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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 12 February 2010 5:48 am “Who can go the distance?” Don Henley asked some thirty years ago before the Eagle answered his own question: “We’ll find out in the long run.”
There’s a long run coming this November, and I have a pretty good hunch about who’s going the distance that day.
Sharon Chapman, like you a Mets fan and like you a reader of Faith and Fear in Flushing, is training for the New York City Marathon. It’s a long run, all right — 26.2 miles for those of you scoring at home. It’s a run with more than a dash of Met meaning, too, because of what Sharon’s doing while preparing.
She is using this personally momentous occasion to raise money for the Tug McGraw Foundation, a group devoted to making the lives of people coping with brain cancer, post-traumatic stress disorder and trauma brain injury better. TMF was established as Tug himself — the man who originated the credo “You Gotta Believe” while closing out games for the 1973 National League Champion Mets — was fighting brain cancer. Tug, a Met stalwart from 1965 through 1974, died in January 2004. The Foundation continues to seek solutions to a deadly scourge in his name.
The intersection of Sharon Chapman’s marathon aspirations and the memory of Tug McGraw crosses our doorstep because Sharon reached out to us and asked if she could represent “Faith and Fear Nation” on her journey and wear a wristband with our blog logo. I didn’t even know we had a nation (maybe a dorm), but Jason and I said, sure, we’d be honored.
Since we’re unofficial sponsors, I thought it appropriate to check in with Sharon and find out a little more about how all this came together, how it’s progressing and get a greater sense for her fellow FAFIF readers why a Met legend, her Met fandom — and another Mets fan she has yet to meet — coalesced to make this more than just one woman running one race.
How long have you been running?
I started running in the spring of 1999. I ran three times a week until the fall of 2008; at that time I had started Weight Watchers. Weight Watchers cajoled me into increasing my exercise by allowing me to exchange the earned Activity Points for Food Points, and as a result I started running virtually every day.
How did your running progress from simple exercise to a try at the New York City Marathon?
I blame Valerie Bertinelli. Seriously.
 Even though Valerie is a Jenny Craig spokesperson and I’m a Weight Watchers kind of girl, I attached to Valerie as my weight loss role model. She’s only slightly older than I am, she was looking to lose a similar amount of weight, and she wasn’t looking to become ultra-skinny; I could relate to her.
To digress — I promise this comes together — in January 2008 I went to Bermuda and ran the 10K race as part of their International Race Weekend. Except I wasn’t prepared for Bermuda’s steep hills, and I couldn’t run the whole way. I was very disappointed to have done poorly in a race in Bermuda, which is my favorite place in the world.
So flash forward to July 2009. My husband Kevin and I were in the car, and I told him that, now that I was at goal weight and in the best shape of my life, I wanted to return to Bermuda to get the 10K right. I also told him that I had no desire to run anything longer than 10K; I wasn’t interested in running a half marathon or anything like that.
Not 20 minutes later, in my Entertainment Weekly, I read this headline: Valerie Bertinelli Runs Her First Half Marathon! “Damn!” I said. “Now I have to run a half marathon!”
I ran that half marathon in Jersey City in September. At first, I thought that would be it. But then, the idea of running the New York Marathon started hitting me. When Kevin and I were in law school in Boston, I would watch the New York Marathon on television just to watch shots of New York because I was homesick.
To go from wistfully watching the Marathon on television to actually running it is something I never imagined, and I realized that it’s something that I need to try.
And I did go back to Bermuda this past January. Not only did I conquer the hills of Bermuda’s 10K race, but the next day — wearing my FAFIF wristband — I ran the half marathon there as well.
By the way, Valerie Bertinelli is running the Boston Marathon this spring as her first full marathon. So I’m still working on keeping up with her. But if she ever decides to go for a triathlon, she’s on her own.
What has the training been like to this point? What’s ahead?
Initially, the training wasn’t all that different for what I’ve been doing since the Fall of 2008. I just kept running every day. But recently I started increasing my long runs, which also means I need to build a rest day and a cross training day into my schedule. I hit a wall during my first attempt to run 20 miles, so now I’m working on proper nutrition for long runs — making sure I’m eating breakfast on those days, finding out which gel packs I like best, adding electrolytes to the equation, etcetera. I’ve gone from being a recreational jogger to someone who is becoming more knowledgeable about running, which is a transformation I never anticipated going through.
I started panicking about making the New York Marathon my first marathon, so I signed up for the New Jersey Marathon in May. I call it my training marathon; I can make all of my mistakes there so I’ll know what I’m doing in New York. The timing is good. I’ll have six months between the two races. That will give me two months to go back to easier running before I have to train again.
You met and interviewed Tug McGraw once. What were the circumstances? As someone who grew up a Mets fan, watching Tug, describe that experience.
I used to write a column called Fan’s Voice for New York Mets Inside Pitch. In early 2003, I had the opportunity to interview Tug by phone for the magazine. It was a great experience, and an instructive one. I was a novice, and Tug teased me about things like not recording the conversation. He was also very personable, entertaining and witty. The interview was basically everything one would ever expect from the man who coined the phrase “Ya Gotta Believe,” and it was a wonderful experience.
The interview was published a couple of weeks before Tug’s diagnosis that he had a malignant brain tumor. I was absolutely shocked. In retrospect, there may have been two times in our interview that he didn’t have an answer off the top of his head, but for the most part he was sharp and on the ball. It was inconceivable to me that he could have been ill at the time we spoke.
The postscript to this story is that my husband and I attended a Mets-Phillies game in the Phillies suite at Veterans Stadium in September of that year because we were involved in a local Cub Scouts group outing that season. I remember sitting down in my seat, looking over to the next section, and seeing a kid who looked like Tug McGraw’s son Matthew. At second glance, I noticed that it was indeed Matthew, and that Tug was sitting next to him. I went over and introduced myself in person to Tug, who remembered me and was very excited to meet me in person. That was one of the biggest thrills in my life.
How did you find yourself involved with the Tug McGraw Foundation vis-à-vis the marathon? And what is Team McGraw?
Kevin and I have actually attended several Tug McGraw Foundation events since the foundation’s inception. We went to a party at Citizens Bank Park in 2004, and to gala dinners in Philly and in New York. BTW, at the two gala dinners, each time I wanted my husband to take my picture with Tim McGraw, and both times we had camera malfunctions. Maybe one day I’ll get my picture taken with Tim…
But back to your question. When I decided that I wanted to run the New York Marathon, I started researching how I could get in. One cannot count on getting in through the lottery, and I was never going to be fast enough to get in via a qualifying time, but I saw that one could get in by raising money for certain charities that had spaces in the Marathon. I remembered reading about Team McGraw from a Tug McGraw Foundation newsletter, and looked into that. It seemed to me to be the perfect fit; I could achieve my goal of running the New York City Marathon and help an organization that has meaning to me at the same time.
Team McGraw is comprised of runners who participate in races to raise money for the Tug McGraw Foundation. It is headed up by musician Jeff McMahon, who is a distance runner himself and is also Tim McGraw’s keyboardist. The coach is Kevin Leathers, who’s given me some excellent distance running advice. Throughout the year different Team McGraw teams participate in races throughout the country. In fact, in addition to the NYC Marathon, I’m also participating in the NYC Half Marathon on March 21 as part of Team McGraw.
Being able to run the Marathon with a support group is a very comforting feeling. I won’t have to worry about finding my way or figuring out certain things on my own. I’ll have a group of wonderful people guiding me and watching my back. Because, frankly, I’m a little scared about tackling this kind of a distance; having Team McGraw there to support me is making the concept of 26.2 miles much less daunting than it would otherwise be.
