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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 8 April 2010 3:56 pm After Sean Green — who elicited the first visceral couch-to-TV reaction of 2010: “Get Sean Green the fuck off my team!” — gave up the laser shot home run to Dan Uggla in the seventh, building the Marlin lead to 6-1, I filed Tuesday night’s game in that one third you’re going to lose, per the ancient and reasonable equation that dictates:
• You’re going to win a third of the games you play.
• You’re going to lose a third of the games you play.
• It’s what you do with the other third that determines your season.
Granted, the first four editions of the Mets couldn’t handle winning a third of their games, and a handful of superteams not clad in Mets uniforms managed to avoid losing a third, but otherwise, it’s a very logical and comforting thought. It keeps you from taking at least 54 games per regulation year too hard. You don’t want to lose, but you accept that losing’s a fact of life.
But when you are compelled to refile a game from “a third you lose” to “the other third”…well, that’s not comforting and it usually causes you to devalue logic. I say usually because a game that sees you come back from 6-1 to tie it 6-6 only to lose it 7-6 tends to favor raw emotion over calm reflection. Yet, unlike Samantha Sang, there was no emotion taking me over (save for Green, and that was earlier) when the game went final. I didn’t expect the Mets to win this game for very long, so it didn’t feel as if the fates were smacking us around.
It came down to a team playing badly beating a team that showed little sign of being very good. We should have taken advantage, but we were incapable. The Marlins winked at us, flashed us some thigh and all but pointed us to the casbah, but we stood there with our thumbs in our gloves not getting the message.
Nevertheless, just standing there almost worked. Just standing there served us well on June 30, 2000, when four consecutive walks were put to astoundingly good use, eventually qualifying them for a plaque among the bricks running down the first base line adjacent to Citi Field. Thing is, that Mets team also had Edgardo Alfonzo singling home the second and third of those walked runners and Mike Piazza homering home the fourth of them, along with Fonzie and himself.
That’s how you earn a plaque, and that’s what was missing last night: big-time stepping up. The Mets scored six runs via two sac flies, a whisper-subtle balk, a well-placed groundout (well-placed because it was eventually founds its way to Uggla, who threw it away) and two bases-loaded walks. Runs are runs, but none of them was driven in by a base hit. According to Adam Rubin of ESPN New York, that’s a franchise record…and that was without the passed ball that wasn’t, the one on which Fernando Tatis didn’t score (I would have liked to have seen an isolated shot of his break from third to determine if he had any kind of chance to begin with) and without the would-be sac fly that I thought Jason Bay could have scored on had he tagged and been in position to take advantage of Chris Coghlan’s rainbow toss to the plate once it flew over the river and through the woods.
No Piazza or Alfonzo in sight (although Alex Cora in No. 13 makes me think of Edgardo every time). No Reyes yet, no Beltran for a bit. No sustained offensive threat with Wright batting third, Bay batting fifth and everybody else gamely battling but indicating only sporadic capability of driving runs home.
And yes, John Maine needed to call a plumber. Or he needed to call me. I feel I sent my boy down the block without training wheels for the first time considering last night was Johnny’s first home start in ten — encompassing his last two at Shea and his first seven at Citi — for which I wasn’t on hand to lend him requisite encouragement. Boy did he look lost without me and his good stuff (probably more the latter than the former). Does he still have good stuff? Late in Spring Training, a friend and I chuckled over a Mets.com headline inviting one and all to watch MLB.tv to observe John Maine “build up his shoulder strength,” as that’s just what draws a fan in to technology.
Maine’s shoulder or whatever body part he depends on wasn’t bringing it last night and his face betrayed that. I’m usually watching him from no closer to the mound than a Promenade seat, so I don’t know if that’s a common expression for him when he’s in Queens. Does he always look so frustrated?
Last night, thanks to SNY, was also my first good look at the bullpen. The physical bullpen, I mean. Yet another Citi Field improvement, being able to see who’s warming up. The problem is getting an even better view of who’s coming in…which is both a cheap shot after one bad night and probably fairly accurate. I’m going to cut Jenrry Mejia first-game slack, but his electric stuff was short-circuited by those teal bastards who saw him enough in Spring Training to know what was coming.
Let’s hang on to this kid at least ’til we go to Colorado, against whom (save for video) he’s a completely unknown quantity. FYI: Jerry Koosman made the Mets out of camp in 1967 as a reliever, was sent down after five appearances and eventually grew up to be Jerry Koosman, greatest lefthanded starter in Mets history. Jenrry Mejia may not be Jerry Koosman, but I’m not willing to assume he’s Jerry DiPoto, either.
Sean Green — striding warily into DiPoto territory by my reckoning — I’m not slack-cutting because I’m a Mets fan and I have to blame at least one reliever for my problems, but Hisanori Takahashi also gets a provisional pass here, partly for being Wes Helmsed to death (nine-pitch at-bat, ouch), partly for it being his first MLB and USA game. Takahashi’s a rookie in that been a Japanese professional a long time way, but he was one of three Mets to make his big league debut Wednesday night. Takahashi was doing it from the vantage point of someone born in 1975, which is rather dated for a freshman in 2010. Mejia and Ruben Tejada, on the other hand, were doing it from the perspective of youngsters born in 1989, the first Mets who could ever say that.
Six Mets have made their team debut this season, four of them born in the ’70s, two in the very late ’80s; DNPers Henry Blanco and Ryota Igarashi, for the record, came to be in 1971 and 1979, respectively. It thus appears, unless somebody revisits January’s mysterious John Smoltz scenario, that we’re done with Mets who were born the same decade as the Mets themselves.
First Met born in the 1960s? Brian Giles, born April 27, 1960, debuted September 12, 1981.
Last Met born in the 1960s? Gary Sheffield, born November 18, 1968, final game as one of us September 30, 2009.
Then again, there was a six-season gap between the going of Rickey Henderson (b. 1958) in 2000 and the coming of Julio Franco (b. 1958) in 2006. And Jesse Orosco (b. 1957) is still lefthanded.
Meanwhile, LHP Jamie Moyer is the scheduled starter for the Phillies Saturday night. Jamie Moyer, who began pitching in the majors in 1986, is the last active player I can call my senior. I will not root for the 47-year-old southpaw to win, but I will root for him to endure.
Being older than all but 749 of 750 major leaguers means I’ve seen a lot, and being me means I remember much of it. I remember thinking in past years that first losses after Opening Day wins have been the only losses I’ve not automatically resented. It’s an annual ritual: We’re 1-0, I can’t imagine the horrors of being 1-1. We’re 2-0, I’m certain the world will come to an end if we’re 2-1. We’re 3-0, I’m usually out in the street all night swilling champagne, so don’t bring me down, man.
But there are exceptions.
• The first loss of 1986 of all years was a debacle I still regret: a 14-inning, 9-8 defeat in Philly, featuring seven walks from Sid Fernandez and seven walks from various relievers. Just think, if we hadn’t lost Game Three that year, we could have gone 109-53, giving lie to that “you’re going to lose a third” nonsense.
• In 1991, there was another first loss in another third game to Philadelphia, at Shea — also a horror show: the Mets walked nine, left 18 on base and lost 8-7 in ten innings. Time of game then made last night’s 4:12 look like a sprint: four hours and fifty-one of the longest minutes I’ve ever spent staring at, ultimately, nothing.
