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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 26 February 2010 7:59 pm On October 28, 1961, eight dignitaries in suits — including Mayor Bob Wagner, master builder Bob Moses and future villain Don Grant — plunged spades into the ground and touched off the beginning of construction on a project tentatively titled Flushing Meadow(s) Stadium. It took 902 days to get from ceremonial shovels to the first official pitch thrown on that site, one fired by Jack Fisher of the New York Mets to Ducky Schofield of the Pittsburgh Pirates. By then, April 17, 1964, the structure in question would be called Shea Stadium…and the pitch from Fisher would be called a strike by home plate umpire Tom Gorman.
On September 28, 2008, Ryan Church would lift a deep fly ball to centerfield in the same place. Deep, but not deep enough. Cameron Maybin caught it and, in essence, ended the life of the stadium. A ballpark can’t be a ballpark unless it’s got some ball in it, and dratted Maybin made off with the last one. Nevertheless, Shea stuck around after the final out, first for another ceremony — one in which Fisher, followed by 42 other former Mets, would bid adieu to the stadium’s last assemblage — and then for the gruesome business of the building’s disassembly.
Breeze Demolition, a subcontractor from Red Hook, dug its hooks into Shea Stadium within hours of Fisher’s fond farewell. It took 143 days to pull apart what required 902 days to put together. For those of us who couldn’t help but monitor its methodical deconstruction, it seemed like it took forever for Shea to come down, yet in actuality, erasing it took less than one-sixth the time it took to create it.
 The disappearance of Shea from the New York cityscape, save for the dust and debris that would linger into May, was completed just over a year ago, when on the morning of February 18, 2009, the last immediately discernible sign of its existence vanished from the Queens skyline. Save for four brass bases and an accurately if curiously named pitcher’s plate in a parking lot, it’s now like Shea Stadium was never there.
Shea, of course, lives on anyway. It lives on in our memories, our souls, our imaginations and our Mets fan DNA. It also, thankfully, continues to exist in print, most notably in the pages of several recent and terrific books. One of them — Bottom of the Ninth by Michael Shapiro — tells thoroughly if almost incidentally of Shea’s conception as part of a larger story of baseball’s late ’50s and early ’60s evolution. Two others whose reach is closer to home — Dana Brand’s The Last Days of Shea and Shea Good-Bye by Keith Hernandez and Matthew Silverman — offer loving encomia crafted on the eve of the park’s passing. Each of them is a worthy companion to the way you remember Shea, whether from its beginning, its middle or its end.
I’ve only recently gotten automatically used to the idea that there is no longer a Shea Stadium. No wonder: 2010 is the first calendar year in 50 during which there has been no immediately discernible sign of Shea Stadium. Still, the slow realization that it’s not around and that it’s not coming back goes beyond the longevity of an entity that began to stir in 1961 and ceased to exist in 2009. It goes beyond what Brand’s textured eloquence or Shapiro’s fresh history or Silverman’s expert editing of Hernandez’s occasionally random recollections can capture, too. It’s gets to the simple fact that Shea Stadium was my idea of what a ballpark was. It couldn’t help but be. It was my first ballpark.
It was my first park on TV. It was my first park in person. It was the park that defined what it meant to watch baseball for me. Shea shaded my view of every other park I’d ever visit, particularly the one I now technically call home.
I’ve been lucky enough to have attended Major League Baseball games in 34 different parks, 10 of which, like Shea, have either left the face of the earth or have stopped functioning in the MLB realm. On some level, that means I’ve been to…
• Shea Stadium;
• 9 parks that weren’t Shea Stadium;
• and 24 parks that are not Shea Stadium.
It won’t surprise you a bit that Shea defines my perspective on ballparks. It may surprise you, however, to learn I don’t consider Shea my favorite ballpark. Most beloved and most resonant to me, absolutely. But there are some I hold in what I guess you’d call higher esteem.
Oh, there’s none I hold as dear as Shea, but I’ve got the ability to delineate. I know when I’ve been somewhere that’s…I don’t know if “better” is the word I would use here, but I’ve been to parks that transcended Shea for me — which is no small feat. That’s the litmus test I wound up applying once I began visiting other parks and ranking them. If I really felt that, all things being equal (though all things rarely are), I was having a Shea-plus time at a ballgame elsewhere, I had to be honest with myself. I had to say, y’know what? I have to rank this place ahead of Shea.
Not many ballparks made it over that hurdle. The uninitiated — anybody’s who’s not a Mets fan, probably — would not get that. But I imagine most of you who are Mets fans do.
Over the next several months, I plan to devote Flashback Friday to ballpark talk in a series ambitiously dubbed Take Me Out to 34 Ballparks. Starting Friday, March 5, I will revisit my 34th-favorite ballpark. The week after, we’ll go to my 33rd-favorite ballpark. Then…well, you get the idea. It’s a countdown because I like to count things down, but it’s less about my immensely subjective rankings than a chance for me to explore with you what these places mean to us as baseball fans.
It’s also an attempt on my part to place Citi Field in some kind of context besides it not being what Pedro Martinez memorably called my beloved Shea. With Shea Stadium off the map, I hope to begin to view Citi Field apart from the ghost hovering over its third base shoulder. Figuring out where it stands for me is an unfinished assignment. Take Me Out to 34 Ballparks might provide me with some guidance.
I tend to rank my ballparks as soon as I see them. Most of them I’ve seen only once, and I know I’ll likely never see again. Citi Field is different in that respect. I didn’t rank it right away. In fact, I kept it unranked until I’d finished a full season there, and even now I view its status as provisional. I have a hunch Citi Field will always be a work in progress for me, which is fine. Shea was always going to be the static standard by which I measured every other ballpark. Citi’s place in my head (and maybe, eventually, my heart) can’t help but be more dynamic. My thoughts on it will be more subject to change than the other 33 parks combined.
But it does have a ranking, so it will show up where it shows up — same for Shea, same for the other 32 where I’ve been fortunate enough to experience big league baseball.
I like some parks more than I like other parks. It’s no secret that I like Shea more than I like Citi. But (again with all things being equal) I’d take being in a ballpark — any ballpark — over being anywhere else just about any day. So I’m pretty excited about going to one every Friday for the next 34 Fridays.
I hope you’ll find it a worthwhile trip.
Unless you’re soaking up the pleasures of practice fields in Florida or Arizona this weekend, consider spending an inning of more at the 24 Hour Talk-a-Thon to benefit Operation Homefront, a joint production of Baseball Digest, FantasyPros911.com and BlogTalkRadio.com. Details on this impressive undertaking for a worthy cause here.
by Greg Prince on 24 February 2010 7:47 pm Pity Mike Francesa. He’s a very insecure man. Today he interviewed James Hirsch, the author of the wonderful Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, and turned the conversation as well as the remainder of his show into a referendum (with his vote the only one that counts) on Mickey Mantle being better or more clutch or more forthcoming or a nicer person than Willie Mays. Even in begrudgingly acknowledging Mays’ unsurpassed all-around greatness, Francesa had to keep injecting Mantle, Mantle and more Mantle into the program.
