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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 3 June 2009 1:40 pm It was singles night in Pittsburgh. The Mets collected eight one-base hits and carefully avoided the other kinds, while there seemed to be fewer than ten healthy Mets let alone ten living Pirates fans at PNC Park. Double-digits are apparently reserved for places like San Diego where the Phillies won 10-5 on the strength of Raul Ibañez’s 18th and 19th home runs and moved 2½ games ahead of us now that we’ve hit the road and, for the moment, stopped playing the Nationals.
Zach Duke outpitched Johan Santana. His full name is Eff Zach Duke. I’ve had it in for Zach Duke since the night in 2005 he completely silenced the Mets at Shea Stadium and left Jim Haines and me grumbling about what a worthless game that was all the way back to the Nassau County border. Jim and I have attended nine night games together since then and the Mets have lost every one of them, all by Zach Duke-like margins, each leaving us more grumbly than the one before. (We were due to break our nocturnal streak last Friday but I threw my friend under the bus so I could accept an invitation to the Ebbets Club — if we had rustled up Promenade tickets as tentatively planned, Ramon Castro would still be a Met, because Omir Santos would not have driven in the winning run in the eleventh because the Marlins would have beaten the Mets handily just as they always do when Jim and I show up in tandem for night games.) Duke, meanwhile, did not grow up to be Johan Santana. He just became one of those young Pirate pitchers who got older and less successful. That Duke boy who went 8-2 in ’05 has followed it up with successive seasons of 10-15, 3-8 and 5-14. He seems to be back in Dukeness, damn it.
The Mets were also done in, for the second night in a row, by Matt Capps, which is an interesting name for a closer or perhaps a lovable rogue British comic strip character. Did you know Matt Capps’ middle name is Dicus? And did he ever, 1-2-3 in the ninth.
Only one Met hit Tuesday night, and that was Jeremy Reed. He, however, found a creative way to not score when he tumbled hopelessly into an out at home in the third from second, somewhat diminishing the halo from his 3-for-3 performance. The Mets’ only run was put up by Ramon Martinez whose thumb took it on the chin in the process and, without even catching the team flu, found himself sidelined immediately thereafter, joining the Mets’ burgeoning ranks of the lame, the halting and the reportedly nauseous. There is no surer path to seasickness than playing the Pirates.
And enjoying it all was a very small kaffeeklatsch of Bucco loyalists. You’d figure after sixteen consecutive losing seasons they’d attract no more than a hardy band of lost souls (aarrgghh!!), but then the Penguins skated into the Stanley Cup finals and reduced their ranks even further. I flipped over briefly to Versus to see what all the fuss was about. Not only was the hockey next door causing a frenzy inside the Igloo, but there was a bigger crowd outside their arena watching Game Three against the Red Wings on temporary TVs than there was inside PNC for Duke, Dicus and the rest of the local baseball crew performing in person. Brought me back to that Saturday afternoon in May of 1980 when Bobby Nystrom and the Islanders finally broke through to win their first Stanley Cup…and that night in June 1994 when the Rangers ended their infamous 54-year drought. On both occasions I wondered how anybody could care about any other sporting event when there was a Mets game in progress.
Baseball, gentlemen…baseball.
To be fair to the ‘Burgh, they haven’t seen a lot of the regionally pleasing kind since 1992, since Barry Bonds didn’t throw Sid Bream out at the plate in Atlanta and then packed for San Francisco. Every time the Mets alight at PNC, the SNY cameras linger lovingly on statues and signs saluting Willie Stargell and Roberto Clemente while Gary and Keith/Ron invoke Ralph Kiner. It’s great historical stuff (what do visiting teams’ broadcasts show from Citi Field — spaces where there are no pictures of Mets?) but it points up more and more what little good the Pirates have achieved lately, as in during the last two two-term presidencies. The Pittsburgh Pirates are essentially the Florida Marlins with backstory but sans any trace of recent achievement.
Yet I’ve identified them in my mind as my Doomsday team. That is to say I decided some time ago that if the Mets ever pulled a 1957 and skedaddled to another city, and that if I could still stand to look at baseball, I would break the emergency glass and become a Pittsburgh Pirates fan.
The rumors that swirled over the winter about the Islanders moving to Kansas City reminded me of all this (though having the Islanders as your favorite hockey team means never having the slightest distraction from baseball come June). What if it were the Mets who were loading Mayflower vans in the dead of night? What would I do?