• And the dream of a perfect 2006 went up in smoke in the second game of that season, a 9-5, tenth-inning defeat at the hands of the Nationals, particularly those belonging Jose Guillen, whose bat launched off of Jorge Julio the proverbial ball that’s still going…except it wasn’t proverbial. A NASA satellite just captured a fleeting image of it en route to Jupiter.
Yeah, the 2006 Mets were so disturbed by dropping to 1-1, they were 10-2 within twelve days. First losses, no matter how brutal, don’t necessarily set tones for anything except an antsy next afternoon.
by Jason Fry on 8 April 2010 12:36 am If you had to choose, would you rather be hobbled by horrible starting pitching or terrible relief?
Too much bad starting pitching and the air is consistently out of the fan balloon by the third or fourth inning, leaving you grousing about wasted evenings and wondering if there isn’t something else you should be doing, possibly including tapping yourself over and over again in the kneecap with a hammer to see when it crosses the line from annoying to painful. Too much bad relief and you don’t trust anything good that happens early, because you know the middle innings will be brought to you by Frogger: It sure would be inspiring to hop across this busy highway, but you know you’re going to get pancaked by a semi.
The Mets got the bad starting pitching, while the Marlins got the hopeless relief (or most of it — the Mets weren’t exactly immune themselves) and Game 2 — by turns depressing, inspiring and repeatedly wacky — wound up in the loss column. Which brings up another age-old and unanswerable question: Is it better to fall behind by five and quietly expire, or to come all the way back and then face-plant into defeat anyway?
Speaking of face-planting, John Maine was so horrid that the joy I felt at having survived baseball-less Day 2 was snuffed out almost immediately. His location was hide-your-eyes awful, and he spent most of his time on the mound looking like a guy confronted by an overflowing toilet. And this, folks, is our Number 2 starter. Ricky Nolasco, on the other hand, was terrific, with his only sin getting tired and turning over the ball to his incompetent teammates. The Marlin pen was so staggeringly awful that the Met relievers’ poor showings will get lost in the shuffle a bit, but it was a depressing march: Jenrry Mejia looked pretty much exactly like a kid who throws hard but needs to harness secondary pitches in the minors, Sean Green looked like his usual blandly awful self, and if you’ll forgive me a thoroughly unfair comparison based on a tiny sample size, Hisanori Takahashi sure reminded me of the last Takahashi thrown in over his head in extra innings.
OK, there were positives to take away beyond “Hey, there’s baseball on again!” (Which ain’t nothing — hey, there’s baseball on again!) And some of those positives weren’t exactly ones I’d been counting on. Jeff Francoeur can’t seem to resist swinging at that 0-0 slider in the dirt, but he then reined himself in and had a couple of pretty decent at-bats, and has somehow walked in two straight games. Rod Barajas’s OBP makes Francoeur look like a Kevin Youkilis clone, but he some good counts, and has shown pretty good thump at the plate. Heck, even Mike Jacobs had a game if ultimately futile at-bat.
Maybe it’s just that it’s early, but I found myself feeling like this game was mildly encouraging — even though if I’d shown you a couple of key plays and said they were from 2009 we’d all be yowling about being lousy and snakebit. Having Fernando Tatis thrown out at the plate on an insufficiently wild pitch with David Wright up in a two-out, bases-loaded situation was obviously awful, the first baseball kick in the nuts of 2010. But I can’t bring myself to scold Tatis. When that ball bounded away, I was screaming “Go!” and you probably were too. The ball didn’t carom right off the back wall, but ricocheted left, and it took a awfully good play by John Baker to get Tatis. If Gary Matthews Jr. makes a throw that’s slightly more on target, Wes Helms is out and maybe we’re still playing — but if Helms slides decently, that play isn’t close anyway. And I still can’t figure out exactly what Leo Nunez did to constitute a balk.
A couple of finger-lengths of bad luck, and we lost. It sucks, but it doesn’t feel like a curse or destiny or incompetence or anything like that. It just feels like bad luck. For right now, I can live with that.
by Greg Prince on 6 April 2010 10:28 pm Weather.com says the high in Zip Code 11368 today was 74 degrees. What a waste of temperature.
I get why there’s a blank spot on the schedule between the first home game and the second home game, but nevertheless, Safety Day is a terrible way to follow up Opening Day, particularly an Opening Day as sweetly embraceable as 2010’s. How are the Mets supposed to build on their 1-0 momentum? How are we supposed to build on our reawakened ardor for our team?
Will ya look at that? I’m irked that there isn’t enough Mets baseball to go around. That was the one complaint you didn’t hear much last year.
About the only truly dumb thing I encountered Monday at Citi Field was the ticket-scanning protocol at the Right Field entrance. They have four turnstiles set up, but only two were working (because Opening Day wasn’t on the calendar all winter), and one of them was unable to withstand that brand new bug in the UPC system, the sun. No kidding: when it’s sunny, the scanners have a hard time working, resulting in stupidly long lines and flummoxed supervisors unsuccessfully shielding the code readers from Ol’ Sol with their hands. Instead of worrying about our open water bottles posing a threat, they should just issue tickets to perceived security threats. It’s the best way to keep them out.
Oh, who am I kidding? That was but a minor annoyance, just like the LIRR connection at Woodside smugly speeding off seconds before the passengers who intended to board it could do so, just like the fellow who backed into me steps from Catch of the Day and decorated the front of my hoodie with about a buck’s worth of Long Island-brewed Blue Point Toasted Lager from my just-purchased $7.50 cup. Major league action can withstand modestly minor annoyances when it’s Opening Day. I had made it to the park, I was inside the gates, I was balancing beer and crab cake at one o’clock on a Monday afternoon and, as my co-blogger took perverse delight in noting, there was no need for my hoodie or Starter jacket on the sun-splashed Porch. Monday’s high in Corona, says Weather.com, was 71 degrees and I was decidedly overlayered.
That was my biggest problem? Ohmigod, I went to a Mets game and have nothing substantial to kvetch about. I have only happy memories, 30-some hours removed from the event itself. Jason already gave you the essentials, so, given that I have no new Mets game to watch, I’ll just recap happily.
I happily swung by Team Chapman’s annual tailgate fiesta, still festively delicious and deliciously festive. Bonus track: the WFAN van drove right up to their spread and handed us a stack of 40th anniversary highlight CDs from 2002…which is the sort of thing that literally happens in my dreams.
I happily bulldozed the lines by the Rotunda so I could check in with my brick, still where I found it last April.
I happily scooped up my Citi Field Apple bank, now flanking my Shea Stadium Apple clock along our living room’s Bobblehead Row.
I happily accepted two pencils with my yearbook and program even though I, like the Marlins, had no intention of scoring that much. But at $17 for a yearbook and a program, I’m taking what they give me.
I happily and lustily booed every Fish during the introductions (which I watched from Field Level, having been held up at the Right Field entrance by the recalcitrant scanner), following up on my bile from the end of the Mets’ open workout Sunday when the Floridians nefariously materialized for their turn on the field. Clad in black by the third base dugout, it was too much like a vision from the moments after the last game at Shea thudded to an end. “HEY MARLINS, YOU SUCK!” I was thoughtful enough to inform them on Sunday. Fans need an open workout, too.
