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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 21 October 2009 6:27 am Welcome to a special Wednesday edition of Flashback Friday: I Saw The Decade End, a milestone-anniversary salute to the New York Mets of 1969, 1979, 1989 and 1999. Each week, we immerse ourselves in or at least touch upon something that transpired within the Metsian realm 40, 30, 20 or 10 years ago. Amazin’ or not, here it comes.
In the span of six summer days in 1989, the Mets traded Mookie Wilson and Berke Breathed stopped drawing Bloom County. Both entities had been a staple of my life over the previous nine years.
That’s it, I thought at the time, the ’80s are really ending.
I loved Opus the penguin. I loved Mookie the centerfielder. Many fine things happened to me in their time. Yet I was never crazy about the 1980s as a decade. I always believed I was loitering in them with a visitor’s pass. Josh Wilker of Cardboard Gods articulated my feelings on these artificially arranged ten-year periods almost exactly earlier this year when he wrote:
I am a citizen of the 1970s. I have resided in other decades, but I have always felt like a foreigner within them, or have mostly ignored them altogether, an expatriate with no interest in participating in the local customs.
Like Josh, I’m at home in the ’70s, a structure I entered at age 7 and exited by chronological necessity the day after I turned 17. No matter how much that decade objectively sucked, it will always be where I live, psychically (sort of like Shea Stadium). When I was forced to leave figurative home on January 1, 1980, I was at a loss. Never mind that it was during the 1980s that I graduated from high school, graduated from college, met my future wife and came of age in all those ways a person naturally embraces. I just disliked it being the ’80s. The values, the politics, the hair…I don’t know what it was, I was just deep-down uncomfortable with what surrounded me for ten years and was tangibly relieved when I crossed the finish line to January 1, 1990.
I’ve had nothing against the ’90s or the ’00s, per se. You get older, you don’t delineate decades as reflexively. I once asked my dad what the ’60s were like. He shrugged. To him, I suspect, they were just years during which he was over thirty. Hell, some days feel so random that if Christmas is mentioned, I can’t remember without thinking first whether we’re closer to the last one or the next one.
Maybe I resented that when the ’70s ended, nobody asked me to sign off on the ’80s. Thus, I mistrusted them — but it’s not like I didn’t enjoy a good bit of them. For instance, I enjoyed Bloom County on the comics pages. “Come On Eileen” was a great song. SCTV was a great show. And the Mets were never better as a long-term proposition.
When we think of the Mets of the ’80s, we tend to jump right to one particular year, 1986, and one particular month, October. Of course that was the height of the decade and, arguably, the franchise. From the standpoint of kicking ass, which is the idea in sports (and a pretty big societal priority in the ’80s), nothing in the annals of Mets baseball touches 1986. Members Only jackets, Trickle Down economics, the staggering popularity of The Cosby Show…lots made me cringe back then, but I had no complaints with the baseball back then.
When the Mets were at the top, it was unimaginable they wouldn’t stay there. Mookie Wilson himself, about as humble a “Bad Guy” as that team featured, stood before the City Hall ceremonies that capped their ticker-tape parade and exclaimed a hope we would all take as an implied guarantee:
1986: Year of the Mets!
1987: Year of the Mets!
1988: Year of the Mets!
Of course. Of course there’d be more than one year for these Mets. There’d be year after year. The Mets of the ’80s were built to last. That they didn’t make ’87 or ’88 their years in the same sense as ’86 didn’t lessen the sense that it was their time. The Mets ran a contest in 1989 encouraging fans to submit designs for a secondary logo, one that commemorated the previous half-decade. The Mets had baseball’s best record from 1984 through 1988. They were, according to their own marketing acumen, excellent again and again…so draw something!
Met hubris wasn’t easily detected by us Mets fans in the last year of the 1980s because it was a way of life. We were in the middle of it, so how could we see it for what it was? We could be asked to create logos celebrating our quasi-achievements and accept the challenge with a straight face. We could read profiles such as that which appeared in a high-flying business magazine called Manhattan Inc. informing us that the Mets were “the IBM of baseball” and be confident of receiving perennial returns on our investment. We could watch a Cy Young winner like Dwight Gooden go down with an injury at the beginning of July and calmly accept as his replacement another Cy Young winner like Frank Viola at the end of July.
We were the Mets. We were excellent. We would be, repeatedly. Everything and everybody said so.
Then we traded Mookie Wilson.
With him went our would-be magnum opus of a decade. Well, him and Wally Backman, traded the December before; him and Lenny Dykstra and Roger McDowell, sent to Philadelphia in June; him and Rick Aguilera, part of the payment for Viola; him and Lee Mazzilli, waived the same frenzied night that Frankie V was acquired and Mookie W was shipped to Toronto for Jeff Musselman.
The Mets traded Mookie Wilson for Jeff Musselman. Next time you watch a clip of Mookie hustling down the first base line during Game Six of the 1986 World Series, try to think of anything Jeff Musselman did in a Mets uniform or could have conceivably done that would make a trade of Mookie Wilson for Jeff Musselman sound remotely reasonable.
You’ll be thinking an awful long while.
The last year of the 1980s was truly a last gasp for the Mets of the 1980s the way we remember them. Gary Carter and Keith Hernandez, each 35 and hobbled, were still on hand but had faded badly in ’89. Mex hit .233, Kid .183. Neither played in even half of the team’s games. Both would bid adieu to Shea at season’s end twice: on the field to standing ovations in the team’s last home game on September 27 and at a press conference in the old Jets locker room on October 3.
Kid:
“I can still play this game, and I know there’ll be an opportunity out there. But these have been five great years. I heard the cheers and I heard the boos, and I like the cheers a lot more. Maybe I’ll hear more of them.”
Mex:
”It’s sad because these have been six-and-a-half great years, and I’ll always be a New Yorker and a New York Met. But then come the cold realities. You can’t retire at 65 in baseball.”
That left Doc and Darryl as the 1986 stalwarts who would lead the Mets into the new decade. Darling, Fernandez, Ojeda, HoJo, Teufel and Elster were the only other veterans of the World Series team to see 1990 in blue and orange. The ’90 Mets would contend to the final week of the season but fall short. They’d also be the last Mets team to finish over .500 until 1997. The IBM of baseball went bust.
Mookie Wilson wasn’t exactly igniting the 1989 Mets toward an encore as division champion when he was traded. Having ceded centerfield to the cleverly obtained Juan Samuel, Mookie was batting .205 as a reserve and the Mets were seven games out of first when he was cut loose. That said, you don’t trade Mookie Wilson from the Mets. You just don’t.
And if you do, you don’t trade him for Jeff Musselman.
The Mets, despite an encouraging August surge, fell flat in September. They finished in second place, six games behind the Cubs, at 87-75. It was a respectable record for mere peons, but these were the alleged paragons of Excellence Again and Again. All those moves were supposed to be the stuff of a forward-thinking IBM-type enterprise, one for which progress was paramount. Yet the 1989 Mets signaled a return to mediocrity. They were a huge disappointment in real time, the first Mets club to not win at least 90 games since 1983.
Even for someone who never fully embraced the decade in which they occurred, 1983 and 1989 make for fascinating ’80s Met bookends. If you checked out of Metsdom after their seventh consecutive losing season in ’83, you’d walk away thinking the ’80s were and always would be a terrible time to be a Mets fan. The team started the decade with the last four of those losing seasons, showing only intermittent promise that things would ever get better. By the middle of 1983, mired in last place with a record of 37-65 (their worst 102-game mark since 1965), there seemed no tangible progress on which to hang one’s Mets cap. The Mets’ marketing slogans in those dark days — The Magic Is Back; The Magic Is Real; Now The Fun Starts — could have been brought up as evidence in a false-advertising lawsuit. It was all talk and no action…except for the losing that wouldn’t stop.
