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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 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.
by Greg Prince on 19 May 2010 12:45 am Sorry gang. I neglected to mention in the promotion of Amazin’ Tuesday that the Mets tend to lose on Amazin’ Tuesday. Well, they didn’t lose in March, because the season hadn’t started yet, but otherwise, there’s reading, there’s pizza, there’s Met camaraderie like you wouldn’t believe every time we hold one of these things…but there’s also a loss.
It’s the opposite of me at Citi Field wherein I go to a Mets game and the Mets almost always win. On these Tuesdays, I attempt to read aloud about the Mets during a Mets game, and they always, always lose.
The Mets are 0-5 on Amazin’ Tuesdays. I fear it’s a trend. Didn’t seem like such a big deal in 2009 when the entire season was a total loss, but I hate having potentially karmically contributed to the recellarization of the 2010 club…though I’m not taking the heat for this one alone. I’m not the one who couldn’t deliver Luis Castillo from third with one out against Billy Wagner in the top of the ninth to obtain a lead, and I’m not the one who couldn’t throw a chopped baseball properly to first base to stave off a loss.
The one behind both of those misfortunes was David Wright, who should have enough goodwill accumulated in the Met bank to allow him a doubly bad ninth inning and maybe even another batch of strikeouts. But we’re a last place team again, David Wright fanned three times in Atlanta and goodwill’s in short supply. As we speak, Steve Somers’ callers are proposing trades whose core principle is let’s exchange David Wright for a starting pitcher. This, mind you, is happening after midnight. So don’t blame Amazin’ Tuesday for Anxiety-Riddled Wednesday.
Tuesday was Amazin’ as long as Amazin’ Tuesday lasted. The Grand Central version of Two Boots was ideally situated — I ♥ Grand Central Terminal as I ♥ few public spaces in New York City. The only thing we were missing as we shared our Metsian testimony (besides utterly optimal acoustics) was a dead-on view of the game. The TV was at the bar and our little Speakers’ Corner was set away from it. It became quite low-tech in our physical niche when we learned nobody’s digital devices could find enough of a signal to click up a score. Hence, we had to do stay informed the old-fashioned way, calling out toward the bar for periodic help:
“HEY! WHAT’S THE SCORE?”
Semi-accurate word would filter back to us from time to time. We knew the Mets had tied the Braves 2-2 in the fifth. We knew Jeff Francoeur had homered. We thought (or maybe it was just me) that Frenchy’s homer was a two-run job, but it was a solo shot, matching Ike Davis’s from earlier in the same inning. Didn’t matter. 2-2 is 2-2. We divined Johan was doing his thing, keeping it 2-2 for a long while.
Yet based on precedent, I sensed it wasn’t going to end well at Grand Central via Turner Field. It never does for the Mets on the road when we do these things while they’re away. The game screeched to an unsatisfying halt while I was on the Long Island Rail Road, David throwing away Melky Cabrera’s chopper, Brent Clevlen scampering home with the losing run. That much I heard live. The part where David didn’t drive home Castillo and struck out three times I learned during the recap.
The recap’s never happy in the aftermath of Amazin’ Tuesday, save for wrapping up Amazin’ Tuesday itself. Amazin’ Tuesday is always great fun. It was great fun to hear from Taryn “Coop” Cooper as she brought My Summer Family to life. It was great fun to get a dose of Cardboard Gods spirituality from Josh Wilker (a Red Sox fan who possesses the soul of a true Metophile). I always enjoy co-hosting these events with MBTN’s Jon Springer, and I really like when the “official” festivities begin to break up and I get to acquaint and reacquaint with other Mets fans who are kind enough to drop by. I met one guy, Frank from Connecticut, who said he’s surrounded by Red Sox and Yankees fans all day long, making a night like Amazin’ Tuesday a revelation for him. He had no idea there were so many people like us.
