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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 11 May 2010 3:58 pm AMAZIN’ TUESDAY is pulling into a new location! It’s headed to one of New York’s most revered landmarks and one of my favorite places anywhere
On May 18 at 7:00 PM, we will reconvene the rookie sensation of 2009 (and Spring Training 2010) at Two Boots Grand Central, located in the lower dining concourse of the world’s most famous train station, Grand Central Terminal. The move was necessitated by the closing of Two Boots’ Lower East Side location (a moment of silence…), but owner Phil Hartman wanted, like we do, to keep our Mets reading ‘n’ rallying program on track.
What better place to do it than Grand Central, renowned icon of Beaux Arts architecture and the third stop on the 7 to Mets-Willets Point? Phil has his restaurant there, and the spirit as well as the reality of AMAZIN’ TUESDAY will live on adjacent to the 7:48 to Darien. Two Boots Grand Central includes a wall of Mets memorabilia, the Mets on the big screen taking on the Braves at Turner Field, Mets-themed culinary offerings and the popular exchange of one beer for one Mets baseball card per customer.
To do the location its just and inaugural due, Jon Springer of Mets By The Numbers and I are proud to bring you two very special guests: Taryn Cooper (a.k.a. Coop) of Metsopotamian favorite My Summer Family and Josh Wilker of Cardboard Gods, the beloved blog that is now a highly praised book. They, along with Jon, me and hopefully you will engage in some delectable baseball talk to go with Two Boots’ excellent pizza and such.
Feel free to admire Grand Central on the way in — and ignore those Yankees fans headed to Westchester.
Two Boots Grand Central is in the Lower Dining Concourse of Grand Central Terminal, 42nd Street and Park Avenue, accessible via Metro-North as well as the 4, 5, 6, Times Square Shuttle and, of course, the 7 trains. Phone: 212/557-7992.
by Jason Fry on 11 May 2010 12:18 am …Dave Howard can spin anything.
Here’s the master, talking about the trash seen piling up on the field at various points in recent days: “It’s sort of good now that there is debris to be blown out there. It shows people are spending some money and buying food and drink and enjoying themselves.”
Truly, Dave Howard’s talents are wasted on the Mets. He ought to be tackling larger issues in need of a honey-tongued makeover. Like global warming (“the majesty of hurricanes is sort of good to witness, particularly for people who don’t normally get to see them thanks to old-fashioned weather patterns”), AIDS (“anything that allows us to display our compassion for others is sort of good, even if it involves dying”) or civil wars in Africa (“it’s sort of good those kids are learning to shoot straight and develop bonds outside the family, now that their family members have been executed by drug-crazed rebels”).
Happily, Dave continues to employ his talents closer to home, where we can enjoy them and have our lives be bettered by them. We are truly blessed.
Seriously — Dave, I’m sure you love the Mets. I’ll assume you’re good at your job. But every time you talk to a member of the media, you make the Mets look smarmy and pathetic.
Please stop doing that.
by Greg Prince on 10 May 2010 12:09 pm [T]his appreciation for diverse views may also come in handy as a diehard Mets fan serving alongside her new colleague-to-be, Yankees fan Justice Sotomayor — who I believe has ordered a pinstripe robe for the occasion.
—President Barack Obama, May 10, 2010
Elena Kagan has been nominated to serve as the next Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. And Elena Kagan is a Mets fan.
Let’s be nonpartisan about this. Let’s celebrate that the president’s choice to be one of nine members of the highest court in the land has already shown Amazin’ judgment. Let’s hope that if confirmed she disbars Paul Schrieber from ever umpiring again.
Can Supreme Court justices do that? She’s a Mets fan whose robe will definitely not be pinstriped. It will be Mets black, with blue and orange undertones. Constitutional parameters notwithstanding, she can do what she wants.
Bill Clinton came to Shea Stadium to retire Jackie Robinson’s number. He kept coming to coming games after he left office. The George Bushes were related to one of the Mets’ original directors, G. Herbert Walker. The first George Bush threw out of the first ball of the 1985 season to Gary Carter. The second George Bush appeared on the Shea Goodbye DVD recalling attending Spring Training at St. Pete with Uncle Herbie in 1962.
This is nonpartisan. This is about the Mets being a part of the lives of the last three presidents. Now a fourth has done more than go to a game. He’s got a Mets fan potentially making nation-altering decisions. She’s already decided to be a Mets fan, which is pretty good. We as a nation can take our chances from there.
Barack Obama is a White Sox fan. He graduated from Columbia University in 1983. I’m reading a biography of him right now that fails to include an anecdote about how, as a senior, he and a friend decided to break the tension of studying for finals by hopping on the 1 downtown to the 7 at Times Square and heading to Shea Stadium to see Tom Seaver early in his second go-round as a Met, not on Opening Day, but on a chilly April night when there were only 4,000 people in attendance. It’s not included, I’m guessing, because it never happened, but I’d like to think it did.
“It was a makeup doubleheader,” the president recalls in my fantasy passage. “Tickets were cheap, which was good, because we didn’t have much money, being students and all. Yet nobody minded that we sat in those orange seats that were always empty on TV. We could only stay for a little of the second game — had to get back to the apartment to study.” Obama, in my dream bio, would then go on to mention how he met Seaver at a White Sox alumni function when he was an Illinois state senator and how Seaver remembered tripling that night more than he remembered pitching a shutout. Then, turning serious, Obama recalls the perfect form form for which Tom Seaver was known (“I used to watch him on the game of the week in Hawaii and I loved how he used his legs”) and how he adapted late in his career when he didn’t have his fastball, and how we, as Americans, can take a lesson from that.
