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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 16 June 2010 9:25 am Two annual rituals of the baseball season cross paths in the middle of every Met June: the instinctive recollection of monumental trades that took place this time of year in years gone by and the reappearance, via clever scheduling nobody asked for, of former friends and foes who now wear American League garb. It seems that this year has given us cause to do both simultaneously.
For example, whatever became of that center fielder we traded for in the middle of June 1989…you know, the guy who used to be good for the Phillies and was abysmal for us and cost us two key players from our fairly recent world championship team? Yeah, right — Juan Samuel. Whatever happened to that guy?
He’s managing the Baltimore Orioles, you probably noticed over the weekend as the Mets began their yearly obligation of gracing junior circuit venues with their stylish presence and jaunty play (a half-game out of first, we can afford to be upbeat). I don’t know how much managing ol’ Sammy is actually doing, however. When you’re the interim skipper of a ship that’s 29 games under .500, and your charges, based on what we witnessed at Camden Yards, do not give off the impression that they are in any way managed, you’re less major league manager than substitute teacher. (Mr. Trembley doesn’t make us take a pitch!)
Still, good to drop in on Juan Samuel as long as he’s not patrolling center at Shea in the mind’s eye. As a Met center fielder, Samuel was a heckuva Phillie second baseman. History tells us trading Lenny Dykstra and Roger McDowell for Juan Samuel was a disaster, though if you’re willing to read the chapter from before June 18, 1989, you’d be reminded Juan Samuel was a hellacious offensive force from 1984 to 1987…primarily on Astroturf. It just didn’t work for him on grass or in New York. But at least his failed tenure served as a cautionary tale against acquiring players whose entire careers were based on the ball skittering across the most synthetic of carpets. If we hadn’t learned our lesson with Juan Samuel, then we might have done something really stupid, like sign Vince Coleman to a long-term contract a little over a year after we got rid of Samuel.
Yeah…might have.
Anyway, there was Samuel in Oriole threads, summoning the ghosts of disappointing 1989, and there were two other O’s bringing up images of a more recent and far worse season, 2003. That’s the year that felt over barely after it literally began. Who could forget that most frigid Opening Day when that lefty from the Braves mysteriously wandered onto the Shea mound and gave up five runs in fewer than four innings? Can’t remember the name of the Met starting pitcher from that day, but I do remember the opposing center fielder who drove in 7 of the runs the Chicago Cubs would score in their 15-2 rout. It was Corey Patterson. Man, what a game Patterson had on Opening Day 2003. And since?
Turns out he’s a 2010 Oriole. Who knew?
I suppose on some level I knew Corey Patterson hasn’t been keeping Tuffy Rhodes company in Japan. I knew Corey Patterson’s major league career wasn’t — as Rhodes’s essentially was — limited to one Opening Day Cubbiefied bashing of the Mets (though we won Tuffy’s). But I can’t say I’d kept up on his comings and goings. From the looks of how Corey Patterson plays baseball in Baltimore, it seems accurate to say he hasn’t really kept up with hitting and fielding, but that’s Juan Samuel’s interim problem, not ours.
Patterson is keeping company with an eclectic mix of Orioles. Teams whose records are 18-47 can be described as eclectic when you want to be nice and not call them motley. And who wouldn’t want to be nice to the Orioles’ first baseman? Why yes, that was 2003 Met third baseman Ty Wigginton we saw holding down first at Camden Yards, trying to keep it from blowing away with the rest of that perpetually downtrodden franchise.
Wigginton’s name came up twice directly before our layover in Charm City. Last week, on the occasion of the seventh anniversary of Jose Reyes’s callup at age 19, Gary Cohen passed along the tidbit that only two of Jose’s first 24 Met teammates were still active in the majors: Pedro Feliciano and Ty Wigginton. Hours after hearing that latest and most striking example of time flying, I was at Citi Field and noticed, as Jon Niese homed in on his one-hitter, a fan one section over from me wearing that must-have fashion accessory from the summer of 2003: the WIGGINTON 9 t-shirt.
Nowadays we like Ike. Back then we would sigh “Ty…” If his merchandise sold it was because it, like Rodney Dangerfield in his bit about what to tell pesky customers who demanded immediate service, was all alone here. Ty Wigginton in 2003 was the only mainstay those Mets had. I think of Wiggy and I think of his unbreakable determination to tame the hell out of third base. The phrase “hard-headed” comes to mind. My friend Jim thought he was a dead ringer for Sluggo, slightly skeevy, comic-strip companion of the equally creepy Nancy. To me Ty was a little more a modern take on the star of the eponymous Henry.
Either way, he wasn’t Superman. But he kept running out to his position every damn day of that endlessly damned season, crafted himself into an adequate fielder, hit what he could and, for his troubles and t-shirts, was traded before 2004 was over. Ty Wigginton, stalwart of the 2003 Mets, was made instantly obsolete by rookie third baseman David Wright. He was swapped to Pittsburgh for Kris Benson in a trade that can be said to have helped only Anna Benson.
Hard to believe Ty didn’t try Japan à la Tuffy Rhodes. Even harder to believe the Mets haven’t reacquired him. He’s been good for twenty homers a year several times on teams that had no reason to keep him around except to torture him with their futility. Wiggy’s been a Met, a Pirate, a Devil Ray, an Astro and an Oriole since debuting in 2002. He’s never been to the playoffs with any of those clubs. He’s barely been to .500 with any of those clubs. Poor Ty. I really felt bad for him over the weekend. Reyes or Wright would spend a couple of minutes as baserunners next to him, and I could swear Wiggy was asking for a good word to be put in on his behalf. Bro! Take me with you! I play like every position! I gotta be a better fit than Jesus Feliciano! If the Mets are really contenders, and we could do a Mazzilli 1986-type addition from our dark past for bench strength, who would you rather have returning for a belated soupçon of success than Ty Wigginton?
Jason Phillips?
For now, he’s an Oriole, one of an eclectic flock. There’s the old Met Wigginton whose truth marches on in t-shirt form. There’s the one-day Met nemesis Patterson. And there, stoically embodying the future of the Orioles for a fifth consecutive year, is Nick Markakis. I didn’t know what Samuel or Patterson were up to until recently. I had heard Wigginton was leading the A.L. in homers early but, occasional WIGGINTON 9 sighting notwithstanding, he hadn’t been remotely top of mind. Nick Markakis, though…I’ve known about him since the middle of June 2006 when the Mets came home from their triumphant road trip and ran into a young and pugnacious Baltimore buzzsaw. The Orioles weren’t any good that year — they are not good in any year — but they gave the Mets fits in their last Shea appearance, taking two of three. In the middle of it all was Nick Markakis, with four hits and three runs. He was the “young talent” the O’s were going to build around. He’s a star by now, I would assume. I don’t know if the Baltimore Orioles have stars, but if they do, Nick Markakis must be theirs, right? He’s been there longer than Matt Wieters, he’s healthier than Brian Roberts, and he had a great weekend in 2006. That’s all I need to know.
You know who else looked good in 2006? Or was thought well of at this time four years ago? The familiar face that has popped up on the current stop of our world tour, the one belonging to Manny Acta. I must confess that although he was a part of the Metscape every day for two years, I never knew why he was considered such hot stuff. But there he is, managing Cleveland after managing Washington and holding greater job security than Juan Samuel to boot.
I’m still at a loss regarding the hot stuff reputation. The Nats hired him and he brought them home next-to-last once, very much last once and incredibly last until he was let go by a Nationals ownership group that was also left to wonder, “Why did we hire him again?” The Acta management mystique was off and running, however, and despite running Washington into the ground, he was named chief of the Tribe for 2010.
At 25-38, they don’t seem to be benefiting from his leadership.
Maybe they will. Saying I have no idea why Manny Acta was considered presidential timber cuts both ways. I’ve seen only his miserable results. Maybe there’s magic going on in the Cleveland clubhouse of which I’m not aware. Believe me, I’m going to stop paying attention to the Indians by Thursday night, so, barring an incredible turnaround, I’ll remain unaware of anything he does under the auspices of Chief Wahoo.
Actually, I do remember one thing about Manny Acta from when he was the Mets’ third base coach in 2005 and 2006, and it has nothing to do with his third base coaching. It was from the apex of Acta’s second season, the night when the Mets accomplished the most they would accomplish in ’06. New York traveled to Los Angeles and concluded a three-game sweep of the Dodgers to win the National League Division Series. First, 97 regular-season wins and a division title for the first time in eighteen years, then a playoff steamrolling. Things could have not looked or sounded better. And you know who made sure of that?
Manny Acta. Long before we ever heard of Chris Carter, this guy was apparently an animal. Who else — coach, player, manager — would have done what Manny Acta did in the jubilant Met clubhouse after Game Three of that NLDS? It made for delicious sidebar material in the midst of the celebration and it was recorded for posterity in Adam Rubin’s Pedro, Carlos & Carlos! & Omar, the dutiful and definitive 2005-06 account of what shaped up as the dawn of a glorious era of Mets baseball.
Inside the victorious clubhouse, third base coach Manny Acta led Reyes, Sanchez, Chavez and Mota in a chorus of “Meet the Mets”. Acta then proclaimed: “Party in Queens, entierro in the Bronx,” using the Spanish word for burial. “Party in Queens, entierro in the Bronx,” Reyes repeated, referring to the Yankees’ ouster in Detroit.”
I think it’s fair to say, all things being equal, that our wildest dreams involve our players and coaches loving their Metsiness enough to be found singing our theme song and gloating over the misfortune of our most bitter psychic rivals. But that’s what they are — wildest dreams. Mets singing “Meet the Mets”? Taking the time after dooming the Dodgers to bury the Yankees?
Acta shouldn’t have been made manager of the Nationals. He should have been elected Queens borough president. But, no, he was made manager of not one but two teams, neither of which have responded to his motivational genius on any tangible scale to date. Manny Acta isn’t interim in Cleveland like Juan Samuel is in Baltimore, but they do have last place in common.
That’s not the only thing they share, in a way…which brings us back to mid-June and the role this time of year plays in the Mets fan psyche.
June 15 ceased being the no-waivers trading deadline in baseball with the institution of a new Basic Agreement in 1986. By 1989, when Dykstra and McDowell were shipped to Philly without waivers on June 18, the new and (and still current) deadline was July 31. That’s when we acquired Frank Viola. The last June 15 deal the Mets made was in 1984, for Bruce Berenyi, a pitcher for the Reds. Probably a few Mets fans remember that. Probably no Mets fan, however, thinks of Bruce Berenyi when it comes to June 15 trades with the Reds.
With all due respect to Berenyi, to Donn Clendenon (1969), to Dock Ellis and Andy Hassler (1979), to Keith Hernandez (1983) even, no mention of “trade” and “June 15” elicits the seismic reaction in Mets fans as the set of swaps that went down on June 15, 1977.
The Midnight Massacre. The Wednesday Night Massacre. The End of the Innocence. M. Donald Doomsday. Whatever you all it, you know it by heart and by the feeling you still get in the pit of your stomach.
No need to recount the whole sorry episode yet again (not when others did a splendid job of recounting it yesterday), except to mention two ancillary thoughts that came up this particular mid-June on the 33rd anniversary of the June 15 that casts the longest shadow of any date in New York Mets history.
1) On the eve of the third anniversary of the trade that turned Tom Seaver into a surreal Cincinnati Red, one of the four players the Mets obtained in return hit inarguably the most memorable home run of its era. M. Donald Granted, it was the most miserable era Mets baseball has ever known and, unless Flushing Bay is targeted for offshore drilling, will ever know, but it didn’t matter when it was hit. All that mattered was it was hit. Steve Henderson hit a three-run homer with two outs to cap a five-run ninth inning against the San Francisco Giants on June 14, 1980. The Mets won the game 7-6 after having fallen behind 6-0. The Mets of Steve Henderson, Doug Flynn, Pat Zachry and sometimes Dan Norman were, all at once, a legitimate major league outfit for the first time since June 15, 1977. It was that important. It was that uplifting. It was, yes, that Magical.