You and I were both kids when Tug was traded to the Phillies. What do you remember most about Tug as a Met? Was he one of your favorites?
 I remember liking him. Everyone loved Tug, but I can’t remember too much about his Met playing career specifically. I do remember reading his Scroogie cartoon in the newspaper, though, and enjoying that very much. That’s the most specific memory of Tug from my childhood that I can muster.
Does what you’re doing now give you a new perspective on Tug’s signature phrase?
Ya Gotta Believe it does. That truly is a great motivating phrase. For that matter, it was also a motivator for my Weight Watchers success (I used whatever mind games I could in order to drop those forty pounds). Whenever you need to give yourself a kick in the rear, Ya Gotta Believe is a great motivator.
Tug spent roughly half his career with us, half with the Phillies, and he remained associated with them right up the time of his diagnosis with brain cancer. The Phillies are to be commended for having done a great job supporting the Foundation, no matter the rivalry that’s developed between the two clubs and their fans. Still, how odd is it for you to be wearing red in this context?
It’s odd, for sure. But, as you said, understandable. Tug was a Spring Training coach for the Phillies when he got sick, and spent much of his final year living in the Philly area.
For what it’s worth, while I don’t root for the Phillies, I do have to admit that the organization has always treated me very well. I live in Central New Jersey, and have attended many games in Philadelphia over the past several seasons. The Phillies have always treated me as a valued customer, which, sadly, I can’t say about my own team.
Kevin and I will be attending the Tug McGraw Foundation Awareness Night in Philly on April 30, which will be during a Mets-Phillies game I’m hoping that by wearing my Team McGraw shirt that the Phillies Phans won’t give me too much abuse for wearing my Mets cap to the game.
And how much blue do you hope to inject into the Foundation?
I’m definitely hoping to inject some more blue into TMF. I think that a lot of the TMF personnel are simply unaware of just how evenly split Tug’s career was. Also, it’s to their benefit to court Mets fans, since we’re certainly at least as generous as the Phillies Phans! Everyone who knows me at the Tug McGraw Foundation knows that I’m a passionate Mets fan, and I think that’s a good first step toward getting TMF to be more aware of the fact that Mets fans are a resource they should be approaching more proactively.
Could the Mets be doing more — or something — in this area?
For sure! If the Phillies can do a Team McGraw Awareness Night, it seems like the Mets could do something similar. I’m not sure whether that kind of thing would be initiated by the TMF or the Mets, but someone should look into making that happen. Tug is a member of the Mets Hall of Fame. The team should definitely honor his memory by supporting the foundation that bears his name.
Tell us a little about the young man you’re running for. We understand he’s a Mets fan, too. What does it mean to be “running for” twelve-year-old Connor McKean?
Team McGraw asked whether they could pair me up to run on behalf of one of their members. Ultimately, they paired me up with Connor.
 I haven’t met Connor in person yet, but I have exchanged e-mails with his mom and I hope to meet them sometime this season. Connor was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor called an ependymoma on October 17, 2007. He still suffers from headaches, but is working hard to keep up in school. I chose to run for Connor after I heard that he only wanted to wear his David Wright jersey when he was undergoing chemotherapy.
As the parents of two teenage boys and a girl in college, Connor McKean’s situation makes us really appreciate our own kids’ health all the more. It definitely makes running the Marathon for Connor McKean all the more poignant for me, because it could just as easily be one of my own kids going through the treatments and adjustments that he has gone through.
What do you hope you will have accomplished by November after the funds have been raised and the finish line is crossed?
Wow — I really haven’t thought in terms of the Big Picture much. So far I’ve been thinking about all of the small pictures leading up to November 7. For me, personally, I will have the satisfaction of having completed the New York City Marathon. I love this quote by Marathon founder Fred Lebow: “In running, it doesn’t matter whether you come in first, in the middle of the pack or last. You can say, ‘I have finished.’ There is a lot of satisfaction in that.” Since I was never blessed with speed, even as a youngster, I definitely hold this thought dearly.
Obviously I want to raise as much money for the TMF as possible. They are a great organization, and I want to support them. Even after my retirement from long runs, I hope to be able to help support Team McGraw in the future.
I love the concept that I can be the poster child for the idea that anyone can run. Two years ago I was forty pounds overweight and had never run longer than a slow 10K before. If I can run a marathon, then anyone with enough desire and dedication can do it. If that can help motivate other people to strive for things they previously thought were out of reach — just like Tug and Valerie have helped motivate me to strive to lose weight and run marathons — that would be an incredible thing.
You’re about two-thirds of the way to your fundraising goal. What does it mean to you to have elicited so much support from so many different people?
It’s very touching to have received so much support from so many people. Obviously some of it is the result of having picked the right charity to run for — so many people love Tug and want to honor his memory. But it also means a lot that people are supporting me as well. It gives me extra motivation to train seriously for this, because I don’t want to let down all of these generous people!
Finally, the wristband and “Faith and Fear Nation” was all your idea. We’re honored to come along for the run, so to speak, and talk it up, but why us?
Why not you? Well, as you pointed out in “The Wrist of the Story,” I did get the idea from Stephen Colbert and his Colbert Nation. Since I know you’re a fan of The Colbert Report, I figured you’d appreciate the reference. Plus we had discussed the fact that you and Jason would help publicize my fundraising efforts throughout the baseball season, which is something I appreciate very much. It dawned on me that the wristband would be a nice way for me to thank you guys for your support.
Plus, again, running for the Faith and Fear Nation provides me with even more incentive to take my training seriously so I can finish the Marathon and earn that medal!
If you would like to support Sharon Chapman’s efforts on behalf of the Tug McGraw Foundation, please visit her fundraising page. Any and all contributions are greatly appreciated.
by Greg Prince on 10 February 2010 10:55 pm  The seventh installment of the critically acclaimed (by us, anyway) Mets Yearbook series debuts Thursday night (2/11) at 7:30 on SNY. The year in the spotlight is 1966, the first season in Mets history that was merely bad and not horrific. Of course, everything is relative. A 66-95 ninth-place finish sounds garden variety wretched, but consider this was the first time the Mets didn’t lose at least 109 games and didn’t finish last. A 16½-game turnaround is nothing to sneeze at in any league…even its second division.
The propaganda value of improving from 50-112 to 66-95 should prove outstanding. And it’s gotta beat shoveling snow. As a bonus, SNY follows up this world premiere with reruns of Mets Yearbook from 1975, 1976, 1968 and 1984.
Image courtesy of kcmets.com.
Please join Frank Messina and me on Tuesday, February 16, 6:00 PM, at the Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village for a night of Mets Poetry & Prose. Details here, directions here.
by Greg Prince on 10 February 2010 10:07 am  It’s September 2009. The last thing I want to do is give the Mets more of my money. But there I am, at Citi Field, in the team store browsing, when I see a sign advising me that player number t-shirts are on SALE.
See, this is why I’ll never be an effective participant in a boycott of all things Wilponian. The desire to support this ownership group’s product is Pavlovian. No, actually, it is Simpsonian. Homer Simpson couldn’t resist a half-price sale on chocolate even though he was already (in his imagination) in the Land of Chocolate, where everything was made of chocolate and he could take a bite out of everything without dropping a dime. I live in the Land of Met t-shirts. I don’t need any more, not at the tail end of 2009 when I’m far more fed up with the reality of the Mets than I am in love with the concept of the Mets. But there is a SALE — $28 marked down to $16 — so I could feel myself stepping up my browsing whether I wanted to or not.
Where do I go with this with this 40% or so discount? Who don’t I have? What’s available? The most plentiful inventory is for injured Mets.
Lots of PEREZ 46. I pass. It would send the wrong message that I’m in favor of his $36 million contract; should Omar see one fan in PEREZ 46, he’ll sign Ollie to an extension.