I happily applauded when I was supposed to be observing a moment of silence for Jane Jarvis when Howie Rose noted her offseason passing. A great performer deserves applause, not silence. (I happily swooned in the middle of the fifth when the Mets saw fit to play Jane’s 1996 recording of “Meet The Mets”.)
I happily listened as my fellow savvy fans let the Met training staff know we’ve been paying attention. No offense, Ray Ramirez, Mike Herbst and your colleagues. I didn’t boo, though, instead admonishing, “DO YOUR JOBS BETTER!” and hoping maybe everybody connected to Mets medicine and baseball would get the message.
I happily dug on the aforementioned crab cake sandwich and Blue Point Toasted Lager. Try both at Catch of the Day, even if in Year Two of Citi Field, food and drink no longer appears to constitute the only reason to make the trip to the ballpark.
I happily agreed with the only truly engaged member of our row, the guy who advised the rest of us that Rod Barajas is “the shit,” that we wouldn’t know that because “he’s from Canada” and that we were all too quiet for his liking. I always feel bad for the one slightly belligerent LET’S GO METS! guy in any given section if he’s sincere about it. You can’t let the LET’S GO METS! guy chant by himself. He gets louder, he gets more desperate, we all come off as snobs because of it. Hence, I gave him a little air cover, even though the Mets were going fine on their own steam by then.
Happy, happy, joy, joy, the Mets are 1-0, the Mets have a marvelous museum and a ton of Amazin’ accoutrement in our midst and the only problem I have is there was no second consecutive afternoon in the Citi Field sun. What a downer to have to wait until 7:10 Wednesday night.
The Mets worry about rain on Day One the way I worry about it being colder than it feels. Yet the last time the Mets were rained out in their Home Opener — which is why the second day is reserved for a precautionary makeup that would accommodate a theoretically postponed sellout crowd — was 1997. As it happened, that was the year the Mets scheduled their Opener for a Saturday because they were hesitant (to put it kindly) to open on the same Friday afternoon as another team in the same city on the day that other team would be having some sort of flag-raising ceremony…and the two teams were opening in New York on the same weekend because MLB had sent them both to California in early April to avoid bad Northeastern weather…which is what New York was soaked by when the Mets attempted to open that Saturday…while it was perfectly fine in early April when neither local club was home.
End result: The Mets wound up playing and being swept by the Giants in an Opening Day Doubleheader on the Sunday after the Saturday rainout, and — because the Mets were bad in 1996 and looked no better on that extended West Coast trip to open 1997 (3-6) — no large crowd was inconvenienced. Paid attendance for the makeup doubleheader that began the home schedule 13 years ago was a shade under 22,000. That was the worst Home Opener crowd Shea hosted since 1981 (15,205), the previous time a rainout necessitated use of the Safety Day. That was also the year I had tickets to my first Home Opener and couldn’t use them thanks to precipitation and my limited flexibility as regarded high school truancy.
Not that I’m still bitter about it 29 years later.
You can’t fool Mother Nature, but you can’t negotiate with her, either. So why bother trying? Instead, as Steve Winwood told me repeatedly one summer long ago, roll with it, baby. Once the Mets saw the forecast for Tuesday, they should have added on an extra game on the spot. Seriously, what do the players have to do but enthrall us? I had been thinking it was a little pushy to make them play every day down the stretch in Spring Training and then drag them to Flushing for a public workout, then have the Opener the next day and then shuttle them to a Welcome Home dinner Monday night, but then I read a dispatch from the Major League Baseball Players Association advising us that the Opening Day average player salary stood a little north of $3.3 million. There went my sympathy for their lack of “me time”.
It’s too late to do anything about it now, but let’s take the impromptu second game plan under advisement should the meteorological and Metropolitan atmospheric conditions intersect this gorgeously again. Make it like the snow day that, if our school district didn’t use it all winter, was tacked onto Memorial Day weekend. The Mets play the Marlins approximately 50 times a year. We’ll be bored with/tortured by them come September. So let’s play all we can in April, while the weather’s warm and we’re all as happy as clams.
Or is that crab cakes?
by Jason Fry on 5 April 2010 11:51 pm Every year I swear I’m done with seeing Opening Day live — it’s generally miserable weather and I’m so wired that the wisest thing is for me to work out my neuroses sitting at the computer and on the couch. But every year I hear the siren call: The Mets are back, doing their jobs to the best of their ability, and I should do my job by being on station to hoot and holler.
And so it was that I yielded to temptation: two seats in the Pepsi Porch, which last year emerged as one of my favorite places at Citi Field to see a game. It’s quirky without forcing the issue, offers a view I never saw at Shea, and is its own little micro-park with bathrooms, beer, food, and places to stand. Having committed, I was left to wait anxiously for some kind of read on the weather.
Sometimes, if you’re very, very lucky, you get an unseasonably warm Opening Day. Twelve years ago Greg and I got one of those, sitting in the mezzanine at Shea on March 31 for the Mets and the Phillies. The weather was borrowed from July; the game seemed destined to end in August, and neither of us minded at all, kicking back in 80-degree weather until Bambi Castillo beat the Phils with a scratch single in the 14th inning. (Greg remembers here.)
Most of the time, though, you’re not that lucky. The weather scrapes its way into the 50s, everyone is so bundled up that if you move too vigorously you move your neighbor’s outermost layers, and he then moves his neighbor’s, and so on down the line. Beer is reserved for diehards, cocoa and coffee become the coin of the realm, and depressingly often it’s a rainout anyway — or a game that a sensible person would have decided should be a rainout.
A week ago the forecast for Monday was somewhere between indifferent and bad. Too far out for a definitive forecast, I grumbled. This is what I always do in this situation. Usually the forecast is on the money.
Not this time, though. Instead, we got the kind of day you’d like to bottle and uncork in old age, a game that leaves perfectly sober grown-ups staggering around like drunks with happy smiles on their faces. I arrived at Citi Field with doubts about the 2010 Mets, but no doubt whatsoever that I was lucky to be a part of this Opening Day, however it turned out. And I was relieved to realize that I was eager to see our summer home again.
Yes, relieved. Because my relationship with Citi Field had proved a bit, well, complicated in 2009.
I liked a lot of things about Citi right away. I liked the way fans circulated around field level before heading up to their seats, and how I’d almost always run into fans or bloggers I knew. I liked the food, of course, and the big food court atop the Promenade, and the bridge in center field, and the Pepsi Porch, and the experience of exiting the park through the rotunda and making my way across the plaza to the subway.
Moreover, I’d never had any affection for Shea, and it irritated me to see my friends’ memories turning misty-colored and beginning to smooth away Shea’s many problems. The Dallas police ads above the urinals in the sludgy lakes that passed for bathrooms? The relentlessly horrible food? The grinding rudeness and incompetence displayed by nearly every Shea worker a fan encountered? I remembered all of it. I missed none of it.
But Citi Field came with imperfections and oversights that made the place hard to defend and difficult to love.
