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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 17 January 2010 11:38 am While sitting here hopng the J-E-T-S will B-E-A-T the Chargers (and coming up with reasons to dislike the City of San Diego…stupid zoo), I’ve been kindly sent a link to a segment of vintage Art Rust, Jr. from 1981, at the beginning of his tenure on WABC. It’s a Spring Training show during which Art — whom we lost this week — forecasts unseasonably blue skies for the rapidly improving the Mets. Lots of guys who can “hit the rock,” a big comeback by “Swannie” and so much more.
Listen to this if you were a fan of New York’s only nightly sports talk fix from that era. Listen to this, too, if you missed him entirely. We were six years from WFAN, and he sounds nothing like WFAN. It doesn’t even sound that much like 1981 (which sources inform me was almost thirty years ago), but that was part of Art’s charm.
And look out for Joel Youngblood at the hot corner this year.
AUDIO HERE: Art Rust, Jr. on WABC
by Greg Prince on 16 January 2010 6:26 pm  Perhaps you’re familiar with the story of Jackie Robinson retiring rather than accepting the last transaction Walter O’Malley arranged for him, a trade to the Giants for Dick Littlefield.
The very thought! Jackie the ultimate Dodger going to the hated rivals! GASP! No wonder he quit!
Actually, Robinson had already decided to retire from baseball after the 1956 season to go to work full time as Chock full o’ Nuts’ director of personnel when the trade was made: Robinson to New York; pitcher Dick Littlefield and $35,000 to Brooklyn. The move was seen as a parting shot from O’Malley, who never liked Robinson.
Contrary to the myth that Robinson would have rather died than call the Polo Grounds home, Jackie — according to biographer Arnold Rampersad — maintained cordial contact with Giants owner Horace Stoneham after the announcement and even told one reporter, “I’ve got no hard feelings against the Dodgers but I’m going to do everything I can to beat them next year.” Perhaps it was a charade (Jackie had sold his “I’m retiring” exclusive to Look magazine and it hadn’t yet been published), but he didn’t immediately or publicly reject the trade out of hand. By this point in his career, however, Robinson was almost 38 and knew the end of the line had been reached. Still, it took more than a month after the trade was made for baseball’s trailblazer to tell his prospective new employer thanks, but no thanks.
“I assure you that my retirement has nothing to do with my trade to your organization,” Robinson wrote Stoneham in a letter making it clear he wouldn’t be reporting to Spring Training in 1957. “From all I have heard from people who have worked with you it would have been a pleasure to have been in your organization. Again my thanks and continued success for you and the New York Giants.”
Doesn’t sound all that vitriolic, does it?
It was a little late for Jackie Robinson to start switching teams, but that doesn’t mean somebody didn’t imagine he might have followed through. Last year, Topps created a special set of “Cards That Never Were” in the style of their 1959 releases for a sports collector’s show. Jackie as a New York Giant, swinging in black and orange as if he hadn’t retired, was in the set. This caught the eagle eye of my baseball card maven friend, Joe, who tracked it down for me for my birthday…which was awfully nice of him. (And yes, I do know my share of baseball card mavens.)
Jackie Robinson, pictured as a New York Giant: I’ll be looking for a reproduction in a Rotunda near me.
by Greg Prince on 15 January 2010 8:37 pm Omar Minaya has told Newsday…ah, y’know what? I was going to update the saga of the ‘scope, but honestly, what’s the point? Without getting into Minaya’s crystal-clear explanation that he did talk to Beltran but he didn’t tell Beltran to have the surgery but there’s no problem between the organization and Beltran even though the organization — which may be a misnomer since nobody running the Mets seems particularly organized — has gone to great lengths to express it does have a problem with Beltran, suffice it to say Omarspeak is having its way with clarity once again.
To sum up:
• The Mets are still without one of their most important players.
• It’s a wonder the people running the club don’t lock themselves out of their offices every night.
by Greg Prince on 14 January 2010 10:49 pm “I am totally surprised by the reaction to my recent knee surgery.”