I found this fascinating, not for the content, but for what it reveals yet again about Francesa, New York’s most listened-to sports talk host and highest-profile über Yankees fan. He couldn’t stand the idea that his childhood idol Mantle wasn’t being celebrated. The book, mind you, covers Mays’ entire life and career. It’s not a comparison of centerfielders at whom New Yorkers and baseball fans were fortunate enough to marvel during the same era. Mantle is not disrespected in this book. He’s just one character in a sweeping biography. Hirsch wrote about Mays, not Mantle. There are plenty of books about Mantle. This simply isn’t one of them.
Not good enough for Francesa, who immediately told Hirsch — because it mattered to Francesa — that he’s “pro-Mickey Mantle” and, therefore, “anti-Willie Mays”.
This is a delineation a six-year-old makes.
It also fits the pattern of Francesa endlessly dismissing the Mets, the Jets and just about anything that isn’t the Yankees or that he can’t somehow connect to the Yankees. The football Giants, since they used to play in Yankee Stadium (and employ a coach who once served under his onetime BFF Bill Parcells), seem exempt from such condescension. I noticed on his performance art showcase that aired on Channel 4 the Sunday night after the Jets clinched their playoff spot that Francesa had to lead with an observation on how badly the Giants had played that afternoon, but we’ll get to them later…oh yeah, the Jets made the playoffs.
This was obviously the fault of the Jets for rhyming with Mets, which automatically devalues them to Francesa, the six-year-old who can’t stand attention being paid to anything that doesn’t smack of pinstripes.
Willie Mays? An all-time great? The subject of a new book, which is why you have on the guest you have on? So what? WAAAH! I WANNA TALK ABOUT MICKEY MANTLE! HE WAS MY FAVORITE PLAYER WHEN I WAS LITTLE! Reminded me of another misguided listening adventure many years ago when I tuned in to hear Francesa and his erstwhile brain-free partner speak to actor and Mets fan Tim Robbins. First thing Francesa said to Robbins was, hey, we should get you together with Chazz Palminteri, he’s an actor and a big Yankees fan!
Robbins was too polite to ask what I would have in that situation:
“What the fuck does Chazz Palminteri have to do with me at this moment?”
I don’t recall the impetus for Tim Robbins appearing, but I do know it wasn’t Subway Series Smack Talk or anything like that. Alas, Robbins was a Mets fan, and that couldn’t be taken at face value. Francesa had to make it about the Yankees, because that’s what a preternaturally insecure, hopelessly childish Yankees fan does.
Perhaps you’ve encountered examples of such behavior in your own life, off the air.
I have a hunch Mike Silva’s interview with Hirsch this Sunday evening at 9:00 on NY Baseball Digest will be far more focused on the subject matter at hand.
by Jason Fry on 23 February 2010 9:18 pm Ignore, this will be gone soon.
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by Jason Fry on 23 February 2010 3:37 pm Back in 2007, the Mets brought up a young man named Carlos Gomez. Gomez could burn — he and Jose Reyes used to race each other out to their positions, which I thought was adorable. He was just 21, but pretty big — the kind of guy you see as a doubles and triples hitter who might mature into a slugger. Meanwhile, the incumbent in right field was Shawn Green. Green was 34 and looked to my eyes like he was 54, particularly in the field, where ball after ball seemed to strike earth and take one gentle hop into his glove. Let’s all pause and remember Scott Speizio’s ball just eluding Green’s grasp, though it was really Guillermo Mota’s fault. Ugh that sucked.
Anyway, I loved Carlos Gomez. He was young. He had promise. He was not Shawn Green.
Greg, stuck sitting beside me on multiple occasions while I yelled at Shawn Green for not being someone else, was more cautious than this. Too many Benny Ayalas and Jay Paytons and Alex Escobars have done too much damage to his psyche for him to get overly excited about callow youth. It wasn’t so much that he was a Shawn Green fan as it was that he wanted to be sure we had a better answer before consigning existing ones to the scrap heap. He’s logical that way. It’s kind of infuriating.
As it turned out, neither one of us can claim much in the way of bragging rights there, not that that’s what we do anyway. Green was done after 2007; Gomez proved periodically talented but mostly maddening as a Minnesota Twin and is now a Milwaukee Brewer.
I know it’s spring training because in recent days I can feel myself coming down with another case of Rookie Fever. Josh Thole, he of the curious inside-out swing and stuff to learn on defense? Well, did you read this awesome New York Times story about him by David Waldstein? He spent the offseason playing for Leones del Caracas and hit .381! The Caracas fans nicknamed him el Infierno — the Inferno! He played in Caracas, which most things you read portray like it’s Grand Theft Auto with better graphics! And he didn’t bat an eye despite growing up in a town the Times called “an Illinois hamlet”! (Though the Times being the Times, that could be anything that isn’t St. Louis.) [Withdrawn. First of all, St. Louis ain’t in Illinois, genius. Second, a pointless, cheap shot about a terrific story and a good get. Not my proudest moment.] And his fiancee sounds like a badass too! After reading Waldstein’s profile, I was not only demanding that Thole be the opening-day catcher but also inclined to suggest that Kathryn Poe immediately replace Luis Castillo.
Or take Ike Davis. He’s an above-average defensively first baseman who says modestly that he has a lot to learn. He’s being respectful of David Wright, who’s taken him under his wing, recalling that Ty Wigginton treated him wonderfully when he might have resented the rookie’s arrival. He can hit! He can field! He’s well-mannered! He’s got a big-league pedigree! He was a Cyclone! I’m getting more and more excited!
We will love Thole and Davis. I’m sure of it. Well, I’m certain we’ll love them … until.
What’s that? You want me to define until? OK, that can be tricky. It might be “until we expire on our deathbeds, thinking of numbers on walls and World Series trophies and trips to Cooperstown.” Seriously, it could happen. But yes, I’ll admit that most of the time until arrives a little more quickly.
We might love Thole and Davis until they commit the sin of revealing themselves to be better than only 99.925% of people on Earth who play baseball instead of 99.975% of those folks. We might love them until they get hurt and are never quite the same. We might love them until they’re traded or seek professional homes closer to their real ones for more money than the Mets feel like offering. We might love them until they get old a little too early for our tastes.
And, yeah, we might love them until they’re competing for jobs with someone just a little bit younger and less defined by reality than they have been. Throughout this discussion Daniel Murphy has been jumping up and down yelling “I’m 24 years old! I was born in freaking 1985!” Quiet down, old man.
That’s the way it goes. But for now, it’s February. Which means Rookie Fever is loose. Just try not to catch it.
by Greg Prince on 21 February 2010 7:50 pm In a post to Twitter, Rick Coutinho of ESPN Radio says RHP Sean Green has modified his delivery, and his sidearm motion is even more pronounced than it was last year.
