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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 26 May 2010 1:14 am When the Mets score eight to win by eight and give me my personal-record eighth victory in a row, you know what that means?
I don’t know. But it sure feels good. I’ll take serene eights over the crazy kind any day.
When last we saw the Phillies in New York, they were no help whatsoever, ich bin eining us against each other en route to shoving us into yet another November of discontent. And the last time we saw them in our neck of the woods, we were subject to those saddest of possible words: Bruntlett to Bruntlett to Bruntlett.
Feh on 2009. Everything sucked then. Everything’s great now. Great may sound like an overstatement for a team that just reached .500 for the first time in ten games, but I’m going with the feel, and there’s a feel in the air that it’s fun to be a Mets fan until it isn’t. That moment could come any second, so let’s just let it be.
Hey, has it really been only ten games since we owned as many wins as losses? Is that all? Seems like we were buried about a hundred below and a thousand out as recently as the last road trip, but you inject an R.A. Dickey into your life, everything looks better. The whole year looks better. Goodness knows the rotation has a certain spin only an effective knuckleballer can put on it.
This is no average knuckleballer, this R.A. Dickey. This guy is fearless. We know he’s ligamentless. We know he doesn’t mind sacrificing a non-pitching elbow as necessary, per Ryan Howard’s hot liner that never saw the outfield. That may be the best sacrifice executed under the auspices of Jerry Manuel since Spring Training.
Do we have problems? No, not tonight, not after a rousing 8-0 win when the weather was perfect, the Blue Point Toasted Lager was sublime and my wife made another unlikely Tuesday appearance at Citi Field (we were there along with dozens of her colleagues…best workplace outing ever). There were Phillies fans in attendance, but the Fightin’ was sapped out of them early and nobody sitting anywhere near us in red could even work up a good vomit.
And how about that Raul Valdes? Not to jump around, but that guy is to relieving what R.A. Dickey is to starting, which is to say excellent. Wayne Hagin mentioned something about 16 starts between John Maine and Oliver Perez and one win registered by the two of them. Well, nine innings Tuesday night between R.A. Dickey and Raul Valdes and the Phillies still haven’t scored. And I still haven’t lost, as a spectator, since the grim late afternoon reaping of Willie Harris. That seems longer than 6½ weeks ago.
Eight in a row. I’ve never been in on eight wins in a row in my life, a life which now spans 461 games and two home ballparks. I’ve gotten comfy at Citi Field. Maybe it’s the Blue Point Toasted Lager, available only from the Catch of the Day stand (all Met dingers, not that we seem to generate them all that often, need henceforth be known as Blue Point Blasts). Maybe it’s that Stephanie, who likes a good walk the way Oliver Perez can create a bad one, has room to roam. “You want me to get you that Blue Point?” she asked as she and one of her social worker friends got up to amble a middle inning away.
Why yes, I would like that very much.
Sure enough, my wife came back with the beer (a phrase I’ve never written, said or thought in my generally temperate life), I flagged down a pretzel vendor and the rest was a Met run here, a Met run there, the Phillies and their unwelcome battalion of would-be vomiters left scoreless and silent. Let ’em choke on our eight runs, our thirteen hits, our delicious Long Island microbrew and our pitchers nobody was counting on when the season began. Let the Mets continue to peck away in Build-A-Run Workshop fashion at opposing pitchers whose careers began when Reagan was president, the first Cuomo was governor, Koch was mayor and our first baseman wasn’t quite yet an embryo. Let Darryl Strawberry, who always hustled and never dogged it (ahem), preach the Strawberry Way anytime, anywhere, to any current Met he likes. Let Frankie Rodriguez remind Randy Niemann which ’86 Met did the least and celebrated the most. Let John Maine deny his pitching arm is a problem except when he tries to pitch.
The Mets have just taken three straight from last year’s World Series. The Mets have just given me eight consecutive in-person wins. The Mets have Blue Point Toasted Lager. The Mets have R.A. Dickey. The Mets have Raul Valdes. The Mets have it goin’ on at least until the next torrent of sniping, aching and whatever usually goes wrong with them.
Let it be.
by Jason Fry on 25 May 2010 10:51 am NPR’s Mike Pesca brought me into the studio to discuss my post about my neighbor and his brother’s baseball cards, and did a nice job crafting it into a story for “All Things Considered.” Have a listen here, and feel free to make fun of my (subconscious) attempt at the NPR voice.
by Greg Prince on 24 May 2010 11:45 am I’d like to be not such a hardass toward my team. I’d like to not be so realistic about the tendencies of its individual components. I’d like to like the players I like without not being able to stand them when their performances unequivocally merit disdain.
I’d have liked to have been a more steadfast supporter of Jose Lima while he was a Met. I really liked Lima, right up to the minute he began pitching for us. I wanted him to succeed as a Met. He most surely didn’t in the conventional sense. I was relatively slow to — as was said far too often in the past decade — throw him under the bus, but eventually an ERA of almost 10 after four starts will have even the most sympathetic supporter calling the pitcher who posts it a cab out of town.
Jose Lima, No. 17 as a Met, was a Met for 17 days and pitched 17.1 innings. Yet it seems like he was around a lot longer and did a lot more. He left an impression. The impression is not instantly flattering, not with 9.87 earned runs allowed per 9 innings pitched.
Lima’s Met time was three turns through the rotation in the middle of May 2006 and one more try in early July. He wasn’t part of the plan. The ’06 Mets were, despite their yearlong pacesetting in the National League, often short of starters. Injuries impinged on their depth beginning in late April when Brian Bannister’s right hamstring gave out on the basepaths in San Francisco. Young John Maine was Bannister’s replacement, but his right middle finger (one he’s probably used a lot lately) gave him trouble after only one start, and he was disabled. Next came and went Victor Zambrano, who felt severe pain in his right elbow while pitching against the Braves. He grimaced, bore down, struck out Andruw Jones for the first out of the top of the second inning and then left the Shea mound never to return.
The Mets rose through the standings even as their starting pitchers dropped like flies. Lots of offense and lots of relief catapulted the team to a 21-9 record and a 5-game lead over the second-place Phillies in the N.L. East by the first weekend in May — this despite their rotation having become Pedro Martinez, T#m Gl@v!ne, Steve Trachsel and a pair of recurring TBAs.
Into this paradoxical breach stepped Jose Lima.
When Jose Lima appeared in Port St. Lucie that February, those who knew better rolled their eyes all over the Internet. The Mets were casting about for any and all arms available. They came up with one that threw very little that worked in 2005 when he was a Royal (Wins Above Replacement rating: -2.1). Now he was 33 and his sole appeal seemed to be that he had been around and had been successful not all that long ago. Scoffing could be heard all across cyberspace. What a retrograde signing! This is the kind of philosophy that ruins baseball! “Experience” is a crutch!
That’s what it sounded like to me, anyway. I wasn’t much counting on seeing Jose Lima as a Met, and if we did, I was confused as to why it would automatically be a bad thing. Wasn’t this guy a winner as recently as 2004? He was. He went 13-5 for the Dodgers. He threw a shutout in the NLDS against the Cardinals. It wasn’t that long ago, was it?
Unlike many shadowy longshot pitching candidates in a given Spring Training, I actually knew who Jose Lima was, or at least who Jose Lima had been. He was an unabashed cut-up in a sport generally shy of confirmed extroverts. Pedro Martinez was one of those types. Martinez was giddy when he learned Lima was coming to the Mets. “This is going to be one crazy clubhouse,” he said. Quite an endorsement.