Lots of MAINE 33, too. I could have gone for one of these in 2007, but how do I know he’ll be back in 2010? I don’t feel nearly enough for Johnny to become a MAINE 33 martyr if he’s not on the team.
An ample supply of SHEFFIELD 10…I might have jumped in May when I was briefly enchanted by his presence, but it’s clear Sheff will not be cooking here much longer. And I’m no longer enchanted.
I look to see if maybe there’s SANTOS 9 available, but an investment in SANTOS 9 seems an invitation for fate to unconditionally release him five minutes and sixteen bucks later.
Then, in blue, with that neat-o alternate inaugural season logo (the one with the rendering of the Rotunda, not the unspeakable Domino’s ad), I see what I want: REYES 7. I don’t just want REYES 7. I need REYES 7.
By September 2009, I need REYES 7 more than I need a t-shirt that says that.
No shortage of JoseWear in my drawers at home, mind you. There’s a blue REYES 7 from 2003, his rookie year. There’s an orange REYES 7 from early in the ’07 season and a black National League All-Star REYES 7 from that same summer. Though I officially condemn the existence of the World Baseball Classic, I added a Dominicana REYES 7 last March. So I’m pretty well set. But staring at REYES 7 in concert with the faux patch that links him to 2009…yes, it will make a handsome addition to my apparel library (as would, given that I’d just theoretically “saved” $12, the REYES UNIVERSITY tee over on the next rack that I snap up as well).
How much better would have the Mets been in 2009 with Jose Reyes playing his customary 153 to 161 games instead of the 36 to which his right hamstring limited him? Would have they been better than 70-92? Would they have been markedly better than hopeless, which is what they were not long after Jose limped away from the scene of the grisly accident that last season was? An extra 120 games of Jose Reyes and concomitantly less Cora, Martinez, Valdez, Hernandez, whoever playing short…I don’t need to check Wins Above Replacement to know that a lot more Jose would have made some kind of difference.
All things being equal, there may be no worse position from which to lose your regular player than shortstop. I base this assertion on two very strong sets of recollections.
• Whenever Bud Harrelson missed copious amounts of time, the Mets seemed to tangibly suffer.
• Whenever Rey Ordoñez missed copious amounts of time, the Mets seemed to tangibly suffer.
No disrespect to the likes of Teddy Martinez, Mike Phillips, Luis Lopez or Melvin Mora, all of whom put in yeoman work as fill-ins in seasons when Harrelson and Ordoñez were shelved by injury for lengthy periods, but a top-flight shortstop never seems easily replaced. At their peak, Harrelson and Ordoñez vacuumed up everything in sight — and in Ordoñez’s case, everything in general. Neither of these guys was an offensive force in the Ernie Banks or Cal Ripken mold, but you didn’t care what they hit when they were in the field. A ground ball at or near Buddy or Rey-Rey was one less thing for the pitcher, the manager and the fans to worry about.
Same could be said for Jose, except Jose at his best extended his anxiety-clearing qualities to the plate and all over the basepaths. In any given game from 2005 through 2008, he had a pretty good shot at being the Mets’ best all-around player. As a classic catalyst, he was unmatched in Met annals. Tommie Agee was power plus speed for a couple of great years as a leadoff hitter. Mookie Wilson could be literally unstoppable on the basepaths (see Mets Walkoffs for just how unstoppable). But Jose Reyes…you know what he was when he was playing every day for four years.
Yeah, you know what I mean.
Subtract that Jose Reyes from any team, and it’s going to show. It was easy to forget as 2009 ground on, given that everybody was injured. It all became one big clump of missing players. Thus, it wasn’t until I stared at that t-shirt that the lack of Reyes in our midst really struck me. There had been so little intertwining of 2009 logos and Jose Reyes. He was the missing person, the kid who was absent when they took the class picture. I didn’t realize how much I missed him while Cora & Co. kept his position lukewarm.
I also glossed over it because of a nagging suspicion that Reyes had stopped being the Reyes I loved toward the end of 2007 and never really recovered his total Joseness thereafter. I know he put up numbers in ’08 that fit in nicely with what he’d been doing since emerging as a full-time player in ’05, but something was always just a little off once the rest of the world discovered how great he was. Not as off as the entirety of Wilson Valdez or Anderson Hernandez, mind you, but askew enough to diminish my innate Jose-loving ways, no matter how many REYES 7 t-shirts I kept wearing. He stopped hitting down the stretch in ’07. His stolen base total froze. He’d choose odd moments to not run to first or to throw tiny, unflattering tantrums. About the only thing I remember well about Jose actually playing in 2009 was the game-winning homer he thought he hit against Atlanta in the twelfth inning on May 13, the one that Citi Field’s daffily designed dimensions kept in play. Had Jose run out of the box, he’d have been on third easily. He broke into a trot and settled for second. The Mets lost by a run.
A week later he was day-to-day, which, per Met medical procedure, kept him out for the rest of the season. Somewhere between May and September, as the ’09 Mets numbed my nerves, Reyes was just another DL casualty in a lost campaign. Since September and that t-shirt, however, with every interview he’s given, every interview somebody else has given about him and every stride he’s taken toward — fingers crossed tight — full recovery, he’s become to me what he’d been since 2003:
My favorite player.
It dawns on me now one of the reasons I found 2009 so toxic, besides the losses and the severe and appalling lack of fundamental baseball skills applied by the Mets in compiling those losses (as their manager and coaches looked on with apparent disinterest), was I had no favorite player to get behind. I had Mets, sure, and I generally root for all Mets. I always find myself rooting a little extra hard for a while for somebody new (like Santos), somebody familiar but new to us (like Sheffield), somebody struggling gamely against adversity (like Maine) and sometimes somebody whom I couldn’t bring myself to completely turn against no matter how compelling the evidence that I should cut bait (like Perez). I was delighted to have Frankie Rodriguez on board. I deepened my admiration for Carlos Beltran before and after his absence. David Wright by now is part of the skyline logo. He’s a landmark. It’s easy to overlook the Woolworth Building, but you still have to root for it. And I do.
But none of them was Jose Reyes to me. None of them was my favorite player. I don’t care how long you’ve been at this rooting thing. You need a favorite player.
Tom Seaver carried that title for me as long as he was a Met or a Met in exile (and, of course, always will in the all-time sense). There was Tom Seaver and everybody else from ’69 until the middle of ’77. I made do with the Mazzillis and Hendersons during the interregnum, but Seaver was my favorite player even when he was a Red.
It took the second idiotic banishment of Tom Terrific and the rise of Doctor K to effectively replace him on a going basis. Dwight Gooden was my favorite player from ’84 until the middle of ’94. Then he was gone, and I was adrift, albeit for only about ten minutes.
Very quickly, I adopted Rico Brogna, who got me through the strike and had me revved up for when baseball returned in ’95. Rico was my favorite player until he was traded just before Thanksgiving 1996 (which gave Thanksgiving a bad name around here for the next decade).
Edgardo Alfonzo came out of the shadows under Bobby Valentine in early 1997 and immediately cemented his place as my favorite player until he was allowed to walk away in December 2002. Not unlike Seaver in Cincy, Fonzie in San Fran retained his ranking for a while thereafter.
I couldn’t handle a long-distance relationship, though. I needed a Met as a favorite player. Not that Fonzie wasn’t still a Met at heart, but I wasn’t about to leave my heart in San Francisco. June bloomed soon enough and, with it, Jose Reyes was brought up from Norfolk. Steve Phillips said it was going to be temporary. Steve Phillips says a lot of things I wouldn’t trust. Reyes was here permanently from June 10, 2003. By June 12, 2003, Steve Phillips was asked to remove himself from his place of employment.