Barack Obama never said any of that. Never went to a Mets game while attending Columbia as far as I know. Too bad. All presidents should go to Mets games. If Ronald Reagan were still alive, he could urge Jeff Wilpon to tear down that wall in left. If Franklin Roosevelt managed the Mets, we’d have nothing to fear from seeing Gary Matthews and Frank Catalanotto soak up at-bats because he would institute a New Deal and trade them both. If William Henry Harrison had managed the Mets…oh wait, he did — reincarnated as Salty Parker (and again as Mike Cubbage).
Republicans, Democrats, Whigs, whoever. Now is the time for all good Mets to come to the aid of their country. And vice-versa.
A Supreme Court justice may be a better fit for the Mets than a president. The Mets exist mostly because of the brilliant mind of a lawyer named Bill Shea. Supreme Court justices are supposed to be shielded from the day-to-day nonsense of political bickering. We like to sit quietly in our chambers and contemplate the great issues of the day, like why is Oliver Perez still here? And let us not forget the note Justice Potter Stewart’s clerk delivered to him on October 10, 1973, one Stewart shared with Justice Harry Blackmun:
V.P. AGNEW JUST RESIGNED!!
METS 2 REDS 0.
The Mets would go on to win the game and the pennant. Spiro Agnew would be replaced by Gerald Ford, who would replace Richard Nixon. Nixon went to Mets games as he lived out his political exile in New Jersey. In July 1990, he told Larry King the Mets were going to the World Series: “The Mets will make it because of pitching.” Like Nixon versus Kennedy, the Mets finished second. Still, he did shake Tom Seaver’s hand at a reception for major league All-Stars in 1969.
“Oh,” Nixon greeted him, “you’re the young man who won for the Mets even when they were losing.”
A good Tom Seaver anecdote helps every president look good. Failing that, putting a Mets fan on the Supreme Court is a step in the right direction. Good luck to Elena Kagan, one of ours. If she’s confirmed by the Senate, and her gavel happens to slip and conk Sonia Sotomayor on her Yankee-lovin’ noggin during some future oral argument, well, let’s just chalk that up to a lack of pine tar on the handle.
by Jason Fry on 9 May 2010 10:27 pm By the late innings it was pretty clear that someone wasn’t going to win today’s game as much as they’d survive it. Oliver Perez was awful. Raul Valdes, admittedly asked to do something difficult, could not. Jenrry Mejia failed, as young men finding their way must. David Wright did nothing at the plate except scream at an umpire for his own recent shortcomings. And in the end, the fatal mistake wound up on the Mets’ side of the ledger. Which you had to admit was altogether fitting: The Giants were bad; the Mets were worse.
Well, not all the Giants were bad. Aaron Rowand hit one to the right place in the wind tunnel that was Citi Field at the right time. Brian Wilson correctly deduced that his catcher was the only person on the field he could trust to record a putout, and pitched accordingly. And earlier, before everything became the stuff of farce on both sides, there was Tim Lincecum.
There’s a pleasure in baseball when it’s played wisely and beautifully, and I’d argue even more pleasure in seeing someone play it who hasn’t been altered by the dead hand of baseball tradition. Like every other religion, baseball itself is beautiful and blameless, but ceaselessly dragged down by the failings of its human institutions.
A couple of years ago, Tom Verducci wrote a wonderful article for Sports Illustrated about Lincecum, one he used for a deeper inquiry into the science of pitching. Lincecum is about my height and build — next to the likes of Mike Pelfrey or Barry Zito he looks like, well, a blogger. (Though let’s not take this too far — he’s a superb athletic who’s gymnast enough to be able to walk on his hands, where I can barely stand upright.) His success comes not from size or power — the right arm replaced by a genetic thunderbolt — but from the perfection of his mechanics. Everything about his motion, from the odd cock of his head to his enormous stride to the vicious downward snap of his arm, is designed to maximize the torque and power with which a human being can throw a baseball. Tim Lincecum is the equation that solves a knotty physics problem, and leaves you smiling at the elegance and beauty of the answer.
The wonder of Lincecum is that he went from Little League hurler to Cy Young pitcher without anybody screwing him up. Because that’s a lot of what organized baseball is: an initial winnowing of players who don’t fit ancient, preconceived notions of who is what, followed by ceaseless attempts to dismiss or diminish anyone who escapes that first cut with some individuality intact.
In discussing the mechanics of Lincecum and Mark Prior, Verducci delivers a stinging indictment of organized baseball: Even when discussing mechanics, most scouts and front-office types are really discussing body types, extending the phrenology of the Good Face to the region below the neck. Prior basically pitched from the waist up, with horrible mechanics that put ungodly stress on his shoulder, but was praised as mechanically sound because he looked like what baseball people think a power pitcher ought to look like. Lincecum was passed over by team after team that criticized his mechanics because he looked like a blogger. Miraculously, he got results so quickly that he rocketed through the minor leagues: He pitched 30-odd innings in the Northwest and California leagues in 2006, destroyed the PCL in early 2007 and was in the big leagues with just 62.2 innings in the bushes. That meant there wasn’t time for some Pleistocene pitching coach to force him to pitch like Mark Prior, or cast him as a ROOGY because he was small and slung the ball. He escaped all that and landed at the pinnacle of his profession before anyone could convince everybody else he couldn’t do it.
