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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 7 October 2009 7:57 pm True story: I boarded the train bound for Woodside on a Friday night this past August. My ultimate destination was clear by my regalia. As I was settling in for the half-hour until I needed to switch for Mets — Willets Point, I noticed a senior citizen in a Yankees cap. I immediately bristled. That's my reflex reaction where such interlocking NYs are concerned. Then I noticed it was one of those FD NY PD caps you saw a lot after 9/11. In addition, he was wearing a t-shirt from a firehouse, so I decided not to instinctually hate on this guy. Older man, probably lost comrades in that unspeakable tragedy…let's live and let live; let's celebrate our differences and how in a free society they bring us together.
The man — in his late sixties, at least — got up to get off at the first stop. To my surprise, he paused by my seat and addressed me. I couldn't make out what he was saying because I was listening to my iPod. So I took off my earbuds and asked, “Excuse me?”
He pointed to the NY on his cap and declared, “Yankees! Goin' to the World Series!”
I wasn't expecting that. I also wasn't expecting what came out of my mouth in response — not playfully, but angrily:
“GET OUT OF HERE!”
He started walking away but repeated his mantra: “Yankees! Goin' to the World Series!”
I muttered back, “Yeah, yeah, enjoy yourself.”
He left and I stewed. I immediately thought of one of my favorite episodes of South Park, the one in which the Goth kids are frustrated by the sudden transfusion into their midst of Vamp kids. The rest of the town doesn't know there's a difference between them, so the Goths get lumped in with the Vamps, which the Goths absolutely can't stand. Hence, the Goths decide to give up their adopted identities and wear Gap clothes like they used to. This doesn't work either, because instead of being inaccurately dismissed as Vamp wanna-bes, they're now insulted for being the dorks they were underneath their purposeful black wardrobes.
“So,” the head Goth fumes, “we're back to that, are we?”
When some open-minded Mets fans contend that we're all New Yorkers and the Yankees aren't the Phillies or the Braves and as long as we're not playing them, really, they'd like to see New York win, I'm going to remember the old man on the train. He wasn't the first Yankees fan to inflict himself into my Mets zone and he won't be the last. That's what they do. Not all of them, but enough of them. Forty years of Mets fandom and I haven't bothered another New Yorker for wearing a different cap from mine. The opposite has happened to me many, many times. (I have an entire chapter devoted to that very Fun Police phenomenon in my book, FYI.)
I'm glad, in a way, that that rude gentleman reminded me his ilk exists, because truth be told, I've loathed the Yankees less in 2009 than I ever have. It's mostly a function of paying little attention their way and part of it, frankly, is respect for the job they did in winning their division. They went out and bought some big-money players and those individuals generally performed magnificently. Their old-timers continued to produce, their new-timers seemed to be having a bit of uncharacteristic fun (even if their old-timers blanched at the shaving cream pies and whatnot) and I even admired, to a degree, their new stadium. Didn't love it by any means, but I liked that they didn't make any bones about their team history (unlike some local franchises I and others could name).
The Yankees' 2009 was peripheral window dressing as long as I was immersed in the Mets. Now that the Mets have exited the stage, I will be forced, as we all will to some degree if we plan to continue following baseball for a while, the Yankees and Yankees fans in our midst. They're still playing. I do respect that. Their players are talented. I respect that as well. Their ranks produce at least one outstanding blog, which I respect a ton.
But now is the time of the guy pointing to his NY and telling me how wonderful it is and he is and they are. And I don't need that.
None of us does.
Though it's often attributed to President Nixon, it was a 1965 cover story in Time magazine that concluded, when it came to the economy, “We Are All Keynesians Now.” I imagine that sense of default conversion is fairly prevalent today among Mets fans where our new favorite team the Minnesota Twins is concerned. Indeed, congratulations to the club that didn't get eliminated on either the final day in its longtime home or the bonus final day. And condolences to the club that blew a seven-game September lead but at least hung in there for a 163rd game and several extra innings beyond that. The 2009 Tigers showed some heart. The 2009 Twins showed some guts.
The 2007 and 2008 Mets…why bring them in to this?
Now we rely on the Twins to beat the Yankees, a team they never, ever beat. I'm already looking past this Division Series to the Angels or Red Sox not beating the Yankees before the Yankees don't lose to whoever the National League produces as our champion.
Excuse the pre-emptive dread. I'm not feeling confident about anybody takin' care of business to our satisfaction in the next few weeks. I could be wrong. It wouldn't surprise me, considering how little I really know about the American League these days. For a while during Tuesday's riveting one-game playoff, I thought I was watching a Disney-style movie about two baseball teams playing a sudden-death match (though if I was, they should have cast someone better than Chip Caray as the lead announcer). I recognized the uniforms of the Twins and the Tigers, and Jim Leyland's been around so long that Stephanie knows who he is without a hint. But almost everybody else? Subtract the All-Stars and Carlos Gomez, and I was like “who the hell is that?” I guess I don't pay much heed to the junior circuit from April until early October. Well, whoever they were, they played a whale of a game, both bunches.
But to what end where our narrow interests lie? Like I said, I have no faith in these generally unfamiliar Twins to slay Goliath. The Goliaths, from my infrequent glances in their direction, look unslayable in 2009. We'll see how it plays out. But the guy on the train, with the pointing and the “Yankees! World Series!”?
Don't ever let it be said the Goliaths are unloathable.
Happy birthday to a great Friend of FAFIF, Sharon Chapman. Hope it's as good a birthday today in all ways possible as it was three years ago in baseball terms.
To whomever sent an e-mail that was titled or began, “Terrific article, Greg Prince,” your sentiment is greatly appreciated, but your note went unread as it mysteriously got trapped in our spam filter and was dopily deleted by me a nanosecond before I realized it likely wasn't spam. My apologies in advance in case you're wondering why I was so inconsiderate as not to reply.
by Greg Prince on 6 October 2009 5:55 pm “After tomorrow, we do what all ballplayers do: we shake hands ’til we see each other next season. Then we go fishing or hunting, make some personal appearances, get to know the wife and kids again.”
—Morris Buttermaker
I’m all for accountability. I’m all for transparency. I’m all for proactivity. But sausage is not something I necessarily need to see get made. Just place it on a bun and get the Mets on a roll.
When did the Day After Media Blitz of Qualified Remorse become standard Met operating procedure? Didn’t they used to lose and simply go home?
Enough with the dogs and the ponies. Enough with the overblown pressers and inane interviews. Enough with the half-baked excuses and illogical alibis. Enough with the misguided Q’s and the flippant A’s.