There are. And we’re all a little miserable right now.
by Greg Prince on 18 May 2010 12:07 am The setting: Visitors clubhouse, Turner Field
The time: Monday night, moments before first pitch
The speaker: New York Mets chief operating officer Jeff Wilpon
Boys, gather round. You’ve got a big game coming up in a few minutes, and I wanna set you all of base monkeys straight. I didn’t fly into Atlanta to fire anybody, no sirree Fred. Not my style. When Jeff Wilpon flies into town, he brings good cheer, and he comes bearing insights.
Insight No. 1 is for you, Big Fella. I told Jerry to give you the ball tonight. You thought the rotation said you pitch? You pitch when I say you pitch. I say you pitch tonight. We’re in a rut, Big Fella. We’ve lost five, six, seven in a row. The number isn’t important. What’s important is you’re big, and I know it takes a big man to stop a big losing streak. You’re my Big Fella…atta boy!
Next insight is for you, the catcher. Catcher, listen, you gotta bring the Big Fella home tonight. Block those pitches, tell him he’s not falling down on the mound. I didn’t come here to fire anybody, but I can get a catcher anytime I want. I got you in the middle of February. There’s probably another one just like you floating around out there on the waiver wire. You wanna stay the catcher? Drive in a couple of runs early.
Insights, more insights, I’m an insight machine. Shorty, you — the shortstop. Run! Run a lot! Run around the bases! I couldn’t be clearer.
Where’s my Animal? Animal, get over here, you base monkey! You’re hitting cleanup and you’re batting fourth. Some people think it’s the same thing, but you and me, Animal, we know different. Make things happen. Gouge their eyes out if necessary. That’s why we’ve got insurance. Baseball’s a tough game. I flew all the way into Atlanta to see a tough game, not to fire anybody.
Jerry — find a place for the Animal out there in the field somewhere. Animals love fields!
Who else wants to play a little ball tonight, huh? Who wants to back up the Big Fella? Where’s that kid who pitches every night? No, not that one, the other one, the one from last year. Yes! The dynamo! Lefty! Lefty, you’re my dynamo. You’ll be out there behind the Big Fella at some point. Make it count! Get my drift? GOOD!
Where’s Goggles? I’ve got an insight for Goggles. You’re Goggles? You’re not wearing your goggles. What’s that? You only wear ’em when you pitch? Not interested. What I’m interested in is results. You’ve been light on results, Goggles. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. You may not see me watching in the ninth, but I’m watching. I have my spies. My spies tell me Goggles isn’t getting it done. Goggles, get it done. I didn’t come here to fire anybody, but Goggles, you’re getting on my nerves. Word to the wise: don’t get on the COO’s nerves. They’re not the nerves you want to be on.
The rest of you base monkeys: Water Commercial Guy, Bay Guy, French Guy, Junior Guy, that second baseman I don’t remember signing but my lawyers say I did — my insights go for the rest of you, too. Don’t get on my nerves.
I had a little talk with Jerry and Omar and the rest of the staff. Nobody’s getting fired tonight. Tonight we win. We’ll re-evaluate tomorrow. But I swear to Fred, don’t make me fly to Atlanta again. I only have so many brilliant insights to light a fire under the whole bunch of you base monkeys.
Now go win one for me!
Jeff Wilpon isn’t likely to be flying in for tonight’s Two Boots Grand Central debut of AMAZIN’ TUESDAY, but come anyway. Your hosts are Jon Springer of Mets By The Numbers and me. Our very special guests are Taryn Cooper of My Summer Family, Josh Wilker of Cardboard Gods and, hopefully, you. We convene at 7 PM. Details here.
by Greg Prince on 16 May 2010 7:15 pm I was napping when Sunday afternoon’s game began. So were the Mets. When I awoke and flipped on the bedside radio, the first thing I heard from Wayne Hagin was something about trying to limit the damage.
But the damage had been done. The Mets were down six-nothing and yet another starting pitcher…and it wasn’t even the fourth inning. A comeback of sorts was generated, and it was almost invigorating — yet it wasn’t enough. There’s generally never enough you can do when you’re losing six-nothing. The damage, on the scoreboard and within Jonathon Niese’s hamstring, had been done.