It wasn’t the most hilarious thing in the world, nor was it intended to be, that he came to camp and casually mentioned he planned to wear No. 42, his number when he was winning 21 games for the Astros in 1999, the one Houston assigned him in 1997, just before it was otherwise removed from circulation to honor Jackie Robinson. Lima did not maintain 42 as he moved on to other teams, so he was no longer “grandfathered” in the way Mo Vaughn was when he came to the Mets in 2002. Thus, Jose Lima wasn’t going to come to the Mets and get Jackie Robinson’s number (in fact, they tried to give him 99). Lima didn’t make a huge deal of it when his request was denied, but I liked his obliviousness to the sacred. It might have seemed self-absorbed coming from another player, but it felt human from Jose Lima.
Jose the human went down to Norfolk after Spring Training, his veteran right arm hidden from harm’s way until Bannister and Maine and Zambrano all fell onto the DL. Then it was Lima Time, May 7, 2006, his first start as a Met, at Shea, against the Braves.
And he was really bad. Let’s not pretend he wasn’t. He was terrible. The Braves hit him hard. Five days later, the Brewers hit him hard. Six days after that, the Cardinals did the same thing. Designation for assignment followed shortly thereafter; nobody else signed him, so he returned to Norfolk. After another month or so in the minors, a series of unfortunate Met events — Alay Soler’s flameout, Heath Bell’s implosion, Pedro Martinez’s inflamed right hip — conspired to give him one more chance in Met colors and then as a Met starter.
The Marlins hit him hard. Dontrelle Willis reached him for a grand slam in the top of a six-run Florida fourth. Willie Randolph, probably still shocked that the opposing pitcher homered with the bases loaded, left Lima in to face one more batter, Alfredo Amezaga. Amezaga singled. Randolph then removed him. It was Jose Lima’s last batter faced as a major leaguer.
To recap, this is how Jose Lima’s 2006 with the Mets unfolded:
First Start — Pitched in 5 innings, surrendered at least 1 run in 4 of those innings.
Second Start — Pitched in 5 innings, surrendered at least 1 run in 2 of those innings.
Third Start — Pitched in 5 innings, surrendered at least 1 run in 3 of those innings.
Fourth Start — Pitched in 4 innings, surrendered at least 1 run in 2 of those innings.
Jose Lima participated in 19 innings and gave up runs in 11 of them. Everybody who said he wouldn’t be any good was right (Wins Above Replacement rating: -1.2). I who thought he was worth taking a flyer on was wrong. As if to compensate for my lack of cynicism in advance of his Met tenure, I raced to join the chorus of voices demanding his immediate dismissal from Shea Stadium, from Flushing, from Queens, from our midst forever.
This was me on July 5, 2006, before his fourth and final start as a Met:
I would have been content to have never been party to the return of Lima Time, but I’ll admit I’m rooting for the guy to have one solid outing and not just because a guy in a Met uniform having a solid outing benefits us all. Both in spring training and during his last stay, Lima was a unifying force in the clubhouse. Everybody seemed to like him in a big way. Yeah, they said the same thing about Gerald Williams, but ya know what? This seems like a good time for a unifying force. For a team with a double-digit lead, its players have betrayed a touch of crabbiness. And who can blame them, with their record having loitered at convenience store level (7-11) since The Road Trip ended? If Lima can keep ’em loose for a few days, maybe that’s a contribution. […] Maybe Lima — who is motivated enough to keep pitching at AAA after his Major League embarrassment in May, so he must have some pride in avenging his prior performance — hangs through Sunday and we see one of the other Tides roll in after the break. After being certain the deployment of Jose Valentin was complete folly, I’m not going to kneejerk any veteran player move Omar makes, certainly not one that isn’t likely to amount to a hill of beans in the long run.
This was me on July 8, 2006, after his fourth and final start as a Met:
Lima Culpa. He’s worthless. Get him out of here. I don’t just mean DFA’d, which he’s been. Jose Lima can be of no help whatsoever as a pitcher in this organization. That spicy meatball he threw Dontrelle Willis with the bases loaded? I can’t believe he hit the whole thing. Nice fella, Lima, but let him loosen another team’s dugout. Good night, funny man.
With Jose Lima having just died of a heart attack at the ridiculously young age of 37, I feel bad that’s the last substantive appraisal I ever wrote about what he contributed to the Mets. I was trying to be a hardass toward my team. I was maybe the last Lima believer in 2006, had been burned for my faith and now I was going to make up for it with a little vitriol. Not that Jose Lima was likely to read what one blogger among a hundred had written — and not that Lima Time wasn’t up as a practical matter — but I kind of hate that I succumbed to the prevailing thought process of the day. Guy pitches bad? Condemn him. Shove him out the door. Forget why you had taken a liking to him in the first place, why just three days ago you were rooting for him and now you couldn’t tolerate his presence.
Yet it was his presence that drew me tentatively into Jose Lima’s corner during his brief Met stay. He didn’t have much of a right arm by that May, but he had an undeniable presence. It energized a clubhouse that was already revved for great things in 2006. “Lima Time” was already legendary as a most uncommon strain of charisma around baseball. No self-consciousness, no restraint in letting joy seep from his every step. Now it would be our Time on our team. It’s no coincidence that twice — once in February and once in May — the Times used the phrase “no laughing matter” in headlines over stories about Jose Lima. Jose Lima was synonymous with laughter. It may not have been enough to get batters out anymore, but it was a precious commodity in a sport where too many modern players put on game faces and mouth inoffensive platitudes when asked anything interesting.
Two images of Jose Lima stay with me from 2006, and neither of them involves his trudging off the mound in despair.
The first was from his first start, against the Braves, in a series finale. The Mets had won two thrillers in the first two games — a 14-inning, 8-7 triumph that twisted and turned until turning out all right after nearly five hours; and the truncated Zambrano start, which required the services of six relievers to finish successfully the last 7.2 innings of a 6-5 decision. With Atlanta reeling 9 games behind us in third place, anything we got from Lima would be gravy, but when you’re in the process of obliterating your archrivals’ dynasty, gravy can be awfully tasty.
As mentioned, we didn’t get more than a spoonful of gravy from Jose Lima that Sunday afternoon. Mostly we got screwed by Angel Hernandez and then Lima was pounded by Atlanta bats. Still, even all that took a bit of a back seat to what I witnessed before the game started.
On his way in from the Met bullpen, a fan seated along the railing on the first base side reached out to Jose Lima. The fan was wearing a Dodger jersey, No. 27. Jose saw that and reached right back out to the fan and hugged him.
The starting pitcher hugged a fan? On the day he was going to pitch? Minutes before he was about to pitch? They can do that?
Seriously, I had taken it as gospel that the starting pitcher never speaks to anyone when it’s His Day. His Day is sacred. He doesn’t talk to you and you don’t talk to Him. But that’s not how Jose Lima played it. Jose Lima was happy to be a major league pitcher again that Sunday. Why hide it?
The second image I maintain of Lima was from TV, from, as it happens, the Subway Series. It was Friday night at Shea against the Yankees, the game in which yet another transient 2006 starter, the late Geremi Gonzalez, was roughed up for four runs in the first inning, and we were presumed done from there. Yet facing Randy Johnson in the bottom of the first, the Mets roared right back, with Reyes walking, Lo Duca singling and Beltran homering. That made a game of it, a Grade A Subway Series contest, the kind of game that makes you forget Interleague play is a marketing contrivance that baseball did fine without for a century or so.
That game goes back and forth and then locks in at a 6-6 tie after five. It stays there until the bottom of the ninth when Mariano Rivera is deployed by Joe Torre to keep things tied. It does quite work out that way. A Lo Duca double, an intentional walk to Delgado and then, at last, a very long fly ball hit by David Wright over Johnny Damon’s head.
Mets 7 Yankees 6!
Exultation!
Ebullience!
And…Lima Time?