Enough with the spin. Oh for god’s sake, enough with Jeff Wilpon’s and Omar Minaya’s and Dave Howard’s and Jerry Manuel’s spin. Enough with the Mets giving their all the day after the season is over. Enough with the Mets thinking they can win from a podium what they couldn’t come close to winning on the field.
You don’t win respect in a press conference. You don’t win credibility in an interview. You don’t win your fans over after losing their confidence along with 92 sullen baseball games. You can, perhaps, make inroads toward those concepts — as best you can away from the field — by demonstrating competence, sincerity and self-awareness. But the Mets didn’t do any of that yesterday.
They would have been better off staying home and shutting up.
The Mets issued two press releases Monday. One announced Jose Reyes’s impending hamstring surgery (for which we all wish him the best of luck) and the other outlined changes to the coaching staff. A fifteen-minute conference call limited to addressing follow-ups to those specific issues would have been appropriate.
Then, instead of parading a procession of dogs and ponies through the recesses of their collective thinking, the Mets should have hung up the phone; taken a few days off to fish or hunt; regrouped; and then returned to the work of remaking the Mets for 2010.
Stop trying to impress us that you’re on the ball by standing before cameras and microphones. None of us is impressed. None of us is encouraged. You make it worse the more you talk. You talk yet say nothing — nothing helpful, certainly.
We can’t make you make the right moves. We can’t set your trade and free agent agenda. We can’t direct your roster management or minor league development. We can’t dictate your budget. We can shout our recommendations until we’re hoarse (or type them ’til our hands cramp), but it’s up to you. We have to trust you to do the right thing. We have to trust the owner, the general manager, the head of business operations and the skipper.
None of you do anything to make us trust you, of course. We’re stuck with you. We’re stuck with your decisions. Don’t make them worse by explaining them. You don’t help your cause. You don’t cultivate our faith. You just anger us, sadden us, frustrate us.
Stop with the dog and pony show every time your season goes down in flames. Strive to make your seasons as flame-retardant as you possibly can. Don’t clear your throats unless you have something to say that will make you look good and make us feel better.
“I got a lotta time to hear your theories and I wanta hear every damn one of ’em. But right now I’m tired and I don’t wanta think about baseball and I don’t wanta think about quantum physics. I don’t wanta think about nothing. I just wanta be.”
—Crash Davis
I don’t know if Luis Alicea absolutely had to go. I don’t know what Razor Shines will bring to a new position. Perhaps Alicea was a liability and Shines is an asset. Perhaps these were the correct moves and tangible improvement will result by their respective dismissal and reassignment. I imagine a team that was as dim on fundamentals as this one was could use some fine-tuning of its coaching staff. I don’t disapprove of these decisions, nor do I approve of them per se.
The Mets elbowed Alicea and shifted Shines. They’ve got both Alomars ambling along. They kept Warthen, Niemann and Johnson. And Manuel’s still the manager. Is this is the prescription that’s going to cure a 70-92 basket case? I have no concrete idea. The pitchers pitched badly. Is that Dan Warthen’s fault? The hitters hit well with nobody on, dreadfully when it was time to drive runners home. Is that Johnson’s fault? What does a bullpen coach do exactly? Other than grow tomatoes back in Joe Pignatano’s day, I couldn’t tell you.
At some point next year, some announcer will reveal that some player says the reason he is doing well will be because he has been working on some aspect of his game with some coach. That will generate a positive vibe toward that coach. Then some other player will give up a home run or swing at a pitch out of the strike zone or throw to the wrong base, and we’ll wonder why that coach continues to be employed in his capacity. This is the way it’s always gone.
Thus, making the announcements regarding Shines, Alicea and the Alomars yesterday doesn’t tell us anything. When Jeff Wilpon huffs that the Mets’ performance in 2009 was totally unacceptable, firing or demoting a coach hardly makes it any more acceptable. Retaining Jerry Manuel as manager after the Mets experienced their second-largest one-year dropoff in wins (19, behind only the 22 fewer victories they racked up in 1977 versus 1976) doesn’t make their situation any more acceptable. Retaining Omar Minaya as general manager despite the overall deterioration of the franchise’s major league personnel since October 19, 2006 — building a team annually on approximately five stars and twenty question marks — doesn’t make it any more acceptable.
Nor does their saying anything make anything true. Dave Howard says very few fans expressed dissatisfaction with the obstructions at Citi Field. That’s not true, but if he says it, it’s good as the truth. Jeff Wilpon insists it was no big deal that the New York Mets obscured New York Mets history in favor of a Brooklyn Dodgers echo. That’s not true in that New York Mets fans noticed it and protested it, but it’s as good as the truth. Omar Minaya, who pretended the Mets’ collapses in 2007 and 2008 didn’t mean they were a deeply flawed competitive entity, acts as if injuries were all that was wrong with the 2009 squad. That’s not true…we saw with our own 6.3 million-plus eyes that it wasn’t true. But Omar said it, so it may as well be true.
All these untruths function as truths because those who decide our reality continue to spout them. You and I know different, but we don’t effect concrete change. We can stop buying tickets and wearing caps (even though Dave Howard says we should continue to do both, as both build character), but we know we’re unlikely to stop doing either or any of the associated acts of fandom. We like being Mets fans even if, yet again, we can’t stand the Mets.
I fell in love with this team forty years ago, right about now. On this date in 1969, the New York Mets came home to Shea Stadium and beat the Atlanta Braves to win the National League pennant. It was the second big thing I’d experienced the Mets clinching in less than two weeks. I didn’t know much about baseball, but I understood that what the Mets had just done was enormous. The next stop would be the World Series and the Orioles. It would be enormous, too.
I didn’t know who the owner was. I didn’t know who the general manager was. I didn’t know there were such things. I knew there was a manager, and he could do no wrong. I knew there were players, and they could do no wrong. Eventually I learned there was more to the Mets than them, that there was an owner, a GM, coaches, a whole organization. But they weren’t of interest to me. I saw their pictures in the yearbook, I saw their names in the paper now and then, but they weren’t why I was a Mets fan. I just assumed they were doing what they could to make me want to be a Mets fan even more.
That illusion would be shattered by M. Donald Grant when he shipped my innocence to Cincinnati and my naïveté to San Diego. Since then, I’ve assumed it’s in my best interest to pay close attention to everything owners and GMs say so I can better understand where my Mets are going. But I think I’ve heard enough from this owner and this GM and their accomplices. I think I know that what they say only brings me down.