I knew Lincecum was taught his unique delivery by his father, and had recalled that the father was a Boeing engineer. Which made for a neat story, for Lincecum’s delivery is the kind of thing an extremely smart, intellectually rigorous aerospace engineer might have created.But I hadn’t remembered things quite right. Lincecum’s father, Chris, is indeed smart and intellectually rigorous and does work for Boeing — but in parts inventory. Chris Lincecum is of a similar build to his son, and taught himself to pitch the same way. He taught his older son Sean his mechanics on a backyard mound, then trained Tim. Every start of Tim’s was videotaped and analyzed. His full ride to the University of Washington was contingent on no coach messing with him. “He was the prototype, and I’m Version 2.0,” the younger Lincecum told Verducci. (If that sounds uncomfortably close to the stage-manager dad, a la Gregg Jefferies, Lincecum seems to have always been a good teammate, and to be very much his own person.)
Lincecum wasn’t perfect today — he had trouble commanding the fastball early, and got touched up late. But he kept at it, tinkering with his pitches and repeating that perfect motion, while Oliver Perez fell off mounds and endangered batboys and looked like the pitching equivalent of a weekend golfer carving divots and slinging clubs and shanking balls into the woods. It was a pleasure to watch the other guy, even if he was wearing the wrong uniform.
But then Lincecum is always a pleasure to watch. He does backflips for fun in the clubhouse and doesn’t ice his arm after starts. He is utterly himself, atop a sport that views those who dare to be themselves with fear and horror. It makes you appreciate him all the more.
by Greg Prince on 8 May 2010 8:37 pm It was one of those days when it’s a minute away from snowing and there’s this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it. And this bag was, like, dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. And that’s the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and…this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever.
—Ricky, the video-obsessed neighbor, American Beauty
Plastic bags floated above Citi Field. Everything lighter than a Collector’s Cup floated above Citi Field. The last item that anybody watched float above the relentlessly windy Citi tableau was a 1-0 fastball thrown by Guillermo Mota to Henry Blanco. Mota didn’t give it much movement. Blanco gave it plenty, and an afternoon that could have blown either way was whisked along most satisfyingly into the victory column.
The wind — not a cold one, praise be, but as persistent as the left field wall is tall — roared for eleven innings. The Mets’ offense simpered for many of them. Johan Santana was stronger than the gusts that surrounded him for seven and two-thirds. He should have been granted an opportunity to finish the eighth. Had he succeeded, the day would have been successful sooner. But if the day had been shorter, we never would have been compelled to hail Henry Blanco for that which he hit very long and tall enough, so we shall, without further ado.
HAIL HENRY!
Gotta love journeyman catchers who hit game-winning home runs to left, whether it’s remarkably often or once in a very great while. If I were as sturdy and indefatigable as Henry Blanco, I’d have inked my arms in tribute by now, but there’s only one Henry Blanco, and I ain’t it. That job is taken, as was this game from the grubby mitts of the Giants who had obnoxiously snatched it from Fernando Nieve and Pedro Feliciano, who had no business gingerly handling it when it was Johan’s to win or lose in the eighth.
But that’s all swirling trash under the Bill Shea Bridge now. Everything kind of drifts away gently in the shadow of a walkoff homer.
There was a point Saturday as I sat and sat and sat in Promenade when the contest below me felt as if it was going to waft into that category known as Games It Really Sucks (or blows) To Lose. The Mets maintained no given rally for more than about four minutes. The one instance when it seemed they’d get lucky was when a no man’s land double followed a no man’s land single. Had the double preceded the single, again, two fewer innings and much less worry would have ensued.
Then, however, we likely wouldn’t be so emphatic in declaring what we must be shouted from the windiest of rooftops again:
HAIL HENRY!
Better to Hail the Met Hero than duck from the hail I half-expected when today’s forecast included thunder, lightning and wind. Only wind showed up in gale force. But what’s a little wind when there’s a lot of Henry? Better Hail than gale any day.
“Sometimes,” as Ricky in American Beauty told Jane, “there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it, like my heart’s going to cave in.”
I could always take a little more beauty like that which was presented by Henry Blanco in the eleventh inning Saturday.
***
And speaking of beautiful Americans as they relate to May 8, happy birthday to Harry Truman, who was born in Missouri 126 years ago; John Maine, who is now a 29-year-old starting pitcher for the New York Mets; and the greatest co-blogger I know, Jason Fry, who’s whatever age he says he is.
Tune into The Happy Recap Radio Show, 6 PM, Sunday, to hear Jason and Me talk, oh, probably Mets baseball. Listen here.
by Jason Fry on 8 May 2010 12:15 am Well!
The endgame of tonight’s completely thrilling, slightly silly, altogether amazin’ Mets win was the perfect culmination of a sloppy, wacky, thoroughly entertaining affair, one that saw Mike Pelfrey fail just enough not to succeed and the Giants’ Jonathan Sanchez succeed just enough not to fail. The early frames brought that rather uncertain contest, as well as the latest chapters in the lavishly illustrated storybook TALL TALES OF IKE DAVIS, BASEBALL HERO. (Didja know Ike lives in an apartment in Yorkville with a blue and orange ox? It’s true — I heard Ike hangs his laundry on the beast’s horns. Big apartment.)
Every time I feel my affection for Ike threaten to topple over into the stuff of besotted fan bromance, it’s like Mike Vail and Daniel Murphy pop up on each shoulder, tut-tutting about small sample sizes. But goodness is there a lot to like. I’m all for tape-measure home runs, but what impresses me even more is how few rookie jitters Davis seems to have. He works the count like — well, like Daniel Murphy. (See? There it is happening again.) And at first base he’s not just smooth, but smart — witness the game a while back in which he unhurriedly arranged his long legs and considerable wingspan in foul territory to give the catcher a better angle on a dropped third strike. A reliable first baseman has a calming effect on a team, and the Mets have been without that sense of calm on the other end of throws from the infield since John Olerud.