I’d say both were the right call.
Reyes won me over right away, partly because I was dying to be won over, partly because he his good notices from the minors didn’t seem out of line with what he was presenting, partly because he just beamed from the outset. That’s a kid who loves to play baseball, I thought. Loves to play it and can play it well. A little raw, but he just turned twenty. Who wouldn’t be raw that young? It wasn’t a tough consumer decision when I wandered into the Mets Clubhouse Shop on 42nd Street and bought my first REYES 7 in July of ’03.
I was horrified when Jose ended his season in a heap of pain at second base in 2003. I was insulted when he was shuttled to the same base in the spring of 2004 in favor of Kaz Matsui, the Toyota of his time (a big-time Japanese brand whose operating problems should have kept it off the road well before its recall). I was horrified when I saw what the Met braintrust had done to Jose’s beautiful stride after he rehabbed from injury. I was protective of his ascent in 2005, irritated no end when so-called experts snorted that Jose Reyes didn’t walk enough. Not walk? Why walk when you can run like that?
When it all came together in the heart of the 2006 season, when the Mets were becoming Jose Reyes and the Mets…wow, that was gratifying. He was a celebrated prospect a few years earlier and now he and Wright and the rest of the Mets were celebrating a division clinching and a bright future. I loved that my favorite player was the favorite player of so many Mets fans. I loved the serenading. I loved that there were about as many home runs as triples, and there were plenty of triples. I loved the All-Star selections, particularly his moment with Willie Mays in 2007. I hate the WBC, but I loved that his shortstop-rich country thought enough of him to make him a part of its team. Even as I found myself occasionally disappointed at how Jose was playing and acting, I loved him. He was my favorite player. You gotta have a favorite player. Baseball’s not the same without one.
My favorite player is coming back. I look forward to wearing my heart on my sleeve along with his name and number on my back.
And speaking of welcome comebacks, Mike Steffanos is returning to the blogging beat after a winter’s hiatus. If I didn’t see all that snow outside my window, I’d swear spring is right around the corner.
Also, another Mike is reportedly returning. Congratulations to our longtime commenter Jacobs27 for maintaining the same screen name since Mike Jacobs’ departure. Talk about keeping the Faith.
by Greg Prince on 9 February 2010 2:13 am I have lost and I have won, losing isn’t any fun. Rain is fine, but when it’s done — sun is better.
—Edward Kleban, “Better,” A Class Act
The Saints were coming, I read Sunday morning. A couple of days later, the Saints are still going, while the Mets will be here soon enough. Excellent news on both counts.
Unlike Jason, I have no particular attachment to New Orleans or its world champion football team. I visited on three business trips in about a nine-month span not quite ten years ago and — a run of several splendid Hurricanes notwithstanding — nothing much happened to me there. A cab driver did engage me in baseball talk upon seeing my Mets jacket, but I can’t say it was a momentous occasion.
Still, I’m glowing the reflected glow I glow when a team that hasn’t won before or in a very long time has won. It’s the kind of result for which I instinctively pull when a team I call my own isn’t involved in a championship round. The ’01 Patriots, the ’02 Angels, the ’02 Buccaneers, the ’04 Red Sox, the ’05 White Sox and now the ’09 Saints all grabbed my temporary allegiance out of what I consider decent sports fan empathy (and, in the Saints’ case, reasonable human empathy for New Orleans). When each of them won, I felt very good…not frontrunner good, but rather “it’s about time the world proves it can be fair” good.
The Saints winning the Super Bowl was the first professional sports championship to be decided since the World Series ended ignominiously in early November. Football beat baseball in this matchup. What would you rather witness: a perpetually downtrodden franchise get off the schneid or somebody/anybody spill tears over a 27th ring? The only thing wrong with the Saints’ celebration Sunday night was a crowd shot from the French Quarter: thousands of happy, deserving fans and, blighting the bliss, one idiot in a Yankees batting practice jersey. Go home and count your rings, buddy. You’re not wanted anywhere people who have waited an eternity are finally being rewarded.
Naturally, the inclination here is to translate that temporary goodwill from the Saints (or Bucs or White Sox, et al) to where it really and indelibly counts by our reckoning, to the Mets. Hence, one is left once again to remember what it was like the last time the Mets won a championship and, more so, imagine what it will be like the next time the Mets win a championship.
That’s what it’s all about. When you’re between or before championships, it’s about everything else, and everything else offers plenty of valid rewards. But a night like the one Saints fans will be experiencing for the next month is the end zone for every football fan and home plate for every baseball fan. Don’t kid yourself. As great as a pretty good season can feel, and as enormously as a nearly great season might loom, World Champion New York Mets is the Holy Grail. It’s not shallow to want it above all else and it doesn’t expose our character as anything less than sturdy to admit it. For all the secular spirituality with which we approach our fandom, it’s impossible to ignore there are wins and there are losses. The wins are the desirable part. The championship is the most desirable.
The losses you can keep.
Sports fans, Mets fans included and maybe in particular, often act in a counterintuitive fashion when it comes to losing. Of course we hate it. Of course we don’t want to go through it. Of course when we’re stuck in its rut, we endlessly strategize methods to eliminate it. Yet god help anyone who would deny us claim to the losses that have been accumulated on our ledger. Those are our losses, damn it, and don’t you dare question our purity for having endured them.
At the risk of being overly judgmental of people whose heads I cannot possibly be inside (or, in one obvious case, have no desire to get anywhere near), it’s safe to say fans of the following professional sports teams have forfeited any claim on long-suffering status:
• The Saints
• The Yankees
• The Lakers
• The Penguins
Those are the defending champions in their respective realms. Their fans are fine until they’re not (except for the Yankees fans, who are sated for life, no matter how many World Series Don Mattingly didn’t win when they were kids). If you root for the runners-up to those champions — the Colts, the Phillies, the Magic, the Red Wings — I’d estimate that you’re exempt from long-suffering status for now as well. We’d like it if the 2009 World Series-losing Phillies fans were as long-suffering as they claimed to be prior to 2008, but given that they won it all two years ago, we’ll have to settle for knowing the Delaware Valley was deluged by snow over the weekend and Phillies fans were among the immensely inconvenienced. Colts fans see their team win 12 games every single year and enjoyed one championship a mere three years ago. A tinge of frustration might be setting in, but that’s not suffering in the wider fan vernacular.
If we consider championships Holy Grails and everything else killing time, we could probably extend this exercise clear back to the 1908 Cubs and eventually decide their fans take the suffering cake and deserve the biggest, most empathetic trophy of all — unless your impression of the Cubs as a bunch of preening bullies was formed as a six-year-old Mets fan in 1969. In that case, every time someone runs the Steve Bartman clip, your smirk demonstrates a mind of its own. This is why patterns and formulas will only get you so far in calculating who can kvetch and moan the most. Not a Mets fan who was watching Terry Pendleton take Roger McDowell deep on September 11, 1987 was thinking, “aw heck, that’s OK that we just missed our big chance to move within a half-game of the Cardinals — we won last year.” There’s no point in trying to look at sports in an unbiased fashion. Rooting is nothing if not an expression of permanent bias.
Every fan has to decide for himself or herself what’s really painful and what’s just not winning. Though I’ve just kind of told Colts fans to take a hike (and maybe not run the ball as the clock winds down), nobody can define your suffering for you. The Great Bill Simmons recently threw the kitchen sink at trying to decide what fans have been tortured more than any other. Per usual for the man who essentially invented sports blogging, his effort was very entertaining but irritatingly overreaching. Simmons’ rankings and system are neither here nor there — he goes with the Cubbie legions as No. 1 among the most put upon — but what’s really revealing is the responses he received from those he didn’t place in his Top/Bottom 15.