Honestly, this is better than the Jay-Conan thing. I mean, yeah, I know, we don’t want to be without Carlos Beltran, and it won’t be the least bit funny come April 5 when Angel Pagan is waiting for a fly ball in left only to realize he’s supposed to be in center, but still…
“Any accusations that I ignored or defied the team’s wishes are simply false.”
First the Mets don’t know about the surgery. Then the Mets kind of know about it, but wanted to mull it over. And they need to talk to a lawyer.
“I also spoke to Omar Minaya about the surgery on Tuesday. He did not ask me to wait, or to get another doctor’s opinion. He just wished me well.”
Now the party of the knee part, Beltran, issues a statement saying, no, the Mets are a bunch of liars…either that or Omar Minaya should check with Drs. Steadman and Altchek regarding treatment for short-term memory loss.
“No one from the team raised any issue until Wednesday, after I was already in surgery. I do not know what else I could have done.”
Maybe Minaya didn’t realize it was Carlos Beltran on the phone. Maybe he thought it was Rigo Beltran (I heard those two were tight). Maybe calling the GM doesn’t count as notification. Or maybe Carlos is just in this to cause trouble. Incidentally, I hope Carlos is feeling up to attending the Baseball Writers’ dinner next week to pick up his Joan Payson Award for community service.
“The most important thing here is that the surgery was a total success and I expect to be back on the field playing the game I love sooner rather than later.”
Let’s be clear on something: As much as we love the Mets, this is not, as I heard it referred to Wednesday night, a disaster. Haiti’s a disaster. This is just embarrassing and semi-professional. And if the fallout isn’t all that amusing from the standpoint of rooting for the Mets to win ballgames, well, it is pretty much par for what has become the course with this organization, and if you don’t laugh at it (in January, anyway), you might cry from it. John Ricco, whom I guess Carlos Beltran didn’t call before surgery, said the Mets were “disappointed” by the process and/or the player.
Disappointed? Gads, that’s so last decade. Or did the last one never end? In any event, as the man said, the most important thing here is that the surgery was a total success and he expects to be back on the field playing the game he loves sooner rather than later.
From Carlos Beltran’s mouth to Omar Minaya’s ear.
by Greg Prince on 14 January 2010 4:29 pm The Mets wanted Carlos Beltran to get a third opinion? OK, here goes:
“Hey Carlos, your team needs starting pitching.”
Opinions are like Met injuries: There are plenty to go around. Today the Mets expressed, as blandly and nonlitigiously as possible (other than by just shutting up), the opinion that Carlos Beltran went behind their backs to fix his knee. That’s their opinion and they’re entitled to it. That knee is a big investment for them.
I don’t really know what the Mets were supposed to do once they couldn’t be ahead of the story from the start. Had they taken, as Mike Francesa lucidly suggested, the tack of “we don’t discuss our players’ injuries,” it would have fired up a PR storm that was already brewing. A PR storm is almost always brewing around the Mets. Twenty-four hours ago, the Mets’ PR waters seemed unusually calm. David Wright was sharing football insights with Francesa, and pitchers and catchers were creeping ever closer.
Now hobbled centerfielders and secret surgeons are reporting instead.
I also don’t know what reporters who cover the Mets are supposed to ask, but none of their questions elicited much in the way of revelations — bad for information junkies, good for the Mets not looking terrible, I suppose. I listened to the conference call with John Ricco, which boiled down to two essential exchanges:
“Can you tell us everything we want to know about your internal machinations?”
“No.”
And:
“Can you accurately forecast when an injured player will be fully recovered and playing baseball despite the horrendous track record attached to your usually wild and inaccurate guesses.”
“Twelve weeks.”
Other than that, the whole process has been characteristically enlightening.