Jeff, Omar… fix the team. Otherwise, just let me be.
More pointed and eminently thought-provoking takes on those who can stand to listen to these guys from Dana Brand and Caryn Rose. Dan Lewis chimes in with a pretty reasonable wish list.
by Greg Prince on 5 October 2009 8:00 pm 
Those clouds are pushing away from Citi Field, not toward it. They have to be. They just have to be.
by Greg Prince on 5 October 2009 7:58 pm 
Meant to get this picture all year, got it on Closing Day. The Mets, as we know, work hard on erasing their history, but somehow this MTA sign survives at the stop formerly known as Willets Point — Shea Stadium.
by Greg Prince on 5 October 2009 5:17 pm If you watched Curb Your Enthusiasm Sunday night, you were no doubt tickled by Jason Alexander’s take on the faux Seinfeld reunion proposed by Larry David. Yes, George declared, a reunion show is a great idea, because now, at last, we can leave the show on a good note.
Larry is mystified by this implicit criticism of Seinfeld‘s farewell, but the viewer gets it. The Seinfeld finale did not feel of a piece with the rest of the series run and suffered as a result. The same could be said for most sitcom finales whose inflated goodbyes tend to come off as foreign or out of place vis-à-vis the narrative arc we thought we knew. The bigger the program, it seems, the more disappointing the finale.
But how often does the final episode dramatically exceed all that came before it?
The 2009 Mets left on the best note possible Sunday afternoon. Granted, the best note available to them, literally speaking, was a 70th victory. That it came bundled with a three-game sweep and two players’ finest individual career performances didn’t in any way blot out that these Mets were nobody’s idea of must-see baseball. If they were a sitcom — and god knows they repeatedly played like one — they would have been put on hiatus in midseason.
Wonderfully, I was able to brush much of their reality show aside yesterday for a few hours. While never quite able to forget how little the Mets were playing for or how much more this kind of 162nd game would have aided them on their previous two final dates, I had my best day of the year at Citi Field by far.
Nelson Figueroa’s first complete game shutout and Angel Pagan’s 4-for-4 near cycle were compelling reasons on their own, but on a Closing Day when there were no particular competitive stakes in sight, that was mostly sweet background music. I mostly wanted one final day in the sun. I wanted to sit in good seats with a good view with the one I loved. That much I secured when Stephanie and I settled into Section 326, Row 4.
If I ever hit it financially big, my season tickets will be right there. Best look I’ve had at everything since that preseason stroll they let us take in early April. It provides the money shot for Citi Field, a facility where money tends to overwhelm baseball’s better angels (FYI, Sunday’s showdown between the hopeless Mets and lifeless Astros was loftily assigned Silver status). The 300s, at least the middle of them, are my double-edged Citi sword. They provide an awesome perspective, yet they’re disgustingly overpriced. How they came up with $115 as a face value for the ticket I had yesterday — affordable via the good graces of StubHub — is beyond me.
Mr. Wilpon, tear down this Club designation for your glorified Logezzanine. Give the people a chance to enjoy more of your park.
That would include one of the unnecessarily hidden treasures of Citi Field: the bars on the Logezzanine level. This, my friends, is gracious living. I’m not a barfly, I’m rarely even a bar patron, but one of the simmering discontents I’ve shared with my beer aficionado amigo Jim Haines is that without a Caesars Club ticket, the bars are off-limits. OK, it was a way bigger discontent for Jim than for me. Jim saw the bar on the right field side of Excelsior during that open workout and envisioned a perfect season ahead. He’d be there so much, he promised, they’ll call out “JIM!” when he walks in.
Then he learned he was less welcome at this bar than Diane Chambers was at Cheers. Still, we never let go of the long-term goal of our being seated if not effusively greeted at what we came to call the Norm! Bar. It would be perfect, he thought: Mets game on TV, beers flowing, profanity-laden exhortations and other baseball dialogue ongoing, and (following some sobering diet colas) back to our seats for the happy recap. There was something about the scenario as Jim painted it that didn’t have me questioning why we needed to sit at a bar and watch a ballgame at a ballgame when, in fact, there was a ballgame right there to watch live. I just accepted it as best-of-all-worlds material, and wondered why only Caesars Club patrons could be trusted to sit at a bar (or, for that matter, drink an adult beverage that wasn’t beer or wine).
It took 81 games, a little couples coordination and the Mets sucking so much that StubHub could be kind and generous to both of us, but Jim and his wife Daria bought tickets in nearby Section 327 after we got ours in 326. Stephanie and I sought out the Haineses, and by the top of the fourth, Jim and I were finally living the dream. We excused ourselves from our better halves, ambled up to the bar that was conveniently right behind us and took our long-delayed places amid the granite and spirits.
All that was missing was an exchange worthy of Ken Levine:
“What’s going down, Normy?”
“One Astro batter after another. Gimme a Hoegaarden.”
Jim and I put in three effective innings at the Norm! Bar. Overpriced beer? Of course. It’s Citi Field. But the sun poured in, you didn’t have to plead with the bartender to switch to SNY (or explain what SNY was) and it was one of those ideals that came to life better than we had anticipated. Jim effortlessly invoked Mel Ott along the way. So did Dave Anderson Sunday, but I didn’t see that ’til I got home.
We returned to the seats for the Seventh Inning Stretch. By then, the notion of being taken out to the ball game carried more poignancy than usual. It was Closing Day and we knew we’d never get back — not to Citi Field in 2009 we wouldn’t. On paper, that was appropriate. On paper, the Mets were angling toward 70-92. In my mind, and every other sentient Mets fan’s mind, we’d had all the Mets we could take from this year. Physically, I kept watching, kept listening and kept attending; mentally I’d checked out around the second week of August.
Yet it was a glorious afternoon, the Mets were winning, Nelson Figueroa was a master moundsman, Angel Pagan was doing everything right…and it would all be over in a blink. We were winding down without angst. There was no 2007 horror show to absorb, no 2008 cavalcade of gobsmack. This had long ago become a season that existed in merely technical terms. It was kept alive only because it was plugged into a pocket schedule. Merciful end-of-life counseling would have recommended pulling the plug with two months to go. These Mets were beyond any cure universal health care might offer.