There were the swathes of seats from which you lost sight of not one but two outfielders, and the Mets’ nonsensical attempts at spinning this into some side effect of geometry that we were too stupid to understand. When I visited Coors Field, the first thing I did was march up to the cheapest seats in left and right, look down and fume. The seats weren’t horribly high, and I could see 99.999% of the field — at Citi the announcers lose sight of fair balls. Last April, as the extent of the sightline woes became clear, it boggled the mind that someone could have let this happen. It still does.
Then there was the fact that Citi Field seemed almost embarrassed about being associated with the Mets and their decades as the raffish, rude, occasionally ragged little brothers of New York baseball. In escaping the sour murk of Shea, the architects of Citi went too far in the other direction, toward bland and sterile. Most of the pieces of Met history that hadn’t been sold off were tucked away in corners. The images of players outside the park (and eventually inside) were presented in Ken Burns sepia, a poor fit for a jet-age, technicolor team. Without the Mets (and New York Giants) as a counterbalance, the salutes to Jackie Robinson and Ebbets Field came off as slavish devotion. There were too many blank expanses of brick and concrete that cried out for some Metsing up.
The Mets eventually stopped making excuses and started fixing things, and I kept reminding myself and anyone who would listen that most of these problems would be relatively easy to put right. But by then the year was a disaster, and our suspicions about the park had spread to the baseball-operations department and ownership. By the end of the year I was sick of defending Citi Field and, frankly, sick of the defenseless Mets. They were horrible to watch, and good tacos and clean bathrooms couldn’t fix that. I thought of the Mets every day during the offseason, of course, but it was for minutes a day, not the hours of years past. And I rarely thought of Citi Field at all.
Like I said, a complicated relationship.
So I happy to hear that the bullpens were being reconfigured. I found myself smiling when I heard that the old apple had been removed from Citi’s equivalent of a back hallway and installed right in front of the stadium — an unexpected stroke of genius. I heard that things were being renamed and repainted. That images of Gil Hodges and Tom Seaver were being literally set in stone. That great moments were joining fan exhortations along the walkways. And that the Mets had a real Hall of Fame and museum now — something they’d never had before — and folks I trusted gave it rave reviews.
I still haven’t visited the museum (it was horribly crowded early and then I had a game to soak in), but I’m happy to say that yes, a lot of other things about Citi Field are much improved. The plaza outside the rotunda now feels like a celebration of the Mets, and in glorious, gaudy color no less. The greatest moments make you want to linger among the bricks and remember. Even from outside, the museum feels like the counterweight the rotunda lacked in its first incarnation — particularly when you climb the stairs and encounter the day’s Mets lineup. This is as it should have been in the first place: The Brooklyn and Dodger past giving way to the Queens and Met present. And there are nice surprises, like the peekaboo window into the stadium control room.
But it’s the littlest touches that help the most: the replica Mets baseball cards you encounter, the orange and blue paint in the stairwells, the plaque for Bill Shea that adorns the newly christened Shea Bridge, and the bathroom floors that are now pointillist blue, orange, white and black. Seriously, the bathroom floors are an improvement. We’re Mets fans, why wouldn’t we have bathroom floors in goofy Mets colors?
Granted, it also helps that we’re now no longer tourists at Citi, trying to figure out where to go and what clubs will admit us. But the Mets have come a long way, making efforts big and small. I’d urge them to keep going — to fill those remaining brick walls with pictures and artifacts and Did You Know? factoids — but the baseline is good. Citi Field feels like our place now.
I walked around happily for a half-hour, taking all this in, and then found my seat. After a bit Greg joined me and then the Mets … well, the Mets gave us everything we could have asked for. Opening Day is just one game, but the Mets couldn’t have drawn up a game more perfectly designed to reassure us. David Wright waited all of zero at-bats to bang a home run off Josh Johnson, the baseball touching down in the right-field district that seemed destined last year to be called Utleyville. Johan Santana made me feel silly for worrying about his spring, tormenting the Marlins (particularly Cameron Maybin) with his entire arsenal. The new guys delivered: Jason Bay hit 2010’s first Citi Field triple, Rod Barajas (who makes Ramon Castro look like a gazelle) roped one over Maybin’s head for a double, and Gary Matthews Jr. was flawless in a center field made treacherous by sun and swirling wind. Meanwhile, the 2010 Marlins were playing like the 2009 Mets. That was welcome too.
Greg and I spent the second half of the game amiably arguing about which numbers ought to be retired, cheered K-Rod through his inning, and trooped down a repainted back stairwell on our way to field level, the rotunda and the train. Marching down the stairs amid choruses of “LET’S GO METS!” I remarked to Greg that OK, I did find the stairs a less dramatic setting for triumphant chants than Shea’s scissored ramps had been.
“I don’t think I ever heard chants like this here last year,” Greg replied, and I nodded. A little bit sadly, but then I shrugged and let it go. That was 2009. This was just one day, and one win from a flawed Mets team, but it’s 2010. Things are already different.
by Greg Prince on 5 April 2010 9:04 am That sound you hear is untold millions of mild-mannered citizens rushing into proverbial phone booths (good luck finding a phone booth) and emerging cloaked in their true identities as…
METS FANS!
Slower than the 7 local…
More gullible than a herd of puppies…
Able to to be sated by the coming of Opening Day…
Yes, we’re putting on our blue capes and our orange tights and we’re ready to take flight into another baseball season, even if the last one flew into us, even if the prognostications for this one have us barely getting off the ground, even if P.A. announcer Alex Anthony will be calling out, prior to 1:10 this afternoon, “On Cora! On Jacobs! On Matthews, Junior!”
So what if Omar Claus left holes in our stockings? So what if under the tree, instead of a new starting pitcher, we got the same old lumps of coal capable of producing scarily smoking ERAs? And so what if only half of our 0-0 record looks convincing right now?
Look at the bright side. Look at Santana Claus (and hope he can still shoulder the load). Watch him throw to the wise elf Barajas and try to hope Josh Johnson won’t be the Grinch who steals Opening Day. There are countervailing forces at work, according to ESPN’s Mark Simon: the Mets are generally merry when the season starts (31-9 since 1970; 17-2 the last 19 times the true Opener came to Queens), but Johnson has a tendency to ruin everything every time he gets in our way (7-0 vs. the Mets). The clash of titanic trends will yield a result that is, as of this morning, unknowable. The fun part — before it happens, anyway — getting to know it.
Something’s gotta give, and it will be us, the people who have been sagging and dragging for months on end. We’re out of our phone booths now and we are METS FANS! once again. We are putting 2009 behind us at least until the first Met falls down. We are filing away the non-trades and non-signings of the Hot Stove League. We now know that both the Ides of March as well as the aights of March (as in “aight, intrasquad workout highlights are on!”) are immaterial. It’s April 5, Opening Day, and Opening Day is a both a continuation of only that which is is good and a break from all that was bad. It’s all good for now. It’s all merry for now. It’s all happy for now.
Happy New Year, METS FANS! It’s good to be up and soaring with you once again.
by Greg Prince on 4 April 2010 3:55 pm I have seen the past, and its name is the Mets Hall of Fame & Museum.
To all who thought the Mets loathed their own history, their self-hatred has come to a merciful end. To all who thought the Mets didn’t listen to their customers, their hearing tests came back with belated flying colors. To all who thought the Mets could screw up a one-car funeral, don’t assume they can’t present a vibrant memorial after the fact.