Since that moment, I’ve thrilled to ninth-inning grand slams and fifteenth-inning grand slam singles and extra-inning playoff walkoff home runs and playoff series clinching home runs and home runs that transcended fun and games, but for sheer emotional fan impact — one swing unleashing equal parts validation and vindication — nothing has topped Steve Henderson’s three-run homer off Allen Ripley.
If nothing has after thirty years, chances are nothing will.
The Steve Henderson home run holds a unique place in the souls of a generation of Mets fans. On June 14, 1980, you didn’t stop to think that Steve Henderson wouldn’t have been hitting that home run had Tom Seaver not been traded. I’ve never really linked the two events, the absolute worst I felt as a Mets fan in my adolescence with the absolute best I felt then, and it almost never occurs to me that June 14, 1980 was practically the exact third anniversary of June 15, 1977. And I’m the guy who remembers dates.
2) The Wednesday Night Massacre wasn’t just Seaver to Cincy. You know that. You know the Mets compounded their eternal error by exiling Dave Kingman to San Diego. Because it wasn’t enough to dispatch your all-time greatest pitcher. Because you had to eliminate all traces of the only pure slugger you ever had. Because you had to shed budget and show the peon players who was boss. Seaver and Kingman gone (Mike Phillips, too, ostensibly for Joel Youngblood, but maybe to let fellow utilityman Leo Foster know he shouldn’t get too cocky). Fan interest was soon to follow our superstars out the door.
If you are too young to have experienced it or were one of those who sat out the Mets starting June 16, 1977 and not ending until after Hernandez arrived six years later, you didn’t have the pleasure of meeting Henderson and Zachry and Flynn (Norman went to the minors). You also missed the coming of assembly-line lefty reliever Paul Siebert — hit him all you want, he’ll throw more — half of the package the Padres overnighted in exchange for Kingman. Siebert’s better half, so to speak, at least the better-known component of the San Diego duo, would go on to play a part in Mets history ultimately bigger than Kingman’s, bigger than Henderson’s, bigger than almost any Met has in the nearly half-century that there have been Mets. Not as big as Seaver or Hernandez, but quite substantial the more you think about it.
We met Bobby Valentine on June 17, 1977. He had been a big-deal prospect with the Dodgers. He wrecked one of his legs as an Angel. He was mostly hanging on as a Padre. Now the Connecticut native was heading back east. I’d love to tell you that Bobby Valentine distinguished himself as a Met handyman, but to tell you the truth, I don’t remember much of what he did on the field. I do kind of recall he seemed pretty happy to be traded here, though. Big smile at the introductory press conference during which his younger new teammates appeared justifiably dazed and confused.
Bobby Valentine batted .222 as one of Joe Torre’s spare parts in 1977 and ’78. His place in Met history could have been a footnote no greater than Siebert’s. Yet without June 15, 1977 and the insult-to-injury trade of Dave Kingman, I’m pretty sure Bobby Valentine doesn’t get a job as a minor league infield instructor in the Mets’ system in 1982. Without that, he probably doesn’t become third base coach under George Bamberger in 1983, where he stays through Bambi’s resignation to serve under Frank Howard and, eventually, Davey Johnson. Without the third base coach experience at the beginning of the Mets’ most triumphant (or, perhaps, triumphal) era, he probably doesn’t seem a logical fit to manage Tidewater in 1994 and again in 1996. Bobby Valentine got his first big league shot at the helm of the Texas Rangers in 1985, lasting parts of eight seasons, and he honed his credentials with the Chiba Lotte Marines in 1995, but there was something utterly unsurprising about his appointment to succeed Dallas Green in late August of 1996. It was almost as if he and the Met managerial post had been waiting for each other for nearly twenty years.
There were times when Bobby managed the Mets that every night felt like June 14, 1980, that whole months and seasons embodied the feeling that The Magic Is Back. Valentine led a more talented team than Torre ever did at Shea, but the situation he inherited from Green wasn’t tangibly rosier than the one Torre took over from Joe Frazier. The Mets were down in the dumps in August 1996, yet Bobby V steered his team clear up and out of them by May 1997. They’d stay well above ground for the next half-decade.
It didn’t end well for Bobby Valentine in New York. He wore on his veterans. He was on a different page from his general manager. He’d guided his Met expedition about high up the mountain as he could before the whole traveling party began to lose its footing. It wasn’t Seaver and Kingman going away on the same night when Bobby V was fired in 2002, but it felt like a pretty raw deal (even if it wasn’t wholly shocking that it happened).
Bobby went on to Japan, back to the Chiba Lotte Marines. Now and then we’d hear he was working wonders. He won a championship there. He was a national treasure there. And through circumstances beyond his control, he was let go. He’s now part of ESPN’s Baseball Tonight. He hasn’t managed anywhere since 2009 or been employed by a Major League Baseball team since 2002.
But you know who has? Everybody else…or so it seems.
While Bobby Valentine was turning Japan on its ear, the Baltimore Orioles — a losing proposition since their inane dismissal of Davey Johnson in 1997 — have given shots to Lee Mazzilli, Sam Perlozzo and Dave Trembley before handing the temporary reins to Juan Samuel. We loved Mazzilli here and we had nothing against Perlozzo from when he was coaching, but Bobby Valentine was ostensibly on the market (his Japanese contract had an out for a U.S. opportunity) and they didn’t grab him three separate times? And what about the Cleveland Indians? They replaced Joel Skinner with Eric Wedge around the same time the Mets were jettisoning Valentine in favor of Art Howe. Wedge had his moments, but when they were over, where did the Tribe turn? They talked to Bobby Valentine, but they hired Manny Acta.
Manny Acta? ¿Manny Sí, Bobby No?
The Nationals had a chance for Bobby but went with Jim Riggleman. The Marlins had a chance for Bobby but stuck with Fredi Gonzalez. Now the Orioles have an opening and have spoken to Bobby Valentine. That they did shows they may finally be serious about resuscitating their sorry franchise. That the conversation didn’t end with “how much?” and “sign here” indicates they didn’t deteriorate into baseball’s worst team by accident.
How does a team like the Orioles or any of the others bypass Bobby Valentine? He turned around Texas when Texas was nowhere. We know that he lifted the Mets out of their second-worst morass ever. Japan idolized him — they named a beer after him, for crissake. He’s got a big personality, he presumably commands a big salary and for those whose nerves he gets on, he gets on them in a big way.
But he’s Bobby Valentine. He’s an extraordinary manager in-game and out. He sees talent in untapped sources and doesn’t shy away from deploying it. He thinks three steps ahead of whatever poor sap is in the other dugout. He takes the pressure off his players and wears it for himself like a badge of honor. He’s one of the truly special people who makes baseball more worth watching than it is without him. How in the name of Paul Siebert can the Baltimore Orioles be stalling on hiring Bobby Valentine?
I know if my team wasn’t on a roll and it desperately needed a new manager, he’s who I’d want. In fact, if my team wasn’t on a roll, I’d be keeping quiet about Bobby Valentine’s availability lest he get away. But since my team is doing just fine, let somebody else do the right thing and put a great manager back where a great manager belongs: managing.
As for pitching, Mark Simon of ESPN New York recently polled several parishioners on their favorite Met pitching performance ever. Jason picked a lefty who pitched last night. I went with a righty who was traded 33 years ago last night. See what we and some other folks had to say here.
In related news, Shannon Shark of Mets Police hates me. Find out why here.
by Jason Fry on 15 June 2010 11:18 pm The Roberto Alomar trade aside, is there anything about the Cleveland Indians to stir the blood of Mets fans? Has an Indians diehard ever gotten up in arms about what’s transpiring at Shea Stadium or Citi Field?
When Mets-Indians actually compares favorably to such epic tilts as Mariners-Cardinals, Blue Jays-Padres and … ZZZZZ, oh, I’m sorry, I dozed off there, where was I … Rangers-Marlins, do you have to be a cynic to say that for the most part interleague play is a strained, stupid gimmick?
Do those casual-dress business guys in the insanely great seats behind the net at field level ever ACTUALLY WATCH THE FREAKING GAME? I mean, those seats are better than the batboy’s, and tonight I saw one of those guys pay attention to the field for perhaps six seconds total.
Speaking of the seats that are an order of magnitude better than any I’ll ever sit in, why is there a TV in there? YOU’RE ESSENTIALLY SITTING ON THE WARNING TRACK! WHY DO YOU NEED A TV? Why not give the left fielder one too?
Does it bother anyone else that while you’re watching your TV, you can see the TV that gives the people in the great seats another way to not watch the game, and that TV is a second behind your own TV? Because doesn’t that imply if you got really close you could see another littler TV on the little TV you can see while watching your own TV, and that littler TV would be yet another second behind? Which means with a TV of infinitely good resolution you could go down a wormhole of tinier and tinier TVs, each further and further behind live action. So how far back could you ultimately see? Would you glimpse Bob Feller in his prime? Steamships and fur traders? Dinosaurs?
Even when such ineptitude suits your own purposes, isn’t it quietly depressing to see teams play baseball as badly as the Orioles and the Indians play it?
Why do some people still exalt Manny Acta as a great manager? Granted, I’ve put in about three hours of work watching the Indians. But they sure look like the Nationals under Acta’s watch, reliably making dopey errors as well as ugly physical ones. Doesn’t a general air of distraction and dimwittedness eventually start to reflect on the manager?
Granted, it took a dozy play by Russell Branyan to make it possible, but how about Jose Reyes scoring from second on an infield hit by David Wright? Have you ever seen a runner go around the third-base coach on his way home? Me neither!
For anyone who doubts baseball is unfair, how does Wright collect two RBIs on a bouncer to Jason Donald that a better shortstop would have converted into an out, while Angel Pagan hits a laser right to Branyan’s glove and gets a complimentary trudge back to the dugout? Pagan’s ball was the hardest hit that inning, even including Ike Davis’s summer homer.
Speaking of Ike Davis, how happy is he that his bunt up the third-base line was near-perfect instead of perfect?
Does it amuse anyone else that when he’s at the plate Ike Davis looks like he’d rather be anywhere else? He looks like a husband who’s convinced himself to knock a wasp’s nest off a branch and into a garbage can, after which he’ll put the lid on real quick.
Have you seen a more discouraging game for a middle infielder in recent memory than Jason Donald’s? If he wasn’t making errors, he was making throws that arrived at first half a step after Met runners.
Am I a bad Mets fan for not being surprised that Francisco Rodriguez nearly blew it? OK, am I a bad Mets fan for being grimly certain that K-Rod will manage to blow others? If you’re still with me, am I a bad Mets fan for thinking that Francisco Rodriguez is a shell of his former self, a horrible closer, and heartbreak waiting to happen?
When things are going this well, doesn’t it somehow seem perfectly natural that a mediocre starting performance, lousy appearance by a closer and a bushel of infield hits would add up to a victory?
by Greg Prince on 14 June 2010 2:52 pm Welcome to a special Monday edition of 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: Great American Ball Park
HOME TEAM: Cincinnati Reds
VISITS: 1
VISITED: July 5, 2003
CHRONOLOGY: 26th of 34
RANKING: 21st of 34
For all the early-2000s caterwauling over small-market clubs who couldn’t compete with the big boys, I wondered how one in particular, the Cincinnati Reds, managed to erect a brand new ballpark with far less fuss than their New York counterparts. When I got to the Queen City to inspect, I thought I figured it out.
They did it on the cheap.
Great American Ball Park looked cheap to me. Not tawdry cheap, but very low on frills, bells, whistles, whatever makes a ballpark sing. That can be or sound appealing — frills, bells and whistles can all be overbearing — but in the case of GABP, it was merely disappointing. We came all the way to Cincinnati and this is it? Did you just unpack the bleachers from a kit and start selling tickets?
 We visited the new home of the Reds when it was new, and though I didn’t realize it at the time, it may have marked a turning point in ballpark construction. Great American was the ninth ballpark I’d been that could loosely be described as “retro”. It was surely more in the Camden Yards mold than it was a relation to its predecessor Riverfront Stadium. I suppose it was meant to evoke, on some level, Crosley Field, where the Reds played for six decades prior to Cincinnati being devoured by the prevailing trend toward roundness and Astroturf.