That ninth inning was anything but calm, though — it was an overstuffed parade of weird, goofy, unfortunate and thrilling plays. Consider the following, all of which might have stood out as the lone thing to remember from your average run-of-the-mill May game:
* Against John Bowker with one out in the ninth, Francisco Rodriguez’s 1-2 curve is pretty obviously a strike. K-Rod is twirling somewhere between the mound and first when Hunter Wendelstedt gives a little shoulder fake but otherwise remains still, forcing Francisco to reel himself back onto the mound mid-pirouette. Instead of trudging back to the dugout as the home fans began to rise and cheer, Bowker is even in the count against an upset closer.
* Two foul balls later, either Gary or Keith or Ron (I don’t remember which one, because I was crabbing about K-Rod needing strike four) notes that Rod Barajas is calling for an inside fastball but has been shaken off by Frankie, who wants to throw the change-up. That’s not a good idea, I think to myself on the couch. WHAM! Bowker swings at a high change and the ball stitches a line across the sky, vanishes from Citi Field, and comes sizzling back to earth in the middle of the Iron Triangle, where it strikes an eminent-domain lawyer who is using a dented Honda Civic door to fend off three chop-shop owners armed with welding torches, after which it is devoured by a feral dog. OK, not quite, but Bowker does hit it a really long fucking way. Tie game. Pelfrey’s work wasted. Boooooo.
* With two out, Aaron Rowand on second and Mark DeRosa at the plate, DeRosa fouls a ball off with Rowand running to make the count 3-2. Except he doesn’t: Paul Schrieber has called a balk on K-Rod. One you don’t see every day in an inning with no lack of them.
* DeRosa then hits a little worm-killer up the middle, a Luis Sojo special that seems like a cinch to bring home Rowand and leave me writing a really angry post about Francisco Rodriguez. Except Luis Castillo flops onto the outfield grass, slightly on the shortstop side, and just corrals it with the tip of his glove, leaving Rowand skidding like a cartoon character on the downhill side of third base and scampering back to it. Still tied, but Pablo Sandoval tramping to the plate, and K-Rod doesn’t throw high fastballs. Uh-oh.
* So of course the Kung Fu Panda hits a pop-up that’s clearly ticketed for the first-base seats. No, make that the dugout roof. No, make that the dugout. No, make that Ike Davis’s mitt where it sits at the end of Ike’s just-long-enough arm, followed by Ike toppling over the dugout railing like a construction crane, his body pivoting around Good Samaritan Alex Cora, his feet winding up more or less firmly planted on the dugout floor, and holding up a mitt with white showing in it. “And he sticks the landing!” crows Gary Cohen. (Ike then picks his teeth with a sequoia. At least that’s how I heard it.)
As if that weren’t enough, we got a bottom of the ninth.
* Jeff Francoeur cues an ugly little excuse-me hit to the left side of the field, and is clearly safe, except Angel Hernandez — grinning evilly before stuffing a wad of dollar bills into his back pocket to keep his autographed Michael Tucker photo company – calls Francoeur out. Gary is apoplectic, and apparently about to begin reciting all the times Angel Hernandez has screwed the Mets. Except the replay shows that Francoeur was actually out. Even amid this inning’s wonders, Angel Hernandez getting an important call right when it involves the Mets might be the most amazing thing of all.
* Ike Davis takes one step north, creating Long Island Sound, and plucks a peak from the Adirondacks. He shapes it into a granite bat and smacks his third home run of the night. Oh wait, he just walks. Very calmly, though.
* Rod Barajas — who has a home run himself tonight, as well as a smashed finger that causes him to obviously grimace whenever he does anything — gets a 1-0 hanging slider from Sergio Romo. This afternoon Mark Simon — part of the very, very good crew covering the Mets for ESPN New York — noted that the Mets hadn’t had a walkoff home run since David Wright made the Padres very sad in August 2008, meaning they’d never had one at Citi Field. I thought of this as Barajas came to the plate. I really did.
Anyway, Barajas squares up Romo’s hanging slider and hits it into the air, as Barajas is wont to do. The ball seems like it will follow the longest parabola a ball hit to left field in Citi Field can follow without being a home run. DeRosa is going to press his entire body against the fence, lift his glove as high as he possibly can, wait for a moment, and have the ball whistle into the very top of his mitt. He will hurl the ball back to the infield and let his shoulders slump in amazed relief. Ike will calmly return to first and frown. Barajas will shake his head and be consoled in the dugout. Those of us in the stands or on couches will boo and/or roll around in dismay, while those of us near keyboards or smartphones will furiously begin pecking out typo-ridden diatribes about dismantling the Great Wall of Flushing. It’s going to be very disappointing.
But no, it’s just over the fence, sending fans leaping and yelling and waving their arms and Barajas floating around the bases for the receiving line and happy helmet pounding at home plate. Mets win, and all’s right in the world. Just another tall tale of Ike and Rod. Except it’s all true. So I heard.
by Greg Prince on 7 May 2010 1:37 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: Network Associates Coliseum
BETTER KNOWN AS: Oakland Coliseum
VISITS: 1
VISITED: July 5, 2001
CHRONOLOGY: 23rd of 34
RANKING: 26th of 34
When you watch a baseball game on television, you have a sense of what the playing field looks like. You recognize the outfield walls, the scoreboard, the seats behind home and the dugout. Yet you rarely get any kind of definitive look at the exterior. If you’re not dealing with an already iconic ballpark, you have no idea what it’s like to approach the place.
In the case of what was then known as Network Associates Coliseum, just as well. I’ve never encountered less grandeur en route to a major league stadium. That hoary quote from Gertrude Stein was obviously written with the home of the Oakland A’s in mind.