—A leading indicator (via MetsBlog) that Spring Training is already too long
Anybody who was caught up in the peer pressure of seventh grade in the winter and spring of 1976 will remember dutifully watching Happy Days every Tuesday night at 8 o’clock on Channel 7. Between the aaays and the whoas of Henry Winkler as the Fonz, there was Pat Morita as the eponymous proprietor of Arnold’s Drive-In (and — when “Fearless Fonzarelli” attempted to jump 14 garbage cans on You Wanted To See It — Milwaukee Fried Chicken Stand). Arnold was generally taciturn toward the kids who frequented his establishment, but when something tickled his fancy, he’d let out a cackle that sounded, I swear, something like this:
BA-RA-HA-HA!!
So that’s basically all I know and all I’ve known or thought of when it comes to our prospective new catcher, Rod BA-RA-HA-HA!!s…I mean Barajas. That and he hit seven more home runs than any Met in 2009 without being particularly noted for his slugging prowess. Boy, did the Mets not hit home runs in 2009, and boy, despite the crowd in the clubhouse on the day they and pitchers reported, did the Mets apparently suddenly realize they need an experienced, but hopefully not overripe starting backstop.
All that stands in the way of Barajas squatting as a Met now is a passed physical and a firm contract. Given that these are the Mets we’re talking about — helmed by an owner who called the just completed offseason “torture,” though one presumes he had a say in its composition — nothing’s a done deal until it’s a done deal, but all signs point to yes, Rod Barajas will be catching and batting anywhere from first to ninth come Opening Day.
First to ninth? Remember, these are the Mets, where even leadoff hitters aren’t leadoff hitters.
Oh, rats. I swore I wasn’t going to get sucked into the Great Batting Order Kerfuffle of February 2010. These are the most pointless kerfuffles of any season, kerfuffling as they do six weeks before any manager has to submit any batting order that counts for anything. Didn’t Jerry Manuel make some noise about batting Jose Reyes third last year? Did Jose Reyes ever bat third? The answers are yes and no, respectively. In our first spring of blogging, a spitstorm erupted over Willie Randolph suggesting David Wright might bat eighth once the season started. Care to guess how often Wright batted eighth? Hint: His next time will be his first time.
Once Pitchers & Catchers are in place, it’s only a matter of time before Pollyannas & Cynics follow. Like most fans, I will veer between the two as the footage from St. Lucie grows repetitive and the novelty that somewhere on this continent there are Mets stretching wears off. For example, I caught a moment of Frankie Rodriguez talking up his physical and mental well-being and I imagined one 1-2-3 ninth after another, with “Sandungueoso” blaring, high-fives flying and magic numbers dwindling in our favor. Then, with images of the two walkoff grand slams he surrendered in 2009 slithering through my head, I realized, what the hell else is he going to say? “I really seemed to be losing something off my fastball there by the end, don’tcha think?” What are any of them going to say? Is Johan Santana going to choose anybody besides himself as the N.L. East’s best pitcher? Is the Daveotronic 5000 going to pick anybody besides the Mets to win the division? Is anybody going to take seriously anything Jerry Manuel says right now?
Among the rites of spring is the right to grow quickly jaded, to slide from yayI to yawn without notice. Or as Fonzie’s ABC Thursday night doppelgänger Vinnie Barbarino of Welcome Back Kotter put it when he went on to play Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, “I’m bored with it, all right?” Honest to god, how can anybody get worked up over Sean Green modifying his delivery on February 21?
If you don’t get bored with it, you’ll get immersed in nonsense and drown in it long before the games that don’t count are finished (and just wait and see how bored you’ll be with those). The classic case of Spring Training folderol that meant nothing in the long run occurred five years ago when Carlos Delgado wasn’t a Met.
He was going to be. It looked good, in that way you want it to look good when a free agent is left dangling in the marketplace for a long while. Delgado hadn’t signed with anybody entering the fourth week of January 2005. The Mets were very interested. Omar had picked off Pedro Martinez, then Carlos Beltran…by gum, can you believe they might get Delgado, too? Too good to be true, it turned out. Delgado signed with the Marlins during one of the rare offseasons when they were adding rather than shedding players and we summered instead with Doug Mientkiewicz.
It was vastly nothing from nothing as Spring Training commenced until Delgado’s agent David Sloane spread the word that his client was turned off by what Delgado felt was an overemphasis on Omar Minaya’s and Tony Bernazard’s part regarding the Latin heritage they each shared. Sloane was also busy that spring letting it be known Recidivist Marlin Al Leiter had helped lure Carlos to Miami by saying not so kind things about Al’s old club. What made Sloane’s contretemps du jour memorable were less the content than how, after engaging the New York baseball media, he expressed horror that a reporter had the nerve to call him on his cell for comment while he was off enjoying a Joe Cocker concert.
All at once, every Mets fan had the same thought: Joe Cocker in concert? 2005? As Jason asked, “Is David Sloane marching against Vietnam, too?”
It was nonsense, but — no disrespect to Sean Green’s awesome arm angle — at least it was different nonsense.
Whatever misgivings Carlos Delgado felt toward how he was courted as a free agent were rendered meaningless the following November when the Marlins traded his massively backloaded contract to the Mets for latent ’05 wunderkind Mike Jacobs (and Yusmeiro Petit, one of the myriad pitching prospects the Mets have given up who didn’t turn into Scott Kazmir). Jacobs, of course, is a Met again, which is nice for those of us who retain a touch of romanticism about this game. On September 18, 2005, the Mets fielded, from left to right, David Wright at third, Jose Reyes at short, Anderson Hernandez at second and Mike Jacobs at first. It was, by my reckoning, the first all 1980s-born infield in Mets history, the blossoming Met youth movement in microcosm.
Two out of four weren’t bad…literally. Fortunately, the two who were indisputably good stayed. Somehow, because of injuries last year and provisional suspicion of Daniel Murphy this year, Hernandez and Jacobs have found their way home. If they join Reyes and Wright to compose the infield for significant swaths of 2010, it’s probably not the future we were hoping for in late 2005, but once or twice won’t necessarily hurt us.
Delgado? He hurts now, sadly. After spending most of 2009 out with a bad right hip, he’s had it operated on once more and he’s going to be sidelined anywhere from four months to for good as a baseball player. Carlos is approaching 38 years old and will have been inactive at the major league level for more than a year when he’s projected as fully recovered. David Sloane has taken off his earbuds long enough to let one and all know this isn’t stopping Delgado from planning on playing again, but planning and playing are two different things.
Adding Delgado when we did, even if meant parting with young Jacobs just as Jacobs was finding his home run stroke (the only stroke he ever maintained), surely didn’t hurt. No, I’d say it helped a great deal. Even though he wasn’t quite the Carlos Delgado at whom we’d marveled on SportsCenter and in fleeting American League glimpses — seems we use that type of description a lot — he was the right man at the right time for the 2006 Mets.
Willie Randolph didn’t much screw around with the batting order then. Carlos Delgado was his cleanup hitter 124 times. Reyes led off 148 times (missing his only significant time when Jacobs the Fish stepped on his hand and cost him his All-Star start); Paul Lo Duca batted second 118 times; Carlos Beltran was in the three hole 137 times; and Wright hit fifth 117 times. David took a few turns at cleanup, usually moving Delgado to third. Otherwise, it was all very stable from one through five, and the Mets were generally unstoppable.