But it wasn’t Camden Yards or Pac Bell or PNC. It was missing something. It was missing a unifying element or a sense of awesomeness. Maybe, despite the faux steamship that dominated the centerfield landscape, it had simply missed the boat. Retro was getting harder to pull off by 2003. Baseball had gone back in time time and again since Camden Yards. You could only go to that well so often. For a while, I was impressed at how the post-Camden group of parks — like Pac Bell and PNC — found ways to improve on an instant classic. I realize now that Great American was leading us toward a post-Camden age, when what would have been impressive not that much earlier now seemed mundane.
And a little cheap.
Great American’s spareness made me wonder, or perhaps conclude, something else. My familiarity with the Cincinnati mindset was based on absolutely nothing but a vague sense (informed by a bit of reading and observation from afar) that it was a pretty conservative town. These folks weren’t necessarily unhappy with their cookie cutter, were they? What was wrong with Riverfront Stadium besides its numbing sameness? In the 1970s, it was the same thing every year: the Reds were outstanding. They hadn’t been Reds hot for a while by 2003, but it wasn’t a sure thing that a new ballpark was going to change that. The Indians’ renaissance definitely coincided with the building of Jacobs Field, and maybe there was a tangible link between the winning and the Jake, but that was Cleveland. This was Cincinnati, where the Red Machine was never Bigger than in its enormous, if enormously boring (on television at least) Riverfront.
Were Reds fans clamoring for a new ballpark? Do fans ever clamor? It’s usually ownership, isn’t it? And does ownership, any ownership, spend more than absolutely necessary in a “small market”? These are rhetorical questions. They may have actual answers. But I couldn’t escape the sensation that Great American was built for as little as possible and, thus, gave its patrons exactly that.
Then again, maybe Cincinnati didn’t need that much, because when Stephanie and I attended our one game there (and I became such an expert), it seemed people were having a very nice time despite the limited possibilities inherent in the structure.
This feeling extended beyond the walls of Great American Ball Park. Some towns you wear your Mets cap around and you get no response. Someimes that town is New York. Not Cincinnati, though. The Mets were in town with us, and the locals seemed keenly aware of the schedule. The Reds weren’t going anywhere in 2003, just as the Mets weren’t, yet their fans were on top of their game. All weekend, as the Mets were (unusually) rolling, we received very good-natured razzing. Actually, it was less razzing and more acknowledging, like, “Hey, you guys are beating us!” On our way home, airport security pretended to hassle us based solely on my Mets cap. But they couldn’t have been nicer.
(Decide for yourself what that says about TSA in its infancy.)
I was wary of Cincinnati, and not just for my vague conception of its conservative nature and its onetime embrace of Marge Schott. The Mets weren’t greeted as friendly relations over the years at Riverfront. Surely they were pissed at us for ’73…and that fight between Ray Knight and Eric Davis in ’86…and that game where Dave Pallone threw out Pete Rose (in a game against the Mets, so somehow I figured we’d be implicated)…and snatching the Wild Card from them in ’99 after they nearly snatched it from us…and, because Bart Giamatti’s office was in New York, for Pete Rose being banned from baseball.
I waited until I was 40 years old to visit Cincinnati. Apprarently I had spent too much time thinking about them in advance.
If any ballpark looks prefab in this day and age, it’s Great American. It’s more than a set of bleachers, of course, but damn if it doesn’t feel like exactly that. But the people in those bleachers (perfectly fine red seats, actually) were mostly sweethearts and fine hosts to the noticeable minority in the crowd who were there to root against the home team. I’d estimate about one of every twenty fans at the sold-out stadium that Saturday night — they were giving out miniature GAPBs — was a Mets fan. It wasn’t a Camden Yards overrun, but a healthy curiosity: new park, our team, let’s have a look.
(I also overheard one unaffiliated party talk about his lifetime quest to visit every big league park — same quest I suppose I was on, Mets presence notwithstanding. It made me wonder how many such people at any one moment make up a game’s paid attendance, particularly on a holiday weekend in a ballpark’s first year.)
Were we treated less than hospitably? Not at all, unless you count the genius who kept reminding Timo Perez that his first name rhymed with TiVo. In fact, throughout the game, there was an easy back & forth banter in our section. We were all admiring Steve Trachsel’s location and Barry Larkin’s acrobatics. We were all disappointed Ken Griffey was a late scratch. We were all in this together, give or take a logo preference. We all liked the same sport. We were of no danger to each other (or anybody else) in the standings. And we were all, given the newness of the venue, just getting to know Great American Ball Park.
The people of Cincinnati, whether or not they were thrilled with their new park, made the best of their guests. One guy who had to get up to let us into our seats joked about this being the only time he wasn’t going to let us in, “Mr. Met fan.” Yeah, I said, we’re having such a great year, you should worry about us. As the evening unfolded, I was in sporadic conversation with the guy sitting in front of us, flattering each other about our respective starting pitchers and so forth. I learned that he and his companion didn’t know the Mets had never had a no-hitter. They reminded me that Tom Seaver pitched one for them. (I refrained from answering, “No kidding, pal.”)
The nicest moment of the night, one of the nicest moments I’ve ever had in any non-Mets ballpark in terms of interaction with non-Mets fans, came when the scoreboard issued its nightly quiz: Who are the five sluggers whose last name begin with a “P” to have hit 40 homers in a season?
This instantly became a group project. Tony Perez was a gimme for this crowd. As was, per the guy visiting from New York, Mike Piazza. We instantly ruled out Albert Pujols (though he would join this select club by September). I added Rico Petrocelli, guaranteeing him as correct. When I was seven, Topps included little biographical comic books of various stars of 1970, and it included a panel on how in 1969 Rico of the Red Sox became the first shortstop to blast 40 home runs. It stayed with me.
We were two short. We thought and thought. Then a Reds fan remembered: Rafael Palmeiro! Of course! The guy nobody ever remembers for anything but wagging his finger (which had gone unwagged to that point) hit 40 home runs multiple times. So that was four. The fifth?
We were stumped. I kept wanting to say Pujols, but it wasn’t Pujos. I kept wanting to say Petrocelli, but I already had. I didn’t have any more tricks up my Cyclone shirt sleeve. So we waited for the scoreboard to give us the answers:
• Tony Perez
• Mike Piazza
• Rico Petrocelli
• Rafael Palmeiro
• Wally Post
Wally Post! How did these people not get Wally Post? Wally was a Red in the 1950s. He hit exactly 40 home runs in 1955 when the Reds were officially the Redlegs in deference to the Great American red scare and the Redlegs were a year from shedding their own sleeves. Those are the Red(leg) uniforms people identify with the ’50s, the kind that showed off the bulging biceps of Ted Kluszewski, a statue of whom stood outside the ballpark.
Given a multiple choice test, I would have gotten Wally Post from a childhood of reading Topps miniature comics and Baseball Digest very closely. These guys, the Reds fans? They were like, “Who’s Wally Post?” — and they were old enough to know better. Hey, I wanted to say, I’m not supposed to know your team better than you do. But I didn’t, because it was all in good fun, this trying to answer a trivia question as a group. I’m not supposed to be that competitive on vacation, right?
But I am. I’m a Mets fan whose intensity doesn’t let up easily. I’m determined to know more than you guys about your team even if you’re all going to wallop me in the congeniality portion of the evening’s competition.
You can plop the New Yorker down in Cincinnati for the weekend, but you can’t ever take the New Yorker out of him. Still, you can show him a few things. You can show him, for example, that he’s as close to another state as he can be while sitting in a major league ballpark. I don’t mean the state of bliss derived from a smooth Trachsel start or anything ethereal. I mean we were in Cincinnati, watching the Mets play the Reds, and one good Piazza poke away (had Mike not been out injured) was Kentucky, right over the Ohio River.
Can you imagine that? Another state, right over the outfield fence, give or take some water. That amazed me more than Trachsel outpitching Danny Graves or a Reds fan not knowing from Wally Post. Logically I knew it was there. The day before, Stephanie and I made a point of walking across the nearby Taylor-Southgate Bridge, from Cincy into Newport, just so we could say we crossed a state line on foot (on hot foot — sweltering to the point of wilting, Stephanie insisted we explore Newport, Ky.’s finest air-conditioned multiplex, which is why I can tell you Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle may well have been the last decade’s worst waste of film, but boy was it nice and cool in that theater). But to see it as backdrop for baseball? Kentucky as somebody’s version of downtown Flushing?
It was definitely value-added. When not groping for sluggers whose last names began with “P,” I spent a lot of time staring across the river at that other state. Newport presented unto us its small buildings and homes, its bluffs and hills. When it got dark (not ’til after 9:00 PM), you had stray Fifth of July fireworks displays lighting up the sky. It was a good game, but the part I enjoyed watching most, I think, was Kentucky just being Kentucky.
It provided a more aesthetically pleasing tableau than Great American itself. GABP lacked cohesion. The fake riverboat, the chintzy bleachers, the three-speed bike Reds fans received while other fans in other cities were being presented with ten-speeds…the overall effect was surprisingly flat without the northern shorefront of the Bluegrass State.
If the Reds fans are less concerned with all this than some dilettante from New York, that’s fine. It’s their park. Let’s give the main entrance plaza props for being spacious and the Reds foresight for having bag inspectors out in front of the actual turnstiles to regulate traffic into the park. Let’s also give GABP credit, like Riverfront, for being easily accessible on foot from downtown where we stayed. It’s not surrounded by parking lots, but there seemed to be plenty of garages nearby. Being able to walk to the park from one’s hotel, however, beats all.
Once inside, we were greeted by a rather large shall we say squaretunda. Lots of people spilled in. It was spacious but it felt more like a large train station than a ballpark. There were a couple of attractive, evocative mosaics of the 1869 Red Stockings and 1976 Reds starting lineups. Funny how some teams figured how to blend their ancestry and their own history at their new stadium entrance right off the bat.
Going in was a highlight. Getting out ASAP was a necessity. The night before our game, there were some brutal thunderstorms in the area. There were fatalities. Thus, unlike Shea, where the only thing Mets management did when dangerous weather threatened was sell you ponchos, the Reds posted live Doppler Radar on their DiamondVision between innings. When — after barely dodging the storms the night before — we saw the serious dark green splotches rolling in from Kentucky, Stephanie insisted we leave. It the middle of the ninth, we led by five…yeah, I had to give priority to threatening weather over David Weathers (who could threaten any five-run lead we held circa 2003). We beat the crowd out of the building and were inside our hotel before the thunder, the lightning or any real damage was done to the Mets. The weather held out and Weathers held on.
Great American wasn’t a great park, but it was a good time. There was even something to the corporate name on the door. There was a touch of Twain to that view of the mighty Ohio and the country that lay beyond it. If you can evoke Tom Sawyer and Tom Seaver in the same evening, that’s gotta be pretty Great.
***
I’ve told you about our visit to Great American Ball Park, but it wouldn’t be a complete recounting of that trip to Cincinnati without mentioning my Great American Stalking.
All my years of scanning the Mets media guide revealed a listing of team hotels. You could lodge just like the pros, apparently. For example, as of 2003, when the Mets visited Cincinnati, they stayed at the beautiful downtown Westin.
So why shouldn’t we?
I felt like a stalker making these reservations. It was an odd confluence of priorities. I kind of hated the 2003 Mets, even more than I’d go on to hate the 2009 Mets (in that love/hate way we have with our baseball teams, obviously). I hated Art Howe managing instead of Bobby Valentine. I hated T#m Gl@v!ne in a Mets uniform instead of Edgardo Alfonzo. I hated Roberto Alomar and Rey Sanchez, period. Steve Phillips had been gone several weeks, but his residue was all over this team. I couldn’t stand them as a collective.
Yet I wanted to fly to Cincinnati so I could watch these guys somewhere else — and stay in the same hotel as them.
Stalker!