For example, Simmons ranked the Minnesota Vikings second and the Detroit Lions not at all. The Vikings, you might recall, almost made this year’s Super Bowl, losing the NFC championship on an overtime interception. They almost made the Super Bowl eleven years ago, losing on a missed field goal as time expired. I looked it up and discovered the Vikings have made the NFL playoffs 26 times in the past 43 seasons. They’re 0-for-26 in attempting to win a Super Bowl from there. Sounds reasonably tortured, right?
Screw them, wrote in a Lions fan, roaringly offended by Simmons’ blithe dismissal of his pain:
“What more do we have to endure? We haven’t won more than one playoff game in a season since the merger. Most Lions fans would KILL to lose four Super Bowls, or even make it back to the NFC Championship Game. We’re jealous of Vikings fans.”
While Simmons gave his benediction to fans of the Cubs, the Vikings, the Bills, the Browns, the Indians and ten others, loads of other fans from the four major sports were disappointed they didn’t get the call and wrote in to tell him so — fans of teams that have Viking-like luck when the clutch overcomes them as well as fans of Lionesque franchises that disappear down the competition hole for decades at a time. If we’re gonna have to lose, one can infer from the reaction, at least give us credit for having lost memorably and painfully.
This is frontrunning in reverse. This is backpedaling into a brick wall.
I don’t know that I necessarily want a piece of this type of action. I can, and I have, sat here this winter and attempted to quantify the downer quotient of being a Mets fan these days. For example, you know it’s been 24 years since a world championship has been celebrated by the deserving citizens of Metsopotamia. Esteemed blolleague Matt Artus of Always Amazin’ noticed quite recently that we are in the midst of the 14th longest World Series drought in captivity; 14 teams have gone longer than we have without a title and two that didn’t exist on October 27, 1986 have yet to win one. I can add to this cavalcade of despondency that:
• We are no longer in the upper half of the big leagues in terms of recent playoff qualifications, which in itself is no crime, but also indicates how long ago, all of a sudden, 2006 was. Fifteen teams have played a postseason game since the Mets last did, on October 19, 2006…which, in case you’ve forgotten, ended with three Mets on base and three strikes on Carlos Beltran.
• Should the Mets by some chance make the 2010 playoffs, and our first playoff game is played the Wednesday after the Sunday when the regular season ends, 1,447 days will have passed since 10/19/06 and that nasty curveball from Adam Wainwright.
FYI, a recent viewing of the bottom of the ninth inning of Game Seven on MLBN indicates Wainwright had that curve working hellaciously against Floyd and Reyes, which I swear I didn’t notice the night it happened or in January 2009, the first time I watched a replay of the game (when I think I was still reeling from the idea that I was watching this stupid game all over again). This third viewing and first really good look has changed my default “Beltran knew what he was doing taking” stance from 1,209 days ago to “how the hell could have he not been protecting the plate?”
Either way, it’s still too long since the Mets have played a postseason game. Just because the Royals have gone a lot longer and the Nationals have yet to play even one doesn’t make our wait seem any shorter.
• The Mets have been to four postseasons since 1986 and have not won a World Series in any of them. It’s hardly the stuff of Vikings…or the Phoenix Suns, 28-time NBA playoff qualifiers yet never champions…or the NHL St. Louis Blues, whose 35 trips to the Stanley Cup Playoffs have sent them home without a Cup every time. It’s also not quite Cubbish — 13 postseason appearances after 1908 with no winning it all — nor is it what happened in Atlanta after 1995: ten consecutive playoff appearances, no more world championships (shucks).
Even using life after 1986 as the baseline, we don’t have it as bad as others where October futility is concerned. Beginning with October 1987, the Indians (7), Giants (6), Astros (6) and Cubs (5) have all made more playoff appearances than the Mets and come away completely emptyhanded. Of course we don’t care that much about any team that isn’t the Mets, so four lousy playoff appearances over 22 seasons (not counting 1994 when there were no playoffs) and no stilted handshakes from Bud Selig…while it’s not the worst showing in sport, it’s more than a little disturbing when you’re immersed in the quest for that Holy Grail.
Baseball is still more selective than the other sports in inviting teams to its tournament, so there is a specialness to just being there, even without a big parade to cap it off, even with crash-landing endings like those that ultimately defined 2006 and 1988. The holy-ish grails can do a nice job of distracting you, particularly if there are 1999-style dramatics or a couple of rounds of victories as there were in 2000 before the shadow of defeat eclipsed every happy thing in our midst. Though we haven’t paraded up Lower Broadway in nearly 9,000 days, it’s not like we don’t drop a little drama on our way out of tournaments.
• Nearly 9,000 days, you ask? On the 8,702nd day of my life, the New York Mets defeated the Boston Red Sox 8-5 to capture the 1986 World Series. This July 24 will mark 8,702 days since that moment. On July 25, 2010, I will, therefore, have lived more than a half a lifetime since the Mets were last crowned world champions.
Yeah, I could do this sort of cheerful accounting all day, and sometimes I have to stop myself from doing just that. It’s easy enough to get caught up in fan hardship. It’s a perceived badge of honor to say we were around when the team was losing, so that when the team wins, we can show off the texture of our bona fides. There is no doubt that nights when you clinch something are a lot more meaningful for all the nights you compiled caring about a team that was clinching nothing.
Nevertheless, we didn’t become fans of a team to prove to ourselves and anyone who’ll listen that we have it worse than others whose teams haven’t won lately or ever. That stuff only sounds good once you’ve won and it’s all in your colorful past.
The Saints’ ascension and their accompanying mythology revived the legend of the paper bags. Paper bags, you were probably reminded along the Super way, became de rigueur in New Orleans in 1980 when the so-called Ain’ts lost 14 of their first 14 games en route to their 14th losing season in 14 tries. If anybody could make paper bags look sharp, it was the Saints fans. It’s not something anybody else would be advised to try on for size.
Seeing the inevitable montages of such Saintly images from New Orleans’ notorious football past eventually brought back to mind the dope I noticed lingering in Shea’s Upper Deck on Collapse Day, 9/30/07. The final game of the season several minutes over, he was wearing a paper bag on his head and shouting “I’m embarrassed to be a Mets fan!” I was embarrassed he was a Mets fan, too.
Listen, that day sucked. As stunning culmination of a 7-game lead blown in 17 games’ time, it sucked more than Beltran taking Called Strike Three, which at least followed a division title and a division series sweep. I was disgusted with every Met who lost 8-1 that Sunday, but I still couldn’t abide the paper bag guy as a symbol of our so-called suffering. Besides it being derivative of another team in another circumstance in another era in another sport, why would a Mets fan hide his head? It was bad enough the players and manager had hidden theirs up their collective rear end. What was this guy proving? That he was suffering? That the Mets did something so heinous to his identity that he now had to obscure it?
I don’t particularly expect us to stop being a non-juggernaut in 2010. Still, I don’t want to get caught up any more than I have to be in the Mets’ lack of successes. We’ll report them, analyze them, comment on them, rue them and, perhaps as a defense mechanism, mock them as applicable, but I’m not going to bask in them. I’m not going to go the Bitter Bill route and constantly moan about all the wrong the Mets are doing me. Bill Price, like Bill Simmons, can be quite amusing and fairly sincere in his shtick, but the Mets fan as tortured soul bit (which fits well into the Daily News Yankee-worshipping narrative, doesn’t it?) feels more forced than genuine.