The upshot I gather is Carlos Beltran has two knees and would like them both to function so he can perform at his job. He went to a really well-regarded doctor for an operation that apparently didn’t do him undue harm. He and his agent ignored his employer since the Mets’ default prescription for regular leechings and bleedings wasn’t making him feel any less pain. And now Angel Pagan will have to be directed to center field, which I’m guessing he’ll find nine of every ten times he lights out for it.
So…do the Mets still Believe in Comebacks?
by Greg Prince on 13 January 2010 11:04 pm Carlos Beltran is out for a projected twelve weeks — three or so months of not just not playing, but also not practicing — after surprise arthoscopic surgey on his right knee to address osteoarthritis that was causing him too much pain to continue offseason training. I say “surprise,” because it reportedly wasn’t on the Mets’ radar or at least wasn’t done with the Mets’ blessing.
Part of me doesn’t blame Beltran for avoiding the Mets’ hierarchy, given their uninspiring track record handling injuries. Still, you probably have to tell them.
Let’s hope Carlos is feeling spry soon. Let’s hope we’re looking all right with Angel Pagan or some other stopgap in center before Beltran is back. Let’s hope our walking 2009 wounded are actually on the way back in 2010 before we pencil them in as healthy. When it comes to figuring out what might happen with the Mets, it may be best to use disappearing ink.
by Greg Prince on 13 January 2010 8:26 pm A winter’s night like this one? Twenty-five or so years ago? I would be dying for Mets news. I’d surely have checked my favorite blogs, except there were no blogs. I’d have watched MLB Network or SNY in hopes they had some information on their crawls, but there was neither an MLB nor an SNY. Naturally, the inclination would have been to tune in WFAN, but y’know what? There wasn’t even a WFAN before 1987.
Not an outlet was stirring, not even a Tweet.
You wanted live streaming hot stove baseball talk around here, you had one option if you were lucky: Art Rust, Jr. There was no guarantee that Art would be talking baseball. But if he was…oh boy! Maybe he’d have a Met or a Met announcer or a Met beat writer on the phone. Maybe he’d just be taking a call from a Mets fan. You leaned forward, even though you suspected you weren’t going to learn anything.
“Art, do you see the Mets improving their roster by maybe getting some new players?”
“Mark my words, my friend, when Opening Day rolls around, the New York Mets will be ready to go in the National League.”
It wasn’t much, but I can’t tell you how much better it was than nothing.
Art Rust, Jr., who died Tuesday at 82, was the sports talk voice of New York for quite a while. I don’t mean he dominated the field. He was the field. He was it on commercial radio. Generally speaking — which was something Art did with élan — if you wanted a sports fix before July 1, 1987, the date the FAN took flight and forever changed our expectations, you had Art, or you had radio silence. WFUV aired a late-night weekend program, and WINS and WCBS each gave you scores at :15 and :45 each hour, but for most of the 1980s, the only way to surround yourself with sports talk was to keep company with Art Rust, Jr.
We’re spoiled now. We have each other and so many other vehicles to feed our obsession. But when it was just you and Art, you valued Art. I know I did, particularly when I first encountered him one night in the summer of 1980. The Mets game had ended on WMCA (570 AM), and on came a smooth, sharp, unironic voice — apparently airlifted in from one of those radios Bugs Bunny might have been listening to in the ’40s — telling me there was no doubt about it, my friend, the New York Mets are playing great baseball and there’s going to be playoff baseball out at Flushing By The Bay this October, you can count on it.
You could always count on what Art told you. Art dealt in definites. Mark his words, he insisted to almost every caller after those Mets games on ‘MCA in 1980, you’re going to have interleague baseball by the end of this decade…and every team is going to be playing under a dome by then. So he was off by a few years on one prediction and ridiculously wrong on the other one. Art was certain, and that was somehow assuring. In that Magic Is Back summer, when I dared to dream the Mets would catch and pass the Phillies, him telling me the Mets were going to the playoffs was good enough for me.
