mike Hessman?
The best news where Hessmania was concerned Sunday is the admission into Club Hessman — One Met Home Run and One Met Home Run Only — of a 70th member, our second baseman of the present and future, Ruben Tejada.
While the Mets were scoring a month’s worth of runs yesterday afternoon, nobody was having a better year than Tejada, cramming what seemed like an entire season’s offense into this one game. The staggering five runs batted in on two hits and a sacrifice fly speak for themselves, but let us remember, if we can go back that far, that Ruben actually turned this game around in the fifth inning when it was still in doubt. The bases were loaded, the score was tied and the Mets were doing what they always do: nothing.
Lucas Duda struck out swinging. Josh Thole struck out looking (on a pitch Howie Rose grumbled was too close to take). This was Typical Mets, leaving ’em loaded, not taking advantage, preparing to fail…the whole bit. The Mets, as a team, were batting under .200 with the bases loaded for the season. Remember, batting with the bases loaded is supposed to be the most advantageous situation in baseball. The pitcher has to throw strikes. Strike are easier to hit than balls.
Can’t anyone here play this most elemental part of this game?
Young Ruben can. He looped a Ryan Dempster pitch into center field, brought home two runs and changed the trajectory of Sunday from a back-and-forth slugfest to an out-and-out mugging. If there was enough season left, I’d be tempted to put a pin in that hit as the turning point of 2010. As was, it placed us on the straight-and-narrow to a romp of a win, and when you don’t have nearly enough of those, you’ll take what you can get.
Ruben’s first major league homer, the punching of his ticket into Club Hessman, should also prove fleetingly memorable in that it sort of mirrored the hit that has kept Mike Hessman in Club Hessman. You’ll recall Mike should have two Met home runs, but his second, called gone on August 13, was video-reversed into a split-the-difference triple (and thus the legend of Mike Hessman, extra-base anomaly, was born). On September 5, Ruben hit a ball toward left, same general neighborhood at Wrigley where Mike launched his at Citi. And as with Hessman’s homer that became a triple, a fan reached out in an attempt to catch the ball. But at Wrigley, they have a basket atop the left field fence, so ultimately the umps weren’t fooled.
Since the ball bounced back onto the field and Ruben was new to this sort of thing, he kept running until he thought he had earned a triple — slid into third and everything. He hadn’t finished dusting himself off when Ted Barrett broke the news to him that he should get up and trot home. He’d achieved something 33.3% better than a three-bagger.
One guy, 20, hits what he’s sure is a triple and it turns out to be a homer, and it could be a significant step forward in a budding major league career. The other guy, 32, hit what he was sure was a homer and gets mangled into a triple and he remains Mike Hessman.
Nonetheless, let’s tip our cap to Mike the minor league home run king for being a part of the 18-run, 21-hit onslaught as our starting third baseman. Next time a Mets team scores 18 runs and somebody is tempted to look at the boxscore from 9/5/10, they’ll be surprised that the Met at 3B was not David Wright (the last time before this that the Mets scored 18 runs, at Arizona on 8/24/05, the third baseman was David Wright and he homered twice). Mike Hessman may not have had quite been the trigger man Ruben Tejada was Sunday, but he contributed by doubling once, walking once, scoring once — and lining out hard once.
He also struck out twice, the only man on either side to do so on a day that featured 31 hits from all comers. Thus, Mike Hessman continues to do two things in excessive proportions: swing and miss a lot; and collect extra bases when making contact.
Which brings us to our next stops along the Mike Hessman Met Historical Tracker:
• Mike Hessman has struck out 17 times in 41 Met at-bats. The only Met position player to strike out that often in a sample no larger? Spare 1996 outfielder Kevin Roberson, who lasted 36 at-bats, striking out in 17 of them. He also managed three home runs in his brief tenure, including a three-run, ninth-inning tiebreaker of Dan Miceli at Pittsburgh that proved the winning margin on April 27, 1996. Roberson was given a brief shot at the starting right field job, but it didn’t take. The Mets could not settle on anyone as a full-time rightfielder for several months in 1996. Great to know how some things never change.
• Mike Hessman has collected 6 hits in 41 Met at-bats, 4 of them for extra bases. The only other Met position player with a comparable profile is 1990 outfielder Darren Reed. Reed’s Met stopover encompassed six games in May, five more in August and recurring appearances in the denouement of our not-quite ’80s dynasty that September. Darren’s dossier includes 39 Met at-bats, 8 Met hits and only 2 Met singles. Reed put up 4 doubles, 1 triple and, à la Hessman, 1 Met dinger (it came the day the Mets were eliminated from divisional contention). What makes Reed and Hessman baseball soulmates is they were each marvelous hitters when it kind of didn’t matter. Hessman, we know, has crashed 329 home runs in the minors (and, at the rate he’s going, will have the chance to Crash more next year). Reed’s bailiwick was Spring Training production. Before he was traded to the Expos in early April 1991, Darren gave the Mets a .337 batting average, seven homers and 28 RBI in four Grapefruit League campaigns. He was named outstanding rookie in camp in 1989 — anybody else remember that the Mets used to give a watch to the winner of the John J. Murphy Memorial Award? — and drove in more runs than any March Met the spring he was shipped off, yet the big club could never carve out space for him.