Suffer? The Mets? Baseball? In the words of Gob Bluth (the Jeff Wilpon character in Arrested Development), come on! It’s the game we love, the affiliation we embrace, the camaraderie we adore. Why do you suppose so many of us mourned the loss of Jane Jarvis? Why were we insistent that the Mets open a Hall of Fame? Why do we treat the countdown to Pitchers & Catchers like a prisoner scratching days interred into his cell wall? The day-by-day of baseball in all its reassuring rhythms, its infrequent rewards, its small disappointments, its debilitating devastations and its 162-part comic drama is a prize unto itself. Maybe it’s not the Holy Grail, but it’s not a bad set of dishes, either.
No, this isn’t suffering. This is what we willingly live for. This is not the suffering portion of life. Sometimes (or a lot of the time) we are prevented from exulting to our maximum capability by front office negligence or an uncertain starting rotation or somebody else’s unhittable curve, but it’s still the good part of life.
The Mets can let us down, but only we can make ourselves suffer. Why, exactly, would we want to do that?
Please join Frank Messina and me on Tuesday, February 16, 6:00 PM, at the Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village for a night of Mets Poetry & Prose. Details here, directions here.
by Jason Fry on 7 February 2010 12:07 am In a few short hours the New Orleans Saints will play the Indianapolis Colts in the Super Bowl.
I bet you remembered that.
Four and a half years ago, Hurricane Katrina gave the city of New Orleans what can be described as a devastating near-miss. The city was spared the direct hit from a powerful hurricane that had long been feared in a place largely below sea level, but failed levees flooded it nonetheless, leading to a disaster marked by terrible human suffering, anger and anguish and searing visuals beamed to a shocked country.
I bet you remembered that too.
The once-lowly Saints’ march through the NFC South and the playoffs has been accompanied by something else: Katrina fatigue. On one level, this is completely natural. If we haven’t already given our hearts over to a team, we turn reflexively cynical when we hear the stentorian tones of sports announcers trying to channel epic seriousness to describe the outcome of a contest between a bunch of young men running around on an athletic field wearing motley. When Fox or CBS or ESPN gets its Ken Burns on and shows black and white pictures accompanied by mournful music, we dig in our heels, because we know soon enough there will be martial music and fireworks and CGI logos and the whole rest of the routine sports show.
I get all that. But I’m asking you, on the doorstep of this Super Bowl, not to be jaded. I understand what motivated all those people who responded to Garrett Hartley’s kick against the Vikings by groaning about the number of Katrina columns they’d now have to endure for two weeks. I know that the miseries of Katrina are not going to be magically remedied by flights of fancy from knights of the keyboard who watched a little CNN on YouTube. But those people who bemoaned the coming Katrina frenzy were letting the cliché get the better of them. They needed to look past all that, to look deeper.
You’ve probably guessed by now that I am a Saints fan. Though truth be told, I’m really a New Orleans fan. This was inevitable: New Orleans was the city where I drew my first real adult paycheck. It’s where I first lived by myself without the immediate safety net of parents or college administrators. It was the first place I was taught my craft, was treated as an adult, had to figure out grown-up stuff on my own, and succeeded tolerably enough at all of those things to give me hope that I might find my way through. (And, a summer later, it’s where I’d meet my wife.) Even if it weren’t one of the world’s greatest cities — which it most certainly is — that would be enough to grant New Orleans a lifelong place in my heart.
For me the Saints were and always have been secondary to New Orleans. I’m a half-assed Saints fan by any real measure. I can moan about Bobby Hebert and John Fourcade and Jim Everett, but this isn’t real knowledge or real suffering. I can’t name all the guys on this year’s team, or most of them, or even an acceptable percentage of them. If the Saints lose, I will be sad for a couple of hours and wake up on Monday morning thinking about spring training and complaining about Omar. I have nothing against the good people of Indianapolis. I think the Colts should be admired for the scientific way they approach rosters and strategy and the consistent excellence they achieve. I give Peyton Manning credit for having grown up with a preordained spot as an NFL quarterback and still managing to be mildly interesting. All things considered, my stake in this is pretty small.
But like I said, I am a New Orleans fan. And as one, I’m asking you to try and step back, to listen again to what you’re tired of hearing about, and to consider two things.
First of all, Hurricane Katrina did not happen in another century or in a world so technologically different as to seem apart from us. The most powerful, technologically advanced nation on this planet saw a storm drown one of its oldest and most-famous cities and proved astonishingly impotent at providing its own people the basic means of survival in a timely, organized fashion. More than 1,800 people died, most of them in the houses and neighborhoods they held dear, killed by an impersonal enemy no ideology or army will ever be able to conquer. More than four years later, whole swaths of the city remain unrecognizable, with decades of families and stories literally washed away. Bourbon Street may stagger happily along, but New Orleans will never be the same. Neither, I would argue, will the United States of America. Regardless of whom you voted for or what political creed you profess or how you assign blame, Katrina matters. What happened in New Orleans in 2005 pierces the uncomfortable heart of whatever we think about race, about class, about the proper role of government, about the possibilities of technology, about the demands of personal responsibility, about fairness, about bias, about faith, about luck. Those who live far from New Orleans will find it bound up in their arguments about these things for decades. Those who live in New Orleans will never escape it.
Which brings us to the Saints.
I know, it’s a cliché to talk of cities rallying around a team. But in New Orleans, the Saints cast a spell that it’s hard for us to grasp in our pick-an-allegiance, this-one-or-that-one metropolis of many sports and choices. The Saints command the affection and allegiance of New Orleans’ gentry and its destitute alike, as they have in good years and bad. And in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, it seemed all but certain that the team was gone for good. Katrina punched holes in the Superdome, where as many as 20,000 sought shelter from the storm in the heat and filth. While the tales of horror in the Superdome proved wildly exaggerated, six people did die there. Meanwhile, the Saints had decamped to San Antonio, where their owner had made his fortune selling cars. Negotiations were under way for the team to relocate permanently. What were the chances the team would return to a wrecked stadium in a ruined city whose population had largely dispersed? We’ve been through a lot as Mets fans, but for all our woes, we’ve never even endured or even imagined anything close to that.
But the Superdome was repaired, and the Saints returned. They have been led by players and a coach who have embraced the city and its people, and not just in the way a millionaire pitcher embraces, say, the idea of commuting from Greenwich and occasionally hitting a museum or an expensive restaurant. A few months after Katrina, former Chargers quarterback Drew Brees was picking a new professional home. His choices were New Orleans and the undestroyed precincts of Miami. Newly hired head coach Sean Payton drove him around the city, took a wrong turn and wound up giving a horrified Brees an extended tour of the ruins. Brees, amazingly, chose the ruins. He has given millions to the effort to get the city back on its feet, and he is far from alone. Many Saints players have done the same.
The Saints are close to religion in New Orleans. In that city’s darkest hour, it seemed certain that they too would be taken away. But they returned and endured, and now shine more brightly than they ever have. All the hoary old maxims about the love of a team making a city whole? They’re said in cities that don’t need to be rebuilt, and they’re no more true in New Orleans than they were in those places. If Brees and Payton lead the Saints to a Super Bowl victory, no houses will spring back to life in the Lower Ninth Ward and no levees will be made strong enough to resist the next storm. But the idea that the Saints have bound up the wounds of a city and its people and given them something to love and cheer for and believe in when there’s been very little else? That’s absolutely true, and it’s been desperately needed in ways most of us, thankfully, can only imagine.
The problem with a cliché isn’t that it’s inaccurate, or a poor turn of phrase, or fails to capture the reality of something. Rather, it’s that a cliché does those things too well, and therefore is employed so often that it becomes empty and shopworn. Every cliché hides in plain sight something that was new and valuable before we got used to it. So don’t get used to it. Don’t let media overkill make you numb to Katrina, or dismissive of the idea that the Saints really do mean something more to their fans than what we’re accustomed to.