Following a most disillusioning four-game sweep in Miami — a new name for Whatchamacallit Stadium, ¡por favor! — there’s not much left to do besides hope for better nights ahead in Atlanta and, perhaps, channel the wisdom of Ellis Boyd ‘Red’ Redding, former resident of Shawshank State Prison in Maine. Red was last seen violating his parole somewhere near Fort Hancock, Texas, but en route to Zihuatanejo he left behind some words that describe well the weekend that was.
I wish I could tell you that the Mets fought the good fight, and the Marlins let them be. I wish I could tell you that — but the National League East is no fairy tale world. They never said who did it, but we all knew. Things went on like that for a while — baseball season consists of routine, and then more routine. Every so often, the Mets would show up with fresh losses. The Marlins kept at them — sometimes they were able to fight ’em off, sometimes not. And that’s how it went for the Mets — that was their routine. I do believe those four games at Florida were the worst for them, and I also believe that if things had gone on that way, last place would have got the best of them.
The Mets are now incarcerated in the cellar of their division, length of sentence undetermined. They’ve lost five in a row, eleven of fifteen. There’s not a day goes by I don’t feel regret.
Find some measure of Met redemption at Two Boots Grand Central debut of AMAZIN’ TUESDAY. Your hosts are Jon Springer of Mets By The Numbers and me. Our very special guests are Taryn Cooper of My Summer Family, Josh Wilker of Cardboard Gods and, hopefully, you. We convene at 7 PM. Details here.
by Greg Prince on 16 May 2010 8:17 am Saturday night was the night I remembered that I picked the Mets to finish fourth. If you check the standings after 37 games, that’s where they are.
It was the night I remembered that the Mets are composed of players who have their upsides and strengths, but that none of them is the type of player who displays mostly upsides and strengths. A few upsides and a little strength were evident Saturday, but most of it went untapped.
It was the night, too, when I realized that for as likable as these fellows are as inidividuals and a unit, and how unlike 2009 this 2010 season has felt, that 2010 is only one season removed from 2009.
The Mets are a terrible ballclub again. A different kind of terrible than they were last year, but terrible just the same.
I don’t get hung up on preseason predictions, even during preseason, but in a noodling session among friends, I said the Mets would wind up in fourth place and win 78 games. They have, after exciting us a bit in late April, locked in at that level. They way they looked last night, I’d be thrilled if they didn’t win fewer.
How quickly we turn on our team, I’m thinking. I wasn’t exactly blocking out all of October on their account before last night, but I had been feeling pretty good about the 2010 Mets until last night. I still feel good about them in the sense that I don’t silently hate them, that I’m not on some level feeling justified in my lack of faith toward them. I feel bad for these guys more than I did those guys of 2009, overlap of personnel notwithstanding. When they fell apart Saturday — and kept falling apart — I could see they were dissolving not out of apathy or idiocy, but out of true commitment…and maybe some idiocy.
Rod Barajas, for example, touched second base in the process of leading off the ninth inning. He’s no Ryan Church missing third in that regard. It’s just that he touched it about ten minutes after being tagged out in front of it as he tried to stretch what looked very much like a double into a double. Alas, it was only a double for non-glacial catchers. Chris Coghlan made a lovely play on his ball in the corner and quite the professional throw, but most baseball players are surefire safe at second in that situation. Barajas, however, is markedly slower than most baseball players.
Rod tried but it wasn’t enough.
Jeff Francoeur, having gone completely to seed as a hitter, did not stumble around and embarrass himself in the Whatchamacallit Stadium outfield in the fifth inning. He’s no Daniel Murphy dropping a fly ball in that regard. It’s just that once he picked up Hanley’s hit, he got ambitious and sought to limit Ramirez to a single. Nobody can stand Francoeur’s bat right now, but everybody loves his arm. Jeff’s arm loves the admiration so much that it apparently wanted to justify the praise. It made a helluva throw, and if Hanley Ramirez had been sliding into shallow left field, he would have been out by a mile. Instead, Ramirez was safe at second, secure at third and on his way home in a matter of moments.