Not really. I swear, I’m not and wasn’t. But, I got to thinking, wouldn’t it be something if I could run into one of them in the lobby or somewhere? It was bound to happen, right? There are 25 ballplayers plus coaches and broadcasters, somebody with a Mets pedigree whom I would recognize. Come to think of it, Tom Seaver would be doing the games and he must stay in the team hotel. I’d never met Tom Seaver. I was afraid of finding out he was not so Terrific in real life, but to actually have a chance…but wait, he played in Cincinnati, so maybe he has somewhere else to stay. Mike Piazza was on the DL and wouldn’t be there. But somebody was bound to stroll by. And then I could…I could…
I wasn’t sure what I could do. Or would do. I was 40, a little old to trot up to a real, live baseball player and ask for an autograph. I have precious few of those, and while they’re kind of fun to have, I don’t actually want to ask for, say, Raul Gonzalez’s autograph.
That’s who I think I saw the Friday night Stephanie and I were there. There were two vaguely familiar Latino figures sitting on a couch near the registration desk. The Mets had played in the afternoon, July 4. They looked too fit and well-dressed to not be ballplayers. I’m pretty sure that was utility outfielder Raul Gonzalez and spare reliever Pedro Feliciano we saw. Nowadays I’d have no problem recognizing Pedro Feliciano. I see Pedro Feliciano more often than I see my own sister. Back then, however, he wasn’t yet so perpetual to be instantly recognizable. Nor was Raul Gonzalez.
I didn’t ask either young man for his autograph. They beat the Reds that day. Let them enjoy their night on the town. (And if they weren’t Pedro Feliciano and Raul Gonzalez, it would have been more awkward than being the Reds fan who didn’t know Wally Post hit 40 home runs in 1955.)
Come Saturday morning, we had a whole day in front of us before our game. What were we going to do in Cincinnati? I wanted to visit the William Howard Taft National Historic Site (you just know it had to be huge). But I was voted down by Stephanie — a 1-1 tie, but I was already getting a ballgame, so I could be magnanimous — who wanted to see the Cincinnati Art Museum. The museum it would be. But first, breakfast. I had noticed a Bruegger’s Bagels on the corner and volunteered to bring a couple back to the room.
Bagels in Cincinnati? What a country!
I’d never heard of Bruegger’s Bagels, a franchise operation meant to bring the hole-y gospel to the deprived non-New York masses. I had heard of Starbucks. I wasn’t going there, but you know Starbucks — they’re unavoidable. There was one on the corner opposite Bruegger’s. If we were coffee drinkers, I might have gone there. Instead I merely glanced over at it en route to Bruegger’s.
And you know who caught my eye, sipping coffee at an outdoor table when not moving his mouth a whole lot?
Al Leiter!
Al fresco!
AL LEITER! RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET!
There’s Al Leiter and some guy talking! Al Leiter is right across the street, drinking coffee with some guy! I think it’s a reporter. Kind of looks like Bob Klapisch, but it’s not Klapisch. Whoever it is, he’s with Al Leiter.
Al Leiter!
Short of Piazza and Seaver, you couldn’t do any better for your neo-stalking needs than Al Leiter. He was the most famous Met available. Certainly the most recognizable of this increasingly anonymous bunch. Alomar had just been traded, Mo Vaughn was gone (save for his onerous contract) with a knee injury. Everybody else was either a nobody or T#m Gl@v!ne, and screw T#m Gl@v!ne. I saw Al Leiter.
Al Leiter!
What good fortune. Al, too, was on the DL, but was traveling with the team. Al was a veteran. He was cosmopolitan. All the Jason Phillips, Ty Wigginton, Jae Seo rookies were probably hiding in their rooms waiting for the team bus. Not Al. Al’s been around. Al goes to Starbucks. Al talks to the writers, or at least one of them. Al is sitting there right now, looking agitated, telling the guy how Art Howe doesn’t know what he’s doing or we’ve gotta get rid of Cedeño — he’s killing us in the outfield. Or Al is being the Al I believe him to be, promoting the cause of Al Leiter. Maybe he’s talking up a trade to the Red Sox.
But you know who was having this conversation? Al Leiter! At the Starbucks, right across the street from where I was standing by the Bruegger’s.
Damn, bagels. I’m getting bagels. Gotta look like a normal person. Gotta go get my bagels, get my wife her bagels. I want to go over there but I don’t want to go over there. Al is having an intense conversation about his trade or the team or his contract or his weird political views. God, I don’t want to be a fan. “Uh, Al, uh, hi, uh, I don’t want to bother you…” God no!
I had one friend in particular who adored Al Leiter. Maybe, I thought, I could use her as an Al-ibi. Uh, Al, I have this friend and she really likes you…ah, that’s lame. The point is I don’t want to bother him. He’s really talking up a storm over there.
Screw it, I’ll get the bagels, or whatever passes for bagels in Cincinnati. And when I do…he’s still out there! He’s the Energizer Bunny—still going! He’s right across the street being Al Leiter!
Calm down. Don’t be a stalker. You’re not a stalker. You’re cool. You don’t even like Leiter that much. You think he’s a bit of an opportunist, a bit of a front-runner. You once read that although he makes a big deal about growing up a Mets fan, he strayed to the Phillies while he grew up in New Jersey because the Phillies were good and the Mets weren’t. You’ve never forgiven him for coming to the bigs as a Yankee. You’re pretty sure, based on what’s been in the papers, that he stabbed Bobby V in the back. All that got us was Art Howe.
I took a walk around the block. Most of the block’s stores were closed as this was a holiday weekend in summer in Cincinnati, but it gave me time to get over Al. I went into Walgreens to buy us some beverages and such. Before heading back into the Westin, I took one more stroll by Bruegger’s, across from the Starbucks.
Look who’s still talking: Al Leiter. Damn good-looking man, I have to say. He’s been a really good pitcher, you know, Game Six against Atlanta notwithstanding. Made the All-Stars in 2000, would’ve done it in ’98 if not for being disabled. Pitched his heart out in the World Series against the Yankees with nothing to show for it. Won the one-game playoff against these very Reds in this very town to win us the Wild Card in ’99. Al had Leiter’s Landing, a charity thing for kids. Bought them lots of seats at Shea. Yeah, he’s not so bad…
The motormouth continues. The bagels and the beverages are getting heavy. Stephanie must be out of the shower by now. I guess mission is accomplished. I saw my Met.
Upstairs, I recounted it all to Stephanie, including my carefully considered decision to not bother Al. She thought I should have. No, no, I said, that would be the wrong thing to do. I don’t need to talk to Al Leiter. Seeing him will suffice.
We ate our subpar bagels, grabbed our stuff, including my Mets cap, and took off to find the Cincinnati Art Museum (that’s its name — they didn’t really break a sweat on it, did they?). When we got off the elevator, there was a bunch of people getting off with us, and a bunch of people getting on after us.
One of those people was Al Leiter. He’s right there, right in front of me, not six inches away. He’s in my face. He’s still chatting with the writer.
Quick! Think! “How’s the knee, Al?” “Way to go, Al!” “You’re the man, Al!” No, no, no! None of those sounds right.
There’s no time to think. The door will close. I’m out. He’s in. I turn around.
“Hey Al!”
He looks up from his conversation. We make eye contact.
I pull upon all my articulateness, everything I know about him and about the Mets and about baseball…and I give him the thumbs-up.
“Yeah. Hi.”
The door closes.
AL LEITER SAID HI TO ME! “YEAH. HI!” While exiting the Westin, finding one of Cincinnati’s two cabs and visiting the museum, that was what I told Stephanie for the next several hours. “Yeah. Hi.” became the most analyzed two words in the English language since that first curious caveman singed his hand and pronounced, “Fire. Hot.”
“Yeah. Hi.” What did he mean by that? It seemed to be a grudging acknowledgement of my existence, and it thrilled me to no end. Al Leiter could have said nothing. He probably preferred to say nothing. He probably gets bothered by fans all the time, and with my Mets cap and my pithy thumbs-up, there was no doubt that I was a fan. But shoot, Al Leiter was a Mets fan once. He probably dreamed of following Seaver or Koosman around (probably Koosman, since he was a lefty). It didn’t cost him anything. Al Leiter said “hi” to me. He also said “yeah,” though not in that order.
For a visiting Mets fan from New York that Saturday, the Cincinnati Art Museum held no greater treasures.
by Jason Fry on 14 June 2010 12:03 am Call it a laugher that didn’t seem that funny at the beginning.
Despite it being hot enough in Baltimore to turn steel into taffy, Mike Pelfrey couldn’t seem to get loose. Or something else was wrong with him for a worrisome percentage of the game: From the beginning we were faced with the old Pelf, looking twitchy and cranky as he yanked on the bill of his cap and stomped around the mound. Luckily, he found himself, looking far more impressive after 90 pitches than he had after nine. And luckily, he was working with a pretty big and springy net, as David Wright slammed two home runs and Jason Bay added one of his own and three more hits to boot, and Chris Carter got another chance to work on his home-run trot. Which could use a lot of work: Not since Mike Kinkade have the Mets had a player who seems so ill at ease circling the bases after a home run. Carter’s “trot” is more of a broken-legged, elbows-churning sprint, like you might see on a hunter who got a quarter-mile into the forest before realizing he forgot to apply bug spray. Does Carter want to get back to hitting so badly that running the bases is an annoyance? Or is he just incapable of doing anything with less than maximum effort, so that a 360-foot jog has to become a contest with his own parts to maintain his interest?
If Carter’s home-run rumble was the most amusing sight from Sunday, Jesus Feliciano’s first big-league hit was the happiest. Of all big-league rituals, the first hit may be my favorite: The player who just earned that 1 in the Baseball Encyclopedia reaches first (usually), retreats to the base to retouch, gets a butt slap from the first-base coach (thus accounting for approximately 40% of first-base-coach duties), and then tries to be cool about it, as if something that has never, ever happened except in years of dreams and imaginings happens every day. This is of course impossible, and inevitably the relieved, slightly dazed smile breaks out, usually as the ball alters course for the friendly dugout. Feliciano’s smile was a bit slower to come, but bigger and brighter for the wait. Which is understandable: If you’d waited 13 years in Yakima and Vero Beach and San Bernardino and Jacksonville and Orlando and Bakersfield and Montgomery and Harrisburg and Oaxaca and New Orleans and Buffalo and then New York, amassing 4,876 professional plate appearances before that 1, your smile would be pretty damn big and bright too.
When you win by seven you can dwell on Chris Carter’s trotting and Jesus Feliciano’s smiling, along with welcoming relievers you’d recently prayed would stay far from the proceedings, and you can also race over to the computer to check the standings even though you know them perfectly well, and be upset that there’s an off-day when you want one least.
Along the way, something Gary Cohen said led me to check into ballpark histories, and discover something startling: Camden Yards is now, by my calculations, the 11th oldest park in the major leagues. Somehow the Orioles’ state-of-the-art retro-park is now nearly two decades old, and to say it’s been imitated would be an understatement. Rather, it’s become the template for all that has followed in 18 years of dizzying construction.
I knew this on one level, but hadn’t grasped quite how thoroughly baseball has remade itself in Camden Yards’ image. The 10 parks older than Camden Yards (forget that Oriole Park shit) include three beloved classics (Wrigley, Fenway, and Dodger Stadium), three pre-Camden Yards parks generally considered decent enough (Kauffman, New Comiskey and Whatever the Heck Park the Whatever the Heck Angels of Whereever the Heck play in), and four multipurpose disasters (Soilmaster, the Tropicana Dome, Oakland and the Rogers Centre). The Marlins are getting a replacement for Soilmaster (though, sadly, not one far from Miami), so that will leave nine parks older than Camden Yards, only three of which will make the average visitor daydream about a wrecking ball.