• Yes, Ruben Tejada and Luis Hernandez are very recent Club Hessman inductees, but is this a long-term stay or just a layover? You enter the Club when you’ve hit your first Met home run because there’s no guarantee you’ll ever hit another. Obviously, certain contemporary Mets’ memberships loom as more temporary than others. We are hoping, for example, that Fernando Martinez makes it back to the bigs and hits at least one more home run in his Met life. He’s supposed to be able to do that, isn’t he? But what about our new pair of Hessmanites? Hernandez homered once in 221 at-bats as an Oriole and Royal before becoming a Met (but did go yard eight times for Binghamton and Buffalo this season). His long-term utility here is sketchy; seems like a guy who will require many more opportunities before he hits another home run. Best guess: Luis Hernandez stays in Club Hessman for the long haul. As for Ruben, whose previous flirtation with warning track power probably took place on a Little League field (nah, not really — he has eleven minor league homers since 2007), he’ll get more chances this year and probably next. I say another Met home run is in his future.
Ruben Tejada, whose OPS has only now surged to .494, projected to hit a second home run? Really? Listen, when the Mets score eighteen runs in one game, a Mets fan is entitled to go out on a limb.
by Greg Prince on 5 September 2010 9:59 pm Eighteen — as represented by chai — is considered good luck in Judaism. And when you get as lucky as the Mets did by scoring eighteen runs the Sunday before Labor Day at Wrigley Field, then there’s no need to belabor the point by saying much beyond mazel tov!
So sit back and enjoy, knowing that there was one day in the otherwise offense-starved 2010 season when we rooted for a team capable of scoring eighteen runs.
And not giving up nineteen in the process.
by Jason Fry on 4 September 2010 11:23 pm In my last job I shared an office with Steve, an Englishman who was a passionate fan of Liverpool. Liverpool, Steve explained, was the football equivalent of the Mets — badly run, generally luckless and often an object of derision for other football fans. Steve loved them as much as I love the Mets, and so we would trade tales of these teams that were thoroughly hapless and yet somehow commanded our lifelong loyalty.
This morning I couldn’t wait to tell Steve about the newest Met.
Mike Nickeas, it so happens, is the son of Mark Nickeas, who began his football career as an apprentice with Liverpool. (He’d later play with Plymouth Argyle and Chelsea, about which I know nothing.) I’m always happy to welcome a new Met into the fold, and doubly excited when the new Met is also making his big-league debut. But here was a player who was a link between two different sports in different nations — a player Steve and I might have dreamed up except for the fact that his existence seemed so thoroughly unlikely. How great was that?
Mike Nickeas was given the start because he’d worked well with Jenrry Mejia, making his first big-league start and hopefully finally moving beyond the damage his own club did to his development by wasting him in middle relief earlier this year. So how’d Nickeas do? Well … let’s just say it was the kind of day fans of the Mets and Liverpool are all too used to. Mejia did better, showing an effective changeup and curveball at times to complement his fastball. Yes, he lost, but he’s 20 — the youngest Mets starter since Dwight Gooden. Unless you’ve got a Dwight Gooden on your hands, sprung fully formed from the head of the Zeus of pitching, 20-year-old starters are inconsistent and lose a fair amount. They grow up in public, and growing up in public is messy.
So too are the late-2010 Mets. The youth movement is finally here, and they look, well, young. There’s Ike Davis bashing a home run and making several nifty pickups at first, but he’s the same Ike Davis who stumbled through a mediocre summer after a marvelous spring. There’s Ruben Tejada making a season-in-review highlight play to gun down Geovany Soto while airborne from the outfield grass, but this is the same Ruben Tejada who makes us long for the powerful bat of Anderson Hernandez. There’s Jon Niese enduring the ups and downs of a young starter, and Josh Thole trying to prove he’ll hit enough to stick in the lineup. There’s the hulking Lucas Duda, who’s made nice plays in the field grafted onto mental errors. There’s Jenrry Mejia showing good complementary pitches, and then not so good ones. There’s applauding the sight of Mike Nickeas behind the plate and then having to watch him scurry to the backstop.
They’re young players with some genuine promise, but their arrival it means September will be bumpy, with plenty of 2010 bruises we hope turn into 2011 calluses. But that’s OK with me. I’d rather watch young players make young player mistakes than see an excess of old players hanging around because of their supposed intangibles. The Mets who came back from San Juan were not just bad but boring. That team is gone, and turning into something else. We don’t know what yet, but these are the early stages of figuring it out.
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