The Mets Hall of Fame & Museum answers just about all of our desires in the realm of Met legacy. Granted, it doesn’t do anything about the pitching and the injuries and the general murkiness that surrounds the season ahead, but it does take care of what came before and it does so with grace and style. The space is airy, the vibe is lighthearted, the density of display is impressive. You know you’re in the Mets’ ballpark when you’re in the Mets Hall of Fame & Museum. You know there’s a team with a half-century of heritage that has been hauled out of storage to shine in the sun. You know the organization that you were convinced wanted nothing to do with you has awakened like Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas morning and, having seen the error of its ways, is sending out plump turkeys instead of begrudgingly flipping us the bird.
God bless us all, everyone!
I’m a wee bit giddy from this experience because I had a hard time believing it might happen, the admonition that You Gotta Believe notwithstanding. It’s just so unlike the Mets to celebrate the Mets…to go all the way in celebrating the Mets. They began to rehabilitate their image last summer with a few Nikon-sponsored murals, but you had the sense they were affixed to the Citi Field walls with spite. Not this venue, though. This thing is the real deal. This thing shows off the artifacts, the trophies, the uniforms, the pictures…everything.
The Citi Field of April 2009 acted as if it invented the Mets from old Dodger dust and implied that the purpose of the Mets all along was to give Ebbets Field a chance to reincarnate. The Polo Grounds didn’t exist in this new history. Shea Stadium didn’t exist in this new history. Just cold, hard commerce in the form of a few private clubs and a slew of ugly ads. Boy did I dislike that Citi Field.
The new Citi Field, which you can call Mets Ballpark and be accurate, acknowledges it had other ancestors. It acknowledges the other two Mets Ballparks and tells a rich, textured story of who played in them and why they mattered. It’s not just the HOF&M, either. It’s the parade of color banners outside. It’s the beloved original Apple on the Plaza. It’s Shea Bridge. It’s the Stengel, Seaver and Hodges entrances. It’s the oversized vintage baseball cards (including one for Bernard Gilkey!) on the Field Level concourse. It’s those plaques within the brick formations. It’s the new actual Hall of Fame plaques. It’s the loving treatment of each postseason appearance. It’s a handful of implicit and explicit nods to the (gasp!) New York Giants. It’s the blue and orange speckles on the restroom floors. It’s “Meet The Mets,” the 1963 version (both verses), playing happily as you enter the Rotunda. It’s the Mets not worrying that other teams have histories that encompass more medals and fancier ribbons. Management has accepted the idea, at last, that we don’t care that it hasn’t all been one long glory ride from 1962 to the present. We just wanted the ride acknowledged. And now it has been. The Mets aren’t wallflowers at their own dance anymore. They’re calling the tune and it sounds better than I could have fathomed.
Today’s visit, possible via the workout opened to season ticket and plan holders (thanks to Team Chapman for the invite), was about being stunned and gratified. Future visits will entail further exploration and yield, no doubt, some more ideas on how to maintain and extend this sudden burst of excellence. Now that we’ve got this place, I want it to flourish. At this moment, however, I just want to think about what I saw and see it again.
Congratulations to all who made the Mets Hall of Fame & Musuem a gorgeous and brilliant reality. Let it be said that on Easter Sunday 2010, Mets history was truly resurrected.
Full disclosure: I had a hand in writing the script for the video you’ll hear Gary Cohen narrating as you tour the museum, having worked with Little Guy Productions on crafting its first draft, but I otherwise had nothing to do with the planning of this beautifully executed facility.
Two other rave reviews worth reading, from Mets Police and MetsGrrl.
by Greg Prince on 4 April 2010 4:50 am I wish I could remember the young man’s name. I remember his age, 15. I met him last summer on an Amazin’ Tuesday at Two Boots. Big Mets fan, big fan of the blog, he said. Within a few minutes of introducing himself, he was excitedly explaining to me why the Mets would be in very good shape in a year or two, rattling off the names of the prospects who were all going to come up to the majors and create a stellar lineup and solid rotation behind and around Wright, Reyes, Beltran and Santana.
Sounded good if unlikely to me. Actually, it sounded like something I would have come up with when I was 15 or anytime the Mets were down and I had a copy of The Sporting News handy. The Sporting News was the only vehicle that delivered minor league statistics when I was a kid. All I had known about Tidewater before The Sporting News was it was where Buzz Capra was constantly being sent to and from. With The Sporting News, I could see who we had, who I could look forward to and what I could expect out of them week after week.
This would explain why I, at the age of 12, spent the summer of 1975 fixated on Roy Staiger, our All-Star third baseman of the future. Roy drove in 81 runs at Tidewater in ’75, most on the Tides — most in the International League and two more than Mike Vail. I was fixated on Vail, too, as he batted .342 at Triple-A, another league-leading stat (three points better than the runnerup, a Pirate farmhand named Willie Randolph). And Craig Swan got my attention for going 13-7 with a 2.24 ERA, but Swan had already been a Met in ’73 and ’74, so he wasn’t nearly as interesting to me as Bill Laxton, who was 11-4, 2.49.
All of these were fantastic numbers. By my reckoning, we could count on each of these fellows to be permanent Mets before long, driving in runs, batting .300, winning significantly more than losing. Add them to Seaver, Koosman, Matlack, Kingman, Staub, Millan, Unser…ohmigod, we are going to be so great in 1976!
Of the four Tides whose cause was my own in 1975, Craig Swan came up to stay and had a very nice sub-Seaver career as a Met ace in admittedly very sub-Seaver times. Mike Vail had a late August and September worthy of cult status, not much thereafter. Bill Laxton was traded with Rusty Staub to Detroit that December for Mickey Lolich and Billy Baldwin, thereby renting asunder my dream roster; I began projecting loftily for Baldwin, but Lolich was beyond my power of positive long-term thinking.
Roy Staiger, probably unfairly, remains my default failed Met prospect for all times. His tidy Tideness notwithstanding, Staiger was an unproven commodity in whom I invested my 12-year-old trust. He repaid me by batting .226 and driving in 37 runs in a Met career that spanned 483 plate appearances in parts of three Met seasons. The Mets traded Wayne Garrett to the Expos in 1976 so Staiger could blossom at third base. Instead, he wilted and was replaced by Lenny Randle in 1977. He’d be swapped to the Yankees for Sergio Ferrer. Sergio Ferrer is my default Met reserve who rarely plays and never hits for all times, but that’s another story.
The story with Staiger (who I’m sure would have preferred to have become the third baseman GM Joe McDonald and I hoped he would be) is that you almost never know with prospects. Examining them has become a far more sophisticated science since 1975. Nobody has to wait a week to track their progress, and there’s more to projecting their futures than batting averages and ERAs. Yet I stand by my Staigering: I don’t believe any Met prospect is going to do anything until he does it for the Mets and does it for a while.