Jeff tried but it wasn’t enough.
John Maine isn’t the John Maine of 2009, neither in the sense of being disabled or being somewhat dependable when he wasn’t disabled. John Maine put it in reverse last night, backed up past Oliver Perez territory, even, in the first inning. He backed all the way up to September 28, 1971. That was the last time a Mets pitcher walked the first three batters of a game. That the pitcher 39 years ago was Nolan Ryan (who walked the first four Cardinals he saw and was summarily removed from what became his final Met start) does not make Maine a stealth Hall of Fame candidate. He’d get one out before walking his fourth Marlin, and a three-run first was underway.
Maine did not pull a Perez. He did not instantly and inexorably implode. His second, third and fourth innings were fine. But he did eventually come back for more, and once the fifth inning was over, John was throwing exactly what Oliver was doing the night before: his glove, in the dugout. Perez gave up seven runs and the Mets were done Friday. Maine gave up six runs and the Mets were as good as done Saturday. They had tied it at three while Maine was briefly finding himself. Despite Barajas contracting his double into a single, they made it all the way to two out in the ninth with the tying run at the plate. But that only made Saturday night more exasperating because even with the Marlin lead cut to 7-5, I knew it was hopeless. I knew Angel Pagan was not going to keep the last-ditch rally going. And he didn’t.
I didn’t want to know that. For weeks I haven’t known that. For weeks I’ve been pretty sure the Mets could come back from any circumstance. When Big Pelf finally proved human in Philadelphia and Doc Halladay was operating and the eight-game winning streak of late April was about to turn into the 4-10 (and counting) of May, I heard myself think, “C’mon, let’s get it back.” We were losing 6-0 that Saturday, but I believed anything was possible, even against one of the best starters in baseball. Two weeks later, against the undistinguished Florida bullpen, I just assumed we were doomed.
It’s a different kind of doom than 2009’s thus far. I am empathetic toward it. I’m fed up with Maine yet I maintain some empathy for him. He reminds me of Matt Saracen, onetime starting QB of the Dillon Panthers on Friday Night Lights. Matt is a forlorn character. John is a forlorn character. Not necessarily sad sack like Ollie, but at this point, with gloves flying through the dugout by the fifth inning, it’s hard to discern much difference.
I’d be fuming as much as John as I was at Ollie except we’re running out of starters at whom to fume, so Maine’s gotta get back on the horse and all that. I’d fume at these Mets but they’re generally not fumeable. I root for Barajas’s legs to have a little more oomph and Francoeur’s arm to maybe have a little less of it. I root for Maine to not worry and be happy. I’d root for Ollie, too, if he wasn’t being a jerk about not going to the minors.
They’re still the same guys from the 10-1 fun run. They still have the ability to win more than 78 games and finish above fourth. They have Jose Reyes as a leadoff hitter again, for example. They have Jason Bay on a nine-game hitting streak. They have David Wright hitting hellacious home runs again when not striking out all the time. They don’t win on the road very much, but they’re giving us a show at home (no matter how Charlie Manuel claims they’re achieving it). There was even a Carlos Beltran sighting at Whatchamacallit Stadium Saturday night. He lives and is said to perhaps jog. Someday he may play. Someday he may be up in that third slot in the lineup as the tying run in the ninth.
For today, however, it’s the guys we’ve got. And the guys we’ve got are very much a fourth place team. They’re quite likable, but their immediate prospects are not.
Were you wondering about Bill Simmons’ future plans? I wasn’t, but I found myself interested after reading Jason’s piece at Deadspin.
Two days away: the Two Boots Grand Central debut of AMAZIN’ TUESDAY. Your hosts are Jon Springer of Mets By The Numbers and me. Our very special guests are Taryn Cooper of My Summer Family, Josh Wilker of Cardboard Gods and, hopefully, you. We convene at 7 PM. Details here.
by Greg Prince on 15 May 2010 12:39 am Two things from Friday night’s game stood out as rather unbelievable, not necessarily in order of import to Mets fans.