Other talk radio hosts tell you the way it is and brook no dissent. Art wasn’t that way. He’d let you have your say, no matter how wrong it was. His big sport was boxing, which even in the early ’80s seemed rather old-timey. There was a huge bout coming up. I want to say it was Thomas Hearns vs. Sugar Ray Leonard; might have been Larry Holmes vs. Gerry Cooney. Whichever one it was, Art declared it over in advance. Hearns would beat Leonard…or Cooney would beat Holmes.
Next caller.
Except the guy Rust picked lost. Did it make Art look bad? Not really, because when a tol’-ya-so caller called in to remind Art of his incorrect prediction, Art shrugged, “I got it wrong, sir” and moved on to the next subject. A simple admission, but difficult for so many who talk into a microphone to make.
I remember that. I also remember that Terry Moore was Art’s favorite ballplayer. “My guy — Terry Moore of the St. Louis Cardinals.” Art would talk about Moore, a centerfielder from the ’30s, in the same vein defensively as DiMaggio and Mantle and Mays. He was that good. Was he? I’ve since read that he was, which is neither here nor there. Art said so, which was all I had to know.
Art really was old school. He was just a shade older than my father but his lingo arrived bubble-wrapped from another era. Shea was always Flushing By The Bay. Yankee Stadium was The Big Ball Orchard In The South Bronx. A good defensive catcher could Swish That Leather Behind The Dish, my friend. Circa 1980, that sounded like an impolitic assessment of the nightlife in certain precincts of Greenwich Village, but whatever. Art expanded my vocabulary as he did my horizons. Without him, I wouldn’t have known who the hell Terry Moore was.
The 1980 season ended with the Mets missing the playoffs by a mere 24 games. Art continued to do sports talk on WMCA that winter and then made a well-publicized move to WABC. I listened as much as I could stand to, considering WABC had just become the Yankees’ station. He had plenty of Mets guests nonetheless. One night he reunited, via phone, Cleon Jones and Davey Johnson, parties to the final out of the ’69 World Series. Cleon and Davey were each now working for the Mets in the minor leagues, Art said. (Who knew?) Another night he had on Steve Albert, then partner of Ralph Kiner and Bob Murphy. The Mets had been playing surprisingly competently, motivating me, for the only time, to call the Art Rust, Jr. Show.
I asked Steve what that big black thing beyond centerfield at Shea was.
“You mean the scoreboard?” Art and Steve asked in unison.
No, that other thing.
“You mean the batter’s eye?” Steve asked.
Uh, yeah, I said.
God, I felt stupid. I’d heard that phrase all my life and I’d seen that thing all my life, yet I never knew what either of them was. Nobody told me I was an idiot, however. Instead, Art asked me if there was anything else.
“I just want to say the Mets have the best fireman, the best second baseman and the best broadcasters in the National League.”
They chuckled and thanked me for calling. And I stand by those appraisals of Neil Allen and Doug Flynn.
by Greg Prince on 12 January 2010 6:21 pm My 2010 plans weren’t inexorably altered when I learned the Dodgers signed Argenis Reyes to a minor league contract, but upon doing a bit of checking, I now realize we’ve lost someone whose penchant for instant winning was unprecedented. We’ve lost a Met who was able to say, longer than any other Met, that he had been — as Willie Randolph might have put it — a winner his whole life…or at least the portion of his life that we cared about.
In short, Argenis Reyes was the best scratch-off lottery ticket we ever bought. We kept scratching and we kept winning.
I didn’t think my 2008 plans were inexorably altered either when the Mets called up the other Reyes two summers ago, but John Lennon advised us life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. Argenis is what indeed happened to us in the middle of ’08 in a very fundamentally pleasing way.
Consider the indisputable evidence.
On July 3, 2008, the Mets placed shining light Luis Castillo on the 15-day Disabled List with a strained left hip flexor, though “chronic futility” might have been enough. To replace him, the Mets sent down to New Orleans (remember the Zephyrs?) and asked for a side of Argenis Reyes to go.