The only prospect who interests me is the one who turned out to be the real deal in hindsight. I don’t care how good looking this player or that looks at Single-A, Double-A or in Rookie League. OK, I care a little, but not that much. I’ve been Staigered far more than I’ve been Strawberryed in my fandom. I’ve been promised rotations of Rick Ownbey, Scott Holman and Jeff Bittiger. My outfield right this very minute is supposed to include some combination of Lastings Milledge, Carlos Gomez and Fernando Martinez. (I’m consciously disregarding Ownbey’s and Gomez’s roles in historic trades that brought us Keith Hernandez and Johan Santana, respectively, since they were supposed to be our future stars, not somebody else’s unfortunate misjudgments.)
I’m delighted that the Opening Day roster will include two twenty-year-old phenoms in Jenrry Mejia and Ruben Tejada. It’s not that I automatically worship at the altar of youth the way my blogging partner seems to (until certain youths grow prematurely old and definitively one-dimensional), and it’s not that I was doing as my 15-year-old friend or 12-year-old self was and counting heavily on their development before this spring. I was barely aware of either of them, to be quite honest. I’m barely aware of most Met prospects beyond a handful at any given instance. Yet I’m delighted now.
Part of my enthusiasm is a desire to see some talent on display after retreads filled in for fill-ins across 2009. The greater part is not wanting to indulge the suspense involved in waiting for prospects who are considered on the cusp. There’s a compelling case for not rushing Mejia, but I’m not interested in making it. Not rushing him because why? Because we’ll derail his development? How often do we develop a pitcher? Whether we take our time with some golden arm or challenge a kid to step up, what have we gotten exactly?
Mike Pelfrey is what we’ve gotten — exactly. We’ve developed no other long-term starting pitchers for ourselves in the past decade, no matter at what level we leave them or to what level we elevate them. Mike Pelfrey is still learning after two full seasons in the majors and two partial seasons before that. I’m still not all that impressed by Pelfrey, whose main attributes, I’ve come to believe, are his height and his age. He’s 6′ 7″ and in a year has an excellent chance of being 27. It’s a little early, meanwhile, to come to even preliminary conclusions about 23-year-old Jon Niese (eight big league starts, four awful, three good, one gruesome injury presumably healed). Could have Pelfrey been further along by now with another dozen or so Triple-A starts? Might Niese benefit from three more months in Buffalo?
I don’t know and won’t pretend to. I won’t pretend to know whether Mejia, a starter in the Florida State and Eastern leagues a year ago, can be an effective reliever against the Marlins and Nationals this week. But I’m more interested in finding out what he’ll do in April 2010 than penciling him into some nebulous future that may never arrive. I’m not normally so Live For Today, but the more I watch the Mets, the more I’m convinced there is no tomorrow. There is no ideal Next Year when all the prospects will be ready and healthy are raring to take the National League East by storm.
It never works that way. It just doesn’t. It almost never did. Thus, when somebody impresses the brass as Mejia has this spring, I’m not in the mood to wait for them to really hone their skills — as if it were my call to make, which it’s not, which in turn leaves me free to be intermittently cavalier with the careers of 20-year-olds.
If Mejia is truly the immediate stud the only manager we have thinks he is, then let’s see what he’s got. It’s not unprecedented to start a season with a kid who crashes Spring Training ahead of schedule. We did it with 19-year-old Dwight Gooden in 1984, and it worked. We did it with 23-year-old Tim Leary in 1981, and it was lethally cold. There went Leary’s right elbow. So it doesn’t always work. Sometimes it works for a while, as was the case with 23-year-old Joe Smith in 2007. Sometimes it works eventually, à la the 21-year-old Neil Allen who didn’t succeed as a starter in early 1979 but worked out splendidly as closer by midyear.
If Mejia comes up, throws his electric stuff, retires division rivals, a star will be born. If Mejia comes up, finds his stuff isn’t enough, gets lit up, he can go back down (the weather looks good and we have no dates at Wrigley in April). Either way, I’ll go by what I see, not what somebody’s telling me. Sometimes I read the Mets farm system is barren. Sometimes I read it’s underrated. Sometimes I read breezy assessments based on which way the wind is blowing, as with what Jon Heyman wrote on SI.com last week:
The Mets’ minor-league system looks a lot better now than most realized last year, when so-called experts rated it near the bottom. Those ratings will need to be re-evaluated now that five young Mets looked very good or better this spring.
Which means what exactly? Heyman cites Mejia, Tejada, Niese, Martinez and Ike Davis because they all had good camps. But they were all here last year. Was Heyman shooting down unflattering portrayals of the Met system in 2009 or did he just happen to be passing through Port. St. Lottery when they were all having a good day?
If Mejia is blowing away hitters, Tejada is supplanting Cora (pending the return of Reyes), Davis is soon settling in at first, Niese is progressing with every start and F-Mart is back and throwing to the right base, we’ll have a great system. If none of them truly makes it — and nobody else down there picks up the slack — then it’s not a very good system. Produce players who play well for the Mets…that’s what the Met farm system is for (that and fleecing Whitey Herzog in 1983). Ratings and rankings for the farm system’s sake are immaterial. Until Met minor leaguers become and endure as quality Met major leaguers, it’s all primordial ooze to me.
Speaking of ooze, the Mets fan heart has to ooze empathy for Nelson Figueroa, that rare Met player who’s truly one of us — a Mets fan. Kevin Burkhardt interviewed him the other day within the context of making the Mets Opening Day roster, which seemed quite certain based on his mostly outstanding spring, his out-of-options status and the embarrassment of pitching riches we’re not exactly wallowing in. Figueroa, a professional since 1995 but never once on a big league Opening Day roster, lit up at the possibility, musing about watching Mets openers on TV when he was growing up, even remembering how the Shea P.A. would play “Celebration” to mark a Met win. I never heard a Met sound so enthusiastic about taking his place on the first base foul line as I did Nelson Figueroa.
Now he won’t, having been passed over for, essentially, Fernando Nieve. In the same vein that Figueroa, 36 come May, didn’t do anything to deserve getting cut, Nieve, 27, did nothing but impress last season before a leg injury ended his 2009. Nieve wasn’t so hot this spring (same 4.61 ERA as Figueroa’s but Nelson’s damage mostly came in one bad outing), but he, too, lacked options. Met thinking — oxymoronic as that phrase may strike us — was Fernando was more likely to be nabbed on waivers. Only one long man could survive, and it was Nieve.
As Figueroa figures out his next move, perhaps to Japan, I find myself wondering about him as an alternate-universe Mets fan. What if Nelson from Brooklyn had never signed a pro baseball contract? What if he had remained “just” one of us? I wonder how he’d feel about his favorite team favoring experience over potential at some positions and valuing potential over experience elsewhere. Would Figgy be blogging that it’s a mistake to keep Mejia? To take Catalanotto over Carter? To depend on Jacobs — 32 homers two years ago — instead of Davis for the two to six weeks Murphy’s supposed to be out? Would Figueroa the fan be sentimentally distraught that Figueroa the pitcher got the axe or would he be coldly discerning numbers that indicate we’d gotten the best we were ever going to get from that guy and that it’s time to move on? Or would he say succinctly, “Screw sentimentality, this guy can still pitch”?
Best of luck to real-life Nelson Figueroa…unless he signs with the Phillies, in which case his inner Mets fan will understand that we wish him mostly the worst.
by Jason Fry on 3 April 2010 12:45 pm This falls under the heading of Things I’d Dearly Like to Be Proved Wrong About, but I suspect the dominant storyline of the 2010 Mets will be how long it takes even the most optimistic among us to concede that the team isn’t going anywhere.