An absurd proposition on the face of it, but I worked out the Doomsday Scenario in the mid-’90s when the talk of a new ballpark ramped up in earnest and progress toward it was nil. That was when most nights at Shea drew the kinds of crowds the Pirates attracted last night. The subtext, beyond lousy Mets baseball, was “we need a new stadium.” What if Wilpon & Doubleday didn’t get their wish? What if the Mets never substantially improved? What if nobody besides me kept going to Shea? How soon before a line like “well, we love New York, but we cannot continue to operate under these conditions” became a genuine threat?
Yes, absurd-sounding now — maybe even then. Once the Mets got Mike Piazza and the orange seats didn’t remain quite so orange for nine innings, it seemed all but prohibitively impossible. But I always had it way in the back of my mind that it could happen. The Giants left. The Dodgers left. Those were unthinkable exits. Why would the Mets be immune? The whole raison d’etre for the Mets was New York couldn’t live without National League baseball. Circa 1994-96, it was living fine while generally ignoring it. If that pattern continued, I couldn’t see the Senior Circuit argument taking hold a second time and securing us a replacement franchise á la what Bill Shea accomplished by October 17, 1960. If the stadium named for our savior continued to deteriorate and the Mets rotted from the inside out and ownership carped that it wasn’t getting what it wanted from the politicians…let’s just say I never completely put away these fears until Mike Pelfrey fired strike one past Jody Gerut on April 13. Whatever my reservations about Citi Field, I figured that if Wilpon got what he craved, he or his progeny — at least in my sentient lifetime — would never make even a veiled threat to move.
Exploring the Doomsday Scenario now is like coming across a Fallout Shelter sign left over from the Cold War. But I did have a contingency plan planted somewhere in a mental deposit box. I’ll spill the contents now.
Option A was to give up baseball forever, which may have been the most likely course. I’d have become one of those guys who told you he saw a triple play at Ebbets Field once but hasn’t watched a game since. Baseball isn’t hockey or any other take-it-or-leave-it activity to me. To not have the Mets would be to not have baseball…probably. But who knows?
Option B, theoretically, would have been to have grudgingly accepted the Mets in their new guise as (Jason came up with this name years ago) the Charlotte Demographic or whatever they’d be called. I know a whole clutch of old New York Giants fans who’ve gotten by for more than a half-century as San Francisco Giants fans. I can’t picture that being me, though. True, I nominally remain a Nets fan even though they left Long Island in 1977, but that’s basketball and New Jersey isn’t far away. But the New York Mets mean far more to me than the New York Nets ever did, even when Dr. J was slamming me home two ABA championships that I still cherish. I can’t see the Anytown USA Mets having any kind of imaginary pull on me.
Option C was find another team. I don’t know if I could have followed through, but it was intriguing to imagine.
• No remaining New York team, obviously.
• No American League team. Just couldn’t.
• No L.A. Dodgers. You can’t avenge a team that left New York with one that left Brooklyn.
• No Atlanta Braves. Yeech.
• No Houston Astros. How dare they be the surviving 1962 franchise?
• No Florida Marlins. I hate when New Yorkers move to Miami-Fort Lauderdale and become Dolphins fans.
• No St. Louis Cardinals. Too much bad blood.
• No Arizona Diamondbacks, since they didn’t exist when I started worrying about this.
• No Milwaukee Brewers, who were probably an American League team when I started worrying about this.
• No Cincinnati Reds. Warren Giles ran the National League from Cincinnati after 1957, acting as if New York didn’t matter. I resent the Reds immensely in the abstract just for that.
• No San Diego Padres because I’ve never cared in the least about them.
I was down to maybe six viable if remote possibilities in this mostly unthinkable realm.
I thought for a second about the Cubs, purely out of admiration for Wrigley Field. But then I’d be a Cubs fan and I really can’t stand Cubs fans or anything the Cubs stand for. They were out.
I thought for two seconds about the Colorado Rockies. New team, a little success early, gleaming home, fresh start, expansion brethren. But c’mon…the Colorado Rockies? A million miles from here? And no pitching? Nope.
I thought about the Montreal Expos, and this was before I developed the absence-inspiring fondness for the Expos I dwell on here from time to time. The Expos weren’t that far away geographically. They were founded in 1969, which was a good year for baseball, and they were unique. We played next to a World’s Fair and they were named for a World’s Fair. They had Rusty and Kid, we had Rusty and Kid. Lots of linkage in my mind. But I took Spanish in high school, not French. Plus I live in the United States, not Canada. It wouldn’t have worked as anything more than le fling. (And, as it turns out, they wouldn’t have been a good long-term emotional investment given that they actually did meet their doomsday on October 3, 2004.)