Is this an endorsement of stability in batting orders? If you have five guys performing at or near their respective peaks, sure. It rarely works that way (which may provide a hint as to why 2006 has been so difficult to replicate). Otherwise, Jerry Manuel will — like any manager — juggle, improvise, pick names out of a hat. The best batting order is the one that works. The trial and error involved tends to bury everybody’s Spring Training quotes.
Still, it sure is nice when you have those first few names regularly present and accounted for. It’s even better when you have eight, but that’s rarely the case. Recall 2008, the last great year of Carlos Delgado. Last great half-year, really, since CD was plagued by the hip through ’07 and the early months of ’08. Then he turned it on, MVP-style, and seemed to carry the Mets into first place for stretches of summer. His hip may have been sore, but his back was strong, his shoulders were broad and oh my, was his swing lethal.
It wasn’t really Carlos Delgado by himself recasting the 2008 Mets from irritating, addled chumps to invigorating, almost champs. Reyes, Beltran and Wright were playing every single day, too. You knew Jose would lead off (159 times) and David would bat third (158 times). Beltran was often fourth (118 times) and sometimes fifth (36 times). Delgado was dropped to sixth 32 times in an effort to let him find himself. Once he did, he was generally entrusted with the five-hole (74 times) or cleanup now and then (40 times).
Batting second? Everybody. Luis Castillo, Endy Chavez, Ryan Church, Nick Evans, Argenis Reyes, Daniel Murphy, Damion Easley, Marlon Anderson, Angel Pagan…whoever worked. As Manuel discovered, none of them did for more than a few games here or a few games there. Perhaps it was telling that with everything on the line in the final weekend of the season, Jerry crafted a front four that may have been the most top-heavy half-lineup in the history of Shea Stadium:
Reyes SS
Beltran CF
Delgado 1B
Wright 3B
One pure leadoff hitter and three sluggers, no muss, no fuss. Not a Millan, a Backman or even a surprisingly powerful Alfonzo in the bunch — just punch.
Batting Beltran second — two hits in the final win, a homer in the final game — wasn’t unprecedented. That’s where he generated his power during his legendary 2004 postseason salary drive and that’s where callers to WFAN have intermittently demanded he be inserted regularly since 2005. The alignment was by no means insane, but it did strike me that Saturday and Sunday as incredibly desperate. Jerry Manuel was down to four offensive players he thought he could trust against any pitcher the Marlins threw at the Mets. Screw it, he seemed to say, I’ll just bat ’em all at the top of the order and hope for the best. A Church who wasn’t slumping, a Castillo who wasn’t hopeless or a Ramon Martinez who might have revealed himself just a touch sooner as untapped dynamite and the lineup wouldn’t have looked so top-heavy. But nobody south of Wright inspired any confidence, thus the makeshift philosophy of Inflict Some Pain, Then Pray For Rain.
Would it have made the difference in how 2008 wound up had Jerry been able to effectively spread the wealth at the end? Who the hell knows? Given a few more games, maybe Manuel would have found the right combination. Unfortunately, you only get 162 games to sort it all out.
I was thinking of that particular lineup construction because of some admittedly esoteric research I recently undertook for another article slated to appear soon in another venue. It started with the foggy recollection that the 1997 Mets, befitting their never-say-die feistiness, were particularly compelling in the eighth inning. It rang a bell considering there’s no better inning than the eighth to decide to not say die. Well, OK, the first through seventh are fine innings on paper, and the ninth is technically not too late, but the eighth is properly dramatic and reasonably pragmatic. You don’t have to win it in the eighth. If you tie it up, you’re doin’ good.
Y’know what? I wasn’t crazy, at least not where my image of the ’97 Mets was concerned. Bobby Valentine’s first club did indeed make the most of their eighth innings. They were, essentially, the best eighth-inning club in baseball that season. They scored in 57 of 162 eighth innings, totaling 114 runs in the process. Only the Indians scored more often in the eighth (58 games) and only the Mariners (124 runs) crossed home plate more. Those were playoff teams. The 88-74 Mets felt like they might be, which, after six consecutive losing seasons, was plenty.
Anyway, as long as I was looking up eighth innings, I decided to see if there was anything to be divined from other innings in Mets history. I found a dozen or so nuggets that I found far more fascinating than Sean Green’s arm angle, but this one item in particular, in light of Manuel’s musings about Reyes batting third and the de facto end of Delgado’s Met tenure, struck me:
The most prolific inning any Mets team has ever enjoyed across a single season was the first inning in 2008.
The 2008 Mets scored 139 runs in first innings two years ago. Not only that, they scored in 74 different first innings, also a Met record for any inning in any year. With Reyes just about invariably leading off, Wright consistently batting third and a Delgado-Beltran combo cleaning up, the Mets went out and put points on the board right away in 46% of their games. That was with nobody in particular batting second, mind you.
Next best inning in Mets history for total runs as well as frequency of scoring? The third inning of…2008. Manuel, when he was a genius, had a batting order that exploded in the first, took a breather in the second and created more noise in the third: 135 runs in 63 games. The Mets would fairly regularly turn over the lineup and produce like it was the first inning once more.
I don’t know that there’s a pattern to be gleaned here. What I’m fond of is the metaphor it presents for the most recent Met club to post a winning record: they were fast starters but dismal finishers. Met pitching — the dreaded 2008 bullpen — was giving up a ton of runs in the seventh, eighth and ninth innings, certainly more than they were scoring. The simplistic view (though I don’t know that it’s altogether inaccurate) is great first- and third-inning production got them 89 wins. It was the rest of the game kept them out of the playoffs. I find it some combination of telling, characteristic and vaguely damning that the 38th of Delgado’s 38 home runs in 2008, cracked in the 158th game of that ultimately unsatisfying season…
a) was a grand slam;
b) was blasted in the third inning;
c) capped a five-run onslaught;
d) was rendered a footnote when Wright couldn’t bring home Murphy from third with nobody out and the score tied in the ninth, as the Mets went on to lose in ten;
e) and represented the final time the 2008 Mets, even with their Big Four intact, scored more than two runs in any one inning — a span covering the last 43 innings of 2008.
Start fast. Finish dismal.
You can read as much as you choose into this sort of thing and you probably wouldn’t be wrong either way. For instance, the most productive ninth-inning team in Mets lore was the 2007 Mets, a unit we tend to consider the quittingest bunch of quitters in the history of quitting. It actually kind of makes sense when you realize the Mets were a distinctly bad home club (41-40) for a technically good overall club (88-74). Losing at home means you’re batting quite a bit in the bottom of the ninth. Know which Mets team scored the most ninth-inning runs in the first quarter-century that there were Mets? The 1962 club, the one that lost 58 games in the Polo Grounds and 62 more elsewhere. Were they never-say-die or just granted ample opportunity to score not quite enough to win very often?