Yes, Lima Time! Leading the charge out of the Met dugout to congratulate Mr. Wright, to celebrate the Met victory, to revel in his teammates’ success was Jose Lima. Lima didn’t pitch that night. Lima hadn’t been a Met two weeks earlier. The day before, he was knocked around in St. Louis. The day after, he would be cut from the roster because St. Louis wasn’t an isolated incident. Yet Jose Lima was as much a Met as anybody that night when they came back on the Yankees. He wasn’t a mercenary. He wasn’t lost in his own drama. He was the absolute definition of a ballplayer who was just happy to be here.
You couldn’t not be happy if you noticed him that night.
Jose Lima’s immediate Met legacy coming out of his four 2006 starts was to be invoked every time we thought Omar Minaya was signing someone unnecessary, particularly starting pitchers who couldn’t go more than five innings or give up fewer than five runs. “Another Jose Lima,” we’d grumble. He’d become a brand name to us, and not the leading national brand, either. Meanwhile, as Lima’s New York teammates were marching to a division title, Jose returned to Norfolk and kept pitching. After 2006, he would pitch in Mexico, in Korea, in a pair of independent leagues in the United States. Last winter, he pitched for a team in his native Dominican Republic. He planned to do it again this winter. He showed over and over that it would be difficult for anyone to again find another Jose Lima.
Jose Lima loved baseball and was never shy about sharing the romance with the rest of us. It may not obliterate a 9.87 ERA or save you a spot in anybody’s rotation, but surely any time spent appreciating a person like Jose Lima was time well spent.
Check out what Lima’s former teammates on the current Mets told Matt Gagne in the Daily News about their old friend. And, echoing Jason’s sentiments, please read Joe Posnanski’s remembrance of Lima Time. That, too, will be time well spent.
by Jason Fry on 24 May 2010 1:17 am One of the problems with being a baseball fan who’s reached a certain level of insanity is most every game is seen as part of your team’s ongoing drama, with the other guys walk-on antagonists who exist only to thwart us. When our team wins, if we can we attribute it to pluck or fortitude or togetherness or some other quality detectable only by emotional instruments. When our team loses, if we can we attribute it to incompetence, laziness, a lack of heart or some equally unquantifiable failing. Now and then our team faces an opponent that plays so well or so badly that we can’t turn the game into a morality play, but most of the time we find a way.
You could write a book on why this is so, but I’ll try to sum it up in two sentences: We’re natural storytellers, and few things are less satisfying than a story that turns on random events. Luck (or its lack) makes for a lousy narrative, particularly compared to virtue (or its lack). I’ve always thought this is what’s at the heart of the increasingly tired and ridiculous divide between traditionalists and stat guys. But it’s also a remarkably one-sided way of looking at a baseball game.
Which brings us to the Yankees.
There’s no shortage of things to despise about the New York Yankees and their fans. There’s the insane payroll. The thoroughly awful combination of a sense of entitlement and an animal delight in others’ misfortunes. The humorless fetishizing of history, Kultur and numbing scale. The insistence among Gotham media hacks that any baseball story is ultimately about them. Their paranoid Tokyo Rose approach to covering themselves. The enshrinement of vaguely fascist rules. The overt, not even faintly apologetic appeal to greedy, front-running wannabe overdogs. I could go on, until I was punch-drunk with hatred for them.
But the Yankees are also 25 guys who are, on average, pretty good at baseball.
Two pitchers took the mound for the Mets in the ninth — a clearly overamped Ryota Igarashi and a clearly underwhelming Francisco Rodriguez. They were facing a pretty good ballclub trying to fight out of a five-run hole. That was it — two pitchers not having good nights trying to get three outs before the other guys got five runs. Because they’re Mets, though, the story tried to become one of their heart and courage and ability to keep cool. And it tried to become our story — thousands upon thousands of fans no longer having good nights trying to have desperate hope win out over despair, doubt and disaster.
And because tonight’s antagonist was the Yankees, all of those unquantifiable, invisible things were magnified until they turned monstrous. Iggy and K-Rod were facing a subset of those 25 guys in Yankee uniforms — not a pack of big dollar signs, a bunch of World Series rings, Michael Kay, a lack of facial hair, or 15,000 baying hyenas. Those opponents were playing only in our own private potential hells.
But what hells they were. Nick Swisher walked and the prickles of dread began. How enthusiastically will John Sterling stutter through his loathsome victory call? Francisco Cervelli dropped in a single. God, WFAN will be unbearable. Kevin Russo hit what first looked like a double-play ball, only Igarashi turned wild-eyed to third and only got Cervelli at second. I swear I’ll wind up punching that guy [from payroll/on the subway/upstairs/beside me at Citi Field/who’s related to me] if they pull this out. Juan Miranda singled, plating Swisher and cutting the lead to four with the hammer-and-tongs part of the order in sight. Exit Iggy, enter the always-suspect K-Rod. The Yankees were pulling their usual act of getting contributions from the fill-in guys and setting it up for the varsity. Joe Girardi will say something to that effect in an hour and I’ll throw the radio through a window. K-Rod battled Derek Jeter through a long, tense at-bat that revealed Francisco was missing most of his arsenal, culminating in a double over Jason Bay that scored Russo and made it 6-3. Various media idiots will roast Jerry Manuel for having K-Rod get five outs the night before, talking about how the Yankees take things one game at a time. Not discussed: Those same media idiots would have roasted Manuel for not using K-Rod, yammering about how the Mets had to make a statement. Brett Gardner hit a little chopper to David Wright, who grabbed the in-between hop and hurled the ball to first, where Ike Davis was pulled off the bag — safe. NO! OUT! Gardner was indeed out by an eyelash, but now it was 6-4 with Mark Teixeira coming up as the tying run. A million Yankee fans will still be whining about the call tomorrow, and we’ll hate them not so much for that or for whatever happens, but because secretly we were astonished it didn’t go their way. Teixeira, showing no flair for drama, promptly hacked at K-Rod’s first pitch and hit a Baltimore chop that Alex Cora had no chance of turning into the final out. Now the tying run was on first, A-Rod was at the plate, and Citi Field’s invaders had put aside their pose of being above caring to whoop and bray for the outcome they think is their birthright.
A-Rod and K-Rod, a showdown between horribly boring nicknames, with Francisco having the advantage according to the numbers but clearly scuffling for velocity and location, and A-Rod having the advantage of all of the above phantoms. You probably saw one or two materialize in your living room, on Gameday, or in the aisle at Citi. Between pitches, Alex Cora threw the ball wide right, Luis Castillo scuttled under a drifting pop fly, Armando twitched as Paul O’Neill fouled off pitches, Jeter noticed Timo Perez clapping his hands instead of running, Roger Clemens fired something at Mike Piazza’s head and the Wilpons gave Citi Field’s pitching rubber to Mariano Rivera. On the couch, I was yelling and pleading and clapping my hands and trying to baby the Mets home like they were a rental car on E, I’d bought the fuel-service option and was only on the Grand Central in traffic.
But wait. K-Rod harnessed a curve, A-Rod swung over it, and we’d won. The ghosts and goblins evaporated. The Yankee fans leaving Citi Field tonight and haunting the office or breakfast table tomorrow would chide us that we hadn’t won the World Series, but that one never stings, because only in the shriveled souls of Yankee fans is winning the World Series the lone yardstick for success.
K-Rod had made his pitch. A-Rod had swung and missed. That was it. The rest had been in our heads, not those of the Mets’. And all was fine. Well, until next time.
* * *
Condolences to the family of former Met Jose Lima, dead at just 37. The peerless Joe Posnanski remembers.
by Greg Prince on 23 May 2010 8:20 am The Mets took a lead, held a lead and only made you think it possible, not probable, that they would blow the lead.