And go he did. On his first night as a Met, with his new team leading 11-1 in the seventh inning at St. Louis, Jerry Manuel inserted Reyes at second, replacing Damion Easley for the rest of the blowout. The Mets continued to lead 11-1 and put the game away. Argenis Reyes was 1-0.
The next night, in Philadelphia, Argenis Reyes sat and the Mets lost. Tsk.
The night after that, July 5, Argenis Reyes pinch-hit and the Mets won. Never mind that Argenis flied out. It’s a team game, and Argenis’s team was now 2-0.
Extra innings were required on July 6. In the tenth inning, Argenis pinch-hit again. He struck out. The Mets, though, would eventually come through. ‘Genny and the Mets were now 3-0.
A pattern was developing. Argenis Reyes pinch-hit again, on July 7. The Mets were up 10-7 in the ninth. Argenis grounded out to end the top of the inning. Then he left. Billy Wagner came in and gave up two runs, but the Mets hung on to win the damn thing, 10-9. They were now 4-0 in games in which Argenis Reyes participated.
There was no stopping these Mets…these Argenis Reyes Mets. He entered the next two games, against the Giant at Shea, as a pinch-hitter and stayed in for defense both times. He collected his first three hits in this pair of contests and the Mets shut out San Francisco twice. The Mets were 6-0 while under the influence of Argenis.
Manuel, giddy from himself replacing Randolph, was determined to go with the hottest of hands, the winningest winner who had been a winner his whole Met life. He started Argenis Reyes at second base on July 10. Guess what — the Mets won again. These were the 7-0 Mets and their newest sensation was the 7-0 Argenis Reyes. Granted, his height was listed at 5′ 11″, and that seemed generous, but did anybody ever stand taller sooner?
No time to ask. The Rockies rolled into town and found themselves the victim of a boulder dropping their head. Its name? Argenis Reyes, an 0-for-1 pinch-hitter on July 11, but an 8-for-8 Met as his boys won again, 2-1. The next day, a brilliant Saturday, was a spectacular kind of Argenis Reyes day. He started and recorded a base hit…exactly as many as the Rockies cobbled together off Pedro Martinez and the four Met relievers who followed him after Pedro had to leave with an injury. Argenis Reyes, however, wasn’t going anywhere. The Mets won 3-0 and Reyes had now played nine games in the majors without ever experiencing a loss.
Jerry, in his cocky gangsta mode, rested A. Reyes the next night and managed a win anyway. Then came the All-Star Break. Then came the game after, which the Mets won in the ninth inning at Cincinnati. It required a come-from-behind rally, generated when A. Reyes singled with one out, thereby lifting his batting average, slugging percentage and on-base percentage to .316 apiece. D. Wright then homered to tie the Reds 8-8. The Mets, with Reyes remaining in the game at second, came away victorious that July 17 evening, 10-8.
Did all good things have to end? Alas, yes. The Mets’ ten-game winning streak was snapped on July 18 despite Argenis Reyes’s deployment as a pinch-hitter. That was the first game in which Reyes played that his team lost. No word on whether he pricked a finger to see if he also now bled like any normal human.
From there, the Argenis Reyes story unravels. Short version for the likable little guy: He didn’t hit; he wasn’t that fantastic a second baseman; and the Mets stopped enjoying good fortune. The 2008 Mets came up painfully shy of a playoff spot. The 2009 Mets came to Citi Field unnoticeably shy of Argenis Reyes. Injuries to almost everybody, however, washed him ashore Flushing Bay in late June. He made it into nine games for the ’09 Mets. They lost seven of them. Then he was gone. Now he’s a Dodger.