I thought about the San Francisco Giants. Yeah, it would send the wrong message in that it would legitimize just the sort of franchise movement that would have cost me my team, but if the Mets had left me, wouldn’t that sort of negate the historical crime committed by the Giants? I’d have full access to the lineage of Mathewson, Ott and Mays without having to exhort endlessly about their latter-day relevancy. They would be my team. But, no, they left New York. As much as I would come to look longingly at Pac Bell when it was built, I never could have gone all the way to the Pacific for my team. They stopped being my team before I was born.
I thought more than I’m comfortable admitting about the Philadelphia Phillies. This was from the perspective of the mid-’90s. The likable 1993 Phillies were still fresh in the mind’s eye. They had Lenny Dykstra. They’d had Tug McGraw. They were a convenient train ride away. I could hear Harry Kalas without too much static. But…they were the Phillies. As Jason told me when I suggested once that they could be my Doomsday team, he set me straight: “No, you don’t have nearly enough hate in your heart to be a Phillies fan.” Amen, brother.
I was left with the Pirates. The Pirates of Hans Wagner and Pie Traynor and Ralph Kiner. The Pirates of Bill Mazeroski and Roberto Clemente and Pops Stargell. The Pirates I rooted against as a kid because they competed vigorously with the Mets, but the Pirates I always vaguely admired despite that rivalry. Five years ago this month we moved, which forced me to semi-organize my shoeboxes full of baseball cards. They were still more or less as I’d had them since my adolescence, wrapped in brittle rubber bands and Hefty Bagged by divisional alignment. I went through my National League East cards on a Sunday night in June 2004. I bristled at the Phillies of the ’70s. I spat at those Cardinals. I rolled my eyes at those Expos. I fumed anew at the Cubs for even thinking of getting in our way in 1969. But when I came to the Pirates, I was like, “Hey, they were pretty good. Good players. Good guys.”
Doomsday dwelled in dormancy for quite a while until I visited PNC Park in 2002. I fell in love with that place. If I were a cat, I’d roll around on its outfield grass. Even if I weren’t a cat and thought I could get away with it, I might. It is clean, lean, green, serene…everything Shea wasn’t, everything Citi Field isn’t. Citi Field, by comparison, is garish verging on whorish, more brassy than classy. PNC Park is beautiful and mostly unoccupied. As I dusted off the Doomsday Scenario, I imagined frequent flier mileage on US Airways being applied generously to weekend trips to Pittsburgh or, what the hell, just moving out there. I never really wanted a piece of Western Pennsylvania, but with computers, you could live most anywhere and do most anything. I just wanted to spend time at PNC Park. If I had to accept the lousy Pirates in a chilling Metsless world to do it…well, there was always Stargell and Clemente and everybody else to admire.
I’m glad it never came to that. Whether it’s the sixteen consecutive losing seasons or their ability to shake off their chronic futility when the Mets come to town, I don’t particularly like the Pirates anymore, not even a little. I don’t want to take away from the gleam of PNC, but any ballpark in which the Mets play so badly so regularly can’t possibly be that great. And screw the Penguins while we’re at it.
Death to Doomsday. Long live the Mets, flu-bugged, injury-addled and impotent as they appear on any given Allegheny evening.
Documentation of what the Mets can do to you can be found in Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.
by Greg Prince on 2 June 2009 9:00 pm 
Robert Moses patterned Shea Stadium after the Roman Colosseum, yet only one of them isn’t a parking lot today. Mark “Bluenatic” Weinstein confirmed that not all ancient ruins have been paved over when he recently parked himself and his classic FAFIF t-shirt in Rome. I wonder if anybody over there mutters, “It’s a dump, but it’s our dump.” Probably not.
As for the shirt, it can be your shirt by clicking here.
by Jason Fry on 2 June 2009 3:50 am Forget the Florida Marlins on final days of the season. As Mets fans, what really ought to make us shiver is the thought of playing the Pittsburgh Pirates at PNC.
Before everything went straight to hell tonight, Emily and I were lying in bed admiring the vistas of PNC and all those unoccupied seats and we agreed that next year we would join the hordes of blue-and-orange fans to invade the Pirates' home. How soon we forget. The Pirates promptly rose up against J.J. Putz, battering him like a steelworker with doubts about unionization, and I remembered. Oh yeah, this is the last place any sane Mets fan would want to be.