Progress!
A good win for the Mets over the Yankees at Citi Field Saturday night. A good win beats any kind of loss, though I have to say in the fourteenth season of Interleague play, that’s all it felt like: a good win. A good win like the one Jeff Wilpon inspired over the Braves last Monday or the one John Maine somehow didn’t cost us against the Nationals on Thursday. Just another win in a season when — as in every season, I suppose — we can use as many of them as we can puzzle out.
I’ve really become the standard Met/Yankee talking point as regards the Subway Series. You know, “It’s just another game,” followed by variations on the theme about respecting opponents, special atmosphere, not being too high or low for any one series. In the Record of North Jersey on Friday, Jeff Roberts wrung confessions out of past SS participants who admitted, long after the fact, that their robotic “just another game” dismissals were simply a shield for actual “Oh boy!” anticipation.
John Franco: “When we played, we just treated it like another game [outwardly], but really it was exciting.”
Rick Reed: “When you’re playing, you have the uniform on, you don’t want to hype it up. But now that I’m done, it was awesome. We wanted to beat their brains in just as bad as they wanted to beat ours. It was a big thrill for us.”
Jeff Nelson: “Even though everyone is going to say, ‘Oh, it’s just another regular-season game,’ and it is, but it’s a little special because you’re uniting the biggest city in all of sports. The guys got up for it.”
Someday, perhaps, Jason Bay will tell you a 4-for-4 night against Phil Hughes and Chan Ho Park was one of the standout highlights of his distinguished career (though god help us if he doesn’t pile up a ton more highlights in a Mets uniform over the next $64 million or so of his contract). Surely Jenrry Mejia won’t mind being reminded that after allowing runners to reach second and third with one out in the seventh, he struck out Mark Teixeira and retired Alex Rodriguez. For that matter, Kevin Russo will have no problem remembering the circumstances of his first two runs batted in and Francisco Cervelli may not be able to forget against whom his knack for hitting with runners in scoring position was definitively derailed.
The players should treat these like big games, even if we’re a little less to a lot less hyped about them than we used to be. We, as fans, treat most games like big games. We like to believe players do the same. Players will tell you night and day about the need to maintain an even keel for 162 games. Whatever. It was a big game Saturday night because we needed a win. And if it was a big game for the reasons it used to feel like a big game, all the better.
When Frankie Rodriguez struck out Cervelli and then accepted plaudits from the sky in that adorable Frankie Rodriguez manner of his (adorable because he’s on my team), there was a deep breath let out and a high-five shared with my wife, but that was about it. It wasn’t the municipal holiday unleashed by Dave Mlicki or the eruption of emotion wrought by Matt Franco high atop Section 36 of the Upper Deck from eleven years ago. It wasn’t close to the giddiness that came from being a passenger on Mr. Koo’s wild ride. It was, at the risk of being labeled a habitual liar by Dan Warthen, just another win.
***
There is not a Mets fan of any age, but particularly between the ages of approximately 16 and 30, who will tell you the 2000 World Series was just another loss. It was a transcendent loss. It’s a decade gone by now, yet it remains in many ways quite the fresh wound. Ten years just isn’t as long as it used to be, not when you haven’t had as close a shot in the succeeding ten years, not when you’re too young to have had a transcendent win to balance your personal cosmic scale.
The calendar would have made the 2000 Mets a topic at some point in 2010, but they were nudged to edge of the spotlight this weekend thanks to some characteristically questionable Met scheduling. Seven members of our last pennant winner were handed golf shirts and invited to Citi Field to hang around during the Yankee series. It wasn’t exactly a full-blown tribute to the N.L. Champs of yore and, with only seven of the guys on hand (eight, counting one doing TV for a regional cable network), it could hardly be called a reunion. Goodness knows it wasn’t Old Timers Day reborn.
But they were at Citi Field Friday and Saturday handing out “Teammates in the Community” awards, throwing out first pitches, posing for photographs and fielding softballs from the likes of Kevin Burkhardt and Eddie Coleman. At least one (one of my all-time favorites) will be in the stands tonight. On principle, it’s never a bad time to have Mets Alumni in the house.
Unless, perhaps, their presence automatically aggravates a relatively fresh wound.
I won’t feel bad for guys who enjoyed lucrative careers as major league ballplayers, but I did feel kind of bad that when I first learned that when the Mets noticed the calendar and decided to welcome home Mike Piazza, Edgardo Alfonzo, Benny Agbayani, John Franco, Rick Reed, Turk Wendell and prodigal son Mike Hampton — plus, via YES, Al Leiter — it would be while the current Mets were playing the current Yankees, four of whom were 2000 Yankees, all of whom defeated the 2000 Mets in that World Series that took place ten chronological years and ten psychic minutes ago.
Having had yet another management decision instigate our usual “WTF?” reflex, the first specific question many of us asked ourselves and each other was why were the Mets having back those Mets this weekend against this opponent? We get the concept, but does anybody pay attention to anything? Does nobody who signs off on these things think them through? Ten years suddenly became ten minutes in our minds. There was this Met not running from first to home and therefore not scoring; there was that Met not getting strike three and therefore no out; there were those Mets not doing anything tangible about a piece of a bat that only one deluded soul on this entire planet swore was a ball…there was all that and too much more still hanging over us in 2010 even though it took place in 2000.
Let’s get it on the table right away that if this was our only 2000 commemoration until 2020, this was a stupid, half-assed way to do it. Oh, no question, as Jerry Manuel himself would say. The Mets didn’t so much announce the boys would be back in town as let word slip out. Relentless selling of tickets for the Subway Series never included the phrase “Come see Mike Piazza and several other 2000 Mets at Citi Field!” If it had, I probably would have found the wherewithal to attend.
I live for such events. Agbayani, Reed and Wendell had not been back in proper ceremonial capacity before. I would have loved the chance to have applauded them. Even Hampton — for goodness sake, forget the silly free agent statements about school systems already and remember the NLCS. Yeah, I’d welcome back Mike Hampton without reserve given the right setting. I’d rewelcome Piazza, Franco and especially Fonzie, whose appearance was my personal co-highlight of the Shea Goodbye Irish wake. Bring back the whole 2000 roster, March to October. Bring back Mark Johnson and Jim Mann. Bring back the putrid Rich Rodriguez and the ineffectual Mike Bordick. Hell, bring back Timo and Armando, two Mets without whom there is no pennant even if they are also two Mets because of whom there is no world championship.
And of course bring back Bobby Valentine (read that statement in any light you wish).
Bring ’em all back, eventually. It has been more than ten minutes even if it doesn’t quite seem like ten years — or that ten years is long enough to shed whatever additional layer of skin we grew to deal with the disappointment of the Mets losing a World Series to the Yankees. I’m not suggesting we commemorate the loss. I’m insisting we, once we’re at proper psychological remove from the pain, celebrate the wins that got us there: over the Giants, over the Cardinals, over the odds, across a fairly wonderful season. We’ve won four pennants. I’ll be damned if I’m going to be ashamed of any of them, or any of those who won what is thus far last of them for us.
The only victory the Mets have ever celebrated consistently and without reservation is 1969. We may be inundated with personalities from 1986 nowadays, but there was a time when this ownership could barely stand to be reminded that it took “bad guys” to win a great title. That was never the case for ’69, not even as M. Donald Grant was dispatching its heroes. As if by clockwork, the Mets honored the 1969 World Champions on their thirtieth anniversary in 1999. As if by Met clockwork, the ceremonies began ridiculously early on a Sunday morning in May so not enough fans were seated to enjoy them, but they did have much of the gang on hand, as well as several 1969 opponents so they could play a brief old timers game.