There is no there there. It didn’t feel like there would be when Stephanie and I stepped off a BART train from San Francisco nine years ago and looked for something approximating a ballpark. Normally I’d just follow the crowd, but for a Thursday afternoon game in Oakland, there was no crowd. There was barely any “there”. There was, however, a bridge. There were some panhandlers. There was then a loading dock. Then there was an enormous pile of concrete.
That’s the Coliseum. Welcome to A’s baseball. It’s going on in there somewhere.
Perhaps it was because the outside was so uninspiring that once we were inside “the Net” (or as our local friends called it, “the Ass”), it actually surpassed our expectations. We expected a quarry, I suppose. We got a pretty decent setting for baseball, all things considered.
You had to take a few things into consideration as you settled in for a day of baseball in Oakland. You had to take football into consideration. That’s what the city had to do to lure the Raiders back from their extended Los Angeles stay in 1995. They built Al Davis a wall of luxury boxes that killed the view of the mountains over the center field fence. “Mount Davis,” they called this atrocity. It was the moral equivalent of Mr. Burns blocking out the sun and plunging Springfield into eternal darkness.
But it wasn’t the practical equivalent, because while you couldn’t see anything beyond Mount Davis, you got plenty of sun. The sun never stopped pounding us, which was too bad because having unnecessarily bought tickets well in advance, I got us some great seats behind home plate. They were so great, my fair lady of a wife — Scandinavian heritage, burns easily — wanted no part of them. Darn. We asked a friendly usher if it was OK if we moved back some (there’s a request I never made at Shea). No problem, he said, pointing us to some still very good and blessedly shady seats a little further back of home. Paid attendance that day was under 13,000; it wasn’t like we’d be sitting in somebody else’s seats.
Lots of concrete, lots of sun and lots of green. Green, green grass in particular. The one thing I’d learned watching A’s games on TV over the years was a surfeit of foul territory made for a verdant festival of popouts. Surely it frustrated batters, but at least it went well with the A’s caps. You can’t go wrong with green in baseball. And while you could go wrong with width in the foul territory department, I noticed and liked the extraordinarily wide concourses behind the stands. They were darker than Shea, but they were twice as wide. If you needed to escape the midday sun some more, there was refuge to be had.
While I didn’t know what it looked like outside until we got there, the Coliseum felt familiar enough as we waited for the game against the Angels to begin. The A’s were a featured actor on the October stage for half the ‘70s, so whenever I’d find an A’s card in my Topps pack, I probably lingered on it a little longer than I would have if a given Athletic had been a White Sock or a Twin. One feature that felt very familiar was the last row of the upper grandstand — it just cut off, like they ran out of money for it. Surely I’d seen it on a card in 1974 or thereabouts. The Coliseum in those portrayals always looked like Bobby Brady’s backyard to me in those days (sans the Astroturf lawn) and that memory rushed back in 2001.
Also back, not shockingly, was my awareness of the four-game cameo this building had in Mets history. The Mets have lost only one World Series on the road in their existence, and it was here. Up close, it didn’t bother me. In some twisted way, I was happy to forge that connection on a stray July day 3,000 miles from home. Sure, we lost, but we lost to a great team (or so I told myself until 2005). It didn’t bother me that this was where George Stone went unused and Willie Mays was blinded by the light and Augie Donatelli was simply blind to Ray Fosse not tagging Buddy Harrelson. The Mets kind of mattered in the scheme of things here. This was the only place besides Shea for which there was a banner hanging that said “1973”. This was the only place besides Shea on whose DiamondVision highlights from the 1973 postseason got a workout — though I booed World Series MVP Reggie Jackson when he was presented as A of the Day.
It had been 28 years. I think the rivalry had died down. My Mets cap was greeted with a smile from the guy who sold me my program. He was friendly. The usher who let us move about freely was friendly. The vendor who sold frozen dairy products may have been unnerved, however, when I felt compelled to resort to Default Flushing Etiquette to flag him down.
“MAAWWLLT!!!” I screamed at him. I was just trying to get his attention the way I might have at Shea. I mean, c’mon, that’s how we do it, right? The mellowness inherent in a Northern Californian afternoon was lost on me. He was a whole two rows away when I bellowed, and with few of the 12,719 on hand vying for his attention, he looked a little hurt that I yelled at him. Nothing personal, pal, we just want your MAAWWLLT…I mean malt.
He was nice about it. They were all nice about it. When you’re Oakland competing with San Francisco, the Coliseum competing with Pac Bell, the A’s (muddled under .500 at the time) competing with the Giants and record-pursuing Barry Bonds, you’d better be nice. Only baseball-oriented tourists like us, on an otherwise all-San Fran vacation, were going the extra few miles to be here. Whatever it was that kept fans out of the Coliseum, it wasn’t a bad attitude. Mount Davis notwithstanding, there was no Black Hole here. A’s Nation — including the fans who teamed on the occasional Let’s Go OAK-land chant and particularly the lady who for some reason thought I would know whether Johnny Damon was Korean — was comprised of nice people doing their best to create a nice atmosphere, even as the A’s went down lamely to the Angels. It left us in a good mood before we braved the pedestrian bridge and its panhandlers to return to the BART and the other side of the bay.
You could do worse on a Thursday afternoon in the middle of almost nowhere.
by Greg Prince on 6 May 2010 8:54 pm  Hey, neat? Tomorrow night, according to the periodic table of elements better known as the Citi Field Seating & Pricing Chart, is a Bronze game on the Mets’ home schedule. Tickets are priced from $15 in Promenade Reserved to $460 in Delta Club Platinum (Delta Club Platinum is, of course, the finest faucet money can buy). The $445 range encompasses 41 different seating levels, some more Terrific than others. You can spend $112 to get high on Baseline Box Gold, roam to Caesars Club Silver for $96 or just go with something that actually sounds like a seating section in a ballpark, like Left Field Reserved, for $40. Your choice.