That wasn’t worth dwelling on Sunday. We could forget the surfeit of injuries and the lack of fundamentals. We could forget the myriad missteps. We could forget how badly run this organization seemed and how short the new ballpark came up in matching its hype. Almost every built-in indignity of Citi Field dissipated yesterday. Maybe it was because I had the right ticket or maybe it was because I was done detecting its drawbacks. If I had never attended a game there before yesterday, I’d tell anyone who criticized it as I have after 36 games of experiencing it that you’re crazy, this place is great. Ignorance and not asking too many questions sometimes amounts to bliss.
Stephanie and I made our final shared Citi Field meal the following: 1 lobster roll (high price covered mostly by the $15 swipe card I received as part of the Gary Keith & Ron package the day before); 1 chicken nachos (a culinary gem lost in the sea of fancier fare); and 1 custom-tossed Caesars Club salad (an excellent touch). We consumed it in the “club” that seemed unusually upbeat. We enjoyed our view. We enjoyed our friends the Haineses. As noted, I enjoyed my bar time. I enjoyed my final 2009 chorus of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”.
I then thoroughly enjoyed rooting Nelson Figueroa home. I haven’t been a big booster of his. If anything, I’ve groaned at the sight of Figueroa (and Redding and Misch) taking the ball, no matter how positive the outcome, because I assumed it was all a massive setup for a 2010 return to mediocrity. “Great, now they’ll all get untradeable five-year contracts for pitching adequately in garbage time.” It’s the same reason I cringed as Brian Schneider raised his average through September. “Don’t re-sign him, Omar! DON’T!”
No such worries in the eighth and ninth yesterday. I really wanted Nelson to get the shutout. Not until I turned on Howie and Wayne for the final three outs did I know he’d never had one. Howie said that as bad as this season had gone and how much he and everybody wanted it to end, he was now feeling sad that it was about to be over. It was all going so beautifully — for Figgie, for all of us. Who wouldn’t want it to continue?
Nelson gave up a two-out single to Lance Berkman, which briefly reawakened my demons. I gave myself over to liking Figueroa and the 2009 Mets and now, I thought, the shutout will disappear and they’ll blow a four-run lead and we’ll all stomp out of here moping and cursing. Daria noticed my sudden surge of discomfort and asked if this was anger or disappointment bubbling to the surface. Both, I said, but I should be long past it.
Instinctive ’09 dread went as quickly as it came. Carlos Lee flied to Pagan in left, and you could put the gleam of Closing Day as well as the disaster that rendered it a footnote squarely in the books. Figgie nailed tight his first shutout. The Mets won their first Closing Day since 2004. They barely managed 70 victories, a low “C” average. Daniel Murphy led the team with 12 home runs. Nobody was their best player, but I compiled a 26-10 Log…and my 26th win instantly emerged as my personal highlight of the year.
Something about Sunday kept getting better, even when it was officially over. We stuck around to watch the season be packed away. Two years ago, I stared in utter shock at the nothingness Shea evinced in the wake of the 8-1 loss that knocked us out of contention. One year ago, I attempted to reconcile all my competing emotions once we lost 4-2, lost another playoff spot and lost a stadium. Yesterday? Tranquil might be the word, and tranquility was fine.
There was an extra burst of applause for Figueroa and Pagan as their exploits were flashed on DiamondVision (bigger crowd than you’d expect), but there was no 1997– or 1985-style appreciation for a Met job well done. A job wasn’t well done in 2009. It can’t be because everybody was sitting at the bar that I heard very little cheering in the course of the afternoon. Citi Field’s biggest roars arose Sunday in response to news from Kansas City, for Giant touchdowns. The Mets reaped what they sowed. They didn’t deserve more than perfunctory acknowledgement, so we didn’t send them a farewell bouquet of sobs and plaudits. The Mets knew this and didn’t inflict a propagandistic highlight video on those of us who lingered. Natalie Merchant thanked us for being so forthcoming with our discretionary income, and that was that.
Yet, somehow, I was moved. I was moved to witness a season’s end, even an indisputably lousy season’s end. That’s why I go to Closing Day. The three final wins were a decent parting gift (as opposed to the Fan Appreciation prize, which was…oh wait, the Mets didn’t bother with Fan Appreciation Day), but I wasn’t fooled. This is the same team that just lost three in a row to the Nationals last week. No, this was not a season I wanted to continue. I just wanted to pay it my respects. Not the 70-92, but the 26-10; not the frustration I endured from afar, but the good times I enjoyed on-site despite my reservations regarding the host venue; not whatever bad surrounded this team, but the good people I sat with, cheered with and commiserated with 36 different times in 2009. I have nothing but respect for the grand habit I’ve cultivated of going to baseball games and spending precious hours with the people I’m fortunate to call my friends. It felt precious in April. It felt even more so in October.
Like I said, it kept getting better. We didn’t rush away from the ballpark per usual. Our foursome meandered to the Field Level and down the Rotunda stairs. I executed my preferred exit ritual: tip the cap to Mr. Rickey and Mr. Robinson; tap the Mr. Met sign; touch a brick in the archway. That’s usually that. But then Stephanie mentioned our commemorative brick to Daria, and Daria was so charmed she insisted on taking our picture with it (my right knee went ouch, but it was a lovely gesture). Having accepted their invitation to join them at a beer garden in Astoria, we set out on a walk through Flushing Meadows Corona Park to their secret parking space. By the weather you’d think the season was still going. It wasn’t, but we already knew that. Then the beer garden, and its own set of revelations and bratwurst.
My Closing Days occasionally have codas, but they usually involve gloom and despair. They’re rarely as much fun as yesterday. So thanks to Jim and Daria for embellishing 2009’s surprisingly happy ending. Thanks to Stephanie for liking baseball and me enough to make us the perfect threesome on a day like Sunday. Thanks to everybody who was kind and generous enough to spend an inning or more with me this past season. Thanks to everybody who lets me extend my days and nights at the ballpark by telling you about them here.
As we toasted yesterday, here’s to 2010.
by Greg Prince on 4 October 2009 3:00 pm We come to bury the 2009 season this afternoon. We’re not ever going to praise it, no way, no how.
It saddens me nonetheless that the baseball season is ending. Not this season, but the season. I left Saturday’s Mets game after forty of so minutes of the rain delay, despite having a hunch they’d resume play eventually. I just didn’t want to be there anymore. I hadn’t exited a game early all year, yet it felt right to abandon ship. Besides, I’d be back Sunday, per usual, for Closing Day.
Hours later, however, I was saddened. No, not that I didn’t stick around. Content to tap my phone’s browser to confirm that the Mets indeed held on for my 25th win of the year, I wasn’t even motivated enough to find FAN reception. I had gone into the city to meet Stephanie who was finishing up some work. In past years it would drive me crazy to leave as many as four innings on the table. Not this year. I needed an out more than Frankie Rodriguez.