Imagine I could erase all memory of 2009 baseball from your brain. (If I could offer such a gift, dear friends, I promise I would.) From this fresh, clean perspective, survey the goings-on in Port St. Lucie over the last six weeks. Your reaction probably would be something like this:
- Oh God, Jose Reyes didn’t get any kind of decent spring training! He’s going to have to get his timing and hone his swing throughout April!
- No Beltran until at least mid-May? AUGGHH! And what’s with the screwy way they handled his injury? It almost feels like he doesn’t trust them!
- Johan Santana’s location has been consistently awful. I am really worried.
- John Maine has been horrible. He’s been beaten like a kettledrum out there.
- Oliver Perez looks like he’s in good shape, but he’s been horrible and wild and distracted.
- Mike Pelfrey has been horrible. I don’t know if he’s scared of his own defense or just can’t figure it out, but it’s bad.
- Why on earth are we turning this kid Mejia into a reliever when he’s got the makings of a front-line starter?
- Why do we think Mejia’s ready when his most-recent numbers against real competition give every indication he isn’t?
- Was Mike Jacobs put on this roster for any other reason than the old Neanderthal standby that he’s been on big-league rosters before? He can only do one thing at the plate and nothing in the field.
- If people are going to be put on rosters solely because they’re veterans, why are we jettisoning a useful pitcher like Nelson Figueroa?
And you know what? You’d be right. It’s only in comparison to the scorched-earth disaster that was 2009 that 2010 spring training doesn’t look like a disaster in its own right. The Mets’ plan for the offseason was either bizarre or not worthy of the name, the starting pitching looks so thin you can see through it, the relief corps consists of Pedro Feliciano and guys who are either unknown quantities or depressingly known ones, two core offensive players will start the season on the shelf, and there are already signs that the decision-makers are looking at short-term fixes even if those create long-term problems. (I love Jenrry Mejia. He shouldn’t be here.)
The 2010 Mets look like a disaster in the making. At this point it’s useless to carp that it didn’t have to be this way, so I will resolutely fix my gaze ahead, to where the view is no more encouraging. I’ll give it until about May 15 before towels start getting thrown in, and June 15 before the incurable optimists experience a medical breakthrough.
This isn’t to say that all is lost. There were some bright green shoots in spring training that give me real hope for 2011, if they’re properly nurtured. We know about Mejia. If Ike Davis and Josh Thole stay on track, they could be ready to take their places in the starting lineup near the end of this season. I’m excited to see a full season from Jon Niese, and to figure out if Angel Pagan is a late (though not too late) bloomer. Ruben Tejada could some quickly. Fernando Martinez had a great spring, and has been through the glare and disappointment of New York and emerged alive. And 2011 needn’t just be a youth movement. Santana, Beltran, Wright, Reyes and Bay will all still be here. Carl Crawford, Josh Beckett, Tim Hudson and Cliff Lee will be free agents at the end of this season. Looking short-term, I have little hope. Looking just a little farther down the road, I have a fair amount.
And looking at the really short-term, I’m giddy. The last couple of days have seen me fidgeting and wishing it were time to get on my gear and head for the 2/3 which will take me to the 7. Despite all of the above, I can’t wait until Monday. Or even Sunday, though I could do without an instant serving of Yankees-Red Sox. Even if you like those teams, why start this way? Can you imagine a Bud Selig dinner party? Hi, welcome, don’t even take your coat off yet BECAUSE THIS EVENING MUST BEGIN WITH CRAMMING HALF A RIB ROAST DOWN YOUR THROAT!
But come Monday, I want to see the apple in its new home. I want to see the new banners. (In color, no less!) I want to eyeball the new friezes for Casey and Gil, and the (now-corrected) plaques for great moments, and get a look at the Mets museum, and see if the stairwells are painted, and see if there are new miscellaneous touches that say “this is the home of the Mets.” I want to see if McFadden’s is worth adding to my routine. I want to see familiar faces. I want to make that can’t-go-wrong choice between Shake Shack and Taqueria. I want to chat with my co-blogger and not have to ask him what’s going on, because the answer will be happily obvious. I want to hear the National Anthem and see red-white-and-blue bunting and then let myself get too excited for baseball and then relax back into it. There will be plenty of time to feel doomed. It’ll wait a bit.
by Greg Prince on 2 April 2010 7:38 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: RFK Stadium
HOME TEAM: Washington Nationals
VISITS: 1
VISITED: April 29, 2005
CHRONOLOGY: 29th of 34
RANKING: 30th of 34
I’m grading on a curve here, a fairly generous curve. On most counts, there is no way RFK Stadium was any better than any place I’ve been to see a ballgame. Except for eschewing a roof, a carpet and optional currency exchange, it wasn’t necessarily better than the facility it unwittingly succeeded, ol’ No. 34 on the countdown, Olympic Stadium. But the curve is in effect here for a good reason: RFK was taking a long nap when it was nudged awake to host its first major league ballgames in 34 seasons. For something that was so somnambulant for so long, RFK served its temporary purpose remarkably well.
Don’t get me wrong. The place was a dump. I don’t mean in that Shea “it’s a dump, but it’s our dump” lovable way, either. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was used for a tire fire when it wasn’t being used for baseball. It was dark, it was cramped, it was MacArthur Park come to life: someone left this cake out in the rain, the sweet green icing was long melted and it showed.
But it came to life in 2005 when the Expos became the Nationals, and you’d be surprised how beautiful a “dump” can be when it’s got baseball and baseball fans.
No you wouldn’t. You went to Shea.
The Shea-RFK connection was generational and utilitarian. They were the first intentional multipurpose stadiums built, RFK — then D.C. Stadium opened for football in ’61 and baseball in ’62, two years before Shea played host to the Mets and Jets. (Candlestick Park debuted in 1960, but the 49ers resisted its charms until 1971.) With the Redskins skedaddled to Maryland in 1997 and the Senators, of course, transplanted to Texas a quarter-century earlier, nothing but MLS soccer was regularly scheduled at RFK for nearly a decade in advance of the Nationals landing. The Mets, meanwhile, kept using Shea.
By the 21st century, Shea, however dowdy one considered it, was lived-in. RFK had been all but abandoned (no offense, D.C. United fans). The seats, for example, were faded from years of sun with no butts to shield them. Lighting had never been upgraded in the concourses. Everything was so…concrete. The flourishes meant to cheer up Shea, the Vet and other allegedly outmoded stadia that endured while the stylish retro parks were rising had completely missed RFK upon its return to baseball in 2005. MLB as owner of the otherwise orphaned Nationals wasn’t going to upgrade more than necessary for what was foreseen as a short stay…and doing what was necessary required $18.5 million of heavy lifting.
The backdrop to the playing field was a little cheerier, as it should have been given the joyous occasion of having a team again. I liked the long list of great Washington sportsmen (clunky but unique) beyond the outfield fence. I liked the DC clock. I liked that they made what they could green. RFK did a very good impression of a ballpark in spots.