New Orleans doesn’t need a miracle — the work to restore it is and will be much slower and harder than that. And win or lose, the Saints already are a miracle, in ways small and not so small. But within the narrow confines of sports stories, they and the city they play for deserve something that’s a lot smaller than that, but far from nothing. They deserve a happy ending.
by Greg Prince on 4 February 2010 6:51 pm Right before Pitchers & Catchers flock to Port St. Lucie, join Frank Messina and me for a little poetry & prose in Greenwich Village. Frank — better and rightfully known as the Mets Poet — and I will be preparing for Spring Training in our own way, reading on Tuesday, February 16, 6:00 to 7:30 PM, at the Cornelia Street Café, 29 Corneila Street (directions here). We’ll try not to pull any muscles in the process.
Frank is the author of a compelling book of Mets poetry entitled Full Count. It’s a must-have for any Mets fan with a soul. He’s a great spoken word artist, too, as I learned when I followed his tour de force last April at Varsity Letters. Get to know him a little better through Gelf Magazine’s March ’09 profile.
He’ll bring the Mets poetry. I’ll bring the Mets prose. Angst and euphoria will no doubt be in plentiful supply. Please join us there.
The paperback edition of Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, featuring an all-new epilogue covering the Mets’ move into Citi Field, will be released next month. You can pre-order it from Barnes & Noble and Amazon now. The book is also available in Kindle format.
by Jason Fry on 3 February 2010 3:27 pm Here’s another sign of spring for you: 2010 Topps Baseball is out.
I know, it’s February. That’s the way things go these days — the first series of cards arrives in the dead of winter, weeks before anyone even shows up in Florida or Arizona, with a couple of cup-of-coffee rookies adorning their first cards (Tobi Stoner has now made his Topps regular-series debut) and a couple of old veterans appearing on Mets cards when they’re no longer Mets. (Sorry, Mr. Delgado.) There will be a second series in the spring, followed by the traded set in the fall, and then the cycle will begin again.
 This year’s cards are pretty nice, at least to my eyes: prominent Mets logos and cards in Met colors. (I still can’t get over that in 1976, the first year I collected, the Mets cards came in Michigan colors.) And even though there’s snow on the ground, it’s great to be able to momentarily glimpse the coming baseball summer through a little cardboard window. Flipping from Daniel Murphy’s 2009 stats back to his picture on the front, you realize spring isn’t so far away and you’ll probably make it, yet again, through the Super Bowl and the tail end of another cruel winter to the promised land of pitchers and catchers.
Still, there are odd things afoot this year. Major League Baseball has now reduced the number of card makers to one — Topps — echoing the monopoly of years past. Upper Deck is still in the game, but won’t be able to use team logos, which I suppose means it will issue cards that look like the pictures of players you used to find on wiffle-ball cartons, or the cards Topps would produce for guys who’d changed teams, with blank caps or no caps at all. (The term for the latter is BHNH — “big head no hat.” More on this in a bit.)
From the highly parochial perspective of The Holy Books this is bad news: In recent years Upper Deck did a public service by rounding up cards for the lesser lights of baseball rosters, and without competition I doubt Topps will worry overmuch about immortalizing fourth outfielders and middle relievers. From THB’s roster of 26 2009 Mets, Upper Deck was responsible for Casey Fossum, Andy Green, Pat Misch and Darren O’Day — not guys you’ve thought of much since Game 162, but Mets nonetheless.
 Speaking of which, 2010 Topps Series I brought new THB cards for Angel Pagan, Gary Sheffield, Fernando Martinez, Josh Thole and Stoner. Thole is an annoyance, though — he’s no longer an Eastern League All-Star, but now he’s stuck with a dreaded horizontal card. Still, at least that’s better than the franchise-history card Topps stuck the Mets with: It’s Tom Seaver tossing the closing pitch under the SHEA GOODBYE banner.
No disrespect to the Franchise or the Mets’ old home, but really? That’s the image that sums up the franchise? An old player in a phony antique jersey bidding farewell to a concrete doughnut after a soul-killing loss that left fans near suicide? I suppose it’s a better fit than we’d like to admit, but can’t the positive be accentuated in a situation like this? Why not young Seaver’s knee scraping dirt? Jerry Koosman jumping into Jerry Grote’s arms? Tug McGraw slapping his glove against his knee? Ray Knight with his hands on his helmet in happy disbelief? Jesse Orosco putting his glove in orbit? Todd Pratt hoisting Robin Ventura aloft? I haven’t seen the rest of the set, but I won’t be surprised to discover that the Yankees’ franchise-history card documents Yogi Berra descending to the surface of the Moon or Derek Jeter capturing Osama bin Laden.
Speaking of franchise history, recently Mets Guy in Michigan and the Crane Pool Forum collaborated to uncover an interesting sidelight to an oddity of Mets baseball cards. There are no 1972 and 1973 Topps cards for Rusty Staub, apparently because of a contract dispute. But Staub is featured on one of the most horrifying-looking cards in Met history — a late 1970s Hostess card in which he bears an awkwardly repainted “Mets” batting helmet. (Follow either link to see it.)
 Ugly, but not exactly surprising: As MGIM chronicles nicely, lots of players from the 1960s and 1970s wound up with their new team allegiances achieved through added pinstripes, awkwardly changed colors and repainted caps. What vaults the Staub card into the ranks of the truly grotesque is that the Expos logo is still very visible on his uniform, and his added Mets pinstripes peter out in the vicinity of his right shoulder.
The theory advanced on the Crane Pool Forum feels right: This is an unused Topps photo from the early 1970s, when Staub was an Expo, that was converted into a Met card but never used until it was handed over to Hostess. The visible Expos logo and missing pinstripes? You can see them (or not see them) because Hostess didn’t crop the photo tightly, as Topps would have done. Tighten the crop, add in a 1972 Mets overlay and RUSTY STAUB in ’72’s font, and you have what very probably would have been Staub’s 1972 card. It makes perfect sense, and it’s immensely satisfying to see.
I don’t have that card, though I’m tempted to make one of my own. But I did recently get another oddball card: an alternate Rusty Staub card from 1971, before his falling-out with Topps. This one was put out in Canada by O-Pee-Chee, which used alternate shots of some Expos and added some other Montreal players to the checklist for the purposes of their domestic market. Like the reconstructed ’72 Staub, looking at my alternate ’71 Rusty gives me a little chill: A card that had escaped me exists, and for a moment I feel like a little kid pausing halfway through a wax pack to gaze at the latest treasure — a ’76 Tom Seaver, say, or even a ’77 Mike Phillips — he’ll be able to display in the neighborhood, and love until the corners are round.
And it’s not even a horizontal.
by Jason Fry on 1 February 2010 11:26 am Remember, in the wake of the Carlos Beltran fiasco, how the Mets wanted those mean people in the media and all us nasty bloggers to think about the rash of injuries that derailed the team on a case-by-case basis, instead of trying to look for patterns?
Well OK. Fair enough. Let’s evaluate these comments from J.J. Putz, in a conversation with Sox Drawer.
First Putz said that when the trade with the Mariners happened, “I never really had a physical with the Mets. I had the bone spur [in the right elbow]. It was discovered the previous year in Seattle, and it never got checked out by any other doctors until I got to spring training, and the spring training physical is kind of a formality.”
OK. That’s fairly astonishing, given Putz’s injury history, but let’s just keep on going for now.
Putz said that in April and May it was clear he was hurt, and the Mets told him not to talk about that with the media. “I knew that I wasn’t right,” he said. “I wasn’t healthy. The toughest part was having to face the media and tell them that you feel fine, even though you know there’s something wrong and they don’t want you telling them that you’re banged up.”