Everybody was in a good mood. Everybody applauded everybody and everything, even Met opponents from 1969, particularly Met opponents who later became Mets. Like Rusty Staub. Like Felix Millan. Except for my friend Richie. As we stood and applauded everybody and everything, Richie suddenly dropped his hands to his sides and waited silently for Felix Millan’s introduction to be completed. What’s up with that? I asked.
1973, Richie said, the other Met World Series of our youth. Felix Millan’s error in Game One against the A’s. We lost 2-1 en route to losing in seven games. Felix Millan fields a ground ball, and maybe we don’t lose. Richie hadn’t forgiven Felix after 26 years, and he wasn’t going to start then.
That was my guess, actually. And it is my far more educated guess that the grudges Mets fans feel toward the 2000 Mets collectively and, in select cases, individually, will be just about as slow to contract as Richie’s toward Millan. Ten years later, and Hampton is still the guy who took the money to run to Colorado, Perez is still the guy who didn’t bother to run on Todd Zeile’s non-homer and Benitez is still Benitez, which almost nobody takes to mean the guy with 160 saves in less than five seasons as a Met. By 1983, give or take a Richie, nobody was holding a miscue from 1973 against Felix Millan. Give or take Yogi Berra’s decision to make like Moses and pass over George Stone, nobody automatically held anything about losing to the A’s against the Mets.
But losing to the Oakland A’s wasn’t the same as losing to the New York Yankees. And the ’83 Mets didn’t honor the ’73 Mets prior to Bert Campaneris leading off and Rollie Fingers closing out against the ’83 Mets. Ten years was a lot longer back then. It wasn’t easily confused with ten minutes.
The stealth placement of seven (or eight) of your last league champs in your new ballpark for the first time indicated the Mets weren’t quite sure if this was good timing. It wasn’t, but the world didn’t end. The world didn’t end because seven Mets who lost to the Yankees ten years/ten minutes ago were recognized if not exactly honored in a stadium that contained more than a few fans who were happy that those Mets lost to those Yankees. The world didn’t end on October 26, 2000, either. I was pretty sure it would if a Subway World Series ever came to pass and it ended in the worst way possible.
Friday morning, Mike Hampton appeared on WFAN with Joe Benigno and Evan Roberts. The tenor of the questions was mainly “how could you lose that World Series for us?” Hampton lost Game Two. He didn’t pitch well and he didn’t hit anybody. Benigno and Roberts — Mets fans who flagellate themselves three hours daily — hadn’t intimated the whole thing was Hampton’s fault, but they were still steamed at the outcome of his game and that series. I couldn’t help but notice they didn’t ask him a single question about the three-hit shutout he pitched against the Cardinals, the one that clinched the Mets’ fourth and most recent pennant. Hampton earned NLCS MVP honors with two wins and sixteen scoreless innings. He was as brilliant as any Mets pitcher ever was in any Met postseason series.
Who remembers that? It was ten minutes and five games ago. It’s as if it didn’t happen because of the five games that followed the clinching. In the revisionist, self-flagellating imagination, it’s as if the 2000 Mets achieved nothing — or achieved almost everything just to set us up for the ultimate five-game defeat at the hands of the last team against whom we could handle losing. We would have accepted a five-game World Series defeat against that year’s ALCS runners-up, the Seattle Mariners, relatively gracefully. We would have passionately hated it then, would have continued to rue it in spots, but would mostly remember with satisfaction now, I’m convinced, that we won a pennant.
That’s difficult to do where the actual outcome of 2000 is concerned. I understand that, particularly if you weren’t fortunate enough to experience 1986 and therefore can’t know fully the difference between being in a World Series and winning a World Series, but would sure like to. I’m also not happy with the actual outcome of the 2000 World Series, and I use the present tense purposefully.
I still can’t believe Timo went into a trot (as did Todd).
I still can’t believe Armando couldn’t muscle strike three past Paul O’Neill and wound up walking him to set up the tying run that led to extra innings.
I still can’t believe Roger Clemens wasn’t ejected after flinging a bat shard at Mike Piazza (or wasn’t already doing time for beaning him in July).
I still can’t believe how many missteps the Mets made in Games One, Two, Four and Five and still only lost by one, one, one and two runs, respectively.
I still can’t believe we lost that World Series. In my own way, I’m still not over it.
But I’m also not over the pain that necessarily came with ultimate defeats in 1973 and 1988 and 1999 and 2006 and just about every year when there was the slightest hint that the Mets might win what they’ve only won twice. That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t appreciate the beauty and joy inherent in those particular seasons. When this particular season meets its almost inevitable doom, I will still remember that fleeting instance in late April 2010 when the Mets were 14-9, had won ten of eleven and held first place. I’m not just a glass half-full kind of fan. I am, if given anything at all to quench my thirst for winning, a glass tenth-full kind of fan.
Which is why, though I may begrudge 2000 its most fatal misstep of all, I can’t get over the fact that we did attain a second consecutive playoff spot, did prevail in two playoff series and did raise an indelible flag that I’ll always appreciate for the victory it symbolizes rather than resent for the victory that didn’t come next.
It was ten years ago. I wish it was only ten minutes ago. If it was, then the World Series would be coming up in five days and I could make it clear to Bobby V that he should save Hampton for Shea where he’s nearly unbeatable. He should’ve done the same with Kenny Rogers the year before. Also, Randy Myers should have been warming up in the ninth inning, George Stone should have gotten the ball in Oakland and Cliff Floyd shouldn’t have been on the NLCS roster once it was obvious he could barely walk let alone run.
The glass can always be fuller.
by Jason Fry on 21 May 2010 11:34 pm Well, that wasn’t so bad.
I mean, the Mets lost. To the Yankees. Because Alex Cora inexplicably threw a ball to Jose Reyes’s invisible twin brother on the edge of the outfield grass, and because Elmer Dessens was Elmer Dessens. And because they couldn’t hit, not even against Javier Vazquez.
How is that not so bad?
Because I’d expected much worse.
This is what we’ve been reduced to by a front office that thinks Plan Bs are false hustle, by the starting rotation’s entirely predictable descent into wreckage, and by every night bringing at least one inexplicable managerial decision. (Is Luis Castillo with a bone bruise really so much faster than Ike Davis? What if the Mets had tied it? At least David Wright’s game-ending groundout eliminated any chance of watching Fernando Tatis go 0 for 3 before Jeter won it in the 16th by coaxing a bases-loaded walk from Jenrry Mejia.)
Give the patchwork Yankees their due. Vazquez looked great, except for the small detail of not putting his index finger between the ball and the bat when bunting, as David Cone once did to his and our lasting regret. A lot of the Yankee fill-ins looked awfully solid, in fact: Someone named Kevin Russo collected his first big-league hit and then a much more memorable second big-league hit, while Francisco Cervelli plays a pretty mean catcher and did the Great Gazoo helmet proud. Derek Jeter and Mark Teixeira weren’t factors and A-Rod had a cosmetic double, but the JV Minions of Satan were up to the task. Maybe that’s what happens when you have a front office that knows how to construct a roster.
While we’re on the subject of debacles, why in God’s name would you bring back the 2000 Mets to be honored in front of a crowd that’s about 40% baying mooks who root for the team that beat them? To be a Mets fan during the Manuel-Minaya-Howard-Wilpon regime means a high probability of nightly indignities. Why must the people who take our money create more of them?
On the Mets’ side, Hisanori Takahashi was as good as anyone could have hoped. Yes, he’s got that funny little hitch in his delivery, but the man can pitch. His confrontations with Jeter and Nick Swisher were Madduxian pitching clinics: changing speeds, hitting corners, moving feet, expanding the strike zone, burying pitches in the dirt, not burying pitches in the dirt. Wonderful stuff. Jason Bay looks like he’s just a beat off where he needs to be, Ike Davis is Ike Davis, and Cora had a pretty good game except for, well, the play he made that lost it. Last night against Washington, I said to Emily that Cora makes himself the best player Alex Cora can be, and it wasn’t meant as an insult even if it is damning with faint praise.