I don’t know. I also don’t know if Delgado will play again. I don’t know if Jacobs will actually be here come April. I don’t know if Reyes batting third in Beltran’s absence is necessarily an unspeakable idea. I don’t know that Barajas will fundamentally alter the Met dynamic. I don’t know how a local greaser is supposed to guide his motorcycle over 14 garbage cans. I don’t know what to make of Sean Green’s pronounced sidearm motion.
It’s the first week of Spring Training. It’s hard to know anything. But it’s tough not to wonder about everything.
by Jason Fry on 19 February 2010 4:14 pm Last night I was at a thing and fell into conversation with a fellow Mets fan. We talked about this and that, with indifferent optimism, and then he asked, “But Reyes is running?”
He wasn’t really asking; he knew. It was more that he was looking for confirmation. And all of a sudden I found myself smiling.
“Reyes is running,” I said. “I mean, he had to get away from the Mets to heal and who knows what’s going to happen and ….”
That was all wrong. I stopped and tried again.
“Reyes is running,” I said. And then I was smiling again.
Close your eyes and you can see him. His head is down and his arms are churning. In another second his helmet will fail to keep pace with the rest of him and fly off for retrieval later, and another second after that he’ll be popping up out of the dust with that huge ear-to-ear grin, slightly pop-eyed, his spiky hair sticking up like a startled cat. If it’s a particularly big moment he’ll smash his hands together a few times in a way that looks like it hurts. He’ll look slightly winded, but mostly he’ll look like you like to imagine you’d look if you could only do what he does. He’ll look like that was an enormous amount of fun and he can’t wait to do it again.
You know what? It’s been a while. Close your eyes and let yourself see that again.
Somewhere, perhaps, Mets front office people are doing something ill-advised.
Somewhere, it’s entirely possible, Mets business people are being cheap and short-sighted.
Somewhere, it may be, Jerry Manuel is chortling when he ought to be listening to someone who’s crunched numbers.
Somewhere, if we’re not lucky, Kelvin Escobar is wincing, Carlos Beltran is limping, or both.
Of late too many of these somewheres have been located too close to home for us to feel at ease. But sometimes somewhere is a good place to find yourself.
Somewhere Jose Reyes is running. Think of that and be not afraid.
by Greg Prince on 18 February 2010 8:19 am “Hello, Mr. Santos. I’m not sure if you remember me…”
“You’re that kid, right? That kid from last September. Holy? Holy Something?”
“Thole, sir. Josh Thole. I just wanted to remake your acquaintance.”
“Yeah, Thole, right. Hey, you don’t have to call me Mr. Santos.”
“Well, it’s just that you’re so much older than I am, and my folks taught me to respect my elders.”
“Listen, Holy..”
“That’s Thole, Mr. Santos. I guess at your age the hearing must begin to go a bit.”
“Thole, how old are you?”
“I’m just a lad of 23.”
“Thole, I ain’t even gonna be 29 until April.”
“Twenty-nine, sir? Can I get you another stool? You must be growing weary putting on all that equipment.”
“Thole, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to tell me something, like you think being younger than me is gonna win you my job.”
“Gosh, no, Mr. Santos. I mean you’re a veteran and everything. If I remember my SATs right — and I think I do since I didn’t take them all that long ago — the word for you is venerable.”
“Knock it off, kid. I ain’t no venerable veteran or whatever you just called me. I was a rookie last year, just like you are this year.”
“At your advanced age? That’s remarkable, Mr. Santos. You must have spent a lot of years in the minors. A lot.”
“Kid, I worked hard to get here and I earned my position as the No. 1 catcher going into the season. Don’t think a few years between you and me is gonna make that much of a difference.”
“Six years, sir. Say, I think I’m gonna sprint out onto the field with all my gear on to get a head start on the workouts. When you’re as young as me, you have a lot of energy to burn, even after hitting .381 in winter ball. Maybe you remember that feeling, Mr. Santos.”
“It’s Omir, kid. Omir.”
“Hola, fellas. This where we don the tools of ignorance?”
“You must be Mr. Blanco.”
“Mister Blanco? Where you get that from, muchacho? Ain’t we all big leaguers here?”
“Ignore him, Henry. Kid’s playing mind games with us. Geez, look at him run…”
“Yeah, sure. And who are you?”
“Aw, c’mon, Henry. You know me.”
“No offense, bro, but I meet a lotta ballplayers in my line of work. Can’t keep ’em all straight.”
“Dude, I’m Omir Santos!”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Omir Santos! Topps All-Rookie catcher from last year!”
“From what team?”
“What team? This team, fool!”
“Oh, right. Sorry, pal. Yeah, I guess I’ve heard of ya.”
“C’mon! The home run against Boston?”
“Boston? So you were with the Angels last year?”
“Angels, where you get that from?”
“Home run against Boston, you said. I thought you were talking about the playoffs, like it was something big. Wait a sec…is this the Angels? Is that who signed me?”
“No man, the Mets. You know…New York Mets?”
“Oh. Listen, no offense, Sanchez…”
“San-TOSE. Omir Santos.”
“Look, Omar…”
“O-MEER.”
“Buddy, I’ve caught for seven different teams. I can’t remember from one year to the next who I’m catching for or who I’m catching behind. I just know my agent sent me a plane ticket and directions to camp. I don’t even know who I’m backing up. Who’s the starting catcher here?”
“I am! I’m Omir Santos, dammit. I was on the Topps All-Rookie Team last year!”
“Calm down, amigo. I’m glad you still collect baseball cards. Good for you. What team’s this again?”
“The Mets.”
“Mets, huh? Hey, Piazza still here? It would be an honor to back that guy up.”
“Sigh…no. Just us.”
“Aw, too bad. Well, I’m gonna go hit the field and find out who my pitchers are. Nice to meetcha, Shamir.”
“That’s OH-mir.”
“‘Scuse me, catchers dress over here?”
“Uh-huh. Hey, you’re the guy from Philly, right?”
“Damn right. Chris Coste of the Philadelphia Phillies. And you’re goin’ DOWN, Met boy.”
“What the hell?”
“Oh, sorry, man. Force of habit. I mean, yes, I’m Chris. Chris Coste.”
“Nice to see ya. I’m Omir Santos.”
“Yeah, I know who you are. You’re a Met. And I don’t like Mets.”
“Chris, you all right?”
“Geez, did I do it again? I gotta apologize. I just have this thing. I was in the Phillie organization an awful long time. They were more like family to me than my own family. I can’t help but think of myself as a Phillie.”
“But didn’t they let you go last year? Houston picked you up on waivers, right?”
“YOU TAKE THAT BACK! HOW DARE YOU SAY ANYTHING BAD ABOUT MY BELOVED PHILLIES!”
“Chris, chill!”
“BILL GILES IS A SAINT! CHARLIE MANUEL’S MY FATHER! I DYED MY HAIR GREEN SO IT’S JUST LIKE THE PHANATIC’S!”
“What?”
“Gosh, Omir, I don’t know what comes over me. I guess I’m just such a Phillie, that I think I’m still on their team. And knowing you’re a Met just brings it out in me.”