Then it began to stop. Not enough to save the 1983 Mets from their fifth last-place finish in seven seasons, but enough to propel them to a final record of 68-94 — if one could be said to be propelled to a record that encompasses 94 losses. It was better than it sounds. The Mets won 31 of 60 in their final two months. Two months of winning baseball was an accomplishment for those Mets. Winning 68 games was an accomplishment for those Mets. It was the most they’d won since the 86 they posted in 1976. These were baby steps, but longer strides awaited in 1984, when 90 victories became the norm and success would become expected.
As viewers of this decade’s greatest television drama Six Feet Under will recall from the episode in which Nate Fisher began to fade badly, the ecotone is that space where two environments overlap. For the Mets of the ’80s, 1983 and 1989 were most ecotonic.
Look at your 1983 Mets. They started the season with Tom Seaver pitching, Ron Hodges catching and Dave Kingman in the infield. That’s how they ended the 1975 season. Everybody was happy to have Seaver back, but still — Hodges, Kingman, Craig Swan, Rusty Staub, Mike Jorgensen, John Stearns…does this sound like a team that was about to turn a corner? Or relics uncovered during Shea’s 1980 refurbishing?
Ah, but Mookie Wilson was there. So was Wally Backman, albeit in a limited role. Doug Sisk made the Opening Day roster (winning what Seaver started). Darryl Strawberry was called up in early May. Ron Darling was given his first start in September. Danny Heep pinch-hit most reliably. Neil Allen, a reliever whose welcome had clearly worn out, was famously traded in June for Keith Hernandez, not only solving first base and the third slot in the batting order, but clearing the closer role for a rapidly developing Jesse Orosco. By the end of 1983, fully one-third of the 1986 World Series roster was in place. The torch was being passed to a new generation of Mets.
Six years later, once Hernandez and Carter said goodbye, only eight World Series Mets survived. In the six months prior, as Dykstra, McDowell, Aguilera, Mazzilli and Wilson were cleaning out their lockers, the 1989 roster hosted Frank Viola and Juan Samuel; Don Aase and Wally Whitehurst; Phil Lombardi and Jeff McKnight; Tom O’Malley, Craig Shipley, Blaine Beatty, Lou Thornton and the immortal Manny Hernandez — no relation, talent or otherwise, to Keith.
The 1989 roster had its share of talent that came along after the formation of the ’86 champs and before their dissolution: Cone, Jefferies, Myers, Magadan, McReynolds to name a few good to very good players. Samuel had been a star not long before 1989 and Viola would win 20 games in 1990. But the times they were a-changin’ in Flushing and not for the better, not the way they were in 1983.
Thing is the 1989 Mets were a legitimate contender, if a continually frustrating and ultimately disappointing one. If you went to one of their games, it probably meant something in the standings. You at least thought it did. You could legitimately spend that entire spring and summer watching the scoreboard and worrying that glorious worry of the fan whose team has something to play for. This was what you had been told the 1980s Mets were all about.
But was it as much fun as the other bookend, 1983 once 1983 foreshadowed an era of potential greatness? The Mets weren’t rising from last no matter what they did that summer, but what a delight it was watching them not fall even further through the floor. There was Keith Hernandez being everything you hoped he’d be when you heard he was en route from St. Louis. There was Darryl Strawberry simultaneously getting used to major league pitching and earning Rookie of the Year honors. There was Jesse Orosco saving or winning nearly every game in which he pitched. There was Ron Darling giving you an idea of why they traded Mazzilli to get him. There were Walt Terrell and Hubie Brooks, too. They wouldn’t stick around to 1986, but they were showing enough to make you optimistic for 1984. Again, no contention with that ’83 team, no chance of it, but no boundary for what you could imagine they might do with a little growth and a little help.
The Mets of the ’80s, circa 1983, were Mookie Wilson racing out of the box no matter how futile the prevailing competitive circumstances. The Mets of the ’80s, circa 1989, were Mookie Wilson donning a Blue Jays uniform as part of an ad hoc reconfiguration aimed at remaining viable in the short term.
The 1983 Mets nurtured players whom we would come to know as 1986 Mets. The 1989 Mets shed them.
The 1989 Mets finished six out yet were more done than we realized. The 1983 Mets finished 22 out yet were just getting started. I’m not sure we realized that either, but it began to feel pretty good there toward the end. At any rate, nobody was calling valedictory press conferences and saying sad farewells.
It’s the section between these bookends we remember best about the 1980s Mets. It’s the story smack in the middle, 1986, that defines the decade. It was the Year of the Mets, just as Mookie said it was. It guaranteed we’d willingly accept nothing less in the years that would follow, even it meant rather cavalierly offing those who got us to 1986 in a lame effort to lunge for one more echo of that once-in-a-lifetime season.
It’s not like the Mets haven’t sent their key players away in other decades. But doing so to those players from that team…no wonder I’m still a little uncomfortable with the 1980s.
Todd Pratt’s 1999 NLDS-winning homer is underranked on Mets Walkoffs’ list of the Fifteen Most Metmorable Postseason Home Runs, but I can’t say any of those slotted ahead of his are unworthy either. Check it out here.
by Greg Prince on 21 October 2009 5:38 am 
Tim Heiman, sports director of WRPI radio at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, just returned home from a road trip the likes of which has been unseen by Mets fans since Benny Agbayani was rising and shining in Tokyo. Tim covered the Engineers’ away game (very away game) at Alaska-Fairbanks — a 1-1 tie — yet found the time to grace the 49th state with a little 37 14 41 42.
Yup, that’s the Faith and Fear shirt in Alaska, and that is indeed the Alaska Pipeline overhead. We’re really impressed by Tim’s display of the numbers so far north, but we are a little concerned that he’s outside in Alaska with no coat on. Tim says it was 20 degrees there this past weekend, making it slightly chillier than the Meadowlands on Sunday.
No word from Tim regarding any prospects on the Goldpanners like the one the Mets eventually scooped up in the 1960s. Then again, we guess that Fairbanks team is a little out of season right now.
Wherever you go in this world, do be sure to go there in FAFIF style.
by Jason Fry on 20 October 2009 4:41 am 
In a better world, many more of these would be Bisons cards. Oh well. Commentary here.
by Jason Fry on 20 October 2009 4:18 am People who think computers play baseball will say the Angels are down 2 games to 1. But computers don’t play baseball. And when you have a teammate like Derek Jeter, and you see the way he goes about his business and how calm he is after a game like that, it’s like you’ve won. So the computers may say the Angels are down just one game, but if you’re in the Yankee clubhouse you feel like you just won two games. That’s the kind of player Derek Jete —
I’m sorry, I came down here and Joe Morgan was futzing around with my computer. (Who even knew he could type?) Joe, you can see yourself out. We’re not here to talk about whatever the heck just happened involving an evil team in a league that doesn’t play real baseball. No, we’re here for the 5th annual admission of a new class of Mets into The Holy Books.
Brief review for newcomers and the similarly obsessive: I have a pair of binders, dubbed The Holy Books (THB) by Greg, that contain a baseball card for every Met on the all-time roster. They’re ordered by year, with a card for each player who made his Met debut that year: Tom Seaver is Class of ’67, Mike Piazza is Class of ’98, Jose Reyes is Class of ’03, etc. There are extra pages for the rosters of the two World Series winners, including managers, and for the 1961 Expansion Draft, with the latter including the infamous Lee Walls, the only THB resident who neither played for nor managed the Mets. (Previous annals here, here, here and here.)