Putz’s conclusion: He’s learned a lesson. “That it’s my career, and when you know something doesn’t feel right, and they want to take these little sidesteps to do something, and just wait and wait and wait, you got to get it taken care of instead of trying to prolong the inevitable.”
My conclusion? I’ve got two of them.
1. Doesn’t this sound like Carlos Beltran would agree?
2. With more and more evidence out there, can anyone claim with a straight face that the Mets baseball-operations folks aren’t mindbogglingly incompetent?
Oh, I’m sorry, there I go looking for patterns again. Nasty blogger!
by Jason Fry on 31 January 2010 7:16 am Recently there’s been talk of WAR and CHONE and the first attempts to figure out what we might expect from the 2010 Mets. Amazingly, despite the three-years-early Mayan apocalypse of the 2009 season, I keep finding myself hopeful — or at least desperate for baseball to move off the winter back burner and return to its accustomed place in my brain and heart. But every time that hope begins to blossom, some horrid Metsian thing happens to tramp it back into the dirt.
No sooner was I getting used to Jason Bay and thinking about the Mets as an 83-win team that had six or seven additional wins within front-office reach than the whole Carlos Beltran disaster arrived, with the usual double whammy of terrible news and evidence of front-office incompetence.
Next came the mysterious Gary Matthews Jr. trade, for which the other shoe never dropped — but once I calmed down a bit and managed to look past the inert bulk of Luis Castillo and his continued presence on the roster, I realized it wasn’t an awful deal, not for that money. Ditto for re-signing Fernando Tatis. I still don’t understand why Tatis kept playing over Nick Evans in last year’s cruelly extended garbage time, but Jerry Manuel’s myopia isn’t his fault, and I wasn’t being fair to him. The contract is reasonable for a player who can play several positions and still hit.
But then, there was this from Ken Rosenthal: “[Joel] Pineiro identified the Mets as his No. 1 choice, but instead signed a two-year, $16 million contract with the Angels. He got tired of waiting for the Mets to sort through their other pursuits, tired of waiting for them to raise their initial offer, sources say. As negotiations intensified, the Mets were prepared to match and perhaps top the Angels’ offer for Pineiro. But by the time they turned aggressive, it was too late.”
Follow that with this, from David Waldstein in the New York Times: “John Smoltz, who turns 43 in May and would like to extend his Hall of Fame career, has received 2010 contract offers from several teams, his agent, Lonnie Cooper, said Wednesday. The Mets, however, are not among those clubs, Cooper added, even though they have expressed some interest in Smoltz … The lack of an offer does not necessarily mean the Mets have only passing interest in Smoltz. It does signal that the Mets are continuing their off-season negotiating posture, which, for the most part, has not been an aggressive one. Although they are widely viewed as a team in need of starting pitching, they have let other clubs outbid them for free agents like Ben Sheets, Jon Garland and Joel Piniero. In each instance, they did not appear to put up much of a fight, or any fight at all.”
Our team’s problem this off-season hasn’t necessarily been being outbid, though there are questions there, too. Rather, it sounds like it’s been basic communication and organization. Which is where Gary Matthews becomes an interesting bellwether.
No, not Junior, back for second tour of Met duty. I’m thinking about his dad, the Sarge — the ruthless outfielder who helped sink the 1984 Mets and liked slamming into Gary Carter at the plate and ripping him in national magazines.
Matthews has another infamous distinction in Mets history. He was one of the members of the inaugural free-agent class, post-McNally and Messersmith, and the player who seemed to interest the Mets the most. So in late 1976 Joe McDonald and M. Donald Grant made that interest plain — by sending Matthews a telegram asking him to contact the team. (He wound up signing with the Atlanta Braves.)
Another offseason, another front office that appears not to know what it’s doing, calls that don’t get made, players who move on. And the exact same name in the middle of it. Then it was the father, now it’s the son. I’m not much for superstition, but that doesn’t strike me as a good omen.
by Greg Prince on 30 January 2010 7:17 am If ever a cold January morning called for a round of the Mexican Hat Dance, this is it. It’s a good time to hear Jane Jarvis on the Thomas Organ welcoming us to Shea Stadium. It’s a good time to lean forward in anticipation of an afternoon in the sun with the Mets and a hot dog and whatever the next nine innings will bring.
It’s a good time to close our eyes and hear Jane Jarvis play something peppy.
Jane Jarvis died Monday at the age of 94, the New York Times reports. She outlived Shea. She outlived the organ as the prime source of pregame and between-innings entertainment. She lived a very long time and accomplished a great deal as a musician and music executive. She lives on for every Mets fan who ever clapped or tapped along to whatever she played. Jane Jarvis was as much the Mets as anybody or anything else between 1964 and 1979. For those of us enchanted by the Melody Queen of Shea Stadium, she’s always going to be synonymous with some of the best days of our lives.
This is where I tell my Jane Jarvis story. It’s not from Shea. It’s from long after she was on the active roster. It’s from just over six years ago, the fall of 2003, at the senior center my wife runs in midtown Manhattan. The church that houses the center hosts weekly jazz concerts. The star of one of those shows? None other than Ms. Jane Jarvis, then nearly 88 — one year for every key on the piano.
“Jane Jarvis is playing at the center Wednesday,” Stephanie told me. “Do you want to come?” It was like one of those cartoons in which the person on the other end of the conversation leaves his chair spinning and a cloud of dust behind before the question is completed.
There I was, and there she was, Jane Jarvis, playing with a small combo, playing with style and grace to a packed house, playing everything on the jazz menu that afternoon. The audience was loving it. They thought they were hearing it all. I was loving it, too, except I wanted to order off the menu. The jazz was tasty, but I wasn’t there to hear all that jazz. I wasn’t going to say that, of course, but my wife is pretty good at reading my Met mind and knowing what I wanted to hear.
The show was ending. Stephanie, as emcee of the event, informed the audience that in case you didn’t know it, Ms. Jarvis was the organist at Shea Stadium for many years and if we all encourage her, maybe she’ll give us a little of her signature tune. This wasn’t a crowd of baseball fans (I think her Shea credentials came as news to most of them) but they were up for it. Everybody applauded.
Jane had this look of “I’ve been a serious musician for 75 years and you want to hear what?” But, pro’s pro, she departed from her set list and dove right in to “Meet The Mets”. It was just a few bars, but it was dreamy.
Until she segued into the other song I associate with Jane Jarvis: “The Mexican Hat Dance”. And that was off the charts thrilling. Jane Jarvis’ “Mexican Hat Dance” is the ultimate pregame soundtrack in my mind. Always will be. And here it was, a command performance almost.
The audience in the church knew exactly when to clap. Just as I did that autumn afternoon. Just as I am right now, in appreciation for making our Mets life that much more joyful.
After her 2003 performance, I brought my Meet The Mets CD from up to the piano, thanked her for playing those two songs and asked her to autograph the liner notes. She did so, regally. Why not? She’s Jane Jarvis, Shea Stadium’s Queen of Melody. Her playing will always rule.
A musician’s perspective on the life of Jane Jarvis is offered here by Ann Ruckert.
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Even though Valerie is a Jenny Craig spokesperson and I’m a Weight Watchers kind of girl, I attached to Valerie as my weight loss role model. She’s only slightly older than I am, she was looking to lose a similar amount of weight, and she wasn’t looking to become ultra-skinny; I could relate to her.
I haven’t met Connor in person yet, but I have exchanged e-mails with his mom and I hope to meet them sometime this season. Connor was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor called an ependymoma on October 17, 2007. He still suffers from headaches, but is working hard to keep up in school. I chose to run for Connor after I heard that he only wanted to wear his David Wright jersey when he was undergoing chemotherapy.