It’s become fashionable now and again to bemoan that we live in a new era of cookie-cutter parks, but these are pretty good cookies. The new parks are intimate, angled for baseball, devoid of stupidities to accommodate lesser pursuits such as football, eschew artificial turf, insist that any roofs open and understand that women like baseball too and thus need access to a civilized number of restrooms. Have things gone too far here and there? Sure — I could do without quirky outfield walls for stadiums sitting in the middle of oceanic parking lots, goofy flourishes like hot tubs and little forests beyond fences, and the relentless mallification of the proceedings. But I grew up in an era of sparse crowds in concrete donuts, and it’s an era I’m glad to see gone. I spent my first day in Camden Yards craning my head around in happy disbelief: It hadn’t occurred to me that you could see a baseball game in a place that didn’t look like filthy, falling-apart Shea; scuzzy, imperious Yankee Stadium; or the Super Mario-colored, thug-filled hell that was the Vet. If Camden Yards being the new normal bugs you, ask folks in Toronto or Oakland or St. Pete how they feel about it.
by Greg Prince on 13 June 2010 1:30 am Admit it. You’ve done it. You’ve done it out loud or you’ve done it in your mind. You’ve done it at everybody wearing a Mets uniform, and you’ve been doing it since a year ago Saturday night whenever the situation has called for it. You’ve done this:
“TWO HANDS! USE TWO HANDS!”
The Mets celebrated the first anniversary of “TWO HANDS!” by not dropping a road game they had in the palms of their mitts from the fifth pitch, the one Jose Reyes deposited over Camden Yards’ human-scaled left field wall (bandbox or not, it’s a marvelous change of pace to witness a Met not have to deploy a cannon to hit a baseball out of a baseball stadium). Hisanori Takahashi found his groove, Jeff Francouer homered to the opposite field — OP@CY surely playing like the opposite of Citi Field — and somewhere in the middle of all that, the Mets’ second baseman acquitted himself really well.
That wasn’t the case one year earlier. At the end of a decade when second base devolved from showcase (Edgardo Alfonzo) to sham (Roberto Alomar), then miscast (Jose Reyes) to mistake (Kaz Matsui), the state of the position reached its logical 2000s nadir when Luis Castillo, on the night of June 12, 2009, failed to catch a pop fly off the bat of Alex Rodriguez at Yankee Stadium. There were two outs in the ninth inning, there were two runners on base and the Mets led by one. All Castillo had to do was catch a pop fly and they would have beaten the Yankees. It wasn’t the simplest of pop flies, judging by Castillo’s unsteady route under its arc, but it wasn’t all that complex for a 14-year-veteran who had been voted three Gold Gloves by National League managers and coaches, the most recent of them less than four years prior.
It was a pop fly. He was a second baseman. We had a one-run lead with two outs in the ninth. How hard could have it been?
It wouldn’t have been hard at all had Luis Castillo brought his bare hand to his glove hand once the ball hit the glove. The second hand helps out the first hand. The second hand ensures the ball will stay in the first hand. Together, they form two hands and secure a third out.
Well, we know that didn’t happen. We know Luis Castillo used only one of the two hands he was issued at birth. He also called on absolutely none of the common sense the good lord presumably gave him, futzing around after the ball bounced out of his glove and onto the ground. Instead of staying with the play and firing the ball home to possibly nail a sprinting Mark Teixeira and send this abomination of a game to extra innings, he disinterestedly bounced a throw toward the infield.
Mets lose. I let out a scream that, one year later, is just now leaving our solar system.
In the wake of Luis Castillo’s dropped popup, it became the night of the long knives around here. The first victim, I declared, had to be the perpetrator of the crime. Release Castillo Now, I demanded. As extreme as it sounded, even to me, I was dead serious. Send the rapidly deteriorating Mets a message. Send him packing ASAP! Get Joe Pisarcik, Jr., out of my sight forever.
Of course the Mets didn’t do that. The Mets would never do that. They owed him a ship-ton of money and — though it was of no help to the team at the time — Castillo was experiencing an offensive renaissance…for him. His on-base percentage after that game was .376. Luis was exponentially better in 2009 than 2008, which is to say he was darn adequate when he wasn’t committing the most egregious, embarrassing error in club history.
I would yell “TWO HANDS! USE TWO HANDS!” at him for the rest of the season. So would you. So would everybody. We’d yell it at Castillo and we’d yell at it any Met who attempted to settle under a baseball in flight. Last month in Flushing, on a night that eventually became the antithesis of a heartbreaker but at the time was just a game we were losing to Washington, Pudge Rodriguez popped a ball to very short right with two outs in the top of third. Castillo backpedaled and, despite multiple entreaties from all of us fielding coaches in Section 109, chose to use one hand to make the catch. The ball was caught, but nobody was satisfied.
“These guys,” the man in the next row turned to me to say — “they never learn.”
No, they don’t. Almost none of them. In the seventh Saturday night in Baltimore, Cesar Izturis lined a Takahashi pitch to left. It wasn’t the game, but it was a key moment. Julio Lugo was on first, there were two out, we were up by one. We wanted Hisanori to get through seven. We wanted the lead to remain intact. Mostly, we wanted Jason Bay to catch the ball. And he did…with one hand.
Do they ever learn? I don’t know. Luke Scott hit Frankie Rodriguez’s first delivery of the ninth to Angel Pagan in center. Angel, who seemed learning-challenged most of 2009, used two hands. It was a delight to behold.
Wishing for Luis Castillo to be unconditionally released following his dropped pop fly proved a fantasy. He continued his pretty decent offensive season the rest of last year. He wasn’t going gangbusters in 2010, but I’d finally, sometime during the 9-1 homestand, decided I’d “forgiven” him. That sounds rather haughty, I realize, for Luis Castillo didn’t consciously do dirt unto me personally, but c’mon. Dropping the last out of a Subway Series game at Yankee Stadium? Of course it was personal. It was personal for all of us. I didn’t boo Luis Castillo the balance of 2009, but I was highly stingy with my encouragement. It took until May of 2010 to give him the requisite hand — even one hand — when the starting lineups were announced.
Luis hasn’t played lately. Went onto the DL with a foot problem. His absence meant we’d see a little of Alex Cora (which is exactly how much of Alex Cora you’d want to see) and quite a bit of Ruben Tejada. It’s been so long since we’ve been given an extended glimpse of a genuine middle infield prospect — the winning touch of Argenis Reyes notwithstanding — that I wasn’t sure how to judge what I might be seeing.
I had no problem figuring out Saturday that Ruben Tejada is pretty damn good at second, even if he’s actually a shortstop. He was in the middle of an around-the-horn double play early and made a sensational jump and throw to retire Adam Jones later. Ron Darling compared him to Roberto Alomar, presumably the pre-Met version. Tejada was showing himself to be a free-range second baseman, unencumbered by age, injury and lack of mobility. He also singled and scored what proved to be the winning run in the sixth.
I’m not sure I’m ready to anoint Ruben Tejada the second baseman of the future or even the present. He’s supposed to be a shortstop and he’s only 20 years old. He’s batting .185 and is obviously raw. But he is exciting and the Mets are winning.
Ruben Tejada’s posting, at least as far as 2010 is concerned, appears to be temporary. Luis Castillo’s foot won’t keep him out forever (though with the Mets you never know). He’ll be back soon enough, laying down bunts and getting to grounders six inches to either side of him and probably holding onto pop flies, however many hands he chooses to use. Maybe the Mets will still be winning with him, too. Luis Castillo has proven to be not a total schlub no matter how horrendously onerous his contract still looks and how far over the hill he was when Omar Minaya insisted on signing him to it. The memory of June 12, 2009 has faded somewhat. I’m not really mad at Luis Castillo anymore.
But I gotta tell ya: I haven’t missed him in the slightest since he’s been out.
by Greg Prince on 12 June 2010 3:22 am I have adopted a new all-purpose rating system lately, inspired by the presence on the New York Mets pitching staff of a certain knuckleballing journeyman who has won our hearts and made me lose my mind.
• If I like something, it is “rad”.
• If I don’t care for it, it is “icky”.
Why have I decided to speak like a seventh-grader from twenty years ago? Because when you put together these two polar opposites, rad and icky, you’ve more or less got R.A. Dickey.
Let me show you how it works.
RAD! That would be the pitching of R.A. Dickey, the polar opposite of whoever he’s pitching in place of. I no longer remember whether it is Oliver Perez or John Maine.
ICKY! John Maine and Oliver Perez in 2010.
RAD! R.A. Dickey on Friday night in Baltimore, toying with and torturing the Orioles with baseballs that must have looked hittable but weren’t. Seven innings, one run, no problem.
ICKY! Rod Barajas on Friday night in Baltimore, toyed with and tortured by those same baseballs that must have not looked the least bit catchable and weren’t. Seven innings, lots of problems but just one run. He’s gonna wanna DH next time Dickey starts.
RAD! Dickey’s record is now 4-0. The worst you could say for him since he joined the rotation is he should be 5-0 but was let down by the Met offense in his first start. The only other Mets to be 4-0 after their first five Met starts, per Gary Cohen during the Snighcast, were Ray Sadecki, Harry Parker and Terry Leach. Not who you’d think it would be, Gary added, though it all made perfect sense to me when I heard their names. So does the continued presence of Dickey in our rotation.
ICKY! The thought that this is too good to continue. I thought that of two previous journeymen who weren’t knucklers but who were longshots to persevere as Mets: Leach and Rick Reed. You know when they each stopped being effective? Never. Knock — or knuck — wood that’s the case here.
RAD! Ron Darling made some clumsy reference to A.L. East sluggers as “big knockers”. Gary rescued him by noting in his neighborhood growing up, that would have been pronounced kuh-nockers. I’d like to believe the casual infusion of Yiddish into a baseball broadcast is beshert, but outside of New York, it probably isn’t meant to be.
ICKY! Ronnie admonishing Ruben Tejada for “showing up” home plate ump Ed Rapuano when Tejada (rightly) thought he walked. The kid took off for first on a strike. EEK! Then Ronnie followed it up with the tired bullspit about how the rookie better swing at whatever came next because of the age-old dynamic between rookies and umpires. How about swinging at strikes and taking balls? Sure enough, Tejada took a ball that was high and outside and Rapuano called it a strike.
RAD! Darling eventually acknowledging this version of rookie hazing is idiotic balderdash.
ICKY I’m going to remember Ed Rapuano’s imperious idiocy when it’s his turn to make the horrible call at first base that costs somebody a no-hitter and makes America wince. All the old-guarders will rush to his defense — human element! part of the game! he’s a great ump! they get most of them right! — and it will be as inane as it was for Jim Joyce. Balls and strikes are the last province of umpiring nobody wants to touch or improve with instant replay. Me, I hope they invent a fault-free force field that abides by a standardized strike zone and sends Ed Rapuano and his ilk out to blue pasture.
RAD! Cohen’s description of the Oriole lineup as “money” with the bases empty. Eleven hits on one run against Dickey, Feliciano and Rodriguez. Keep the change, fellas!
ICKY! The DH, even if our temporary use of it resulted in three of our five runs.
RAD! The first major league home run by Chris Carter, a three-run shot by the, uh, Mets’ designated hitter. I didn’t ask for a DH, but as long as they’re forcing one on me, nice to make good use of it.
ICKY! Not so much Interleague play, but all the complaints about Interleague play. We make them, everybody makes them. The only thing more tiresome than two weeks of playing games against teams who have nothing to do with your playoff chances is constantly noting it. And look — I just did it myself.
RAD! We won on the road!
ICKY! Winning on the road seeming rad! We have two chances to nail down an away series for the first time this season. This season’s more than two months old. Whatever league our opponents come from — even if it is from the depths of that league — this trend must be eliminated this weekend.
RAD! Hisanori Takahashi starting Saturday night and matching R.A. Dickey’s strikeout total of eight and making like he’s Tak’tor K.
ICKY! Hisanori Takahashi starting Saturday night and mimicking Maine or Perez and making a Taka-hash of things.
RAD! Fun with starting pitchers’ names.
ICKY! Not knowing when to quit having fun with starting pitchers’ names. The American League overdid its gimmick with the prolonged use of the DH. I don’t want to overdo mine.
by Greg Prince on 11 June 2010 6:07 am This is no one-night stand
It’s a real occasion
Close your eyes and you’ll be there
It’s everything they say
The end of a perfect day
—Steely Dan
Ooh, wait! I’ve got another one! I know you guys are sick of me chiming in, but I can’t help it. Now that we’ve experienced the first no-hitter in Mets history and we’re seeing how many Met one-hitters we can name before we forget how we used to count Met one-hitters as if they were no-hitters because we didn’t have any no-hitters, I want to get them all on the table — especially the ones I went to.