When a player has a Topps card as a Met, I use that unless it’s truly horrible — Topps has been around a decade longer than the Mets, so they get to be the card of record. No Met Topps card? Then I look for a Bisons card, a non-Topps Met card, a Topps non-Met card, or anything I can get my hands on. Topps had a baseball-card monopoly until 1981, and minor-league cards only really began in the mid-1970s, so cup-of-coffee guys from before ’75 or so are a problem. Companies like TCMA and Renata Galasso made odd sets with players from the 1960s — the likes of Jim Bethke, Bob Moorhead and Dave Eilers are immortalized through their efforts. And a card dealer named Larry Fritsch put out sets of “One Year Winners” spotlighting blink-and-you-missed-them guys such as Ted Schreiber and Joe Moock.
Then there are the legendary Lost Nine — guys who never got a regulation-sized, acceptable card from anybody. Brian Ostrosser got a 1975 minor-league card that looks like a bad Xerox. Leon Brown has a terrible 1975 minor-league card and an oversized Omaha Royals card put out as a promotional set by the police department. Tommy Moore got a 1990 Senior League card as a 42-year-old with the Bradenton Explorers. Then there are Al Schmelz, Francisco Estrada, Lute Barnes, Bob Rauch, Greg Harts and Rich Puig, who have no cards whatsoever — the oddball 1991 Nobody Beats the Wiz set is too undersized to work. Best I can tell, Al Schmelz never even had a decent color photograph taken while wearing his Met uniform. (I’ve stopped writing to him in search of one for fear that he’ll call the authorities on me.) Anyway, the Lost Nine are represented in THB by fake cards I Photoshopped together.
A 10th Lost Met seems unlikely — today it’s rare to sign a pro contract and not wind up on a card somewhere. (Though next year Topps will be the only company allowed to use team logos on its cards, leaving Upper Deck to produce products that I fear will look something like the “cards” we used to cut off the back of Hostess boxes.) During the season I scrutinize new card sets in hopes of finding a) better cards of established Mets; b) cards to stockpile for prospects who might make the Show; and most importantly c) a card for each new big-league Met. At season’s end, the new guys get added to the binders, to be studied now and then until February. When it’s time to pull old Topps cards of the spring-training invitees and start the cycle again.
Anway, time to meet the Class of 2009: the many, the less than proud, the submarines. If we see more than a few of them next year something will have gone badly wrong. Again.
Here they are, in order of matriculation (group photo here):
Sean Green — Green arrived in New York via a trade that sent away the beloved Endy Chavez, and bearing the same name as Shawn Green, the briefly inspiring but mostly dreary rightfielder I nicknamed “One Hop” for his apparent inability to catch anything hit more than three feet in front of him. Neither of these associations was his fault. What was his fault was that he spent long stretches of the year pitching like Aaron Heilman, down to biting his lip with a glum expression that all but shouted, “I can’t believe this is happening to me again.” (And why take that number, Sean? Why?) That said, there’s no particular reason not to bring Green back: Middle relievers tend to yo-yo around a median of competence, and no Met pitcher should be judged without an acknowledgment that they played with stone-handed infielders and a stupid manager. But just thinking about Green uncorking a wild pitch and looking like a kicked dog makes me want to throw something.
J.J. Putz — Arrived with a history of elbow problems, departed with his season cut short due to elbow surgery. Shocking. The Mets will have 10 days after the World Series to either pay Putz $8.6 million for 2010 or to buy out his option for $1 million. This would seem like a no-brainer, but Putz will undoubtedly work super-hard in the offseason, want to prove something to his teammates, bring a veteran presence to the bullpen, and so on. Ow, this stove is hot! Ow, this stove is hot! Ow, this stove is hot! Ow….
Francisco Rodriguez — Lived up to the ignominous history of recent Mets closers by being quietly terrible. Remember when he walked freaking Mariano Rivera with the bases loaded? The first time he gave up a walk-off grand slam to a player who had no business hitting one? How about the second time he did that?
Jeremy Reed — About as close to anonymous as you can possibly be for a player who stayed on a big-league roster for an entire season.
Alex Cora — Cora is one of those guys whose attitude and work habits you wish you could bottle — a smart, wise, tough player who made everyone around him better. Unfortunately, since everyone around him was terrible, the best Cora could do was make them merely bad — an adjective that statistically one would have to apply to Cora himself, however reluctantly. The man played a good chunk of the year with busted ligaments in both thumbs, and that should be applauded. But he’s the kind of guy you desperately wish your team would bring back as a coach, while dreading that a two-year contract is in the offing instead.
Darren O’Day — Vanished around Tax Day after 3 2/3 innings for the Mets as a Rule 5 pick. Wound up in Texas, where he naturally put together a terrific season. Ladies and gentlemen, Omar Minaya!
Gary Sheffield — Sheffield was greeted by the New York press corps and plenty of fans as if he were an Al Qaeda member — clearly he was done as a player and could only bring woe, misfortune and rancor to the idyllic world of the Mets clubhouse. So what happened? He turned out to still have plenty of life in his bat, did a lot better than anyone could have anticipated playing the outfield (meaning he was somewhere below average), and quietly proved a very good teammate. (Jeff Francoeur credited Sheffield for a tip that helped his swing.) Sheffield did eventually blow up and cause a ruckus, but for once in his life he was right to do so: The dead-and-buried Mets put Sheffield on waivers, saw him get claimed by the Giants, and pulled him back instead of getting a prospect or two and rewarding Sheff with the chance to play the final weeks for a team with a heartbeat.
Livan Hernandez — If the old guard of baseball GMs had run prehistoric human society, no one would have ever discovered fire, the wheel or agriculture. Exhibit A is Livan Hernandez, a profoundly terrible pitcher who for years has reliably eaten up innings and vomited forth baserunners, runs and losses. Enter Omar Minaya with a bag of money; exit hope and dreams of a better world organized around something other than superstition and phrenology. Players like Livan Hernandez make me want to cry even when they’re not on my team.
Omir Santos — Omir was the first player to become a bone of contention between stat guys, who looked at his nonexistent minor-league track record, inability to walk and unlikely BABIP and held their noses, and look-and-feel fans who loved Omir for his flurry of big hits and apparent joy in what he was doing. I tend to side with the stat guys on this one, but with the caveat that Omir Santos is the kind of player whose unlikely success makes you want to jump up and down and throw an impromptu parade. His home run off the perennially childish Jonathan Papelbon was the last flicker of life in the 2009 season; if someone actually made a highlight film of this hideous year, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the credits rolled right after that moment.
Casey Fossum — Made his Mets debut on April 21 against the Cardinals with two outs in the fifth, the bases loaded, and the Mets clinging to a 4-3 lead. Walked the first hitter he faced. On four pitches. Yes really.
Ken Takahashi — 40-year-old Japanese rookie lefty pitched competently enough, though he got killed by lefties while handling righties decently. Which made about as much sense as signing a 40-year-old Japanese rookie lefty in the first place.
Tim Redding — A big dude with a silly beard and a cheap-looking shamrock tattoo, Redding began his Mets career by getting his rear end handed to him by the University of Michigan, which most baseball fans will agree augurs poorly for success. He then got pounded for much of the early part of the season, after which the Mets cruelly let him twist in the baseball wind, telling everybody but Redding himself that his release was a done deal. Redding wasn’t released, as it turned out. To Mets fans’ slow-building astonishment, he pitched well again and again in late August and September and ended the year as the Mets’ most-reliable starter. This sounds like a bad joke but actually is meant as honest praise. Redding took a lot of abuse, hung in there, and changed some minds. Kudos to him.