But here’s the thing you’ve got to know: Argenis Reyes’s team won the first ten games in which he played. I can find no evidence of any other Met in 48 seasons being able to say the same thing. I looked. I checked long pre-2008 Met winning streaks and the Met debuts that coincided with the blossoming of those long Met winning streaks and came up Argenisless. Tom Paciorek had immediate impact almost as resounding as Reyes, but just missed the mark; his Mets lost their first game in July 1985, 1-0. Then they reeled off ten straight wins with a dash of Paciorek in the boxscore. But as Billy Joel put it, get it right the first time, that’s the main thing. Get it right the next time? That’s not the same thing.
Besides Paciorek, nobody comes incredibly close to the standard set by Argenis Reyes. The Mets were red hot when Willie Mays came over in 1972, but Willie played in only four consecutive victories to start his Met career. The Mets were white hot when Mike Piazza came over in 1998, but Mike played in only seven consecutive victories to start his Met career.
In this narrow but actual context, we can honestly say Willie Mays and Mike Piazza were no Argenis Reyeses and mean it completely as a compliment to Argenis.
by Greg Prince on 12 January 2010 1:29 am  Mark McGwire says he wishes he didn’t play in the Steroid Era. I have the same wish to a certain degree. From 1997 to 2001, McGwire hit 13 home runs against the Mets, batting .280 and getting on base in almost 39% of his plate appearances. Beating the Cardinals on any given day or night then would have been easier had he not produced those numbers. Hence, I wish Mark McGwire hadn’t played against the Mets in the Steroid Era. Conversely, I’m glad he played against the Braves, the Cubs, the Marlins and whoever else was keeping us out of the playoffs back then.
I could also have done without Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, Ken Caminiti…you name ’em facing the Mets. I wish the Mets had faced 9 Freddie Pateks (5′ 5″; 41 homers in 14 seasons) per lineup or 25 Harry Chappases (5′ 3″; 1 homer in 3 seasons) per roster. The Mets could have found a way to lose to Lilliputians, too, particularly at the end of 1998 when the snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory was a Metropolitan art, but I would have taken our chances with a less uniformly enhanced opposition.
Thing is, the new hitting coach of the St. Louis Cardinals did play when he played, as did the others who excelled as supernatural sluggers. Those seasons happened. The homers were hit, the numbers were posted. Mark McGwire really did hit 70 homers one year, 66 in another. He did whatever he did to the Mets, just as the Mets did whatever they did to the Cardinals when they showed down. Mets-Cubs games happened, with McGwire’s record-chasing shadow, Sammy Sosa, a major gate attraction at Shea — no matter how much less genuine Sosa’s statistics, like McGwire’s, appear in hindsight. Mets-Giants games featuring Barry Bonds happened, even if no one’s exactly waiting on a Barry Bonds outburst of qualified contrition to match McGwire’s.
Ken Caminiti, who died of a heart attack in 2004, gathered momentum toward a unanimous MVP award in 1996 after a particularly dramatic weekend against the Mets, recounted here by Baseball Library:
Caminiti’s toughness reached legendary proportions in August of 1996, when two liters of an IV solution and a Snickers bar helped him overcome dehydration, diarrhea, and nausea and hit two home runs […] against the New York Mets in Monterrey, Mexico. The 8-0 win tied San Diego with Los Angeles for first place in the NL West; Caminiti’s inspiring play eventually led the Padres to their first division title since 1984.
Caminiti admitted in 2002, after he retired, that he used steroids in his MVP year and in the years that followed. It doesn’t mean he didn’t find sustenance in a Snickers while in Mexico. It also doesn’t mean he didn’t help the Padres win a game and a division title. He, like many, played and succeeded in the Steroid Era.
More accurately, perhaps, where these players are concerned, they didn’t play in the Steroid Era — they composed the Steroid Era. That was the most darkly amusing component of McGwire’s confession Monday. He wishes he didn’t play in the Steroid Era? How does he suppose the period in question, the mid-’90s through the early ’00s, became the Steroid Era? Was it listed on a calendar in advance? Or was it because so many baseball players decided, for whatever reasons (McGwire says he was compelled by injury), to inject or ingest substances that weren’t altogether on the up and up where the old ballgame was concerned?