Did I tell you I went to seven? Yeah, seven! My first Met win was a one-hitter: Jon Matlack against the Cardinals in 1974. The only hit was the St. Louis pitcher, John Curtis, in the third. It was too early in the game to notice a no-hitter had been broken up…or maybe just too early in my life going to Shea.
And I was at the Bobby Jones one-hitter against the Giants, the clincher in the 2000 NLDS. A Jeff Kent double in the fifth. I could never figure out whether I was upset over that not being a no-hitter or kind of relieved I didn’t have to worry about that aspect of the game since we were trying to win a series. Bobby worked carefully to a couple more hitters in that inning, issuing a couple of walks, but no more hits and no runs. He was perfect in the other eight innings. It was a perfect ending, no no-hitter or not.
Sometimes I forget I saw Shawn Estes one-hit the Brewers in 2002. Yes, Shawn Estes, the guy who didn’t hit Roger Clemens. That’s the only thing most Mets fans remember about him, but he prevailed in a pretty rare for its time duel against ex-Met Glendon Rusch in April 2002 in which both pitchers went the distance and the only thing that separated Shawn Estes from being remembered for something more than not hitting Roger Clemens’ ass was an Eric Young single to lead off the seventh. I can’t believe I tend to forget it as one of the best Met pitching performances I ever saw.
One of my one-hitters was kind of bogus: 2007, a five-inning affair. Shouldn’t even count, but it does. It was John Maine versus the Nationals. He gave up a leadoff single to Ronnie Belliard and nothing more. Then the sky gave up and deluged Shea. A rain-shortened one-hitter. To tell you the truth, I had to look it up to remember it was a one-hitter.
I didn’t have to look up John Maine’s other one-hitter I was at. Technically it wasn’t John Maine’s one-hitter. He shared it with two relievers you’ve probably forgotten about, Carlos Muñiz and Willie Collazo, but everybody instantly remembered it as the John Maine one-hitter. This was one of those one-hitters that stung because it wasn’t a no-hitter. We used to get really hung up on that before we got to experience our own no-hitter. It was, as Jerry Seinfeld put it in “The Contest,” part of our lifestyle…like shaving. Maine took a no-no into the eighth with two out. The opposing batter was some catcher you’d never heard of, less familiar than Carlos Muñiz and Willie Collazo combined. His hit wasn’t worthy of the word “hit”. We won 13-0. Maine struck out 14. There was a fight. We were tied for first with one game to go. Yet all anyone remembers was John Maine’s one-hitter that could have been a no-hitter except for some stupid Marlin nobody of a catcher named Paul Hoover who wouldn’t have even been playing if it hadn’t been for the fight that got their starting catcher Miguel Olivo thrown out.
I wonder if we’ll still remember that now that we have our no-hitter. I wonder if I’ll still remember any of my first six one-hitters the same way ever again. For example, will I recall at all my sixth, a combined one-hitter that started with Pedro Martinez going four, surrendering only a single to Brad Hawpe, then leaving with an injury? In came Muñiz, Heilman, Schoeneweis and Wagner. They gave up no hits. A five-man one-hitter. It fell somewhere between Maine’s five-inning one-hitter and Maine’s three-man one-hitter that was mostly Maine and some stupid Marlin on the seriousness scale.
We were always so serious about one-hitters before our first Met no-hitter. It probably started with the most famous of them all, the one that was more famous even than Bobby Jones against the Giants. That, of course, was Tom Seaver and Jimmy Qualls, July 9, 1969. It was the third one-hitter in Mets history, but it instantly became the flagship. You know about it. We all know about it. It’s got its own plaque outside Citi Field. Even Bobby Jones’s one-hitter that clinched a playoff series doesn’t have that.
No wonder it stands out: Twenty-five Cubs up, twenty-five Cubs down; Shea so packed that fans had to sit in the aisles; the Mets closing in on first place for the first time ever; Seaver young and perfect. Then Qualls singles. The Mets won — Tom quickly retired the next two batters — but something was definitely imperfect about this otherwise grand occasion. No wonder Nancy Seaver was in tears. Tom wanted to know, “What are you crying for? We won 4-0.”
But we know why. We know what got away, and we know that what we got instead, no matter how stupendous, was no substitute.
It was a one-hitter. It became our version of the no-hitter. It was our runner-up ribbon, our Miss Congeniality sash. It was the headline below the fold on the front page that announced we’d just been elected vice president.
It was a one-hitter. It wasn’t a no-hitter. It was the best we could do without doing the best we could do.
Some Met one-hitters were Quallsish in their heartbreak. Seaver had another of that ilk in 1972, going to the ninth again, one out away again, until Leron Lee broke it up for the Padres.
Others got away earlier but hung heavy in the air for years to come. In 1984, Dwight Gooden gave up an infield hit to Keith Moreland of the Cubs in the fifth and nothing else. A more sensible (or humane) official scorer would have found a way to charge Ray Knight with an error.
Still others gnawed at our nerves in real time with their sense of possibility that went ultimately unfulfilled. T#m Gl@v!ne, of all Mets, challenged the unchallengeable clear into the eighth inning in 2004 against the Rockies. I really didn’t want it to be him, the Manchurian Brave, to be the first Met to throw a no-hitter, but I wanted it to be somebody. Right around the instant I decided I would allow it to be Gl@v!ne, Gl@v!ne allowed a double to a Paul Hoover of a Rockie named Kit Pellow. Foiled again by the Manchurian Brave!
I wasn’t there for Qualls or Lee or Moreland or Pellow. I realize I told you I was at seven one-hitters yet recounted only six of them: Matlack, Jones, Estes, Maine in the rain, Maine with two relievers and Martinez with four relievers. Funny, I just realized that when I’m not at the game, I identify the game by the hitter who broke it up, but when I’m there, I call it by pitcher. Must have been a subconscious thing all those years before the first no-hitter in Mets history, me trying to burnish a fine game with the credentials of a great one. When there’s a no-hitter — as we now, at last, understand — there is no batter with whom to identify it. It’s all about the pitcher.
It was that way with the sixth one-hitter I attended, my first at Citi Field, in June 2010. The pitcher that night was Jon Niese, back when he was a third-year rookie. He’d been up briefly in ’08 and seemingly to stay in ’09, except he got hurt before he burned off his freshman status. He got hurt in 2010, too. Not badly and not for long, but long enough to make you wonder if he was somehow cursed. Sort of like the Mets seemed cursed to never throw a no-hitter.
The Mets and no-hitters…geez, I still can’t believe it. I still can’t believe how long we went without one just as much as I can’t believe we finally got one. Did you notice all those names I was tossing out there before? Seaver, Gooden, Matlack, Gl@v!ne even. I could go on. Almost every Mets pitcher of note threatened to pitch a no-hitter. Any Met who pitched one would have been of note. Some got real close and gave up more than one hit. Those hurt as much as the late one-hitters like Qualls and Lee and so on. The sum total of all those attempts that came undone weighed on us. We didn’t look at any game without considering it a chance to break the streak, to get off the schneid.
C’mon, you did it yourself, right? First hit our starter gave up, even if it was to the first batter, what’d ya say?
“There goes the no-hitter.”
“Not tonight.”
“Damn.”
It was like that on June 10, 2010 with Jon Niese. Niese got through two innings against the Padres. I didn’t even see the first inning because I got to the park a little late. But I saw the 0 on the scoreboard and then I saw him keep it that way after two. I was supposed to call somebody else who was at the game. Yet I wouldn’t, not while there was a 0 under the H of the Padres. Seven innings remained and I was already thinking in those terms.
Typical Mets fan, certainly in that period before we got to experience the first no-hitter in Mets history.
The Mets took a lead in the second that June night in 2010. That was a particularly welcome development since they hadn’t done a damn thing that afternoon. This was a makeup game grafted onto a scheduled game: what they referred to as a day-night doubleheader (never mind that a doubleheader sturdily implies two games for one admission). The Mets went down listless their last 22 batters during the day portion against Mat Latos. He and his relievers gave up two Met hits in toto. Thus, when we scored a run in the second inning of the night game, it felt huge.
And when we short-circuited our crackling offensive electricity by hitting into a triple play right after that first run scored, it felt…
I don’t know how it felt. I remember it couldn’t have looked more routine. Who hits into a 5-4-3 double play anyway? Ruben Tejada, that’s who. He was a rookie at the time (the Mets started five rookies in that game, including Niese). I don’t know if he did anything wrong except he hit it to the wrong place and nobody on the Mets was fast enough to do anything about it. It couldn’t have been better choreographed in the Padres’ favor had Gene Saks been directing Bill Mazeroski à la The Odd Couple.
That could have been a big story, I suppose. I had been to a game at Citi Field in 2009 when a triple play was the big story. It was an unassisted triple play, also hit into by a Met (Jeff Francoeur) and it ended the game. This wasn’t that dramatic. Or traumatic. It was just a ground ball that produced three outs in the second inning after we took a 1-0 lead. Not everything is a crisis, you know.
I don’t know that the triple play had anything to do with momentum, but the Padres’ leadoff batter in the third, Chris Denorfia, doubled off Niese. The murmurs commenced per usual.
“There goes the no-hitter.”
“Not tonight.”
“Damn.”
Oh well, I chimed in to myself, but now at least I don’t have to stay glued to my seat like I did for Maine at the end of 2007. I can make my phone call. I can visit my friend in Promenade. I can swing by Catch of the Day on the way back to my seat on Field Level. It’s not like it was going to be a no-hitter anyway.
Niese didn’t give up anything else in the top of the third. The Mets took a 3-0 lead in the bottom of the third. It was going to be just another game, just another of the 7,700-plus games to that point in which a Met did not pitch a no-hitter. It was going to be yet another reason that if I were going to Cooperstown the next day, I’d behave just as I did in August 1997. Back then, my wife and I eagerly inspected every inch of every exhibit save for one: the no-hitter exhibit. “There’s no reason for us to look at that,” I said without cracking the slightest smile. I didn’t get back to Cooperstown anytime soon after that, but my rule stood.
The fourth and fifth innings flew by as I temporarily abandoned my friend Kevin and made my rounds. The Mets were leading 3-0, but I wasn’t paying much attention. My few minutes of schmoozing in Promenade centered on the triple play and our general consensus that it was routine to the point of mundane. My visit to Catch of the Day, which moved a little slower than I would have liked, resulted in a crab cake sandwich and an order of Bayside Fries, but nothing else of substance on the field behind me. Still 3-0 Mets when I got back to my seat for the top of the sixth.
The evening proceeded securely but unremarkably. Kevin and I were a last-minute hookup that night. The tickets were a surprise and the game was, as I mentioned before, a makeup. We were happy to talk Mets this and Mets that, not all that engaged by the Mets right there in front of us. Niese continued to pitch well but the Mets had stopped scoring again. The only thing we really noticed was how deep the park was playing, how every fly ball that had the slightest chance of traveling seemed to lose interest well short of the warning track. It was frustrating when the Mets batted. it was less so when they didn’t.
Had Chris Denorfia not struck in the third — and I must confess I had forgotten the identity of the sole successful Padre hitter by the seventh — it would have been different. I would not have visited Promenade. I would not have bought a crab cake and Bayside Fries. I would not have followed it with Dibs, the ice cream treat I had to have because the Bayside Fries were spicier than I thought they’d be. Kevin and I would not have been dwelling on a home run Mike Piazza hit nine years earlier off Carlos Almanzar or another home run, by Mo Vaughn off David Wells a year after that. We would have been focused solely on the present and the absolutely immediate future: the very next pitch. There would have been uncomfortable silences and strained small talk about anything but what we were focusing on. Eliminate a double by Chris Denorfia and the night in questions would have been very different.
But Denorfia had doubled. The night was no different from all other Met nights to that point in that there would be no no-hitter. Yet something novel occurred to us as Jon Niese again set down the Padres in the eighth as he had in the seventh and the sixth and so on since Denorfia in the third.
Jon Niese was working on a one-hitter.