Fernando Martinez — The latest wildly hyped Mets prospect arrived in late May, and turned out to indeed be the Second Coming. Unfortunately, he was the Second Coming of Don Hahn. F-Mart looked hopelessly overmatched at the plate, uncertain in the outfield, made boneheaded mental errors and then was lost for the season due to injury, furthering the suspicion that he’s made of porcelain and nitroglycerine. Martinez only just took his first legal drink, so he still has plenty of time to find himself, but his initial impression suggested he’s not close to doing that.
Wilson Valdez — Actually played pretty well as 2009 Mets replacement shortstops went. This isn’t the same thing as praise, but in 2009 it’s about as close as you can get.
Emil Brown — Had five at-bats in early June, collecting one hit. He would have had another, but he passed Luis Castillo on the basepaths and was called out. It was that kind of year.
Fernando Nieve — Plucked off the waiver wire from the Astros, Nieve proved a nice surprise, actually beating the Yankees and looking like he had some kind of future. So of course he went down as if shot in a July game against the Braves. Torn quadriceps, gone for the year. (Jon Niese, his replacement, had essentially the same progression in miniature: Looked promising, grotesque injury, gone until 2010.)
Jon Switzer — Debuted against the Yankees, got his brains beat in, heroically lowered his ERA to 8.10, vanished.
Elmer Dessens — A pudgy reliever with a goofy name, Dessens seemed like the latest punch line to an increasingly unfunny joke when he arrived in June, but pitched well and proved dependable.
Pat Misch — After pitching tolerably but mostly anonymously for the bulk of the summer, Misch absorbed one of the more-fearful beatings I can remember against the Braves in late September, giving up eight runs on seven hits in an inning and a third. In his next start, he stared down the Marlins to pitch a gutsy complete-game shutout, probably the best performance of the season by a Mets starting pitcher. Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong.
Jeff Francoeur — The poster boy for sabermetricians inveighing against baseball primitivism, Francoeur is almost comically aggressive at the plate, making you wonder if no one’s ever told him that four balls will gain him first base. After languishing in Atlanta, he came to the Mets and immediately became either lucky or good, lashing balls all over the park, playing with a billion-watt smile and carrying on despite a bad thumb. It’ll be fascinating to see how he fares in 2010, and how he’s received by the fans if the statistical gods are against him. Oh, and he hit into the 15th unassisted triple play in big-league history to end a game against the Phillies. It was that kind of year.
Angel Berroa — Records show he played for the Mets, and Topps gave him a baseball card for some reason. Apparently the morphine had kicked in by the time he arrived, because I either don’t remember him or have blotted his tenure out of my mind.
Cory Sullivan — A hard-nosed journeyman outfielder, he became something of a fan favorite (by the low, ironic standards of 2009) for seeming to retain a pulse in the pitiful days of $5 StubHub tickets and playing for draft picks the Mets will be too cheap to sign. Sullivan seems like he could prove useful as a bench player in a better season.
Andy Green — Oh, I’ll let Greg tell the story.
Lance Broadway — Failed White Sox prospect was thoroughly mediocre as a general dogsbody at garbage time. If it doesn’t work out, at least he can pursue a reasonably lucrative porn career without having to resort to a screen name.
Josh Thole — Interesting catching prospect showed a precocious eye for the strike zone and a nice, compact stroke at the plate, giving us some reason to hope as the season circled the drain. (Why did Jerry give Thole time to learn at the major-league level while seeming to forget Nick Evans existed? Don’t ask me.) Thole probably won’t return until summer, if not 2011, but unlike most of the Class of ’09, we’ll actually look forward to his return.
Tobi Stoner — Former Cyclone could really help the Mets sell more merchandise to snarky college kids. We’ll have to reserve judgment on what he might contribute in actual games.
My goodness, that was depressing. But take heart! Every second brings 2010 closer! And a plague year like this CAN’T POSSIBLY HAPPEN AGAIN! RIGHT? RIGHT?’
Just tell me I’m right.
by Greg Prince on 19 October 2009 9:03 pm In 1959, a New York Times editorial entitled “Requiem for the Meadows” was only saying what most people thought about this reviled land of burning garbage dumps, of polluted canals, of smokestacked factories, and impenetrable reeds. The Meadowlands was the nation’s eyesore, the blight separating New York and America. The Meadowlands cried out to be developed.
—Robert Sullivan, The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City
In August I mentioned casually at a Mets game that I’d never been inside Giants Stadium. Next thing I knew, my friend Sharon — a person who converts casual mentions into first downs — asked me if I wanted to break that lifelong ohfer before the ancient facility (opened in 1976) turned to dust. She and Kevin have Jets season tickets and there was an opening October 18 against the Bills. A chance to see a stadium before it meets its wrecking ball sounded right up my sentimental alley. New Jersey Transit even started operating a rail line to and from the stadium as if anticipating my needs. It shaped up, in gauzy anticipation, as a brilliant autumnal afternoon.
Despite my August observation, I never much cared if I saw the Giants or Jets play at Giants Stadium, though I’ve always felt a little bad that I never made any kind of move to see the Jets at Shea during their twenty-year stay. Never mind that they left Shea in 1983 and that I didn’t start rooting for the Jets in earnest until 1978 — or that by 1981 I was spending my autumn Sundays in Tampa. The whole thing never added up, but I’ve remained charmed that on September Sundays when the Mets were home, clear through to 2008, guys continued to show up at Shea in Jets jerseys, as if Curtis Martin was going to pinch-run for Matt Franco. Guys even showed up that way the last Sunday at Citi Field, where the Jets never played. That was adorable, I thought. Even if I’ve been following the Giants longer and a bit deeper, I generally maintain a soft spot for the Jets.
That soft spot is in my head. And now it’s frozen.
There was little brilliant and nothing autumnal about going to Sunday’s Jets game. It was so cold! I cannot believe how freaking cold it was! I knew it was coming, I was prepared for the nor’easter, I layered and I bundled…but geez, it was cold!
But it’s football, right? It’s supposed to be cold, albeit not so soon. At the peak of my fandom in January 1983, I was encouraged to read that when the Jets landed in Miami for the AFC championship game and saw the rain, they chanted “JET WEATHER! JET WEATHER!”
Then Richard Todd went out and threw a zillion interceptions. But the idea holds.
The Meadowlands is legendarily windy. Jerry Izenberg once wrote in a great book called No Medals For Trying that the gust is so notorious in the area that folks in Newark gave it a nickname: The Hawk. You want the Hawk at your back if given a choice by the referee.
Good advice. By the middle of the second quarter, Sharon and I had the Hawk at our backs — as we fled to the first NJ Transit train back to Secaucus Junction. It was a slow game, it was a cold game, it was not a baseball game. Sharon and I once stuck out fourteen innings of a Mets loss to the Cardinals, but that was the Mets. We’ll sit through almost anything for the Mets, even the 2009 season. But for the Jets?
C-O-L-D…leave, leave, leave!
And judging by the way the rest of the afternoon/evening unfolded, we didn’t miss anything we’d want any part of.
Don’t get me wrong, however. I’m glad I got my Giants Stadium cameo, particularly before all decent citizenry of the Garden State will be advised to evacuate lest they be stampeded by the obnoxiousness that will envelop New Jersey when the inevitable Phillie-Yankee World Series proves there is no God — at least not one that likes us.
It so happens I have enough green in my wardrobe to meet the approval of Jet management, which asked for a “green out” (and helpfully suggested a trip to the team store so we could all comply). I wear a green winter coat anyway and I own a green Jets hoodie. Alas, no Jets headgear in my collection. As the New Jersey Sports & Exposition Authority forbids umbrellas, I dipped into my pile of blue and orange caps to pick the biggest one I’ve got to shield me from potential rain. That’s fine in my book. I’ve seen so many Jets jerseys worn to Mets games, the least I could do was return the favor. While there wasn’t a ton of Mets gear in evidence, my cap was not the only one of its kind on the premises.