Mark McGwire was in full apology mode Monday, but he didn’t have to apologize to me as a baseball fan in 2010 for what he did in 1998. I saw him play at the height of the Steroid Era and it was quite entertaining. I watched him hit home runs on TV and I applauded from my couch when it didn’t harm the Mets’ Wild Card chances. When he hit what turned out to be his final Shea Stadium home run in 2001, I gave him a standing ovation because he was Mark McGwire, holder of the single-season home run record to that point, and to watch Mark McGwire hit a home run was to feel as if you were in on grandeur. Nobody really talked much about steroids then. Even if they had, they couldn’t erase what McGwire had achieved or accomplished — or just “did,” if his powerful feats no longer seem like achievements or accomplishments. As a partisan of the Mets, I didn’t want McGwire or Sosa or Bonds or Caminiti or their pumped-up brethren to do their damage against my team, but from the perspective of someone who loved baseball, I appreciated their ability to swing, connect and launch in ways that I had never seen consistently since I began watching the game.
I still sort of do, no matter how many asterisks public perception reasonably attaches to the bombs those sluggers detonated so explosively over so many National League fences. But they did what they did at the plate, however they went about doing it. That will not be erased. Those games in which they went incredibly deep took place. Boxscores are on file for all of them; I can probably dig up ticket stubs for a couple of them. The Mets lost to the Cardinals on August 12, 2001, when Big Mac hit his last Shea homer. The Mets’ record for 2001 is still 82-80. It won’t suddenly be 83-79 now. It won’t be 82-79-1. Nor should it be. I don’t know who else was juicing that day; I don’t know if McGwire was juicing that day, come to think of it. Mark McGwire may have been onto something in 2005 with his infamous “I’m not here to talk about the past” remark to Congress. You can talk about it all you want, but you can’t undo it.
Yet you can acknowledge that the past wasn’t passive, that eras didn’t innocently arise from the mists of unquantifiable intersections of time and space. The Steroid Era was the Steroid Era because Mark McGwire and an army of ballplayers who wished to Be Like Mark sought out steroids. These things don’t happen by accident.
He wishes he didn’t play then? Too late, pal.
by Jason Fry on 10 January 2010 1:51 pm Longtime readers of this blog know of my quixotic pursuit of a decent picture of Al Schmelz, former Alaska Goldpanner and briefly a New York Met, along with many other momentary ballplayers in the bizarre 1967 campaign.
 There were 54 1967 Mets — 35 making their team debuts — and those 54 players managed 61 wins, or 1.13 per Met. Those making their blue-and-orange debuts included a future Hall of Famer (Tom Seaver, of course), a player who’d become a star in New York (Jerry Koosman), one who did so elsewhere (Amos Otis), future workers of Miracles (Ken Boswell, Don Cardwell, Ed Charles, Cal Koonce and Ron Taylor), a guy who’d be better known in Met circles as a coach and a father (Sandy Alomar), a guy whose name would live in mild infamy (cruelly overhyped center fielder Don Bosch), another who’d be better known for his watering hole than his on-field pursuits (Phil Linz, impresario of the once-upon-a-time famous tavern Mister Laffs), and a lot of guys of interest only as answers to trivia questions posed on blogs such as this one (Dennis Bennett, Bill Graham, Joe Grzenda, Joe Moock, Les Rohr, Bart Shirley, Billy Wynne).
But all those guys, from Bennett to Billy, got a decent baseball card one way or another, and are now enshrined in The Holy Books — my pair of binders collecting baseball cards for all the Mets since 1962: one card for each new Met, ordered by year. Including the Class of ’67.