Can you work on a one-hitter? Can you run for vice president? Can you legitimately attempt to be the best you can be without actually being the best you can be?
We — me, my friend Kevin, everyone around us — decided you could. We decided Jon Niese, third-year rookie pitcher for the New York Mets, was doing just that. Or, to be completely correct about it, he needed the opportunity to do just that. Eight innings had gone by. The Mets still led 3-0. A three-run lead on the edge of the ninth inning usually meant one course of action by the manager in 2010: call the closer. It was a save situation. The Mets, like every team in baseball, paid a specialist handsomely to protect or at least not surrender three-run leads with one inning remaining.
But what fun would that have been? Sure Francisco Rodriguez might have come in and not given up a hit, but where would that have left us? It would have left us with Maine (+2) or Pedro (+4). Not terrible, but not nearly as satisfying as Niese and Niese alone. Jon Niese, little lefty born under the very best of signs — the calendar page read October 27, 1986 — had recently battled back from a slight leg injury to return to the rotation the week before. The leg was only an issue because the year before he tore something a lot worse. He was a tough little lefty. It would have been too tough to not let him start the ninth.
It would have been ridiculous not to. This was 2010, the reincarnation of the Year of the Pitcher. This was the year of the two perfect games, Dallas Braden and Roy Halladay, and the third perfect game that had been royally screwed by an umpire. That was the Armando Gallaraga perfect game, which happened just eight days earlier. Niese was pitching his one-hitter only four days after Ubaldo Jimenez, a no-hitter in his back pocket from April, had gone to 11-1, raising his ERA to 0.93. It had been barely 48 hours since Stephen Strasburg had struck out 14 while walking nobody in seven innings in his major league debut. Niese had struck out six but walked nobody in eight innings. He had thrown, Kevin informed me when I asked, 99 pitches. This was as close to the Year of the Pitcher as we were ever going to see…the Year of the Starting Pitcher. This was no time to reflexively go to a closer.
This was Jon Niese’s time.
Jerry Manuel agreed. The Mets agreed. The Mets did not trot out to their positions to start the ninth, not right away. Just Niese. It was the briefest of staggered entries, but it was fitting. We didn’t care who was going out to first, to short, to center. We just wanted to know who was pitching. We wanted to know it was Niese. And it was.
We approved. We stood and we applauded and we yelled some. A guy behind us yelled a lot. “NIESE! WE WANT NIESE!” We have him, I wanted to tell him if only to get him to stop shouting (I had such a headache), but he was right. We did want Niese. We wanted Niese to do what was routine in 1968, the original Year of the Pitcher. We wanted him to complete his own game. We wanted him to earn a shutout. We wanted him to get his one-hitter.
It could have been anybody sitting next to me in the ninth, I suppose, but I was glad it was my friend Kevin. We’d only known each other since 2007, only met each other in person in 2008 (at, of all games, the Pedro/Four Relievers one-hitter). The foundation of our friendship had been a shared longing for Shea Stadium to still exist and a parallel reluctance to embrace Citi Field. Our resistance was wearing down month by month where the latter was concerned, but our affection for the former remained steadfast. Sure, Shea didn’t have crab cake sandwiches — though it had more than its share of crabs — but it was Shea and all that implied to us. It was an old story by 2010, but it resonated.
And that’s probably why I remember this particular one-hitter at Citi Field so well, even now, even after we’ve finally attained that forever elusive first no-hitter in Mets history. I remember it well and I remember it fondly because it was only the second time I felt Shea at Citi. The first time was more of a goof. It was a blowout at the hands of the Giants in the lost year of 2009. A utility infielder named Andy Green was making his debut for us in the ninth inning when the Mets were trailing by nine runs. I instigated a wiseass chant of AND EEE GREEN! to greet him. My friends with me that night picked up on it. Then others scattered across our section joined in. Then it gained traction in a few other pockets of the park. Then Andy Green, suitably urged on, walked. We were triumphant in our Mets fandom — behind 10-1 en route to losing 10-1, but serving notice that we in the stands were still capable of finishing strong.
We finished strong that night in 2010 when Niese was working on the one-hitter. We — not just Kevin and me, but however many thousands were left at Citi Field — figured out something more than a complete game shutout was at stake for 23-year-old Jon Niese. It was a Met thing, just like it might have been at Shea, way back when Bob Murphy wasn’t simply stroking our egos by telling us we were the most knowledgeable fans in baseball. Anybody could know enough not to jinx a no-hitter. But who is determined to nurse a starting pitcher home for a one-hitter?
Mets fans, that’s who.
Lance Zawadzki grounded to Jose Reyes for the first out. Nick Hundley fouled to Ike Davis for the second out. Jerry Hairston popped a ball behind the plate. Rod Barajas, who also did a pretty fair job of nursing his starting pitcher home, went back and grabbed it in front of the screen.
Jon Niese had just pitched the 34th one-hitter in Mets history, the 24th complete game one-hitter of at least nine innings in Mets history, the seventh Mets one-hitter to which I had borne witness. It extended my personal-best winning streak of games attended to nine, for what that was worth, and it included the second triple play of my life. It was quite a little ball of statistics and distinctions, but what didn’t show up in either the boxscore or my Log was the feeling that washed over me after the last out.
I didn’t want to leave Citi Field. I wanted to stay and keep feeling what I felt for this moment, for this one-hitter, for this bit of Shea that had survived the move to Citi. Maybe it wasn’t a Shea thing anymore. Maybe it was just a Met thing. Maybe it was the first of many non-sardonic Citi things.
God, I wish it wasn’t called Citi Field. Every time I referred to it as just “Citi” in those first years, I felt I was doing somebody’s dirty corporate work for them, making a for-profit behemoth into something friendly and neighborly. But despite those t-shirts somebody was kind enough to send me in 2009, I never called it Shea. It was something else altogether. Sometimes, I decided after our night with Niese, it could be something good altogether.
On June 10, 2010, after the Jon Niese one-hitter, it was something phenomenal. I just wanted to stay, so I stayed. I applauded Niese as he came out to be interviewed. I was overjoyed when he was smacked in the face by a whipped cream pie via the mischievous hands of Angel Pagan (even though I found the pie thing rather hackneyed and pointless). I waited for the music bed they had taken to playing under game highlights at each of the victories I’d been coming to that May and June, “Uprising” by Muse. The lyrics to that song seem to urge us to rail against corporate behemoths, yet in a stadium carrying the name of one, it could come off as unironically buoyant.
We stayed as long as was feasible. There was a late summer calm to the air even though it was the second week in June. All the rain, I guess, had made the night as gentle as the Padre hitters had been against Niese. In late summer at a ballgame, even one relegated to mock-support of an AND EEE GREEN!, you really appreciate the fleeting nature of the happiness baseball can give you. You know it will be gone soon. In June 2010, however, it was too soon for that form of subtle surrender, yet who really knew? I wasn’t the only Mets fan with a fantastic Citi Field record. The Mets were the best home team in the majors at that point of 2010…and owned the fewest road wins in the National League. They’d be taking off after the game to try their luck in a couple of Interlague outposts. They had Johan Santana and Mike Pelfrey and now Jon Niese. They also had all sorts of question marks. They had nearly four months to figure it out. I had more season to hold onto than the weather indicated.
Yes, that was quite a one-hitter. I can’t say it was my favorite of those I attended. I mean, Bobby Jones, clinching game, NLDS….that’s gotta be No. 1. And in broader Met terms, nothing beats Seaver beating every Cub but Qualls. That was coming of age stuff, not just for The Franchise, but for the franchise.
But the Jon Niese one-hitter still feels very special to me as far as one-hitters went when one-hitters were as far as Met pitchers would go.
Now that the Mets have the first no-hitter in their history and I no longer have cause to avoid any exhibit in Cooperstown, I don’t know how one-hitters will endure in our memory. But I have a hunch if you ask me about it in a few years, no matter how many no-hitters Met pitchers go on to record, I’ll always be able to tell you what it was like to bear witness to Jon Niese’s.
by Jason Fry on 10 June 2010 10:17 pm Don’t worry folks, I’m just the amuse-bouche until Greg arrives with the main course.
Several times I’ve had the experience of bringing someone to the first baseball game they’ve ever seen, or at least paid any attention to. I find it nerve-wracking: You hope for a crackling game full of reversals and anxiety and perhaps a little bad feeling thrown in — years ago my parents had a German houseguest named Joachim, and his first game turned out to be this throwdown between the Mets and the Cardinals. Joachim started the game baffled by everything that was going on and not sure what he was signing up for, and ended it whooping and hollering with the rest of us. (He’s been referenced in these parts before.) That’s what you hope for, while knowing it probably won’t be what you get.
What you really don’t want is a game like today’s matinee — the baseball equivalent of a lizard on a rock. Joshua and I were there in great seats behind the Padres dugout courtesy of a kind benefactor, and everything was lovely. We ran into Faith and Fear reader Chris and his son Alexander on the train and had a grand time discussing all things Mets. We toured the Hall of Fame and museum for the first time (yeah, I know — I’m a bad fan) and Joshua read the entire Mets timeline, perhaps sensing that there was no way his impatient father would rush him through this self-appointed task. We had hot dogs and French fries and lemonade and Taqueria and a beer (mine, not the kid’s, seeing how this isn’t Philadelphia) and Joshua capped his afternoon by eating a Sno-Cone the size of his fist, after which I wondered if he might need to be Tased for the protection of those around us.
Everything was great, except for what was happening out there on the field.
Johan Santana wasn’t sharp and spent his time stomping around looking annoyed. Mat Latos and his supporting cast were superb: We saw Met after Met rear up in dismay after strike three, with the only variable whether we were looking at said Met’s front or back. Other than Henry Blanco’s jolt of a home run and a couple of nifty double plays started by Alex Cora and David Wright, it was a snoozer. (Though all four balls struck by Jason Bay were hit on the screws — he might have had two home runs in a bandbox.) I assume Jesus Feliciano will remember this game (he got a nice hand from the knowledgeable fans in attendance), but give me two months and I’ll have trouble.
But before we move on to the main event, two quick things.
While foraging for hot dogs Joshua and I ran across a guy wearing a dazed smile and a well-loved Chicago Blackhawks jersey, collecting attaboys and high-fives and back pats from random stranger after random stranger as he made his way through the concourse. Unless you’re a geologist, 49 years is a fricking long time — and it must have seemed infinitely longer after the Blackhawks turned into the NHL’s North Korea. Congratulations to them and their fans, and here’s a Hang in there, baby for every loyalist of a downtrodden cause. Your dazed smile awaits you somewhere in the future, and it will beam ever brighter for these dark days.
As I left Citi Field with a child whose exhaustion and sugar intake had him speaking in tongues, I thought to myself, If only every game like this could be the first half of a day-night doubleheader. And with that, it’s Greg’s turn.
by Greg Prince on 10 June 2010 2:40 am Stephen Strasburg is baseball’s best pitcher. Not just now, but forever. I know it’s true because he pitched seven sensational innings Tuesday night and Bob Costas’s drool seeped through my television screen while it happened. As Strasburg struck out fourteen Pirates in seven innings, Costas all but dug up the late Walter Johnson just for the purpose of burying him again. The Big Train was great, Costas solemnly informed us, but he can move on now.
Strasburg was definitely enthralling. Costas could be forgiven his rhetorical excesses in speculating that the kid who had yet to win one game was destined to sit someday on a historical par with Johnson — Washington’s previous pitching legend, with 417 victories but one fewer appearance on MLB Network than Strasburg. Strasburg, who walked nobody and gave up only four hits, struck out the final seven batters he faced in his debut. He threw better and harder as it got later and later. I temporarily forgot (or tried to forget) that the day will come when he’s trying to replicate such a performance against the Mets up to six times a year. Instead, I reveled in and rooted for this display of astonishing ability. I didn’t want him to come out after seven. I wanted him to go nine as much as I wanted Mike Pelfrey to go nine Tuesday night. I didn’t realize that if Jim Riggleman left him in, he had a genuine chance to break Tom Seaver’s consecutive strikeout record of ten.
Of course he would have broken it. He’s already better than Walter Johnson. He must be better than Tom Seaver, too.