“Chris, man, you’re a Met, too.”
“You say that one more time, and I swear I’ll pop you right in the face.”
“Whoa, take it easy there.”
“Don’t tell me to take it easy! The Phillies aren’t gonna take it easy on you losers! I’m gonna go get my buddies Chase and Shane and J-Roll…and, oh, don’t get Ryan Howard mad. He’ll mess you up but good! We’re the team to beat!”
“Chris, seriously…”
“And who painted this clubhouse these disgusting shades of blue and orange? Why isn’t it red and white like it always is? How did the Clearwater city authorities allow this?”
“This is Port St. Lucie, Chris. You’re a Met.”
“Oh, that’s it! I’m telling Hamels to come inside on you, and you’re not gonna like it, you choke artist.”
“Chris, I think you need to go see the trainer or something.”
“ENEMY! ENEMY! UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!”
“Uh-huh…”
“STEVE CARLTON WAS MISQUOTED! BEN CHAPMAN WAS MISUNDERSTOOD! PHILLIES FOREVER! I WILL ALWAYS BE A PHILLIE!”
“Who was that?”
“Just some guy who’s lost, I think.”
“Say, you’re Omir Santos, right?”
“Yeah. Who’re you?”
“Oh, hi. I’m Shawn Riggans. I was with the Rays the last few years. Didn’t play much, though. I just signed a minor league deal with the Mets and I’m looking forward to hopefully being your teammate.”
“You another catcher?”
“Yup.”
“Go screw yourself. You and that guy whose footsteps I hear out in the hall.”
by Jason Fry on 17 February 2010 1:30 pm Tomorrow pitchers and catchers officially report, and I will breathe a small but real sigh of relief. Depending on what’s going on in the winter, the lack of baseball is somewhere between an itch and an ache, but it’s always there somewhere. Tomorrow, we get to scratch. There will still be an agonizingly long stretch of time before there are fake games and an even longer, more agonizing stretch of time before there are real games, but tomorrow the season — with its promise of warm nights and life as it should be — will be in view once again.
What the season will bring is another story, of course.
Back in early December, elevendy-billion feet of snow ago, I reacted to the Mets’ re-signing of Alex Cora and the Red Sox’ pocketing of draft picks for Billy Wagner by vowing that I would print out and eat my just-written blog post on Opening Day if anyone could convince me that the Mets’ offseason reflected some sort of coherent plan. Having seen 10 more weeks of offseason unfold, it’s clear that I’m in no danger of having to choke down a paper meal. The Mets did sign Jason Bay, albeit without much competition, and he should help. But they completely failed to address the need for another reliable pitcher, apparently missing out on Joel Pineiro through simple incompetence. They claimed they weren’t broke, but acted like they were by passing on another chance to acquire Orlando Hudson and eliminate a defensive black hole at second base. Their surplus of backup catchers is a punch line throughout baseball — you know you’re in trouble when everybody agrees importing a guy who just posted a .258 OBP would be an upgrade. Elsewhere, they made small, baffling moves that may not hurt much but don’t seem likely to help. For a first baseman, Mike Jacobs is a heck of a designated hitter, and he’s left-handed — just like Daniel Murphy. Having Gary Matthews Jr. on the roster seems pointless, no matter how little he cost. And what would the off-season have been without the Mets mishandling an injury and engaging in their trademark finger-pointing and bungling?
It actually appears worse than I thought back in December: From what I can see the Mets not only have no plan, but as presently run are incapable of planning.
And yet.
That “and yet” has little to do with Florida sunshine and people showing up in the best shape of their life and lessons having been learned and all the usual spring-training blather, though all of that will make us feel better. Six weeks in Port St. Lucie aren’t likely to turn Mike Jacobs into a first baseman or make Luis Castillo stop fielding like a concrete pylon. Starting with a 0-0 record won’t mean Liggy and Podie have quit the premises, though it will be a lot better than watching those two stumble around when you’re clearly ticketed for 90 losses.
No, the “and yet” has to do with the fact that the Mets still have decent ballplayers at the center of their circus. I expect David Wright’s 2009 will turn out to be an outlier, not a forecast of his future. Escaping the tender mercies of his own employer seems to have allowed Jose Reyes to heal. Defying his own employer ought to bring Carlos Beltran back more quickly. Johan Santana should, with any luck, be Johan Santana. There are loads of qualifiers there, yes, but there’s also a core of talent that more than a few teams would be happy to start with. To that, add Jason Bay, who may not age well but is a far better corner outfielder than anyone from 2009’s corps. And throw in Mike Pelfrey, John Maine, Oliver Perez, and Daniel Murphy — question marks who at least have some recent history of being exclamation points. And while we’re being optimistic, the farm system could actually show dividends relatively soon in Jon Niese and Josh Thole, and Ike Davis might not be too far behind them. (Hey, sometimes the Alex Escobars are interrupted by a Wright or a Reyes.)
As fans and bloggers we think we know everything when we don’t. But from all the reports pointing the same general direction, it sure looks to me like the Mets could have spent the offseason turning themselves into a team that a reasonable person could expect to win around 90 games. That they proved incapable of this is exasperating, to say the least. But we can dwell on that later. With spring training finally about to arrive, I’m reminding myself of something else: Teams that a reasonable person expects to win around 83 games get lucky sometimes.
Will the Mets be one of those teams? I doubt it — one of the many things Branch Rickey was right about is that luck is residue of design. But it’s not impossible. It’s not even wildly improbable. And if the Mets get lucky and/or put their house in order, I and many other Mets fans will proclaim ourselves dead wrong with full-throated glee. That’s one of the pleasures of sports — if you’re shown to be a hopeless pessimist, admitting it is bliss.
Odds are none of this will mean anything by the warm nights of July, but on a frozen afternoon in February it’ll do.
by Greg Prince on 16 February 2010 2:53 pm Happy birthday to us!
Happy birthday to us!
Happy birthday dear FAFIF!
Happy birthday to us!
How old are we now? February 16, 2005 is our blue and orange-letter day, having begun this thing of ours precisely a half-decade ago today. Thus, as we blow out the candles, I’d like to share five reflections on five years of blogging the Mets in this space.
1) In one of my favorite books about television (or anything else), Saturday Night by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, published in 1985, the authors brought readers up to date on what members of the original cast had been doing since leaving SNL. “Gilda Radner,” they wrote, “has said that whenever she watches” reruns of her episodes, “she reverts to the mood she was in the week of that particular show, whether she was in love, or having her period, whatever she was going through at the time.”
I’m with Gilda, at least when it comes to the Mets’ cycles. When I find myself, for whatever reason, looking up one of the nearly 3,000 pieces Jason and I have posted in these past five years, I am shocked at how quickly I shoot right back to where I was when it was written — where I was and where the Mets were. It’s either a gift or a curse that for me no season is ever really completely in the past.