1. Keith Hernandez said he has better things to do with his day than be driven a half-hour from the Mets’ hotel in Miami to get a haircut, yet I can’t believe Keith Hernandez has anything better to do with his day.
2. Jerry Manuel said the Mets will have to evaluate Oliver Perez’s status in the starting rotation, yet I can’t believe Oliver Perez will be in the Mets’ rotation the next time his turn comes up.
Keith found himself a fine barber on the premises of Whatchamacallit Stadium. His problem was solved. Ours, regarding who will take the ball every fifth day and give us a reasonable chance to compete, must be taken care of next. En route to that solution, the ball must be removed from Oliver Perez’s cold or hot dead fingers.
Ollie’s dead in this rotation. He’s dead on this team. He’s a sympathetic soul and a human being, but get him the hell out of here. Get him to Buffalo or points south. Keep him off the Met mound at all costs…even if it costs more than $20 million over the next season and two-thirds.
This has become a farce. It was a farce when he was granted a three-year, $36 million contract, it was a farce when he was allowed make ineffective start after ineffective start in 2009 and it was high farce when, this week, the excuse made for him in every corner was it was tough to pitch at windy Citi Field last week. I’m sure it was. I’m also sure it was windy for Tim Lincecum, who managed all right. It was windy most of the last homestand. Nobody pitched as poorly as Oliver Perez in that wind. Just you wait, we were told. Just you wait till Ollie reaches the beaches in Miami. He likes that hot weather. He’s had success at Whatchamacallit Stadium with the sacks of Soilmaster stacked up in the dugout.
So it’s Ollie vs. the Marlins in ideal conditions, and guess who had it most ideal Friday night? Ollie’s problem wasn’t windy walks. It was home run upon home run upon home run climbing into the South Florida atmosphere. The weather didn’t cure him. Nothing cures him. We hold our breath with this guy. We wait for the slightest sign of recovery. We pat him on the head when he goes two innings without calamity. That’s fine for your kid’s tee ball league. It’s a disgrace for Oliver Perez, highly compensated professional.
And what are we waiting for exactly? What is the upside here? Oliver Perez hasn’t gone seven innings in a Mets win since August 8, 2008. He’s thrown 31 consecutive non-outstanding starts since then, and it wasn’t like he was burning it up all that much before this extended run of uselessness. Rick Peterson lost him. Dan Warthen lost him. He’s beyond coaching. He’s beyond help at the major league level. Surely there is a league below where somebody can tinker with his mechanics or his mindset or something.
What’s astoundingly obvious is it can’t be done here, not every fifth day, not in games that count.
There’s no sense of urgency with this management. Jerry Manuel trots the same ineffective lineup out there a day after acknowledging it was ineffective. Guess what — it’s still ineffective. Ollie, meanwhile, is a veritable white flag every fifth day. Other than amortization of what used to be an asset, there’s no excuse for him continuing to be trusted to pitch. The excuses must end five games from now. Be it R.A. Dickey or P.T.J. Misch or D.K. Gee or E.J. Korvettes, the Mets must take Ollie to the proverbial returns counter and exchange him for another arm, one slightly more alive, as if any of them could be deader.
The Mets maintain no sure things on their roster and precious few near certainties. Of the quintet of starters in their employ, Johan Santana is a near certainty. Mike Pelfrey is nearing near certainty status. John Maine and Jon Niese, coming at it from different angles, are still finding their place in this world. Oliver Perez is simply lost. He got his weather this time. He says there’s nothing physically wrong with him. His only ill is terrible, terrible, terrible pitching outside the strike zone and within the strike zone. If it’s not bases on balls, it’s bases on gophers. Per Roseanne Roseannadanna long ago, it’s always something. If it’s not one thing, it’s the other. And Oliver Perez sure makes a lot of money for a guy who pitches from hunger.
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