So there’s that.
But that isn’t nearly enough. We lose 2-1 on a hideous error and think we got off easy. Hooray for 2010.
by Greg Prince on 21 May 2010 6:10 pm At the risk of dampening our mutual bout of Toronto Fever (now as well as then), the Subway Series begins anew tonight.
Oh man, am I psyched!
Or should that come with a question mark?
It’s been a little while since SS Friday got my various organs racing. Two years, to be precise. It was already past its peak, but it was capable of revving my internal baseball engines. It involved my favorite team versus the team that plays in relative proximity to it that’s not my favorite. It was a bit of a sop to our baser instincts to create this rivalry (essentially hooking up to jumper cables to that which was purely theoretical bus stop chop-busting), but it worked. It worked in 1997. It worked in 1999. It worked in 2005 and 2006 and 2007 and 2008, and on some level, it worked every year in between.
It was torture but it was fun. Sometimes the fun was tortured to a crisp by the end of a given game, but what the hell? The stakes felt as hot as they seemed high.
I attended one Subway Series game in 2009, just as I had attended at least one Subway Series game every season between 1998 and 2008, save for ’03 and ’04. It was little like I remembered it at Shea. For all my gauzy romanticization of the municipal stadium that leaked like a sieve (but that I loved like a limb), it was true that there was nothing like being inside Shea Stadium when things were very full and going very well. Fran Healy was a prophet without honor when he predicted that Shea Stadium would be rocking! on such occasions. It rocked, it shook, it was full of delightful rage, and that was just among the spectators.
Citi Field? Nice place to eat last year during the Subway Series. Otherwise, it was as flat as the venue that hosted it a year ago. Mets fans were dead. Yankees fans, even in victory, couldn’t be bothered. Demolishing Shea extracted the fangs from the Subway Series, certainly by that Sunday night, definitely for me. I’ve been slowly coming to feel proprietary of Citi Field in 2010. Expecting it to wrap its arms around the Subway Series in its second year, however, would blow two months of genuine progress between me and the building.
Thus, unless there’s a last-minute invite or offer that’s unrefusable, I’ll be home for these three. There was a time I’d feel guilty about that kind of decision. Just the thought that somebody who shouldn’t have been at Shea was using a seat for this instead of me would push me toward securing a ticket. That was the time when all good fans had to come to the aid of their party, so to speak. Not this time, not after last year, not for the Subway Series. A brief hiatus is in order.
I’ll be watching, of course. By 7:10, I’ll likely be frothing. From here, it will be reasonably same as it ever was. But it will be from here.
That’s fine for this year. We’ll see about next year.
by Greg Prince on 21 May 2010 2:35 pm Welcome to Flashback Friday: Take Me Out to 34 Ballparks, a celebration, critique and countdown of every major league ballpark one baseball fan has been fortunate enough to visit in a lifetime of going to ballgames.
BALLPARK: SkyDome
LATER KNOWN AS: Rogers Centre
HOME TEAM: Toronto Blue Jays
VISITS: 1
VISITED: July 30, 1993
CHRONOLOGY: 9th of 34
RANKING: 24th of 34
I saw the future and its name was SkyDome. As Jason intimated earlier today following his coincidentally timed trip north this week, its future was short-lived, but while it represented tomorrow today, it seemed like something else.
It was! It had a roof that was retractable! A real one! It could open and close in under thirty minutes! Olympic Stadium supposedly had something similar, but it never seemed to work. Olympic Stadium was yesterday from the get-go. SkyDome was tomorrow, even if tomorrow didn’t last terribly long.
SkyDome was the first out-of-town ballpark I truly sought out on its own perceived merits. The first time I left New York for a ballgame was to see Fenway Park, but that was more of a lark for a lark’s sake. The Vet was to see the Mets relatively close to home. The Big O was the same, if not as close. The others prior to 1993 just kind of happened. SkyDome and Toronto, though, was a planned vacation, the first one Stephanie and I ever took. We’d been living together (first in sin, then in matrimony) for three years and, save for a brief honeymoon, never went anywhere. I never particularly wanted to go anywhere, but we had vacation time and, well, we decided to take it literally.
Why Toronto? Because of SkyDome obviously. Why SkyDome among all the stadia we had yet to visit? Because it was gorgeous and modern and thrilling on TV. It had that roof, which was revolutionary. It had a hotel above the center field fence and a Hard Rock Cafe built in and the world’s largest McDonald’s on the premises. It had the Blue Jays, who were unstoppable. The phrase “large market team” wasn’t prevalent in baseball then, but the Blue Jays defined it. They entertained a metropolitan area of 4 million and they drew 50,500 of them every day and night they played. They played great. They won their division almost every year. They had won the World Series the October before. They picked up whoever they needed to establish and maintain their dynasty. New to the team in ’93 were Dave Stewart and Paul Molitor. They needed a star, they’d get a star.
The Big Bad Blue Jays and SkyDome, the stadium of tomorrow today. Why wouldn’t you make Toronto your vacation destination?
Attraction that the Blue Jays were, they were sold out for every game in advance. But I’d been tipped off that ticket-scalping was legal and prolific in Toronto. So we’d go there and we’d take our chances. After an afternoon devoted to wandering the campus of the University of Toronto (because we like to buy college t-shirts wherever we go) and taking a load off our feet at the McLaughlin Planetarium (where I heard a local man say, completely without irony, “eh?”), we were fairly stoked for the Jays. Everywhere you looked, you saw pennants commemorating the 1992 championship and signs exhorting the 1993 edition. We were staying within walking distance of the Dome and saw a lot of downtown. To this day, two dozen ballparks later, I’ve never seen a city that was as excited about its entrant in our National Pastime than Toronto, Ontario, Canada, was for its Blue Jays.
Two tickets on the street outside SkyDome cost us 50 bucks Canadian. Of course it was Canadian, but in my handful of trips across the border, I’ve never gotten over my amazement that they use money that doesn’t look like money. A $25 ticket for a baseball game in those days was a bit steep, but it was Canadian. How much could it have really cost? A bootleg Blue Jays cap (a bit of an affectation, looking back on it) was $5 Canadian, as was the official program. One of these transactions required change, with one street vendor asking another if he had a loonie. I knew that a loonie was a dollar coin, but it still cracked me up.
Our $50 pair of seats was in SkyDome’s upper deck, or “SkyDeck,” which sounds so much cooler than upper deck. Very futuristic, very tomorrow. Thing is while we climbed to said Deck, I wasn’t being whisked along by a PeopleMover or a GlideWalk or something else that smushed TwoWords together in a futuristic construction. There were just stairs. Outside the doors to the seating bowl, there was just a hallway. It was no more modern out there than Madison Square Garden. With a threat of rain, the retractable roof was closed. We were inside an arena, basically. A vast, carpeted baseball arena adorned by the largest JumboTron in North America.
Where’s the future in that?
The upper deck by any name is the upper deck. Steep prices for a steep climb. Tourists without tickets can’t be choosers, so what we wound up buying for our funny money were pretty lousy seats, but we weren’t alone. Remember, the Jays were hot stuff. The place was jammed that Friday night. Toronto entered the action a game ahead of the surprising second-place Yankees; believe it or not, there was a time when not only were the Blue Jays a powerhouse, but the Yankees were an upstart — 1993 was that time. The Tigers were the opposition. Michigan was next door to Ontario. This was actually a geographic rivalry (one that’s been diminished since by questionable divisional alignment), so we were joined by a generous sprinkling of Tigers fans as well as Blue Jays fans.