What will you get for between $15 and $460 Friday night? You’ll get the Mets playing the Giants, Mike Pelfrey (shoulder tightness willing) versus Jonathan Sanchez, a matchup of a team that’s been on a bit of a roll — a 7-2 spurt has elevated San Fran into first place — posing a challenge to our boys who have cooled down since their last historically hot homestand. Depending on how much you value baseball, it’s a perfectly attractive game and you are, by all means, encouraged to consider purchasing whichever ticket fits your desires and/or budget.
Also, if you buy a ticket and enter among the first 25,000 ticketholders, you will receive a cup. A plastic cup. A cup with a picture of Johan Santana, one of the Mets logos and the words LET’S GO METS. It is “presented” by the company that makes the sausages sold at Citi Field, so I suspect the company’s trademark will appear, too.
You may want a cup that features those characteristics. You might say, “Hey, neat!” Johan Santana is still, recent unnerving drop in velocity notwithstanding, a pretty popular guy with Mets fans, and the whole notion of LET’S GO METS presumably continues to maintain resonance with the same audience. I personally don’t give a damn about the company that makes the sausages, but you know the old saying: There’s two things in this world you never want to let people see how you make ’em — laws and the Mets’ promotional schedule.
You may want that cup when you come face to face with it. When you’ve paid between $15 and $460 for that ticket and then attempted to self-scan it five or six times before the scanner beeps and you are permitted to pass through the Kozy Shack turnstiles (after you and your belongings have been searched, patted down and wanded), you may be wordlessly handed that cup and indeed say, “Hey, neat!” Or you may say, “Oh.” Or you may say nothing. Again, your call.
What I’m guessing you won’t say is, “Oh boy, a plastic cup! This was that little extra bonus that attracted me to the stadium tonight.”
I don’t think you’re gonna say that at all. Even if it’s a most handsome cup, I don’t think a single ticket buyer will have been moved to dig deep because of a plastic cup. Even if it’s got Johan Santana’s picture. Even if it says LET’S GO METS. Even if you’re a fan of the sausage company.
You know what this particular promotion is billed as? Collector’s Cup Night. That implies there is an active effort underway among Mets fans to collect plastic cups. That there are vibrant, growing plastic cup collections all about Metsopotamia. That there is something to collecting plastic cups beyond not throwing them into the trash or leaving them under your seat.
I have, mere feet from where I type, probably a dozen different plastic cups featuring the Mets logo and a complementary design highlighting a given year’s star players or marketing slogan. They come from disparate and sometimes desperate Mets seasons. They came with a Diet Pepsi, most likely. Elsewhere in the Prince household, there are more Mets cups of that nature. Some predate Pepsi’s Mets sponsorship and came with a Diet Coke, maybe even a Diet Rite if we reach back far enough. I like to display them here and there. I don’t like to throw them away. When my wife decided to indulge her latent green thumb a few months ago, she asked if she could use one of them to pot a plant. Sure, I said, we have plenty of them. After a fashion, they are not really fit to drink from anyway, so you might as well fill one of them with dirt and seeds and hope for the best.
But I gotta tell ya, I don’t collect plastic Mets cups. Nobody collects plastic Mets cups. We collect stuff with Mets logos, sure. And we keep our cups because they have Mets logos, but it’s not a hobby or a passion or an obsession, not one I’ve encountered in my Met travels. Therefore, to host a six-game homestand and have as your only promotional date a night dedicated to giving out plastic cups…I can’t see that working.
This is the best the Mets could do? Collector’s Cup Night? It’s a false construct. Nobody seeks out these cups. They’re not collected. Collections of them just happen. At best, you go for a soda and you decide to spring for the difference between what the soda would cost in a paper cup and what it will cost in a plastic cup. When I told Stephanie that Friday was going to be Collector’s Cup Night, she asked, “Don’t you get that with the ten-dollar soda?” Yeah, I said, something like that.
You wind up with the cup because you bought the soda. Or you wind up with the cup because somebody else bought the soda and you’re not too proud to scoop it up when that person doesn’t care enough to take it home. It’s not why you went to the game. It’s just what you wound up with when you left. That, I am convinced, is the extent of plastic cup collecting.
You don’t buy a ticket priced anywhere from $15 to $460 so you can get the Collector’s Cup. You’ll take it if they’re dispensing it. You’ll be damned if you don’t get what’s coming to you for the price of your admission. You’d prefer not to be Fan No. 25,001 and not get your cup.
But no way — no way in hell — are you going to look at your pocket schedule or visit mets.com and say, “I think I’m going to go Friday, May 7, because it’s Collector’s Cup Night.” No, it’s not going to happen. And the organization that plans promotional nights has to have a hunch that it’s not going to happen. That organization, in concert with its sausage supplier, might want to sit down for as many as five minutes and discuss the matter. They might want to acknowledge to one another that a Collector’s Cup is neither a legitimate enticement to buy a ticket nor a suitable reward for having bought a ticket.
It’s a plastic cup. You get it with the ten-dollar soda.
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• Though “Attend Collector’s Cup Night” just missed the cut, check out the newly released paperback version of Matt Silverman’s 100 Things Mets Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die. It has been updated with more thoughts, more facts and more things to know and do. I’m particularly partial to No. 81: “Read the Mets,” but all hundred are top-notch.
• Today is New York Met and New York Giant icon Willie Mays’s 79th birthday. If the Mets are marking the occasion during the visit of the Giants this weekend, they are keeping it a well-hidden secret. Nevertheless, you can celebrate the life of the Say Hey Kid by reading this great story about Willie and a member of the Mets’ broadcasting family by James H. (Jim) Burns.