We’ll see what Stephen Strasburg becomes whether we want to or not. We’ll see if he’s a Seaver and, because it wouldn’t be fair to anybody, hope he’s not a Leary. Being a Strasburg looks pretty good for now. We as baseball fans, even if we’re not Nationals fans — and we’re not — are entitled to anticipate if not exactly project what he might do.
As Mets fans we’re expert at that sort of thing. We’ve had our youngsters and we’ve spoken for their futures before they had much chance to cobble together a present. The litany that constitutes the Youth of America, dating back to Casey Stengel’s touting of 17-year-old Ed Kranepool, is unnecessary to unspool, but it just so happened that one of the young Mets we marked for success not that long ago was on the scene for Stephen Strasburg’s coming out party. And since he was at Nationals Park instead of Citi Field, I guess that tells us what became of his future Metwise.
Lastings Milledge was Strasburg’s first strikeout as well as his third hit allowed. He was batting third for Pittsburgh. Batting third is pretty good. Pittsburgh isn’t. Lastings Milledge is 25. I’d hate to tell any 25-year-old his future has been decided. But Lastings’ future surely isn’t what it used to be.
We thought we knew what Lastings Milledge was going to be. Few of us wanted to err on anything but the side of optimism. He came up wearing No. 44. Mets By The Numbers hoped he’d be assigned 6. David Wright wore 5. Jose Reyes wore 7. Wouldn’t it be great if our three homegrown stars lined up numerically? I thought so, which is probably why I remember that.
I remember the weeks of Lastings Milledge, next big thing. I remember we were able to call him up because there was no way, no how we could trade him, not even for Manny Ramirez (though I couldn’t tell you whether that was ever a real possibility). I remember he came up wearing a wooden cross large enough to scare off vampires and made a throw from right to third that cut down a Diamondback. I remember his first home run was a cause célèbre, not only because it was the first home run hit by our hottest prospect, and not only because it tied a game for us in extra innings, but because Lastings Milledge reached out and touched the hands of the fans who reached out for him as he trotted back to his position in the game he personally extended. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever heard of or seen on a baseball field. But it turned out to be a serious breach of protocol. Word went out from the village elders: You just don’t do that, Lastings.
Lastings had to act contrite for breaking the unwritten rule that you don’t appear to acknowledge the fans. The whole non-issue made for a fantastic couple of days of WFAN fodder. Then Lastings Milledge gave us different fodder: a triple, a homer, three runs batted in and another big throw, this time nailing a Dodger at second from left to secure the first win of what would become an eight-game winning streak that would all but nail down our division by the middle of June. He had taken off his immense cross, but his arm was still a sight to see. Everything about Lastings was a sight to see…and a sight to foresee. After he played a key role in dismantling the Dodgers, I allowed myself to foresee his future:
He was going to the Hall of Fame.
I was half-kidding when I suggested after eight games that he was going to be “recreating the game as we will know it in the 21st century,” but I think I might have been half-serious. The game that sent me over the edge in not just believing the hype but advancing it was played in Los Angeles, late at night, so maybe I was just groggy. I know wanted to believe it. I wanted an outfielder who could hit; hit with power; run; run for years to come; throw; throw off sparks; catch; and catch lightning in a bottle. I wanted Lastings Milledge to be that ten-tool player.
He came up a little short. He came to the park a little late at the end of that particular road trip in Philadelphia. Everything had gone so well for Lastings and the Mets — 9-1, putting away the East — and yet there was this slight discordant note. Lastings Milledge didn’t show up on time. It couldn’t be ignored. It wasn’t ignored. By the end of the season, the Mets having clinched with only stray contributions from their game-changing outfielder, a sign appeared above his locker, admonishing him to “Know your place, rook.”
Should have known then it was never going to work out for Lastings Milledge with the Mets. Should have known it the following season when he went into the hip hop business and rapped some lyrics a little less uplifting than, say “Don’t Sweat The Technique”. Should have known it at the end of that season when Lastings enjoyed maybe the best game of his Met career — 3-for-5, two home runs in support of the John Maine near no-hitter that kept the Mets alive on the final weekend of 2007 — but the facet of his performance that was examined in-depth was the expert and extravagant handshaking exhibition he conducted with Jose Reyes. Seems nobody cared for Lastings Milledge and hand gestures.
Lastings Milledge, despite being the future of the Mets, wasn’t long for the Mets. Two months removed from his two homers and his fleeting happiness, he was a Washington National, swapped south for the depressing Ryan Church and the morose Brian Schneider. That he was batting against and not on behalf of Stephen Strasburg the other night indicates it didn’t go so swell for him in D.C., either.
Milledge’s two-and-a-third seasons since leaving the Mets haven’t given anybody tangible cause to regret his absence from Flushing. He was a No. 1 pick who didn’t pan out for us and hasn’t panned out for anybody. He’s played for three teams in five years and it would be hard to argue the sum total of what he’s produced on the baseball field is any better than what he produced in the recording studio when he lent his voice to “Bend Ya Knees.”
Except I’m still enthralled by those early hits of Lastings, his throws, his high-fives, his promise that never seemed to get its big chance to become fulfilled in New York. It took Mike Pelfrey a while, but he’s done it. It took Heath Bell a while and a continental transplant, but he’s done it. Lastings Milledge hasn’t done it. He did not fit snugly between Wright and Reyes as a homegrown Met icon of the modern age. He is not here with them and Ike Davis and perhaps Ruben Tejada to form an under-30 system-produced Met nucleus for the half-decade ahead. In what may very well already be the post-Carlos Beltran era, it is Angel Pagan who has bloomed late but definitely blossomed as the outfielder in this picture. He’s a homegrown Met not yet 29 years old. He looks good in center. He sounds good after games. I watched Pagan and Bay and Francoeur all do their clubhouse interviews after the comeback win over the Marlins on Sunday and I realized how much I like our outfield as a unit and as individuals. They’re not perfect, they’re not particularly consistent, but they sure are likable.
But I was going to love Lastings Milledge. I was going to thrill to Lastings Milledge. A part of me remains oblivious to the immaturity that doomed him as a Met and the .264/.326/.388 that hasn’t distinguished him as a major leaguer. Part of me, now and again, wishes he had made it with us. On June 7, 2006, Lastings Milledge was tripling, homering and throwing out Nomar Garciaparra at second base. Exactly four years and one day later, he was one of nine mostly anonymous Pirates striking out against somebody else’s big hope for the future. The game has moved on to Stephen Strasburg, one month shy of 23 and slated for greatness.
Lastings Milledge looked so good there in spots in 2006. He was 21 then. He’s 25 now.
by Jason Fry on 9 June 2010 12:18 am Between all-purpose busyness and an awesome, awesomely exhausting wedding in Braves country, I’d missed my Mets, whose recent admirable gaffing of Marlins had been relegated to condensed games peered at blearily on At Bat. So it was a relief to find myself pottering around my own kitchen with the Mets on at a normal time — though less of a relief to remember that their opponent would once again be the Padres, recent winners of two of three in West Kamchatka and a team that’s awfully good in a minimalist way: Adrian Gonzalez + Stingy Starting Pitching + A Deft Bullpen + Ecksteinness + Heath Bell Still Being Pissed Off About Everything = Much Tougher Than You Keep Thinking.
But the rules say you have to play whomever shows up, and so Joshua and I settled in to watch the Mets try to find their way to safety. One of the many joys of fatherhood is getting to be half of my son’s nightly tutorial in baseball (I was flying solo, but Emily had a rock-solid alibi — she was at Citi Field), and when I came back from some interminable stage of ferrying recycling to the curb he reported disapprovingly that Jose Reyes hadn’t worked the count to a single ball yet. Other topics covered included why it was bad that the Padres were putting the ball in the air against Mike Pelfrey in the first, why it was immensely heartening that Pelf then cruised through the second on three groundball outs, why we accepted physical errors but deplored mental ones and what the difference was, and why the blandly action-figure-featured Clayton Richard getting the inside pitch called a strike was a big advantage. (Tonight’s new term for Joshua: “the black.”)
I get the sense that “settling in” is also a good description of where we collectively stand with this latest incarnation of our team. It’s now the beginning of June, by which time teams hope to have shed the unlucky and the ill-fitting and the failed gambles and the too old and the too young after shuffling through them in April and May. And the Mets have mostly done that, for which they deserve praise alongside my inevitable grumblings that they could have done much of this work more rigorously in March.
As fans, we too have our shuffling to do in the spring, and by June we have tried on various predictions and characterizations and certainties, and are now starting to be used to our team, and less likely to be surprised by what a given week brings.
- For openers, the Mets are better than I thought they’d be, and seem likely to be more of a factor in the National League East than I’d expected.
- Between Wright and Francoeur and Bay they are streaky to an almost surreal degree.
- Their starting pitching is a mess, but an interesting mess: Johan has returned with his Johanness not only intact but enhanced, Pelf has pushed his way to the front of any line Johan isn’t in, and everything else is spaghetti at the wall. But get a noodle or two to stick and call front offices with fading hopes, and who knows?
- Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but they’re really good at home and confoundingly awful on the road.
- For all our recent pain and frustration, they’re fun.
And when it’s early June and you’ve gotten used to leaving the windows open at night and having a lot of time between leaving work and the fall of dark, fun’s enough. You can start getting anxious when the daylight is dwindling and you have to remember to shut the windows again at bedtime.
As for the game, well, it was a classic. Big Pelf used to just refer to the fact that Mike Pelfrey is tall, but now it means a lot more than that. He didn’t have his best stuff, but he had a big park and a big strike zone and he went to work with those advantages in mind. And when Wright’s arm and Reyes’s glove betrayed him on the same dreadful play, leaving Scott Hairston on second with one out in the ninth, he took matters into his own hands. Must I do this myself? Very well, it seems I must. All right then. Here is strike three for you, Nick Hundley, and here is a 1-3 putout for you, Max Venable, and now I am going to the dugout to think good thoughts. The Mike Pelfrey of 2009 would have elicited our sympathy, but also our sense of imminent doom. The 2010 model just rubbed up a new ball and got on with it.
Big Pelf’s offense, on the other hand, was engaged in a hands-on experiment in determining to a micron how far you had to hit a ball to get it to count as a Citi Field home run. Reyes sited his experiment exactly atop the Great Wall of Flushing, requiring a subterranean dash for three of the umpires. If you want a reason replay will be expanded beyond home runs soon enough, it has nothing to do with justice for poor Armando Galarraga. Rather, it’s that most everybody in the park now has replay — except the umpires. Even if your glimpse of SNY is from a section away, if you know the rhythms of baseball broadcasts you can tell by where the Coors Freeze Cam stops whether the guy was out or safe. (And if this is too advanced, just listen for whether those near a set are booing.) Fast-forward the tape a year to when we have in-park WiFi bringing crystal-clear replays to an ever-greater number of smartphones and tablets, and the technological pressure will be inevitable. Once the umps ascertained what everybody else had already learned, Jose got to finish his trot and on we went.
From a Mets-centric point of view, Angel Pagan’s experiment was less successful but deserved praise for its ambition. Pagan picked the odd notch of Citi Field required because of the cramped street grid outside the park a fetish for quirkiness, and hit his line drive a few microns short of topping the orange line. Pagan, to his credit, was running and not spectating, and so wound up on third and was allowed to stay there after miscellaneous squabbling and discussion. (Pagan’s emergence as a very good ballplayer in all aspects of the game is one of the year’s best stories, and hopefully will create an interesting problem for the Mets before the summer’s over.) I briefly hoped Jason Bay might get to write the happy ending, but was not to be, and so on we went again.
Ike Davis might get a worse grade than you’re inclined to give out for his experiment, because Ike didn’t determine the exact dimensions of the playing field with any great degree of confidence. Ginormous Blast That Nearly Hits Bridge > Orange Line, but we all knew that. Though let’s be fair: Perhaps Ike was trying to measure something else, such as whether a hanging splitter launched on that particular arc will land north or south of Montauk. In which case let’s say his experiment is off to a promising start, and acknowledge that it brought tonight’s affair to a most satisfying finish.
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