Blue Jays fans were quiet. Tigers fans were clueless. OK, one Tigers fan in particular was clueless. I learned of his cluelessness when Detroit’s nine-hitter (not the pitcher…talk about an entirely clueless league) Chris Gomez stepped up for the first time in the top of the third. SkyDome’s enormous scoreboard trumpeted Gomez’s minuscule batting average: .182. Gomez proceeded to strike out.
The clueless Tigers fan next to me was apoplectic. “Aw geez, Sparky!” he implored Detroit manager Sparky Anderson with absolute astonishment. “How can ya use this guy? Who is this guy? He’s batting .182! He’s no good!”
I had never heard of Chris Gomez, but I figured out who we was pretty quickly. He was an unproven youngster hitting at the bottom of the lineup. Unproven youngsters hitting at the bottom of lineups often bat .182. This was 1993. I had just spent four months watching a stream of unproven youngsters float across the bottom of Met lineups bearing .182 batting averages. Half our team would be Chris Gomez by the end of the year. You wanna get mad at Rob Deer or Mickey Tettleton or other underachieving Tigers the way I might have at Bobby Bonilla or Vince Coleman? Help yourself. But don’t take it out on Chris Gomez during his sixth game ever. Aw geez!
And how can you not know who your starting shortstop is unless it’s his debut? What kind of fan are you, Tigers fan? I’ll tell you what kind of fan you are…
You’re clueless!
We were rooting for the Blue Jays since they were who we were there to see — we hopped hard on the John Olerud bandwagon as he continued to flirt with .400 — but every at-bat the rest of the night for Chris Gomez, I cheered wildly under my bootleg Blue Jays cap for Chris Gomez.
C’MON CHRIS!
LET’S GO CHRIS!
GO GO GOMEZ!
After my new favorite American League player Chris Gomez collected the third of what would be four hits on the night — a night when he literally more than doubled his batting average — I kind of nudged the Tigers fan. “You know who Chris Gomez is now, huh?”
Much Midwestern happiness radiated from my neighbor from the south as he nodded and laughed at his rush to judgment. And during his periodic visits to Shea as a Padre or Pirate, I always gave Chris Gomez a round of polite Toronto applause for the rest of his career.
Blue Jays fans were indeed polite. Or withdrawn. In the early days of WFAN, they did loads of remotes from wherever a game was going on. One night, Howie Rose brought on the station’s stringer from Toronto for a Blue Jay update. While the reporter talked, there was absolute silence in the background. The Jays were playing, but nobody was cheering. Nobody was booing either. “It sounds like a library there,” Howie said of old Exhibition Stadium. Yup, the reporter said, in so many words. “Sure does, eh?”
The crowd was muted in its enthusiasm, but enthusiastic in its demeanor. They were pro-Jay without being anti-Tiger. They recognized Olerud’s unlikely quest for .400. They were appropriately fond of their all-world second baseman Robbie Alomar, who lived in SkyDome’s hotel, where we couldn’t hope to get a room. They liked reacquiring their old shortstop Tony Fernandez far more than we ever liked having him when he started 1993 with us. There were a lot of people — 50,511 — and a lot of good vibes, just not a lot of noise.
Blue Jays fans were into the seventh-inning stretch, however. They had their own thing for that, with their bird mascot and their proto-Party Patrol trotting onto the field, all smiles, and leading us in a round of the team song:
“Okay! Blue Jays! Let’s play ball!”
Cute. They were a powerhouse team, they played in the world of tomorrow, but it was a cute franchise. It was cute four years earlier when they took Mookie Wilson off our ungrateful hands and chanted Moo-KEE! for him instead of mooing. It was wrong, but it was cute. Their song was cute. Their bird was cute. Their money was cute. Even the clueless Tiger fan was kind of cute in his ignorance of Chris Gomez. I’d always think of Chris Gomez as kind of cute, too.
Enough with the cuteness, we decided after the song. We got up to inspect a little more of SkyDome. We tried to get into the Hard Rock, but it was too crowded. We were asked to leave our names on a clipboard and hope to be called in half-an-hour. I don’t do that in real life, I’m not gonna do it at a ballpark. Although we were in one of our periodic disavowals from fast food, I insisted on a visit to the World’s Largest McDonald’s. It had to be futuristic, I said. SkyDome has a roof that opens and closes in less than half an hour. It has a massive DiamondVision. The McDonald’s has to be something incredible.
It wasn’t. It was McDonald’s, nothing more. It had pizza and hot dogs, yes, but it was just McDonald’s with acres of seats and tables. It also had little to do with the Blue Jays. You couldn’t go there and then return to the game. Also, it didn’t stay open throughout the game. If we were going to experience the most amazing McDonald’s ever, we would have to say Okay, Blue Jays, see ya later after the stretch. And we did.
We sat in the rather desolate McDonald’s, we ate our Canadian pizza, we counted our loonies and the next day the Blue Jays went out and got Rickey Henderson. That’s what a large market team does at the trade deadline. The roof was open that Saturday, but we had other things to see in Toronto, including the Hockey Hall of Fame, which was surprisingly modern. It was probably more modern than SkyDome.
Neither of us was much of a hockey fan, but it was a great building with incredible treasures, including the Stanley Cup. SkyDome, meanwhile, would get one more World Series trophy that October and it’s been mostly downhill for the Blue Jays ever since. SkyDome has another name and it’s lost its tomorrow-ish luster. The “eh?” planetarium is closed, too. If you want to contemplate the heavens in downtown Toronto, you can go to a Jays game and hope the roof is open, or you can just stand outside. That, apparently, is what most locals choose to do these days.
by Jason Fry on 20 May 2010 11:46 pm So first I was really busy. And then I was really busy and in Toronto. (More on Toronto in a bit.) Between those two things, the Mets receded into a vague, distant unpleasantness, like a civil war in another hemisphere. I read Greg’s recaps and saw highlights, but I was spared the endless, metered doses of pain you get watching a lousy baseball team struggle night after night. The Mets are getting swept by the Marlins. Oliver’s been exiled to the pen but not to the minors or the ranks of the formerly unemployed. Jeff Wilpon just happened to be wandering through Atlanta and felt like checking in on his failing family business. David Wright struck out with nobody out and a guy on third again. Imagine what the Mets might have done if Angel Pagan wasn’t essentially alone out there.
It was no fun knowing the Mets were sinking further into irrelevance unless the discussion concerned whether it was possible to spend $134 million and still be in last place. But it was worse to realize that what I was feeling was a sneaky, disloyal relief at having drawn a Get Out of Bad Baseball Jail Free card for a few days.
So, Toronto. Lovely city — very walkable, nice people, lots to do, plenty of food and drink. It deserves a lot better than the Rogers Centre, formerly the SkyDome. (Greg will be along presently with his impressions as part of Flashback Friday.) Along with the White Sox, the Blue Jays had the misfortune to get new, mega-priced palaces just before Camden Yards ushered in the retro ballparks, which may have grown a little generic in recent years but certainly makes for a much better template than, say, the concrete doughnuts of the turf-and-elastic-waistband era. But by being the last in line before Baltimore, Chicago and Toronto got stuck with instantly out-of-date parks.