For example, a few weeks ago, on the night the Jets lost the AFC Championship game, MLB Network — a.k.a. The Proustian Channel — was running what appeared at first glance to be a fairly random game from the 1995 season, the Mets at Cincinnati on a sunny Saturday in May. The Mets broke the game open in the middle innings, up 9-2 in the middle of the sixth, 11-4 in the middle of the eighth. The viewer eventually learns that this game wasn’t random. It was being shown because of a gargantuan comeback staged by the Reds. They scored six in the eighth and three in the ninth to win 13-11.
This game took place fifteen years ago, but for me, it didn’t. It was happening in real time as it aired. All at once, the 1995 Mets were the Mets, the only Mets I had. Dallas Green was our manager. Brett Butler was leading off. Bobby Bonilla was hitting cleanup. Edgardo Alfonzo was our promising rookie whose first home run was an inside-the-park job in the fifth. Did Alfonzo go on to hit more homers? Did we ever dig out of the debris the bullpen of Jerry DiPoto and Doug Henry left behind? I know the answers, but that night I couldn’t have. That night, it was that day in Cincinnati. When I watched that rebroadcast, I was in 1995, counting on Butler and Bonilla to lead us into Wild Card contention.
It went beyond reflexively cheering a Mets hit or instinctively cringing at a Mets misplay in a replay of a game you know was put in the books a generation ago. Instinctively, it was May 6, 1995. I could feel it.
That’s what rereading what we’ve written on FAFIF is like for me. I find myself confident for stretches of August and September 2007 all over again, even though I know better about the end of 2007, because I really was confident for stretches of August and September 2007, and it’s reflected in my writing of the time. I find myself desperately warding off uncertainty in May 2006, just before the Mets elevate themselves completely above the pack and take a death grip on the National League East. Hindsight proves my worrying was for nothing in divisional terms, but in those posts, while starting pitching is short and second base is a muddle, I’m not sure about anything.
If it’s not quite the same as watching an old game on TV for the first time since it aired, it’s pretty intense. It’s not a matter of wanting or not wanting to relive a certain game or homestand in recent Mets history. It just happens. And it’s not reliving. It’s living it. I read Faith and Fear from whatever the date, and it is that date.
When I inaugurated the original Flashback Friday series in 2005, I used a phrase on a couple of occasions my underlying rationale for digging into the past: We are the sums of all the seasons that came before the one we’re in now. Five years of FAFIF have only deepened that sense.
And I can still feel what I was feeling when I first wrote that phrase.
2) One minute you’re sitting here excitedly hailing the appearance of Carlos Beltran in a Mets uniform; the next minute, you’re sitting here wondering when, exactly, Carlos Beltran will be appearing in a Mets uniform.
There’s more to that observation than a wisecrack at the expense of the Mets’ most recent public relations debacle. Carlos Beltran was at the center of our thoughts as Mets fans five years ago. Signing Beltran for $119 million was stunning. It wasn’t just the money or the idea of the Mets committing to someone through the far-off 2011 season. Carlos Beltran was acknowledged as the prize of that winter’s free agent class. The Mets had only netted one of those before: Bobby Bonilla. By all indications, Beltran wasn’t Bonilla. The best indication was what had gone on in the last two series Beltran played, the ’04 NLDS against Atlanta and the ’04 NLCS against the Cardinals. Carlos may not have singlehandedly beaten the Braves and nearly done the same to St. Louis, but it was close.
Once again, it was MLB Network that conjured it all up recently when it devoted an hour to remembering 2004. There was Beltran the Astro, owning October. There was Pedro Martinez of Boston, pitching — in tandem with Curt Schilling — the Red Sox to their elusive World Series title. Naturally Boston was all over that show. It started with them losing to the Yankees in the ’03 ALCS and crested with their remarkable comeback against them one postseason later.
The effect of all this was to send a not insignificant chill through me. Proust again. That confluence from October 2004 brought me right back there, specifically to a team whose name wasn’t mentioned at all in this MLBN documentary: the Mets. As thrilled as I was to watch the Red Sox scale that hump, I was saddened all over again thinking about how little the Mets existed as a competitive entity at that moment in time. It led me to remember what it was like to sit at this very desk and absorb the news that the Mets had signed Pedro Martinez in December and Carlos Beltran in January, and how much that thing that had been missing for several seasons was appearing over the Met horizon:
Hope.
That was the mindset in the first weeks of February 2005, informed by the presence of one pitcher who was great but had probably peaked and one player who was great and seemed to be peaking. The player, Beltran, would reach his high point in a Mets uniform. And, on the Wednesday afternoon when my friend of ten years called and said that idea we had, for the blog, well I put it up, try posting something (which was no mean feat, as I was tethered to a very old computer that apparently wasn’t built for blogging), my immediate Met thinking focused squarely on the man…the Met who loomed as the best player in baseball.
The first thing I wrote about was Carlos Beltran arriving in Port St. Lucie. I had no idea how the Mets would do in 2005. I wasn’t necessarily confident that the organization’s facelift — new general manager, new manager and that pair of high-profile acquisitions — would translate into a contender right away, but I could feel the hope. Carlos Beltran gave me that more than anybody else five years ago…gave me more of it than probably any single New Met ever has in any February.
Which is why I felt sad watching the MLBN show. The Beltran who became a Met has been a splendid player, arguably as good over his three best seasons, ’06 to ’08, as any Met position player has ever been. Yet watching highlights of him defeating the Braves and taking the Cardinals to the limit, I wondered how come we never quite got that Carlos Beltran. That’s some bar to set. Clearly those were two series almost nobody in baseball history has ever come close to matching: 8 home runs; 14 runs batted in; 20 hit; 21 runs scored; 6 stolen bases; 1.557 OPS in a dozen games.
Those were superstar levels. Superhuman levels. Not quite the Beltran we’ve seen as a Met, and it’s unfair to think you could get 162 games worth of that every year, year after year. I’ve always been fine with the Beltran we’ve seen as a Met. Yet I found myself wondering how come that October 2004 Beltran never quite made it to the Mets. I rarely think of Carlos in those terms, but this February, five years later, it crossed my mind.
I’m still glad we’ve had him for five years. I’m happy he’s supposed to be here for two more years. I admire his grace and composure as much as his talent. I look forward to his return. Still, I guess I miss the Beltran I imagined on February 16, 2005.
3) For a very long time, my career involved writing for and editing magazines that were usually in some sort of circulation and ad revenue battle with a direct competitor. The mindset was always, “We’re good, they’re bad.” It was how we did business.
I have to confess that attitude carried over into my first brush with blogging. There was no direct competition with anybody, yet I wondered when we were going to prevail in the marketplace. When, I’d ask Jason at least a little seriously, will everybody who reads blogs stop reading those others and start reading ours and our alone? When would everybody else who blogs about the Mets find another topic? I mean, we’re here — they can move on now.
Blogging didn’t and doesn’t work that way, and I couldn’t be happier about it. There are as many Mets blogs as there are grains of sand, and the ocean keeps making more. Yay, to that. Yay to everybody who finds his or her own angle, yay to everybody who churns out a dozen posts a day, yay to everybody who crafts one post every dozen days. Yay to all the perspectives the Mets inspire, and yay to all the new ways of looking at the Mets our blogging community has created.