My sadness materialized after the game was over, after she was done working, while we were walking down Second Avenue in search of a noodle house. With the rain gone, it had become a warm October evening in Manhattan. Lots of pedestrians, lots of cars, lots of life.
And no Mets, I thought: The Mets barely exist right now and by this time tomorrow, they won’t exist at all. None of these people care about the Mets. Life is about to go on without my favorite team.
I contrasted that sense of the situation with another evening a few years ago in the same neighborhood. Stephanie and I had chaperoned a group from her senior center to Shea Stadium. It was June 2006 and the Mets were as hot as the weather. We had beaten the Reds, we had had a great time and, having dropped off our charges, we were looking for a place for dinner. All I could think about and talk about was the Mets…
• how great they were playing;
• how far ahead they were in their division;
• how many wonderful players they had;
• how excited the fans were that afternoon;
• how jammed Shea was;
• how we kept running into people on the street wearing Mets gear as we strolled;
• how the world and the city were falling into place as we always wanted it to.
How long ago it seemed Saturday night. Now we were a lousy team nobody cared about, a lousy team I couldn’t be bothered to stick around through some raindrops to watch. I didn’t care enough to tune in their game if it was going to inconvenience me. If I didn’t care, why would anybody else out here on Second Avenue?
The murky sky reminded me of yet another night when Stephanie and I walked through Manhattan, over on the West Side. It was just over twenty years ago, the night we got engaged, also a Saturday. I gave her an engagement ring hours after giving her a Mets jacket of her very own (which would make the ring an anticlimax, you’d assume). I thought of how that night in 1989 became so many baseball moments together, particularly that afternoon game in 2006, and how the highest highlight of my 2009 at Citi Field was not any of the 35 official games I’ve attended, but the afternoon before the season started. It was the workout the Mets opened up to ticket plan holders — which we’re not, but a friend is, and the friend couldn’t make it, so he passed his admission onto us.
My big moment that day was when we wandered through the Caesars/Excelsior level (they uncharacteristically let everybody look at everything) and we plopped ourselves down in seats in front of the press box to take in our new stadium. Stephanie doesn’t immerse herself in baseball as I do, but she is a keen observer of ballparks. We’d sat in so many of them across this continent and analyzed them thoroughly. Now, suddenly, we had this one that would be the one we’d call home. As wary as I was of Citi Field, I was so happy to be there with the woman I loved, opening up the next chapter of our baseball life together.
We return almost to the scene of that high point of 2009 today. With StubHub’s help, we’re in Excelsior this afternoon, a few sections to the left of where we absorbed Citi Field’s panorama and promise for the first time. In early April, we didn’t know what would play out on the diamond below. In early October, we know too much. But Saturday night, on Second Avenue, I was just grateful to anticipate one more day in the sun with my wife and the Mets. Even these Mets.
For those who are relatively new to Faith and Fear and wonder what it is we do when the season ends, besides stare out the window and wait for spring, we do pretty much what we do throughout the season: we blog about the Mets. So when you need a Mets fix, even a Mets tangent (especially a Mets tangent), we’ll be here. We’ll be here for you, we’ll be here for us, we’ll be here for the Mets. Starting tomorrow, I hope to not have to add the caveat “even these Mets” ever again.
Before the season ends, please take the Faith and Fear readership survey here.
by Jason Fry on 4 October 2009 6:46 am When we sat down it would start to rain. When we got up it would stop. When we sat down again it would start to rain again.
It was a misty, murky, muddled-up day out at Citi Field — one that started early.
Emily and Joshua and I trooped through the bullpen gate at 11:30 for the Gary Keith and Ron event, which was filled with genial Mets folk buying shirts and raffle tickets for a good cause and lining up to eat hot dogs and nachos and popcorn because why wouldn't you? We met Ron Darling briefly (I admired his genial poise while under siege), said hi to friends, glimpsed Gary Cohen and Howard Johnson and Omir Santos from afar, hooked up with Greg and then made our way through the bowels of Citi Field to stand on the warning track during the national anthem. As was true at Shea, I was amazed by the sheer size of a major-league stadium seen from ground level. On TV it's hard to grasp just how big the field is — up close and personal, you wonder how so few balls can be hits in so vast a space, and appreciate the almost-superhuman skill of even journeyman outfielders and banjo hitters.
From the warning track, the stands are imposingly high, a mountain to be filled with people and with noise. Except, well, there wasn't much of either on this penultimate day of the star-crossed 2009 season — I suspect we GKR minions could have given the rest of the stadium a pretty good fight. The anthem passed and we were herded back to the bullpen entrance, past various itinerant Astro hurlers, to take up residence in left-center near the apple.
Where, very soon, it began to rain.
After a bit of back-and-forth negotiations with the heavens, we wound up in a little knot under the scoreboard, not entirely dry but no longer actively wet. And there we passed the time companionably enough, chatting about the game, saying hi to a welcome number of readers and friends (including a brokered meeting between Joshua and Ross Chapman, who I can attest is impressively polite and grown-up and kind to six-year-olds), and attending to bathroom trips and souvenir outings. Nobody was paying particularly close attention to the game happening out there beyond the tucked-away apple, and nobody was feeling too bad about that.
Or at least nobody was until I started feeling that way.
In 2005, the inaugural year for me and Greg as Faith and Fear in Flushing, the Mets fell short of the postseason but were clearly on the ascent. There was a crackle and spark at Shea until the beginning of September, and an afterglow that lingered even after Willie Randolph's team was turned away. 2006 was magic, a charmed season right up until the final moments, even if they did come 10 days too soon. 2007 and 2008 ended in devastation and disbelief, but their final hours were the stuff of high drama, a tightrope act between joy and agony.
2009, on its next-to-last day, was very different. It was irrelevant. It was the dregs of a season that had been decided in July. It was the motions being gone through. And as such, it was a new experience for me (and I assume for my co-blogger, though I'll let him speak for himself) as a chronicler.
What a terrible thing, I thought to myself. The Mets are down there playing and nobody cares. Not even us.
But then I thought that no, that wasn't quite right. We did care. After all, we were there, flesh and blood amid a sea of phantom attendees. (37,000, ha!) We might have gotten a bit fuzzy on the inning and the score (it did change back and forth due to umpires huddling), but we knew the Mets were winning and we were close to an official game. And we were all having a good time at the ballgame, weren't we? It Didn't Matter, but that wasn't the same as saying it didn't matter.