Yet why was it that as we walked through the parking lot before the game and passed a tailgate gathering, I had to hear this?
“Hey! You root for the right football team, but the wrong baseball team. LET’S GO YANK-EES! METS SUCK!”
I don’t remember what I blurted in response, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t J-E-Et Al. What strikes me a day later is that there must be something about me that Yankees fans like, because I’m always being told I should be rooting for their team. It’s never occurred to me to extend the same invitation in their direction.
Then again, I’m not a sports fascist.
Yes, they’re everywhere, in every season. No place in the Metropolitan area is safe from their kind. Most of them were content to be smug and otherwise keep to themselves about it. A Jets game should be a DMZ for baseball. Later on, I switched to my orange Michigan Hunter’s Hat since it’s the warmest hat I’ve got. This elicited another wise guy, this one sitting in the row behind us:
“Yo! You can’t wear an orange hat to a Jets game!”
I turned around and gave the kid who said that a look that was more droll than dirty. He changed his tune instantly.
“Yo! Your hat is all right, it’s all right! Let’s Go Mets!”
Whatever. This was supposed to be about the Jets, an organization whose long-term proposition regularly mystifies me, and the stadium, a place that was I just meeting. Was it really time for it to go? I can still recall watching an NJSEA propaganda film in 1976, narrated by Pat Summerall, explaining that it was OK that the New York Giants had moved to New Jersey because, “The Greeks had a word for it: megalopolis.” The Meadowlands, you see, wasn’t East Rutherford. It was the whole region, so get past the “Hackensack Giants” jokes and come on out. The Giants filled it every Sunday and the Jets would do the same once they moved west, so I guess the argument was processed and purchased as intended. Still, it was kind of strange seeing the big green NY on the screen and thinking that technically, we’re somewhere else.
It’s not like you’re far from New York. You can see the skyline plainly from the right spot just as you often do on TV during one of the interminable breaks in the action. The train ride — Penn Station to Secaucus, Secaucus to the stadium — was a dream. As easy to get to via mass transit from Manhattan as Shea, almost. Still, you look around and you wonder what all this is doing here. It really is a swamp. It really was the middle of nowhere, like that spare room where you throw your clutter, your bric-a-brac, your extra sports franchises. Now it’s the middle of nowhere except with a stadium that for some reason needs to be replaced by another stadium.
Sharon mentioned the Vet as a point of architectural reference and I found that an accurate comparison (save for the lack of a jail). Giants Stadium is from that age when stadiums weren’t “state of the art,” let alone “world class”. After a summer of being hit over the head by how lucky I was to be at a ballpark that was tailored just so to my needs, it was chicken soup for the sports fan’s soul to attend a rather utilitarian facility to see a game. We did several pregame laps around the 300 level and the sameness was reassuring. There’s the food, there’s the souvenirs, there are the bathrooms that so relieved Leon Hess…what else do you need exactly? I had never been inside Giants Stadium before yet I felt very much at home along its ramps and concourses.
Entering the seating bowl was like visiting a set at Universal. The Giants and Jets had been a television production for me all these years. Now it was live. How strange.
The verdict? It’s a football stadium. They’re all a hundred yards. You can’t wedge a Mo’s Zone into the end zone. I guess you could do something cute (others have), but Giants Stadium retains the same clean look that Summerall touted in ’76. The Jets drape it in green and I know the sky-high press box is a relatively recent embellishment, otherwise it appears serviceable and, pending the presence of the Hawk, relatively comfortable.
Of course they have to tear it down.
Our seats were over one of the end zones. I would say the south end zone using the sudden appearance of the sun to our left as a gauge, but later I heard something on the radio about the east end zone, so who knows? It was a fairly spectacular panorama from wherever we were. Behind us were the idiots who didn’t care for my orange hat. They had turned their attention on a girl wearing extravagant foul-weather gear (“Miss Yellow Pants! Miss Yellow Pants!”…shut up already) and on any Bills fan who happened to make his or allegiance obvious. An undercover Buffalonian who wore his Bills stuff to a Jets game ten years ago and will “never make that mistake again” struck up a conversation with me, swearing that if he had to sit here eight times per season, he’d kill himself — or the guy behind us.
“The latter would be more efficient,” I recommended.
I go to a game and I think about the stadium and the history and the sociology. Others go to a game to drink, yell and curse, reminding me of my brother-in-law’s tenure as a Shea vendor in the ’70s: he hated working Mets games…but he really hated working Jets games. Sunday, whether measured by prevailing winds or temperament, didn’t provide much of a climate for ruminating on what makes the Jets the Jets and why it never really works for them. The only notable highlight we saw from our seats was Thomas Jones breaking a very long run. Of course there was much celebration in the stands and on the field. The Bills fan volunteered he’d prefer to see more consistent reactions, not getting so high from a brief victory, not getting so low when things don’t go well.
“Kind of a metaphor for this franchise,” I told my nominal enemy whom I rather liked. Not that the Bills have much to brag about over half a century (thanks, in part, to my other football team), but an air of desperation just hangs over the Jets. Lots of video clips of the players on Fan Appreciation Day — we got swell travel mugs as we left — telling us how important it was we make lots of noise. I suppose this is standard admonition at sporting events, but I flashed back to Joe Namath using a Super Bowl III reunion in 1994 to lobby the fans for a better home-field advantage. I flashed forward from there to Rex Ryan leaving his infamous voicemail for fans imploring them to whoop it up against the Patriots a few weeks ago. Is all this anxiety over fan enthusiasm really necessary? Are the Jets worried they won’t be mistaken for a mid-market team where all anybody worries about between Sundays is football?
A little unbecoming if you ask me. “Noise Meter” graphics notwithstanding, even the Mets display more dignity than that. And if “76,048” in attendance don’t rumble nonstop, I can’t blame them, not when there are so many torpid halts in the action. You don’t appreciate how much nothing happens in football when you’re watching it on TV. Football is awesome on TV. It’s impressive in person, but only for the eight seconds per hour when they’re actually playing. I exaggerate slightly, but I once read that if you add all the plays together from an NFL game, they amount to all of twelve or so minutes. Don’t tell me baseball is dull.
I had my taste and was satisfied. Sharon had made the second-strongest guarantee in Jets history when she said she’d be willing to leave our wind tunnel at any time, so I didn’t feel the least bit bad when, after Jay Feely kicked the field goal that put our side up 6-3, the only noise we produced was from our shoes making tracks to the train. I wished my new Bills pal luck (with the idiots behind us, I meant) and that, presumably, was the last I’ll ever see of Giants Stadium.
I’m still cold.
Mark Sanchez didn’t throw too many bombs Sunday, but at least ten Mets have operated some heavy artillery in their time. Check out Mets Walkoffs’ penultimate installment regarding the greatest regular-season home runs the Mets have ever hit.
by Greg Prince on 19 October 2009 9:02 pm 
No blue, but a Michighan Hunter’s Hat worth of orange at Giants Stadium Sunday. Thanks to Sharon Chapman for converting a casual mention that I’d never seen the place into a first down, or at least a first visit. Neither I nor an early Jets lead lasted long in the face of the bitter cold, but it was as much fun as one can have when Mets baseball is out of season.
by Greg Prince on 18 October 2009 1:59 pm Ever since the Yankees recorded a 9-8 walk-off win over the Mets in June on a dropped pop fly by Luis Castillo, they've become conditioned to believe that anything is possible — particularly in their new home in the Bronx.