I haven’t been to New Comiskey, but the Rogers Centre is so consistently uninteresting that it actually comes to feel like some kind of weird accomplishment. The concourse is a sterile circle dotted with really boring things you don’t particularly want to eat. (The hot-dog girl’s amused look when I reacted with horror at receiving a huge pile of Canadian change was pretty funny, though.) There’s some kind of awful sculpture beyond center field that commemorates everything everybody did to line up financing for this place, or something: It’s all wire and words and depressingly late-80s, like a sweaterdress worn with a huge belt and a bunch of kooky bracelets. I mention it because it’s actually one of the more interesting things in the park. There are indeed hotel rooms overlooking the field. I suppose that would be cool if you were in one. The stadium staff are Canadian and don’t have enough to do, meaning they’re almost spookily nice and constantly in the way. (After a foul ball plunked into the seats in the next section and was retrieved by a fan, four of them arrived in record time and stood in the aisle for a couple of minutes for no reason I could figure out.) Oh, and former Blue Jays greats are honored with the usual ring of names and numbers up around mezzanine level — an unsurprising but perfectly appropriate ballpark feature. It’s called the Level of Excellence. Seriously. My friend Michael and I spent a half-inning or so trying to think of a more generic name and failed. Circle of Immortality? Arc of Triumph? Olympian Oval? Ring of Honor? No, it’s the Level of Excellence.
There’s a lot of “used to be” heard when discussing the Rogers Centre. There used to be a gigantic McDonald’s on the premises, possibly the only one in existence where you could order a hot dog. It’s gone now. (Things are bad when McDonald’s decides it can’t make a situation like this work.) Above the center-field fence there’s a multi-level restaurant, deserted and possibly abandoned — it used to be something, but now it’s just a depressing nothing, the baseball equivalent of keeping a rusted-out junker on cinderblocks in your front yard. Looking around the vast expanses of unoccupied seats, I politely said to Michael that this place must have been pretty awesome when the Jays were a powerhouse, the place was full every night and everybody was screaming. He shrugged. Yeah, it used to be.
None of this is a knock on Blue Jays fans. There were maybe 15,000 people in attendance, but that meant they were diehards — they knew their stuff, cheered batters for moving runners over and booed Lyle Overbay if he so much as twitched. (Overbay had one of the worst games I’ve seen a major-leaguer have in a long time, culminating with a play that saw him drop a throw, then heave the ball past the third baseman.) The Blue Jays’ song is pretty cool, complete with calisthenics. And the roof was open.
So we were nominally outdoors and got to watch baseball. That’s pretty good even when the park isn’t. And then today, it was back to the Mets — and they even won. They won ugly, starting the night with a tense semi-confrontation between John Maine and everybody and ending it with a parade of ineffective relievers trying to hand the game to the Nats. They won because the Nationals were a lot worse. The Nats just missed balls they might have caught. They completely missed balls they should have caught. They fell down. They ran the bases poorly. They were more Mets than the actual Mets. Ryan Zimmerman’s look of disgust after falling down before he could pursue Jose Reyes’s little blooper said it all.
But it was one game.
One of the more useful baseball cliches, in my opinion, is that you spend April and May figuring out what you have, June and July getting what you need, and then August and September seeing if it works out. Except the Mets have spent April and May figuring out they have what a lot of people said they had in February and March. It’s good that they stopped giving Mike Jacobs at-bats — except he shouldn’t have gotten them in the first place. It’s good that Frank Catalanotto was relieved of his duties — but he shouldn’t have been given that job in the first place. Jenrry Mejia will supposedly soon be sent down to the minors to develop as a starter — that should have happened in the Grapefruit League.
And now, to present difficulties. Oliver Perez is in the bullpen. John Maine is … oh, who the hell knows anything about John Maine, except that several somethings are wrong with him, and it probably no longer makes sense for the Mets to figure out what those things are. So now it’s R.A. Dickey and Hisanori Takahashi and for a night, the heroic Raul Valdes. But didn’t a legion of bloggers and writers and interested observers spend the winter wondering why the Mets’ plan for the starting rotation seemed to be hoping for the best from very uncertain arms? (Joel Pineiro, the man the Mets wouldn’t bother to call, has had five good to great starts, one average one and two clunkers — I’d sure take that right now.) Sooner or later the useless Gary Matthews Jr. will depart the premises, and we’ll be heartened even though it will be just the latest example of the Mets no longer doing something stupid months after it was first identified as stupid.
That’s what $134 million buys you in these parts these days: the belated realization of stupidity. Better late than never, but weren’t there higher expectations around these parts once upon a time? Weren’t there higher aspirations? Yeah. There used to be.
by Greg Prince on 19 May 2010 11:51 pm This could have been the Angel Pagan Game. You remember the Angel Pagan Game, don’t you? It was in Washington, in May 2010. The Mets had been playing really badly on the road and had dropped into last place. Angel was first-division all the way, though. He made Nyjer Morgan look silly. He made Nyjer Morgan look like Angel Pagan used to look.
Angel drove one to the centerfield wall off that annoying ancient ex-Met junkballer Liván Hernandez who got better after leaving the Mets for whom he just kept getting worse. Morgan took an ill-advised leap (and wouldn’t it have been nice if more Nationals outfielders had taken ill-advised leaps in those days?) and missed the ball completely. The ball rolled back into center. Angel then got rolling — past second, past third, just kept going. I thought he’d find a way to get thrown out at home, but Angel always could run if we weren’t always confident he could think.
SAFE! Angel Pagan was safe with an inside-the-park home run!
That wasn’t all Angel did. Angel dove once and robbed Roger Bernadina (the pain in the ass from the week before) of a bases-loaded single, or maybe more if it got by. That was the bottom of the fourth, a half-inning after Angel went “coast to coast” as Gary Cohen put it. One of the best innings any Met had had in a long time.
But then came the fifth, which was at least as astounding. That was when Angel dove again with the bases loaded and came up with THREE OUTS. Yes, a triple play! It was a little dicey in that the umps were slow to call Cristian Guzman’s sinking liner an out — which it was without much mystery. Angel could have jogged in and tagged everybody and made it an unassisted triple play, murdering the ghost of Eric Bruntlett in the process, but when you rooted for the Mets in those days, you were just happy if Angel Pagan caught the ball and didn’t throw it in the wrong direction. He actually did overthrow second, but the Nats were even slower on the uptake than the umps. It was a weird 8-2-6-3 triple play (Henry Blanco backed up the bad throw and Jose Reyes made an unnecessary relay to first), but it was a triple play. All triple plays are perfect in the retelling.
What a game for Angel Pagan. It could have been the Angel Pagan Game. It should have been the Angel Pagan Game. And if it wasn’t going to be, it could have been the R.A. Dickey Game.
You remember the R.A. Dickey Game, don’t you? Do you remember R.A. Dickey? R.A. Dickey was that knuckleballer. Kind of looked like he just blew into town, the bedraggled drifter seeking only honest work. Well, he came out and gave the Mets their night’s worth. Very first batter he faced, Morgan, popped up. Big deal, you say? Dickey made it so, diving à la Pagan and making the putout himself on the line between home and third. Here’s a guy who had endured more than a month of pitching for Buffalo waiting to get his chance in The Show. He wasn’t taking anything for granted.
Dickey was a great story. He was starting because Oliver Perez should have been kicked out of town. Dickey the righty journeyman with no ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow (sounds impossible, right?) was outpitching Ollie the millionaire by a mile. He was matching Hernandez in a battle of fast-working slowballers, too. His knuckler was knuckling and baffling the Nationals. Before the inside-the-parker and the triple play, the night was shaping up as all R.A. all the time. He didn’t give up a hit ’til the fourth and kept the Mets in a 2-2 tie until the seventh.
It was more than Oliver Perez had done in any start but one through the first quarter of the season. It was just what the Mets needed. It was, all things considered, an outstanding Met debut for R.A. Dickey. It could have been the R.A. Dickey Game. It should have been the R.A. Dickey Game if it wasn’t going to be the Angel Pagan Game. The game the Mets played in Washington on May 19, 2010 should be remembered for at least one of them, probably both of them.
Instead, it went down as just another stupid Met loss.
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