• AMAZIN’ TUESDAY is returning May 18, 7:00 PM, to a NEW LOCATION: The Two Boots at Grand Central Terminal. We’ll have more details next week, but mark down the date, the time and the special guest speakers: Taryn “Coop” Cooper of My Summer Family and Josh Wilker of Cardboard Gods.
• Every day is a good day to read Metstradamus, who can now be found at a new URL: metstradamusblog.com. Belated fifth-anniversary wishes to the only blog that deserves a permanent place in the Angel Berroa Rotunda.
• Reminder for fans of Jane Jarvis’s music, Mets-related and otherwise: a jazz memorial in her honor is taking place at St. Peter’s Church in Manhattan this Monday evening. Details here.
• Reminder for those who love New York and want to know more about it: Peter Laskowich is kicking off his spring and summer history tours next weekend, May 15 and 16. Some are baseball-centered, others give it to you without horsehide. Every one I’ve been on has literally and figuratively been a trip. You can get in touch with Peter through New York Dynamic to learn more..
• Finally, heartiest of congratulations to Sharon Chapman on having reached her initial imposing fundraising goal of $3,600 for the Tug McGraw Foundation. Thanks to readers like you and a lot of other generous folks, Sharon has earned her entry into the New York Marathon this fall. Befitting someone who has undertaken a long run, Sharon’s not done trying to help out the fight against brain cancer and other insidious diseases. She is going to try to jack up her total to a Tuglike $4,500 and we will, as Official Wrist Sponsor, continue in the coming months to keep you apprised of her and the Foundation’s activities. We’ll also be sharing a few more Tug stories along the way. If you can, please donate here.
by Greg Prince on 5 May 2010 7:17 pm Baseball is a first pitch being thrown at 12:35 in the afternoon, and a schlubby fan attempting to follow it while working. A decision to listen on the radio because things are going well for his team while avoiding the TV. That’s baseball. And so is a kid from Defiance, Ohio, pitching for the first time in Cincinnati.
There’s a man in Connecticut who will confirm a forty-seven year-old pitcher from Philadelphia won a game for Chicago at New York twenty-four years ago. That’s baseball. So is the scout reporting that a seventeen-year-old pitcher in the Dominican is a coming Dwight Gooden. Baseball is a marathon and a sprint. A game of turning tides. It’s the pitcher who strikes out the side in his first go-round making you wonder why he doesn’t have a better lifetime record. It’s that same pitcher walking in a run three innings later, answering your earlier question.
Every skill is measured. Every heroic, every failing is seen and cheered, or booed. And then becomes a statistic. A veteran outfielder, a tired old man of thirty-five whose last name is amended with Junior, breaks a slump of zero for fifteen and scores his team’s first run. By day’s end, he will have begun a new slump. A reliever who is still new to these major leagues pitches to nine batters and retires them all. Another reliever, who has pitched in every other game his team has played for the past two years, throws only two pitches and is declared the loser.
In baseball democracy shines its clearest. The only race that matters is the race to the bag. A second baseman hustles to first in his first at-bat, jogs his next time up and trots the time after that when it becomes apparent he has no need to run. His double play partner, a shortstop who hasn’t hit as many as ten home runs in any of the past six seasons, emerges as the slugger who ends the game.
Baseball is a star third baseman removed to ensure that his seldom-used backup who has just pinch-hit remains in the game because he is the emergency catcher. It’s worrying that that move will backfire and having that worry rendered moot when the game ends two pitches later. It’s a stolen base attempt against a catcher who has thrown out every base runner who has dared to run on him. It’s questioning that attempt until a television replay shows the runner took too big a lead and got too good a jump to resist trying to steal. It’s the catcher negating the lead and the jump with an even more outstanding throw. That’s baseball.
Names are baseball, names that seem close, like Johnny and Jonathon and Jonny, and names that couldn’t seem closer, like Henry and Jenrry. It’s Laynce and Drew and Angel and Hisanori and a Francisco on each side. It’s searching for a nickname for the previous night’s hero who doesn’t get to start because today is a day game. It’s an exotic name like Catalanotto belonging to a man who hails from a place called Smithtown. It’s the man from Smithtown singling to lead off the ninth for his first hit in a week and his fourth hit of the year and ultimately scoring the tying run, the second run he has scored after a month of play. It’s an enormous run when it goes up on the board, but it’s forgotten when his team loses. That’s baseball, too.
Baseball is the quiet frustration of Jason Bay. The mile-wide grin of Jeff Francoeur. The second-guessing applied to Jerry Manuel. It’s the wind current that blows to right at Great American Ball Park, a breeze that draws everybody’s attention until the game-deciding home run clanks off the left field foul pole.
Baseball is just a game as simple as a ball and bat. Yet, as complex as we who blog wish to make it. A sport, a business and sometimes almost even a religion. It’s a pastime, an obsession, a subject of endless fascination. It’s what we regret when our team loses, it’s what we wait for to return in two days when we realize there’s no game tomorrow.
Why, the inspiring tale of Jose Reyes working his way back from a hamstring injury. And then being told he can’t move a muscle because he has a thyroid condition. That’s baseball. So are the voices that sing his name when he is cleared to return to the game he plays so beautifully.
Baseball is chewing your thumb, taking a deep breath, clicking refresh, balancing your logic with your superstitions, wondering how a text message can be more important than the next pitch and “Lazy Mary”.
Baseball is knowing people better than you would otherwise, feeling you know those you’ve never met and, at its best, baseball is a self-described tongue-tied kid from Georgia growing up to be an announcer and touching millions with his voice and his kindness, probably never grasping how much he will be missed when he is gone.