And so I realized I'd reached the final stage of dealing with the 2009 Mets. It was acceptance. And it felt OK.
And then it began to rain like it meant it, and the players disappeared, and Emily and Joshua and I sought shelter for a time and then decamped for Brooklyn, certain that this one had ended Mets 4, Astros 1 (F-5). When it turned out it hadn't, when I flipped on the TV out of idle curiosity and found Brian Stokes engaged on the mound, I settled in to see how things would turn out. I hadn't been hungering for a regulation-length baseball game, but I knew that in 24 hours the Mets would be gone, so I took what I was being offered. At one point I flipped over to the Royals-Twins game and was startled by the contrast — over there, Zack Greinke was on the mound and Joe Mauer was at the plate and 50,000 Twins fans were cheering and screaming and worrying and praying, while on SNY the clonk-clonk of Cow-Bell Man echoed through a stadium by now absurdly empty. I thought about sticking with the Twins, with finding out how the AL Central would play out, but I decided not to. There would be time for things like that. The Mets — even such unworthy specimens as this year's Mets — deserved my attention during their final hours.
We had to go to dinner and I set TiVo to record the rest, taking some small satisfaction from the fact that it thought it was recording football. (Not yet you're not!) And then, after dinner, I watched the end, with Sean Green antagonizing the couple of hundred remaining fans and Frankie Rodriguez coming in to clean up his mess. And there was a day to go. A day, when we'd once wanted so much more. But also a day when, amid the horrors of late summer, I'd wondered if I'd wind up wanting less.
Nope. One more day, one more game. Seemed about right to me.
Acceptance.
Before the season ends, please take the Faith and Fear readership survey here.
by Greg Prince on 3 October 2009 5:15 am You're not just reading the blog for Mets fans who like to read. You're reading the blog entry of a Mets fan who set a record Friday night — a personal record, but a record just the same. With the Mets' decisive victory over the Astros, I improved my 2009 home season mark to 24-10. Four times previously (including two regular season/postseason combos) I reached 23 wins. That was the heights. Now the heights have gotten higher.
Yes, in this otherwise cursed campaign, somebody's Log is filled with W's.
The Mets are 24-10 for me in 2009 with two games to go. They're 15-30 at home without me; 15-30 is the mark that got Joe Frazier fired in 1977, a year in which Mets didn't hit home runs in bunches, but more on that in a bit.
Even weirder in this otherwise godforsaken hellhole of a season, they've gone 5-0 for me on Friday nights. Friday nights in recent years, particularly late in those years, were the stuff of deathtraps and suicide raps. Not this year. This year of all years was my golden year at least one night a week. Then again, factor out Fridays and I was still a nifty 19-10.
I can't say Citi Field isn't, in its own way, trying to win me over.
Let us not forget John Maine. John Maine has started seven games in the young life of Citi Field. I have witnessed every single John Maine start at Citi Field. We're 6-1 together: an early loss followed by six consecutive wins. That makes him the first Mets pitcher to win six consecutive home starts in nineteen years.
So I saw that history. And I saw the 47th Met triple of the year, lashed by the heretofore presumed dead Nick Evans, tying a team record. Plus, as usually occurs around these Mets, there was the strange saga of Daniel Murphy.
After Jeff Francoeur hit his tenth Met home run in the sixth, I revealed to my friend Rob Emproto (with whom I kept alive a streak of fifteen consecutive seasons with at least one game attended together) that I hoped Murph's home run total would stay on eleven. He could triple all he wanted and score on an error, but I wanted no Met to mash a twelfth home run in '09. The lowest total for the team lead, as mentioned here recently, is twelve homers, accomplished (if you wanna call it that) by Stearns, Henderson and Milner in 1977. If you remember 1977, you remember it being very bad for the Mets, but more for a Seaver shortage than a power shortage (Lenny Randle's July 13 notwithstanding). This season, though? In this park? I thought 2009 deserved the dubious honor of having the fewest home runs hit by a team leader. Lotsa triples, no homers — perfect for a team with a great batting average and never enough scoring.
Murphy comes up as a pinch-hitter in the eighth with two out. Rob starts laughing. He can feel it. “This one's going over the Modell's sign,” he says. This is before Murph sees a pitch. It's just a hunch. Daniel takes ball one, ball two, ball three, yet I agree with Rob's assessment. Daniel Murphy, who was welcome to produce at will for the 150 or so games that I was unaware of this twelve home runs thing, is going to hit one out just because I — for my own admittedly bizarre reason — don't want him to.
Suddenly Daniel is Shawon Dunston from ten years ago, fouling 'em off left and right. The count is three and two for quite a while. Then, Doug Brocail, who I'm pretty sure is old enough to have played with John Milner, serves up a juicy one and…BAM! Waaaay gone to right.
Daniel Murphy is suddenly Adam Dunn. It's home Run No. 12 on the season. Stearns, Henderson and Milner scooch over on the couch. 2009 looks a little less awful than it really is.
Every Mets fan cheers. One does so a little begrudgingly. But I did cheer. If your biggest problem is a pinch-hit two-run homer from a player who leads the team, then you're probably having a pretty good night.
Also, I had great ribs. Blue Smoke, you lead the league in yum.
***
• Mets Walkoffs examines the 66 Mets who were no threat to hit twelve home runs. These are the fellows who blasted one out and never blasted again, at least not as Mets. (Please note Mets Walkoffs' URL has shifted to http://metswalkoffs.blogspot.com/ and adjust your bookmarks accordingly — and don't tell me you haven't bookmarked Mets Walkoffs!)
• My thanks to the several individuals who were kind enough to introduce themselves and mention their enjoyment of Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and a fine bookstore near you. (Rob got quite a kick out of my being spotted.) I'm guessing it makes for great October baseball reading since there won't be, for the third consecutive October, much worthwhile baseball-watching.
• You know about the letter the Mets should've sent. A brief quote of mine regarding the one they actually transmitted appears in the weekend edition of amNew York; scroll down to page 3 of this PDF.
• Don't let this season end without taking the Faith and Fear readership survey, here.
by Greg Prince on 2 October 2009 2:36 pm Dear Mets Fan:
As we come to the close of a very disappointing season, I wanted to reach out to you on behalf of the entire New York Mets organization and tell you a few things.