—Jerry Crasnick, ESPN.com
Saturday night, I watched the Mets lose the 1973 World Series on MLB Network. Then I watched the 35th President of the United States struck down on the History Channel. Those were depressing results, but at least I knew for sure they were coming.
I tried not to watch too much of ALCS Game Two on Fox, for I knew I might be lulled into believing something not depressing might happen. The Angels took a 3-2 lead in the top of the eleventh. On MLBN, the Mets had gone up three games to two. On History, JFK arrived to cheers in Texas. I knew neither circumstance was going to last. But I watched out of irredeemable hope nonetheless.
I stayed away from the game in progress out of conviction that the Angels' 3-2 lead wouldn't likely last. Sure enough, during a commercial break from the Kennedy documentary, I flipped to Channel 5 and heard raucous cheers for those two seconds before the picture kicked in. “Wait…let me guess…” Yup, A-Rod. The only thing I didn't know until I caught a replay was how his game-tying home run would have been an outfield fly in a ballpark built to big league dimensions.
Didn't matter. The Yankees, earflaps and all, would have found a way to overtake the Angels. If it wasn't going to be Alex Rodriguez in the bottom of the eleventh, it would have been, I don't know, Jerry Hairston, Jr. in the bottom of the thirteenth.
Actually, it was. Of course it was. While the rest of baseball was delirious with speculation over where Roy Halladay was headed at the trading deadline, Brian Cashman scooped up Hairston for Chase Weems. I don't know what Chase Weems was watching last night, but Hairston was busy igniting a game-winning rally in the American League Championship Series. Alex Rodriguez tied it, Jerry Hairston, Jr. — with a little help from an Angelic version of Luis Castillo — won it.
Before they dissolved into grainy archival footage, you couldn't have known what would happen in Oakland 36 years ago or Dallas 46 years ago. You watch those events develop now, on film, and you're filled with rising levels of dread (different kinds of dread, obviously) because you now know the outcome and no matter how hard you wish, it never changes. You implore Yogi to start Stone in Game Six on MLBN, but he doesn't listen. You plead with President Kennedy to turn around, don't get in that motorcade, but the History Channel doesn't hear you. You don't have any control over the events on Fox either, but they are live, so maybe, you believe, they won't conclude the way you don't want them to.
But they do. And they will. Better to find more cheerful things to watch than pretend otherwise.
The thirteenth inning was unlucky last night, but The Eleventh Inning provides a pretty good book review right here.
by Greg Prince on 17 October 2009 2:04 pm Pedro Martinez mowed down his opponent. Then the Dodgers picked apart Chase Utley and the Phillies' bullpen. There was the added bonus of learning Kobe Bryant grew up a Mets fan and seeing that somewhere in this world it's still summer. Game Two of the NLCS unfolded beautifully for my purposes, save for the gnawing realization that had Pedro been available to this then-employers three Octobers ago, I'd be less bitter every time I watch a playoff game. The thought process usually goes like this:
This is the postseason. The Mets are not in it. They were last in it in 2006, which gets further and further from the present. How did we not win that World Series? How did we not make that World Series? We might have made and won the World Series had Pedro Martinez and Orlando Hernandez pitched, but they were not able. And we did not hit. Yet we had the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth in Game Seven…
That's usually where I switch to VH1 Classic and let a Men at Work video distract me so I can temporarily forget all I remember.
I watched the Angels last night — Charlie's Angels, second season, disc five. Stephanie made it a Netflix pick because a longtime favorite soap actress had a bit part in one of the episodes. In an Archie comic strip circa 1977, Archie's mom told Archie's dad she could tell her little boy was growing up because he had replaced his California Angels poster with a poster featuring those other Angels.
Archie's dad then emitted sweat beads of shock.
I stopped watching Charlie's Angels after season one, after Farrah left. Cheryl Ladd could bring it, I suppose, but once you'd had Tom Seaver as your ace, who could take Pat Zachry seriously, y'know?
Franchises were getting away everywhere you looked in 1977. Archie, to my surprise, is still going strong, or at least still going (cue the sweat beads).
I didn't look in on the other Angels very much despite my affinity for them. I didn't care for the venue, the opposition, the score or the on-site audience. When Joe Buck is the least objectionable element of a baseball broadcast, then you're better off checking to see if Jaclyn Smith's acting lessons ever paid off.
They didn't.
It's now forty years and one day since the Mets won their first world championship. Several blolleagues joined us in commemorating the ruby anniversary with remembrances and reflections I was happy to read. You might enjoy them, too.
• Louie Maz gives this indelible slice of Mets history his customary fine “This Date In…” treatment.
• Lou Di Falco would never forget 10/16/69, or any of the year that preceded it.
• Steve Keane shouts out to Mrs. McGuire and P.S. 105's cutting-edge technology.
• Rob Kirkpatrick echoes Karl Ehrhardt, then manages to find some words anyway.
• Mark at Mets Walkoffs fills us in on all the minutiae we might have missed amid the revelry.
• Dave Murray visits a stadium where the Mets went 0-6 in '69 but he makes it an Amazin' trip per usual.
• Howie Rose, weighing in for mlb.com, still takes geometric inspiration from “the gift that keeps on giving”.
• Paul Vargas proves exceptional vis-à-vis my rule of thumb that one would have had to have been at least six years, nine months and sixteen days old at the moment a Mets world championship occurred to maintain a clear memory of it to this day. Paul's talking about 1986, but that was a good one, too.
Whether you were in first grade, in fifth grade, in college or not even close to in utero, if you're a Mets fan, you will want to secure your copy of The Miracle Has Landed, a gang-authored celebration of the 1969 Mets. This is, as one of the sponsors of that year's World Series highlight film put it, the real thing: bios of every player and significant Mets figure; chronicles of all the big moments; essays about everything connected to that year of years (including one by me regarding Shea Stadium); and from the secret archives of The Holy Books to you, images of every Topps 1969 Mets Baseball Card. If you're looking for the perfect Mets gift this holiday season (besides this baby here, I am compelled to mention), The Miracle Has Landed will, like the Mets rolling down Lower Broadway, receive a hero's welcome.
Finally, Happy Grand Slam Single Day. Is it ten years already? Seems like just four years ago that it was six.
by Greg Prince on 16 October 2009 11:47 am Welcome to Flashback Friday: I Saw The Decade End, a milestone-anniversary salute to the New York Mets of 1969, 1979, 1989 and 1999. Each week, we immerse ourselves in or at least touch upon something that transpired within the Metsian realm 40, 30, 20 or 10 years ago. Amazin’ or not, here it comes.
The 1969 baseball championship, won — not stolen — by the New York Mets, stands unquestioned as the greatest sporting achievement of the year. Yes, some will say “of the century”.
—Richard Dozer, Chicago Tribune, 1969
I’ll love Ron Swoboda ’til the day I die.
—John “Little Chief” Sullivan, Frequency, 2000
Forty years ago today was the last time Mets fans who could sleep woke up never having never experienced a world championship. Come afternoon, Gil Hodges would bring a shoe polish-smudged baseball to Lou DiMuro; Donn Clendenon and Al Weis would each homer; Ron Swoboda would double; Cleon Jones would score a couple of runs; and Jerry Koosman would throw a complete game five-hitter. The last pitch he fired was hit by Orioles second baseman Dave Johnson. It would be caught by Jones in front of the left field warning track and crown the New York Mets the World Champions of baseball.
That was it. For as long as there would be baseball, for as long as there would be Mets, for as long there would be Mets fans, we had one. We had a world championship. We had a trophy (the only one with a Seattle Pilots flag among its ornaments, it would turn out). We earned a parade. We could watch Ed Sullivan introduce Edwin Charles, Rodney Gaspar and G. Thomas Seaver so they and their teammates could sing of the benefits of having heart. But even without the tangible rewards of victory, we were fulfilled in the eyes of eternity. We were Mets fans and we were fans of a world champion. It was not mutually exclusive. Stunning to consider both for where the Mets had been not long before October 16, 1969 and, let’s face it, where they’ve been lately.