The Mets are 12-14 at PNC since it opened; 6-8 in the less-remarked Faith and Fear era. But oh, the gag jobs we've seen. Take some Dramamine and buckle up — we're going down Bad Memory Lane.
July 8, 2005: After eight very good innings by Victor Zambrano, Aaron Heilman comes in and gets two outs, but also allows three runners to take bases. Handed a four-run lead and needing to get one lousy out, Braden Fucking Looper proves the wisdom of his middle name by allowing a two-run single to Tike Redman and a sinking Matt Lawton liner that gets past Cliff Floyd for a tie game. Looper, sent back out for the 10th because Willie Randolph doesn't hate us enough, is victimized by “defenders” Miguel Cairo and Jose Offerman, two ex-Mets I'd gladly kick in the head if I could get away with it, then allows the game-winner to Humberto Cota.
July 9, 2005: The not-yet-useful Heath Bell and the long-proven-useless Danny Graves conspire to allow seven Pirates run in the seventh, with the big blow a Jack Wilson grand slam. Mets lose, 11-4.
September 15, 2006: With the Mets on the verge of clinching the NL East title, Pedro Martinez returns from a month on the DL with a sore calf. But that's as good as the storyline gets — Pedro is not himself, or more accurately (though we don't know it at the time) is what he will be from this point forward. The Pirates lead 4-0 after three and don't look back. Insult to injury: The Mets spend the evening batting in front of a bizarre banner for something called Pup-Peroni.
Sept. 16, 2006: Keep that champagne on ice. This one's 2-2 with two outs in the bottom of the ninth when Ronny Paulino drives in Joe Randa with a long double off Heilman, who bites his lip and makes his I Just Ate a Big Lemon face. (At least I'm assuming. How long will it be before I can no longer instantly summon up what Aaron Fucking Heilman looks like just after losing a game? HOW LONG, GOD?)
Sept. 17, 2006: Oh, fuck. For the third day in a row, the Mets are beat by a Pirate left-hander and denied a chance to clinch their title. Afterwards, David Wright says all the right things. Greg Prince, on the other hand, has had it. The Mets will clinch the next night, but the memories of PNC and the reverse broom will endure.
Aug. 16, 2007: Mets up 5-0 after three. And then … oh, for fuck's sake. There's no link for your own protection. Greg and I could only manage total denial and curt surliness, respectively. If you remember, you don't need another poke with a sharp stick. If you've forgotten, leave it that way.
June 1, 2009: Mets up 5-0 after three. We should've known, shouldn't we?
***
Need to deal with the pain? Call our office in the morning, but for now, read two chapters of Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.
by Greg Prince on 1 June 2009 7:43 pm 
Straight from his sprawling silhouette above the Right Field gate, it’s 1969 World Series Game Four defender extraordinaire Ron Swoboda out in center Sunday. The man they called Rocky was re-meeting and greeting the Fantasy Campers he coached earlier this year, chief among them, for our purposes, No. 17, Keith Hernandez Jeff Hysen. Jeff — who shared his experiences with FAFIF in January and his extra ticket with me yesterday — is finishing his Amazin’ journey with a day of baseball at Citi Field tomorrow with the other campers. I’d say “have fun!” but I think those instructions would be superfluous.
by Greg Prince on 1 June 2009 4:18 am This is the people's history and it has flesh and breath that quicken to the force of this old safe game of ours.
***
This is how a ballpark becomes your ballpark: by having something happen there that really means something to you. Not that I don't care about any given Mets game, but there has to be something at stake besides the dwindling contents of your wallet and the National League East standings to really get you going about a place. For me, there was on Sunday.
There was a winning streak. My own personal winning streak. If the Mets could beat the Marlins, I would set a record for bearing witness to uninterrupted Mets winning: seven in a row. All seven would take place in this merry, merry month of May and all seven would be taking place at Citi Field.
Me and Citi Field making history together. I never would have believed it as recently as April.
Yes, the Mets won. And I won: my seventh consecutive win, a streak never accomplished in my first Log or at my first ballpark. Long live Shea Stadium, but six straight was all I ever notched there in the regular season, twice, ten and eight years ago, respectively. I've been sore at Kevin Appier since August 10, 2001 for blowing a 5-0 lead to the Cardinals in what was certain to be the seventh consecutive win (we lost in ten). So this was quite a while in the making. When you write down the result of every game you've ever attended, it's a bigger deal than you'd think to string together seven in a row.