First off, we’re sorry. We’re extremely sorry for how the 2009 season unfolded. We’re sorry for our performance on the field and we’re sorry for our performance as the stewards of this organization. We did a very poor job for you. I suppose you knew that if you stuck with us through this awful year, but I think it’s necessary that somebody with responsibility for this mess take responsibility for this mess.
We’re sorry for the way our team performed between the lines. Wins and losses are a matter of competition and clearly our competitors outclassed us in 2009. There is no way to guarantee how successful a team will be on the field, but a baseball team should able to guarantee you a few things: that they will always hustle; that they will always execute the simple fundamentals of the game; that they will not give up no matter the score or their record. It is clear that the 2009 Mets did not live up to that implied guarantee and, for that, we are sorry.
We are sorry as well for the caliber of our roster, particularly in the second half of the season. You know about our injury situation. Obviously we did not deploy the players we planned to for much of 2009. Again, some things are out of an organization’s control. But a good organization is prepared for all contingencies, and I feel we should have had a more Major League-ready corps of replacements at hand, whether on our higher-level minor league teams or through acquisition.
We are also sorry for the injuries. An unprecedented avalanche of aches and pains befell most of our topline players at one time or another in 2009, and while it is the players who hurt the most, we know the effect of their absences took a toll on you. As with wins and losses, injuries are sometimes simply a part of the game, but we also see, as we look around our sport at other, healthier organizations (and those who suffered injuries yet persevered with greater results), that there are measures that can be taken to minimize the repercussions from injuries and perhaps the incidence of them.
You have my apologies for the above. Now I would like to tell you about how we might go about preventing a repeat of the horrors of 2009 in 2010.
First, we greatly appreciate the hard work put in by our general manager Omar Minaya. He was hired as general manager at the end of the 2004 season, and two season later we were a division winner and playoff team. He did a great job to get us there, but it is abundantly clear he did not succeed at taking us to the next level or even maintaining the level we achieved. Omar will be offered a consulting position in the organization for the duration of his contract with the New York Mets, because we do value his experience and opinions on some baseball matters, but he will no longer be our executive vice president, baseball operations or general manager.
Jerry Manuel was a breath of fresh air when he succeeded to the manager’s office in the middle of the 2008 season. We do not hold Jerry responsible for our failure to hold a first-place lead of several games last September; we believe he was one of the major reasons we contended as we did. But there is no way one could watch the 2009 Mets and not take issue with how this team was run. Players performed not just badly but in embarrassing fashion, whether it was fielding, hitting, baserunning or pitching. We are dismissing Jerry as our field manager and releasing his coaching staff, all of whom — like Jerry — are decent men who tried what they considered their best yet presided over a massive failure in 2009. We will evaluate each of them for other positions in our organization, but you will not see any of them in Mets uniforms next year.
The doctors and trainers we employ are all qualified professionals, but it has become apparent they do not adequately serve the needs of the New York Mets. It cannot be a coincidence that our Disabled List remained so crowded through 2009 or that certain players’ prognoses and diagnoses so wildly diverged from reality for so long. We are replacing every doctor and every trainer who works with the New York Mets.
We will be undergoing a most through and extensive search to fill the above positions. We are taking the same tack throughout our organization. Nobody in player development or scouting will be immune to reevaluation in the offseason, and we are prepared to make changes in those slots as well. I promise you we will not jump at the first candidates we see to become our new head of baseball operations, our new manager or our new medical team. We have done that far too often in the past with deleterious effect on the long-term good of our organization. I look forward to offering you specifics as soon as we have them.
Rest assured, we have the resources to compete for free agent talent, but I think you understand large contracts aren’t going to solve all of our problems. This isn’t a copout or a veiled allusion to the money my family’s other concerns may have lost to Bernie Madoff. We are going to start building a serious farm system, with an emphasis on doing everything on the field the right way. Ostensibly we do that now, but you could never tell from watching our team perform.
I understand there are some of you for whom on-field performance is all, and that as long as the Mets are winning, then you’ll be happy with us. Of course winning is paramount to me and everybody else here. Our goal remains another World Series title as soon as possible — as well as our team playing a brand of baseball of which you’ll always be proud and never ashamed. But I also know many of you have concerns about our new ballpark, and I would like to address those as its first year ends and the rest of its life approaches.
Thank you if you bought one of the 3.15 million tickets we sold in 2009. Every single one of those transactions is valued by us. Whether you were a full season-ticket holder, a partial season-ticket plan holder or someone who attended individual games (perhaps dealing with ticket brokers in the early going when demand was inflated), your patronage is important to us. Moreover, your loyalty in a season like the one we’ve just completed towers over our thinking.
We owe every one of you an apology for the way we conducted our business regarding the inaugural season of Citi Field.
It was bad luck that we opened a new facility of which we were justifiably proud as our nation sunk into its deepest recession in decades. We planned Citi Field during a more vibrant economy and set much of our pricing with those parameters in mind. It’s not unusual for a sports team to try to get the most the market will bear, and that’s the tried-and-true path we followed.
We were wrong to do that. Quite frankly, we were as greedy as we thought we could get away with being through much of the ballpark on many of our dates. We didn’t take into account the recession. We also didn’t take into account the roots of our game or our team. Baseball’s supposed to provide the most affordable entertainment possible. It’s supposed to be an accessible day or night out with your family, your friends, that special someone. Yet we priced large swaths of our tickets insanely high. We designated some games as more attractive than others and created a complex pricing plan that, now that I’ve examined it closely, makes little sense.
These are baseball games. Simple baseball games. Yet we were regularly asking for $75, $100 and up for decent seats. That’s not the baseball I remember as a kid going to Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. Even accounting for inflation, that’s not close to reasonable. We could have had all our star players healthy, we could have contended for the playoffs, and it wouldn’t have been worthy of what we understand a baseball game to be.
Nor would it have been true to who we are. We’re the New York Mets. We long prided ourselves on being “the people’s team,” yet I now realize the only people who could afford the face value we were charging for too many of our tickets are people I see at my country club.
I’m so sorry about that. We are doing away with categorizing games by tier and we are meaningfully reducing ticket prices for 2010 and beyond. We can still make a very healthy profit without ostentatiously gouging you. We want to give you a reason to buy our tickets and sit in good seats and watch our games. We don’t need to give you another reason to shun us after the year we’ve had.
You’ve perhaps heard our reflexive answer to all criticism of our pricing by pointing to the Promenade level and the relative affordability of those seats. Indeed, we are proud to have maintained price points as low as $11 in 2009, but I must admit, after taking the time to go to our upper deck and attempting to view the field from every section, that we have failed to make these seats worth whatever we were charging you. I hoped for a ballpark that, like Ebbets Field, would have a feeling of “character” to it, so I signed off on some unorthodox angles both in terms of the shape of the seating bowl and the field.