This winning a World Series isn’t easy. First you have to get to a World Series, and our Mets have done that only four times in 48 attempts. They’re two-for-four upon arrival. The second time they succeeded, in 1986, they were overwhelming favorites along every step of their journey and it was still hard as hell to nail down. The first edition to be ultimately successful went all the way more succinctly (five games versus seven) but not without its own share of stress and drama.
Your first world champions won two games by one run (one in extra innings) and another after falling behind by three runs. The one game they won by a large margin came via two magnificent Tommie Agee catches that, if not made, would have changed the course of immediate baseball history. It’s not severe overstatement to calculate the Mets in Five could have been, if not for just about everything going right, the Orioles in Four.
But just about everything went right. Maybe not Ron Swoboda’s leap at the Memorial Stadium wall in the first inning of the first game, but history would say Rocky made up for that all right. History would say the Orioles didn’t know what hit them, or, more precisely, what caught them (to say nothing of who pitched right by them). History has been kind and consistent to the Mets from the moment Cleon Jones put away Dave Johnson’s fly ball.
What amazes me when I read contemporary accounts of the 1969 world championship is that everybody got it right away and that the story hasn’t changed all that much over four decades. It was an achievement for the ages and a miracle like no other. It still answers to that brief description. Occasionally its enormity has been overlooked (like when MLB failed to include it among what couldn’t therefore be described as the sport’s thirty most memorable moments) and sometimes it’s been taken a bit for granted (like when shortsighted Mets fans voted it no higher than the third-greatest moment in Shea Stadium history), but it’s held up. The 1969 Mets didn’t fall down a memory hole. You don’t have to explain it all that much. It’s not a season for which you had to be around to understand. It probably helps to have experienced at least some of it first-hand to truly appreciate it, but you can probably say that about everything.
I’m forever grateful for the timing I unwittingly demonstrated in coming to baseball and the Mets in the late summer of 1969. By the time I understood what a world championship was, I had one. My earliest sports memory of any kind was watching the 1968 Summer Olympics with my parents. We laughed at whichever discus thrower grunted the loudest in Mexico City. The first specific sports event I can recall watching was the fourth game of the 1968-69 NBA Eastern Division Finals between the Knicks and Celtics from Boston Garden (Knicks lost a one-point heartbreaker and fell behind three to one in the best-of-seven). But really, it was the Mets who were the beginning of everything for me. They were the beginning of knowing what I was watching and why I was watching. The 1969 Mets were the first thing outside the limited sphere of my own insignificant six-year-old life that I ever cared about.
The Mets were my point of entry to the world at large. And suddenly they were the champions of it. Talk about your most hospitable of Welcome Wagons.
After plucking the Birds, Maury Allen suggested in the Post that ever higher times loomed for those Amazin’, Amazin’, Amazin’ Mets. “Ryan hasn’t yet been tapped and Ken Boswell will be better and Agee has confidence and Jones is only 27,” Allen wrote with glee. “Why, the Mets could win for the next 10 of 20 years.” Perhaps Maury Allen was doused with more clubhouse champagne than Mayor Lindsay. Perhaps the giddiness of the moment was contagious. Or perhaps the Mets seemed just that ready to roll.
It didn’t happen that way, of course. The 1969 Mets stand apart not just from their predecessors but all their immediate successors. Anybody who came along not much after me would have to wait until 1986 for the kind of fulfillment I felt instantly (though 1973 wasn’t a bad consolation prize). Anybody who came along after the fall of ’86 is still waiting. Using my own timeline as a gauge, I deduce that no one currently under the age of 29 likely has any tangible memory of the Mets approaching and winning a world championship.
Thus, I congratulate you the younger Mets fan on this fortieth anniversary. You’ve maintained your affinity despite receiving no ultimate reward on your watch. Congratulations on displaying admirable perseverance and loyalty. But congratulations, too, because today is the fortieth anniversary of the Mets winning their first world championship, and it belongs to you just as it belongs to me, just as it belongs to everyone who started at zero — literally zero and nine — with this franchise when it commenced losing in amounts so voluminous that when it began to win anything at all, it had to be considered a miracle. What happened forty years ago today belongs to all of us. I hope if you’re younger than 30 you see October 16, 1969 that way.
I wasn’t around in 1776, but I still celebrate the Fourth of July.
I’d like to think I would have been every bit the diehard I became had I discovered the Mets a little later, without the benefit of witnessing them become world champions the first time. I assume I would have, but I’m glad I’ve never had to find out. I’m glad I could grow up knowing that it happened at least once. It meant it could happen again. That fact was all that tided me over when things grew grim. Somewhere in my Met-loving soul, I’m pretty sure I still rely on it for reassurance. On October 16, 1969, the Mets beat the Orioles 5-3 and became champions of the world. I know it happened. I saw it happen. It can happen again.
It will.
by Jason Fry on 14 October 2009 2:14 am Not far from here, Citi Field sits empty, as we’ve known it would for months now. The team that calls it home had the kind of year that makes you want to sleep with the light on. The people who run the baseball operations had a worse one.
Given that, it’s a bit complicated answering what should be a simple question: How was Citi Field’s first year?
For example, we don’t really know what Citi Field feels like with a huge, revved-up crowd making noise inside it. The Mets’ early-season games were marked by the usual spring chill and a certain forgivable inattention as the faithful wandered around and figured out the new park. (I can’t go behind home plate on the, um, Excelsior level? What gives?) That was followed by a strangely cold June, and by the time full summer arrived it was obvious the 2009 club was going nowhere.
We can all remember nights when Shea’s decrepitude was transcended by the enormous, exultant noise of a big, baying crowd, but Citi Field never got one of those, so how can you compare them? Any discussion of the park runs into a similar problem: 2009 was a frustrating, infuriating and embittering year, and the sourness of that will cling to Citi until it's washed away by better days.
But l’ll try anyway — with a few admissions up-front. As longtime readers know, I was never a fan of Shea, which I generally described as a DMV with a baseball game in the middle of it. I have lots of great memories of baseball games I saw there and friends and loved ones I saw those games with. But those are memories of people and events, not of a building. I shed no tears for Shea’s passing and I have not missed it.
From the beginning, some of the things that bothered other people at Citi Field didn’t bother me. I quickly warmed to the Jackie Robinson rotunda (though it’s far more useful as an exit than an entrance), and I never begrudged the Wilpons making the front half of the ballpark into a handsome replica of Ebbets Field. Imagine the Mets had decamped for Sacramento when Shea was torn down, and generations later you found yourself owning the expansion team that replaced them, with a new stadium to build. You’d want to right a historical wrong, too. I don’t mind the green seats and the black walls — there’s no reason for a park’s colors to echo that of the team, and Shea’s variegated seats always struck me as borrowed from the palette of a 70s panel van anyway. Security guards wearing maroon? Not the greatest idea, but they can wear panda costumes for all I care.
For a while it was strange watching a game without people circulating in front of me, as they did in Shea’s aisles. But I soon found myself grateful to be able to watch the game without having to stand and peer irritably around lost tourists or bark “Down in front!” at some moron who’d gone into a coma after coming out of the tunnel. For every Cow-Bell Man or bearer of an amusing/inspiring banner, Shea stuck you with a gang of wandering mooks in sideways Yankee hats, accompanied by dimwitted girls leaking gum-flavored drool into their Sidekicks. I’m glad they’re now up in the concourse instead of down between me and the game.