The Nats were not an expansion club, but there was that new team smell to the fan base. Stephanie and I arrived in the Union Station Friday afternoon, a few hours before gametime. As we walked to our hotel, we saw several Nats caps (home and away models). My Mets cap brought a few “going to the game tonight, huh?” inquiries. The Nats were 11-11 heading in, same as the Mets — not exactly the kind of matchup you’d figure would have a city on edge, but Washington hadn’t had a Friday night ballgame to attend since September 17, 1971, so why not be excited?
I’d made probably more than a dozen visits to D.C. over the years for business purposes, but I was oh boy! excited, too. All those trips to town and — with one Baltimore detour exception — no baseball on the agenda. I accepted it as perfectly normal before. In hindsight, it was positively unAmerican that America’s capital lacked the National Pastime. I still felt bad about Montreal losing the Expos, but this part of it, baseball in Washington, was the right thing to have.
We walked back to Union Station and boarded the Metro that would take us to whatever connections took us to RFK. There were more baseball-bound passengers per capita on the Red line to the Green line to the Blue line to the Stadium-Armory stop than there seemed to be most Friday nights on the 7 (at least pre-2005). Lots of those W caps. Not a few NY caps for our side, too; we befriended a fellow in a KINGMAN 26 jersey on the return trip. This was the Mets’ first game ever in Washington. We had fellow pilgrims.
It indeed took a pilgrimage to get to RFK. Changing trains twice wasn’t that big a deal, but the famously efficient Metro seemed to chug along forever. Then marching from the station to the stadium was a whole other dreary journey through space and time. RFK pulled off the neat trick of being reachable by regular mass transit without feeling particularly accessible. Then again, it was a 34-year trek through the wilderness, so what’s another fifteen or twenty minutes?
A third kind of cap evinced itself among the National and Met brands, that of the Montreal Expos. Enough weird M’s to be noticeable. There were still some Exponents hanging on to whatever was left of what had been their team. It must have been a bit like the Giants fans who traveled from New York to Philadelphia for a fix in 1958. I was still publicly mourning the demise of the Expos, so when I saw a Montreal loyalist, I tried to give him the thumbs-up, let him know I was with him in spirit if not for the same team as him.
He told me to go fuck myself, believing I was mocking him. I guess something was lost in the translation between my Mets cap and my thumb going up. If I’d just lost my team seven months earlier, I’d be touchy, too.
I let the Ex-pat be as we burrowed at last into RFK. Dark and dank as it was, there was a surge of electricity when we saw the field. It was a baseball game, complete with Mets and 30,000 people. Many were fans who overreacted to every pitch, swing and bounce. I found the first-month enthusiasm invigorating — even if the bouncing felt a little unsafe when the P.A. played Jump Around by House of Pain during the seventh-inning stretch and the upper deck turned into a trampoline. In the fifth, when I was up seeking a pretzel-like snack when Liván Hernandez homered (which the program warned he might do). A buzz went through the dim hallways and a crowd gathered around a lone monitor. “Hey! Our pitcher hit one out!” This was giddy innocence on display, and if a dump couldn’t dampen their spirit, more power to them.
Sadly, the crowd included four dopes who had tickets because they had tickets, probably a circumstance of Washington having a surfeit of climbers. We were in seats graciously sent to us by my friend Jeff’s Uncle Frank, an area Cubs fan who decided to buy a season subscription in the name of supporting his new local team. I feared for Uncle Frank’s sanity if the quartet behind us would wind up behind him. They were twentysomethings who talked nonstop for nine innings about the tricks and travails of their law office. At that moment, I wanted to kick them Outside the Beltway.
Back on the field, the park was cavernous for the Mets (who were in a nasty hitting slump at the time) and couldn’t hold the Nats, whose balls were jumping off of bats like House of Pain was in effect, y’all. A homer for Liván. A homer for home team catcher Brian Schneider. Another for their right fielder Jose Guillen. All of them off Met starter and loser Jae Seo. A monumental night for Washington, less Seo for the team from New York.
“Ha! We beat you!” was a common reaction we got on the way out and on the Metro back. Let ’em have their moment, I magnanimized. It’s April and they don’t know that their team isn’t going anywhere (though, to be fair, the Nationals would be in first place as late as July 25). I didn’t like losing, but I didn’t altogether mind the teasing. They waited, they earned it. They’d wait a few more years for a modern facility. As indicated, the concessions left everything to be desired. The “team store” was stuffed into a trailer in the parking lot. Not a problem. The point wasn’t that there wasn’t a store. The point was that there was a team.
It was good enough as temporary encampments go. It was RFK Stadium.
by Jason Fry on 2 April 2010 2:21 pm Let’s get this out of the way: Emma Span is a Yankee fan. This means that even though she seems like a very nice person (we’ve drunk beers together and spent an enjoyable subway ride talking baseball, sportswriting and book publishing), I wonder if I could really trust her in a foxhole, and fear that on some level her soul is dead.
But I’m going to let that ride. Because she has written a book that’s funny, heartfelt and wonderful — unfortunate allegiance and all. Opening 90% of the Game Is Half Mental, I nodded at the well-chosen quote from Roger Angell, then smiled at something in the third paragraph, then laughed out loud. I decided I would rearrange my schedule to read a couple of chapters. Halfway through the first one I’d chucked the schedule entirely, because I knew I wasn’t going to stop reading until I was out of book. By the time I got to the last couple of chapters, I was forcing myself to slow down, because I was sad that I was coming to the end. That’s about the highest compliment I can pay a book, and this one more than earns it. It’s that good.
She’s clear-eyed about the Yankees, not missing the loathsome sense of entitlement of a lot of their fans, the basic unfairness of the baseball deck being stacked for them, and their general Olympian air. Here’s her eventual acceptance of the new Yankee Stadium:
Yes, it’s too big, too proud of itself, pompous and over-the-top in places, the embodiment of the unhinged free market. But let’s face it: a lot of the time — and I say this with love — so are the Yankees.
Minus the “with love” part, that’s pretty much how I’d describe the Yankees too.
But this book isn’t just about the Yankees. It’s about the Mets too, and baseball in general. And Span gets the Mets. She admits to a sneaking fondness for them that comes off neither as patronizing pat-the-little-brother-on-the-head stuff nor as civic-robot rah-rah. Her discussion of “Our Team, Our Time” is hilarious and gets that the Mets have always had a weakness for dimwitted marketing, from Homer the Beagle to Mettle the Mule to, well, Dave Howard. And see if this doesn’t get to the raggedy but real heart of Shea Stadium:
What I liked about Shea, though, is that precisely because of all the many things wrong with it, there was really only one reason to go. It wasn’t much of a tourist attraction; it wasn’t a particularly big draw for businessmen or women trying to impress colleagues and clients; it wasn’t an architectural treasure or a hip place to be seen. And that’s what worked about it, perversely: you went to Shea only if you loved the Mets.
She’s smart and unsparing about being a sportswriter in the locker room (she covered the Mets and Yankees for the Voice), and best of all she’s wry and unafraid when writing about herself. Her book is funny, honest, wise and ultimately moving. As we say around these parts, it would make an excellent addition to your baseball library — or any library, for that matter.
I know, you’re still stuck on the Yankee-fan thing. Well, she admits that after enduring Derek Jeter’s book she wanted to kill him with a shovel. That has to count for something, right?
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