It’s amused me quite a bit these past few weeks whenever I’ve read one of our blolleagues lament that it’s a “slow news day” where the Mets are concerned. Because of blogdom, we’ve gotten the impression something should always be happening with the Mets. It wasn’t that long ago that winter was winter, and we accepted as a matter of course that nothing happening with the Mets was the norm. That’s what winter was good for: nothing. The blogging community changed that and made being a Mets fan a whole lot more interesting.
I sit here alone and type, but I know I’m part of a community, not just half of a two-man operation. I was reminded of this last week when I sought to increase awareness of something worthwhile one of our readers is up to. I asked a bunch of other bloggers if they’d mind posting a link to the interview with our friend Sharon who’s running the New York City Marathon to raise funds to battle brain cancer. You know how many of them responded affirmatively? Every damn one of them. More than every damn one of them, actually. Some blogs linked to our Tug McGraw Foundation story without my having asked them. This isn’t atypical of Mets bloggers, but it is a reminder how beautiful it is to write in the very real virtual company of these people.
I’ve come to know, to varying degrees, a lot of Mets bloggers through this adventure. They’re not competitors. We’re all in this together. We’re all bound by wanting our team to do well and by wanting to tell the rich and textured story of what it’s like to root for this team. It’s a pleasure and honor being on the same team with them.
For those with whom we blog, I salute you.
4) On my first trip to Citi Field in April, as I groped to come to grips with the existence what was going to be my ballpark for the rest of my life, I was instantly impressed by a couple of things — the food was good and the setting was sociable. One of our readers commented that this didn’t impress him:
Call me an out of touch dinosaur, but I’ve got a million and one places to be social. If I wanted to relax, talk to friends and have some nice food, I’d stay home.
I certainly appreciate the sentiment behind that, but these years of writing Faith and Fear have changed one fundamental thing about going to the ballpark, whichever ballpark it is. There is a more social element to it. I run into people at Mets games in a way I never did before 2005. I meet up with people in the middle of Mets games. This was almost never the case for the first 25 or so years I’d go to Shea, and it wasn’t all that common thereafter. Now, thanks to FAFIF, I see friends at the game. I’m lucky to have friends like these.
I go to the game to see the game first and foremost, of course, but this is another dimension, and I truly value it. Likewise, I write about the Mets here because I like writing about the Mets, but knowing so many of the people on the other end of this series of tubes aren’t just readers but friends — including the proverbial friends I’ve yet to meet — is what makes this blog a passion for me. I thank all of you for your friendship, your readership and your passion.
5) Before the most recent storm of the century, I went to weather.com to check my local forecast. In the box where you’re asked to enter your ZIP Code, I automatically typed in 11368.
I stared at it a moment. It didn’t look right. Then I realized that 11368 isn’t my ZIP Code. It’s Shea Stadium’s ZIP Code.
Geographically speaking, according to MapQuest, I live about 20 miles south and east from the parking lot formerly known as Shea Stadium, but let’s not quibble. The Mets are my psychic home. If you’ve taken the time to visit here on any kind of regular basis, I’m guessing they’re yours, too. Perhaps, then, it’s most accurate to consider Faith and Fear in Flushing an extension onto that home, an extra room for all our Mets stuff: all our anxieties, all our exultations, all our memories, all our analysis, all our flights of fancy, all of our id when it comes to baseball.
I find all Mets seasons unforgettable. That’s my blessing and my curse. But these five seasons…it’s been good to spend them here at home with all of you. I’m gonna go clear some space to make room for whatever the next one brings.
by Greg Prince on 15 February 2010 4:51 pm Fans, it’s the middle of the sixth inning, and you know what that means: It’s time for the Citi Field Fun Run, the forced frivolity we co-opted from Milwaukee, Washington and our own minor league Cyclones!
The Citi Field Fun Run is brought to you by a total lack of imagination on the part of the Mets’ marketing department.
Lining up at third base are our regular contestants:
Liggy, the misdiagnosed ligament!
Podie, the press conference podium!
Empty, the plush green seat from behind home plate!
And Angel Pagan, part-time outfielder!
The object, as every Mets fan knows, is for our four characters to race from third to home without incident. Will this be the night it happens? We’re about to find out.
Mr. Met brings down the green flag and…THEY’RE OFF!
Liggy takes one step and he’s writhing in pain. The Mets’ medical staff rushes out to attend to his cries of anguish.
Podie looks sharp but is suddenly cringing in embarrassment at whatever a Met executive is likely to say next into his microphone.
Empty doesn’t seem to be here. Empty almost never pays attention to what’s going on on the field despite being a great seat.
Angel Pagan tags up at third, apparently unaware of the rules of the Citi Field Fun Run. You can go for home anytime, Angel!
He’s not listening.
Liggy is still on the ground. He doesn’t appear to be in any shape to run anywhere…but the Mets doctor literally rubs some dirt on him, hands him a Band-Aid and props him to his feet. The doc pats him on the rear end and tells him he’s 100% good to go!
Liggy falls down again. The cries of anguish only intensify.
Podie isn’t running, but he is covering his ears, indicating he doesn’t believe a word any member of the Met front office would ever utter for public consumption.
Empty is still AWOL, though we do have a report that…yes, our CitiVision cameras have found Empty! He’s enjoying a cocktail in the Delta Sky360 Club with his pal Pricey.
Angel Pagan has finally gotten word that he doesn’t have to tag up, so he’s sprinting at full speed now. However, he seems to be…yes, Angel Pagan has run from third to second…where he’s tagged up again. You should run the other way, Angel!
He’s still not listening.
It’s the home stretch! It’s anybody’s race! Here they sort of come!
Liggy is limping off the field. The Mets have released a statement that though he appears to now be a torn ligament, Liggy has absorbed no more than a mild bruise, and he should be considered day-to-day…even as Liggy is carted off to a waiting ambulance outside the ballpark.
Keep Liggy in your prayers tonight, Mets fans.
Podie has just tendered his resignation. He says he wishes to spend his career providing support for local politicians and other “more honorable” figures.
Empty is still taking advantage of the amenities offered by Citi Field’s sumptuous private enclaves, the ones that are off-limits to most Mets fans. He’s in the Ebbets Club now…and his back is clearly to the field. Empty will not be watching the rest of tonight’s game.
And with no competition, Angel Pagan has just taken off from second for first…but he’s tagged out en route by an ever alert Eric Bruntlett, who was heading to his position for the start of the next half-inning. It seems that, once again, we will not have a winner here tonight.
But let’s give all our contestants the hand they deserve. Ladies and gentlemen, the Citi Field Fun Run!
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The disappearance of Shea from the New York cityscape, save for the dust and debris that would linger into May, was completed just over a year ago, when on the morning of February 18, 2009, the last immediately discernible sign of its existence vanished from the Queens skyline. Save for four brass bases and an accurately if curiously named pitcher’s plate in a parking lot, it’s now like Shea Stadium was never there.