While Shea was literally two-thirds of a concrete donut, Citi Field has architectural surprises, from the center-field bridge to the funny walkway that leads to the Pepsi Porch to the picnic area atop the rotunda, with its baseball set in the floor. I immediately liked the light towers, with their simultaneously industrial and vaguely organic feel, and the gates down the lines and at the bullpen, marked with iconic silhouettes.
And the park is friendlier to foot traffic, without having that traffic interfere with the sightlines. I’ve rarely been to Citi Field without running into people I know out by the bridge or in the left-field food court, and I love that. The crowd naturally flows through the field-level concourse as game time approaches, and it feels right to stop on the bridge or among the food tables, under the early-evening sky, and chat about the game before moving on to the business of 7:10 or 1:10 or 4:05. Shea’s dank tunnels were no place to stop, unless you liked being serenaded by towel-hawking MasterCard touts.
The food? There's no debate there. Alas, no skirt steak, elote and Sabrosa for me until April.
Finally, there are the seats themselves. There are shamefully bad seats at Citi, about which more in a moment. But when I was able to stay out of those, I was happy. After my first couple of games I told someone that the seats felt like moving down a level and forward by a third compared with their Shea equivalents, and I think that was fairly accurate. They’re angled properly for baseball, they're bigger, and they have cupholders and more legroom, all of which make me happy. It wasn’t until late May that I got out of the habit of sitting Shea style: feet tucked firmly under the chair, shoulders forward to avoid contact with knees or fumbled beers behind you. As for there being fewer seats, maybe I’m just getting old and undemocratic, but this never bothered me either. Shea generally had 15,000 or so empty seats on a given night.
I thought all of that was a great foundation, one the Mets could have built on rather nicely.
Unfortunately, they didn’t. Instead, they undermined their own efforts by making the kind of dopey, tone-deaf mistakes the Mets seem to always make. In doing so, they damaged relationships with a lot of loyal fans who missed Shea and were nervous about what would replace it.
First off, the seats. Yes, they were mostly better. Much better. But the ones that were worse were mind-bogglingly worse. For our first visit to Citi Field, Emily and Joshua and I sat in the Promenade, far down the left-field line. Emily and I settled into our seats for St. John’s and Georgetown and grinned at each other and reminded Joshua to eat his hot dog and compared notes, and we were so busy doing all that that it took me a while to notice something.
I couldn’t see the left fielder.
Nor could I see the center fielder.
What the hell?
Yes, there were seats down the lines at Shea where you lost a corner, and I called the back of the loge the U-boat seats because you lost the top half of the arc of fly balls and had to peer at the field through a slot. But this wasn’t Shea — this was a brand-new, extremely expensive, state-of-the-art baseball-only park that had been relentlessly marketed as everything Shea wasn’t. And I couldn’t see two of the outfielders.
On the FAN, Dave Howard split hairs about obstructed views vs. sightlines. He invoked park geometry, blustering that this was the price to pay for the greater intimacy of the modern parks. Really? In the last 13 months I’ve been to Coors Field and Petco Park and Nationals Stadium and walked around all of them. The only geometrically-challenged seats I found were in one Petco section behind the warehouse around which they built the park — and those were clearly marked when buying tickets. The Mets opened Citi Field with whole swathes of seats like mine. Moreover, balls down the line disappear from view even if you’re in the really expensive seats. Gary, Keith and Ron lose sight of balls in the corners, for God’s sake.
As always with the Mets, it’s impossible to figure out who screwed up. Did someone not vet Populous’s work? Overrule the architects? Ignore their counsel? We’ll probably never know. But someone definitely screwed up — that aspect of the design was negligent and incompetent. It got put right, sort of, with the mid-summer installation of a video board down the right-field line. But that was a kludge for a problem that never should have existed in the first place — the stadium-design equivalent of There I Fixed It. Those seats should be cheap in 2010, and purchasers should be told what they’re getting.
Then there was the other big problem.
In the final days of Shea, Greg and I had a polite but impassioned argument about the selling of everything in the park that wasn’t nailed down and most everything that was. He wanted to know why there was no place for the banners of Tank and Rusty and Franco at Citi Field; I wanted to know what the big deal was. OK, those particular banners wouldn’t be in the new place. But surely there would be other banners, right?
Wrong. Citi Field opened with the silhouettes on the gates, a new apple, a couple of welcome holdovers from Shea, a sepia collage of famous Mets down the left-field line and some sepia banners outside the building. But that wasn’t nearly enough. Contrast that with the soon-to-open Target Field, the new home of the Minnesota Twins, as toured by Ken Davidoff. Its entrance gates will bear the teams’ retired numbers. There are beautiful atriums named after Kirby Puckett and Rod Carew and bearing artwork of them. A 573 bar for Harmon Killebrew. Announcers’ famous calls engraved in stone. That's what the inside of Citi Field should have been like. Instead, its features were either anonymous or evoked Dodger history.
There’s nothing at all wrong with honoring Jackie Robinson or evoking Ebbets Field — I think both those things are great, in fact. (And they’d be even better if from there you were led to an exhibit dedicated to National League baseball in New York, one that acknowledged the Giants and put the Mets in their full context.) But honoring the Dodgers and Giants should have been prologue to celebrating the Mets. If that had happened, few fans would have griped or made jokes about Fred Wilpon’s favorite team. But it didn’t happen. Jeff Wilpon has called the anger about the lack of Mets stuff a fair criticism, and the Mets belatedly tried to put things right with more team imagery. Good. But as with the Promenade seats, it’s disturbing that the team got something so basic so wrong.
Moreover, it’s not clear to me that the Mets understand what’s broken. It’s not just the lack of Mets stuff but the way it’s presented. The Mets went too far in delivering the Anti-Shea, making everything blend in an overzealous effort to class the joint up. That’s fine when you’re talking brick and green seats and black walls (heck, I wish they’d rejected the horrible scoreboard ads on aesthetic grounds), but it’s not right for Mets iconography. Tug McGraw and Lenny Dykstra and Turk Wendell didn’t blend, and we loved them for it. Sepia works for the rotunda, and it works for Ken Burns, but banish it elsewhere. We want our Mets in Technicolor.
And we want a lot more of them. We want a Hall of Fame, of course, but don’t stop there. The interior of Citi Field should be full of Mets stuff. It should be a scavenger hunt of Mets stuff. Give us a wall of honor carved with the name of every player to wear the blue and orange. (I’ll make rubbings of Mike Phillips, Rusty Staub, Edgardo Alfonzo and David Wright. And Al Schmelz.) Tear down the sepia and put up full-color photos. (They can still have a Nikon symbol. Don't care about that.) Put up Shea-style banners in the weirdly barren stairwells. Line the concourse with yearbook covers, biographies of players great, good and merely beloved, and graphics about the Mets’ changing uniforms, past homes and origins. Name the park’s features to honor our heroes — calling the picnic area the Piazza, for instance, is funny and appropriate. (And what the hell's Excelsior, anyway?) Buy back Tom Seaver’s locker and encase it in Plexiglass as a devotional point where fans will gather before big games. Reward exploration and keen eyes. Surprise us.
Citi Field began with two pretty big mistakes that should have been avoided, and that was unfortunate. But they’re fixable, and the Mets have already made some progress. If they finish fixing them, I think Citi Field will be discussed for the many things that were done right, and before we know it the park will be three or four years old and the initial missteps will have faded. What we’ll have then, I believe, is a wonderful park — one where friends meet on the bridge or in line at Shake Shack, then head for their seats past a parade of reminders of the Mets and their rich (if star-crossed) history. Citi Field is the Mets’ home, and ours. With a little work, it can be a happy one for decades to come.
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