This is a game for America. Still a game for America, this baseball. And Ernie Harwell, we thank you for making as much of it as you did.
Do yourself a favor and read the real thing here, and a glorious take on the man behind it here.
by Greg Prince on 5 May 2010 9:49 am 10. R-Bar
Among the many things that make my skin crawl regarding Alex Rodriguez is how lazy he made us all in conjuring nicknames for baseball players. First initial of first name, first syllable of last name? That’s so much easier than thinking! A-Rod could also be known as Z-Zzz. Yet I’ve been guilty of it myself, imploring, among others these past few years, P-Lo, C-Bel, C-Del and J-Bay to come through in the C-Lutch. R-Bar doesn’t really work for Rod Barajas, even though he most definitely came through in the clutch Tuesday night with the ninth-inning homer that pre-empted more creeping Red Dread (or R-Dread). Besides, R-Bar puts me in mind of the old Roy Rogers Double R Bar Burger, which might be appropriate in light of the way Rod pulled the Trigger on Francisco Cordero’s two-out delivery before absolutely tasing it, but I’ve never been fully comfortable with the horse/hamburger connection.
9. Old ’Jas Rod Bar
Then again, Rod Barajas has been a horse behind the plate this year, and he’s no spring chicken. If this were the 19th century, we’d be issuing colorful nicknames along the lines of Old Hoss Radbourn, the pitcher who won 59 games for the 1884 Providence Grays (wonder what his pitch count was). By the end of this season, Rod Barajas will likely take part in 59 Met wins. He may even take 84 pitches by then.
8. The Wild ’Jas of the Osage
Gashouse Gang third baseman Pepper Martin was known as the Wild Horse of the Osage. Like it wasn’t enough to be known as Pepper (full name: Johnny Roosevelt Leonard Martin). The wildest thing about Rod Barajas is his idea of the strike zone when he’s batting. Rod’s got two walks in one-sixth of a season. Buddhists will tell you that he’s on pace to be reincarnated as Jeff Francouer.
7. Air Rod
Not that it’s gonna happen anyway, but you don’t want Rod Barajas hitting the ball on the ground. When he does, the earth doesn’t move. Certainly Rod doesn’t. He has one hit on a ground ball thus far this year. Then again, he’s only hit the ball on the ground 13 times. You will, however, find Air Rod has the most daily nonstop flights of any Met. Forty-seven of the 69 balls he’s put in play have, like Harry Chapin in “Taxi,” taken off to find the sky. Seven have found the other side of the fence.
6. Rodney Allen Rip ’Em
Back to burgers for a moment. Does anybody else remember that adorable kid who plugged Jack in the Box in the ’70s? His name was Rodney Allen Rippy. He’s still around. Like Roy Rogers, Jack in the Box doesn’t seem to be around as much, at least in New York. On the other hand, our catcher has ripped nine line drives this season, six of them for hits. Rod Barajas didn’t sign with the Mets until late February. Talk about a fun surprise springing out of a box!
5. Andy Roddick
This is a truly awful nickname, but it would carry on in the tradition of truly awful Mets nicknames. Perhaps you’ve heard Ron and Keith explain the lineage of Howard Johnson’s clubhouse nickname Sheik. Howard Johnson was HoJo to the rest of us. HoJo morphed into Haji, per the Giants placekicker of the day, Ali-Haji Sheikh. Follow that ballplayer logic? Well, Rod Barajas’s full name is Rodrigo Richard Barajas. So you’ve got the Rod, and then you take the formerly respectable shortening of Richard, and you bring an athlete from another sport into it…like I said, this is truly awful, but it would have fit on the 1986 Mets. In The Bad Guys Won, we learn Darryl Strawberry not so affectionately dubbed Timothy Shawn Teufel “Richard Head”. FYI, Darryl — or Straw — is now listed in the Mets Media Guide as a “club ambassador”.
4. ’Raja California
Rod Barajas was born in Ontario, California, well east of L.A. and a little more than a hundred miles north of Baja California. As it happens, his father is from Mexicali, part of the Mexican peninsula just south of San Diego. When Rod Barajas homers for the Mets, he brings great honor to all peoples (save for Francisco Cordero). He brought great honor to the Diamondbacks as a catcher on their eternally beloved 2001 world championship team, but it doesn’t sound like he’s looking to get back to Arizona any time soon.
3. B-Rod
Confession: I’ve been calling him this in front of the TV lately. B-Rod with the winning hit, K-Rod with the save, A-Rod at fault for this total lack of originality (with an assist to my own organic laziness).
2. B-Roll
In a newscast, B-Roll is the footage that runs while the anchor or reporter is nattering away. Thus, when Gary Apple is attempting to lamely tease our interest with “Guess which Met catcher is doing something no Met catcher since Mike Piazza has done!” you’ll probably see B-Roll of B-Rod from last night while you think, “What, lead the team in home runs? Does SNY think I’m an idiot?” If he has enough highlights like the one he filmed last night, Rod Barajas will be the embodiment of power-hitting B-Roll B-fore long.
1. Huggy Bar
On Starsky and Hutch (again with the ’70s references — contemporize man!), Huggy Bear was the streetwise contact who gave the lead detectives the information they needed to make it through another episode. Well, what is a veteran catcher if not a streetwise contact for pitchers in a tight spot? And didn’t you want to just hug the ever-lovin’ stuffin’ out of Rod Barajas when he hit that home run last night? For that matter, is he not, purely on demeanor, the most huggable Met we’ve had since Benny Agbayani? Then again, everybody’s huggable when you win in the ninth.
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