Some of the ’67 Mets are fortunate enough to actually appear on Topps cards as Mets. Others demand creativity. Momentary Met Les Rohr has to share a 1968 rookie card with Ivan Murrell, a Houston outfielder wearing one of Topps’ blank black hats, but hey, it’s a card. Billy Connors shares a ’67 rookie card with fellow Cub Dave Dowling. Bill Denehy, Bob Heise, Bob Johnson, Jack Lamabe and Larry Stahl and Amos Otis appear hatless in their Met uniforms, or with their caps rendered generic, and are identified as members of other teams on their Topps cards. Properly attired as members of other teams are Bennett (Red Sox), Shirley (Dodgers), Nick Willhite and Wynne (Angels). Hal Reniff, sad to say, is a Yankee.
Graham and Moock never got Topps cards, and their careers were over before minor-league teams started issuing card sets in the mid-1970s. (A number of Mets in The Holy Books have cards from their tenure as Tides, Zephyrs, Bisons or members of other organizations’ farm clubs.) But Graham and Moock do have baseball cards, thanks to the efforts of a veteran card dealer named Larry Fritsch. Beginning in the late 1970s, Fritsch made several series of cards called One Year Winners, giving cardboard immortality to players who’d never had a card before. His efforts saved 10 thimbleful-of-coffee Mets — Graham and Moock, as well as Ray Daviault, Larry Foss, Rick Herrscher, Ted Schreiber, Wayne Graham, Dennis Musgraves, Shaun Fitzmaurice, Dick Rusteck — from anonymity.
But despite such efforts, a few Mets slipped through the cracks. Two — Brian Ostrosser and Leon Brown — got minor-league cards that are so dismal they’d be better off with nothing. (In Brown’s case this happened twice.) Tommy Moore got a Senior League card long after his big-league tenure. On it, he looks … well, senior. Then there are the guys who got nothing: Francisco Estrada, Lute Barnes, Bob Rauch, Greg Harts, Brian Ostrosser and Rich Puig. And, of course, Al Schmelz. Together, these nine make up the lonely roster of the Lost Mets.
In a fit of spectacular OCDism, I decided a few years ago that if the Lost Mets didn’t have cards, I would make cards for them — and so I did, using Photoshop to cobble together cards from old yearbook photos and scans of Topps cards. Which worked out fine for everybody — except Schmelz.
No moment of Schmelz’s baseball career seems to have been captured in a decent color photo. There are shots of him as an Alaska Goldpanner, but they’re in black and white. A couple of Mets yearbooks have pictures of him grouped with other guys invited to camp — always group shots, always black and white. He’s in the team photos — in glorious color, no less — in the ’67 and ’68 yearbooks, but of course he’s in the back, almost completely blocked by his teammates. His Holy Books card is a Frankenstein assemblage, with his body assembled from bits of pieces of different Mets from that ’67 team photo. It was the best I could do.
The Mets don’t have a better picture. As far as I can tell, no one else does either. I’ve even written to Schmelz himself a couple of times, with no answer. (I no longer do that — it seems like a ridiculous reason to wind up the subject of a restraining order.) Though Schmelz was photographed a few years ago at a fantasy camp in Arizona: He was wearing 1990s-looking Mets garb, sunglasses and what I had to interpret as a slightly mocking smile.
Every couple of months, out of habit, I Google Schmelz’s name. The results are not as straightforward as you might think: “Al Schmelz” appears to mean “aluminum smelter” in German. I also look for him on eBay. Sometimes this turns up a copy of an undersized, black-and-white semi-card he got as part of a 1990 Shea giveaway. (Cool, but no good for THB purposes.) Mostly it turns up nothing.
Until this morning. There it was, a snapshot of Al Schmelz, wearing the number that would one day belong to Dwight Gooden. As you can see, naturally it’s in black and white. Inevitably, Schmelz’s face is mottled by shadows. Of course his expression suggests that he just had a gulp of milk past its expiration date. No matter. It’s a picture of Al Schmelz, and though it’s faint praise to say it’s the best picture of him I’ve ever seen, it’s the best picture of him I’ve ever seen.
Of course I bought it. By now, it’s pretty much my job. Besides, who else would?
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