I apologize. I didn’t know it would be so inadequate for the simple act of watching a baseball game. I’m aghast that we sold you as many seats as we did that had no view of the right or left field lines, and that you can’t see the main scoreboards from so many places. This is unacceptable, thus this winter we are working with engineers to see what we can do about redesigning our physical plant to make it work for you. If we are successful, you will see the difference. If we can’t move things around, then we will label those seats with obstructed views what they are and will charge accordingly.
We do have some very nice seating sections in Citi Field, but I noticed that not all of them were filled or particularly vocal. I’m thinking specifically of the Excelsior level which we envisioned as one of many of our “club” areas. I can see now this was a mistake in thinking. I’m not sure why we were so overcome with the desire to foster elitism in our ballpark, but we will pull back from that misdirected objective in 2010. Next year, the Excelsior level — now to be known as the Mezzanine — will be open to all pedestrian traffic as will all its amenities. If we allow our fans to walk through the upstairs and the downstairs of Citi Field, we should allow them through the heart of the park, too.
As chairman and CEO of the Mets, it shouldn’t surprise you I park wherever I want, thus I had no clue we were charging $18 for each car to park in our lots. My deepest apologies for this affront to your intelligence. Parking will be free in 2010. It’s enough you’re buying yourself a ticket. I don’t know why you should have to buy one for your car. We will also offer merchandise and food menu items at price points that won’t make a parent swallow hard when his or her child asks for a cap or a hot dog.
There is nothing at Citi Field that makes me prouder than the Jackie Robinson Rotunda. Jackie was a great baseball player in New York, a great American and a great human being. I consider it one of my finest accomplishments in my thirty years as part of ownership that I have helped make the New York Mets custodians of his legacy. The Jackie Robinson Rotunda is the culmination of this effort and I still get chills when I enter it.
That said, the New York Mets have a much greater legacy to present and share with our fans, and properly showing it off will be a top priority of this organization next year and every year.
While we appreciate our sponsors’ support, we realize plastering their names on everything that doesn’t move in no way enhances your enjoyment of the baseball experience. Thus, the Caesars Club will now be known as the Polo Grounds Lounge, named for our first home, and it will be redecorated to celebrate the part of our heritage that comes from the New York Giants, just as the Ebbets Club attempts to commemorate our connection to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Likewise, the Acela Club will be recast as the Shea Cafe, celebrating the man who paved the way for National League baseball to return to New York and the stadium long ago christened in his honor. Both venues, along with the Ebbets Club, will be open to all ticketholders.
We began to install a few scattered reminders of New York Mets history through Citi Field in the latter stages of the 2009 season. That was just the tip of the iceberg, I promise you. It took us a while to understand that we are part of a grand historical continuum, but now that we’ve gotten it, you’ll see the evidence. Yes, there will be statues erected to honor the greatest of Mets legends and personalities. Yes, there will be broader and more detailed photographic exhibits throughout the park to shine a light on the players who made the Mets the team you love. And yes, we will, on Opening Day 2010, cut the ribbon on the New York Mets Hall of Fame and National League Museum, making it an attraction and destination every bit as inviting as the ballpark itself.
Naturally, we will resume Mets Hall of Fame inductions in 2010 and make Mets Hall of Fame Weekend a grand and annual tradition. (Details regarding our 2011 Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration will be revealed soon.)
I think we came a long way in the first year of a ballpark in terms of food offerings and general hospitality, but we can do better. We can always do better. We will tailor our promotions so as to offer you items you actually want (and you will get, whether you are among the first 25,000 to show up or arrive a little later) and events you will actually anticipate. We will turn the noise level down so you can speak and hear between innings.
We will also decrease the organizational smugness that still seeps out from too many corners of our operation. We’re lucky to have you come to see us. We need to stop acting as if it’s the other way around. All of our personnel — and that includes me and every member of my family who works here — will undergo rigorous customer service training during the offseason. Whether it’s the counterperson who sells you the beverage growling at you as he or she takes your money or the security guard who won’t abide a simple request to let you tap an acquaintance on the shoulder because that person has a “better” ticket than you, you shouldn’t encounter avoidable annoyances at a Mets game. We’re going to figure out how to be better people in our interactions with you. We have some really great people working here right now. We want all of our employees to live up to that standard.
I’m writing to you because you’re a Mets fan. You don’t have to be, no matter how much it feels like you are locked in to the habit. You come to our games, you watch us on TV, you listen to us on the radio, you wear our logo no matter what, you spend every available waking moment thinking of ways we can improve ourselves. I can’t thank you enough for your support, particularly after a season like the one we just endured, which came on the heels of a very sad ending in 2008 and an incredibly frustrating one in 2007. We must not take your loyalty for granted, and we will not.
I’ve promised you a lot today. I can’t promise you a world championship in 2010, but I can promise you every effort will be made toward securing one and that everything surrounding that effort will be much sounder and more professional. Finally, I will promise you this: If you do not see real, concrete progress toward the goals I’ve set out in this letter, I will put the New York Mets up for sale following the 2010 season. There is nothing I would want to do less. It is my fondest hope that the Wilpon family will be privileged enough to steer the Mets organization for generations to come. But if we show no signs of succeeding in caring for this public trust, we no longer deserve that opportunity.
You, on the other hand, deserve the best. You are Mets fans. We are the stewards of this organization, but it’s your team. It’s about time we remembered it and acted like it matters.
All my best for an Amazin’ future together,
Fred Wilpon
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
New York Mets
***
Flashback Friday returns October 9.
Please read Metstradamus today. It’s another masterpiece in blogging.
And, if you haven’t already, please take our readership survey here.
by Greg Prince on 1 October 2009 10:16 pm 
There was no stopping Ray Knight from scoring the winning run in Game Six, but the 1986 World Series MVP had no compunction against doing a stop ‘n’ chat with FAFIF reader Jim LaFemina, who visited Nationals Park Wednesday wearing his mint Faith and Fear t-shirt. Jim reports Ray, despite being in the broadcast employ of our new archrivals, is a class act all the way, graciously gracing Jim’s Series ball with his most valuable signature. It’s a sphere that already bears the imprints of a certain Mr. Wilson and Mr. Buckner. Memo to Bob Stanley: get on the ball.
And you can get in the shirt by clicking here.
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