And it happened at Citi Field. We now have that, me and it.
***
Bill says, “Let me tell you something, Cotter.” Then he pauses and grins. “You got quite a grip, you know. My arm needs attention in a big way. You really put the squeeze on me.”
“Lucky I didn't bite. I was thinking about it.”
***
During the eleven seasons in which the Pepsi Party Patrol did its thing at Shea, I never caught a t-shirt. I can't say it was up there on my list of priorities like “catch foul ball”; “see no-hitter”; or “win seven in a row,” but if such things are going to fly through the air, it struck me that it would be nice to grab one of them. The last thing that struck me where the shirt giveaway was concerned was some dude's elbow to my shoulder when a shirt was coming right at me. That was in 1998. The bruise healed. The scar apparently remained.
But that was a Koonce age ago, back when I didn't win seven in a row or catch t-shirts. Today, out in the Big Apple section (I would've loved a piece of the consulting action on naming everything here), the Launch crew appeared before us and a shirt was popped toward the sky. It began to fall. There was no one sitting to my left. The shirt was heading in that direction. I put out my hand. I felt cotton in my palm. Could it be?
Yes!
Yet maybe not!
Somehow the shirt that landed in my left hand was making its way into somebody else's hand. I'm pretty sure I had it first. And let me tell you something: I had it last. I've always been a little dismissive toward those Pepsi shirts given what I do for a living, which involves knowing people at beverage companies. “If I really want a Pepsi t-shirt, I could just make a call,” I liked to huff. But that isn't exactly true. I could call somebody, but if you really want something, you should have to grab at it like it means something.
It meant enough. I grabbed and I got it. I got the shirt.
I GOT THE SHIRT!
Then I got another. Really.
I'm sitting there, exulting in my soft hands, when a shirt appears from the right. It bounces out of a crowd. It bounces toward the airspace of the guy next to me. It bounces off his chest when he's not looking. And it bounces right into my hands.
There. Just like that. No shirts for eleven-plus years. Then two shirts in about sixty seconds. Go figure.
I happily gave the second shirt to the guy who just missed it because he was the reason I was out in center to begin with: Faith and Fear Fantasy Camp Correspondent Jeff Hysen. You might recall we turned the blog over to Jeff for a few days last January and he reported to us on what it was like to travel to Port St. Lucie and play ball like a pro under the tutelage of the pros. The addendum to that wondrous week is the campers are invited to Citi Field to a) line up on the warning track and have their names read over the public address system and b) play some ball in a big league stadium — this one — once the Mets leave town.
Jeff lives in the Washington area, which made this trip a bit complicated, particularly since the organizers aren't letting his group pitch, hit and catch until Tuesday. He was going to skip the Sunday game but became convinced that lining up where the Mets play and hearing his name over the loudspeaker was nothing to take lightly. Part of the deal was they gave him two tickets for Sunday. In the same manner I was perfectly positioned to catch two t-shirts, I was in the right spot to accompany him.
My role in his official activity was to take some pictures from over the centerfield wall. It wasn't easy because all the other campers had somebody trying to do the same for them and because I was looking for someone wearing No. 17.
Guess what the most popular number among fantasy campers is.
But I picked out HYSEN 17 and shot as best I could. I take t-shirts better than I take pictures, but I think I got a good one of Jeff with coach Ron Swoboda. (Ron smiled for my camera without bringing up that Thanksgiving 1977 awkwardness that still haunts me if not him or Lee Mazzilli.)
***
The crowd, the constant noise, the breath and hum, a basso rumble building now and then, the genderness of what they share in their experience of the game, how a man will scratch his wrist or shape a line of swearwords. And the lapping of applause that dies down quickly and is never enough. They are waiting to be carried on the sound of rally chant and rhythmic handclap, the set forms and repetitions. This is the power they keep in reserve for the right time. It is the thing that will make something happen, change the structure of the game and get them leaping to their feet, flying up together in a free thunder that shakes the place crazy.
***
Jeff helped kick off this seven-game surge of mine on May 9 when he made his first Citi Field trek and invited me to join him and his sons. It occurred to me then that he was the first person with whom I ever watched a game at the new place who never joined me at the old place (though we had taken in Mets road games in Philly and D.C.). Perhaps it's appropriate that he was the man on the scene for the record-breaker, not just because he helped jumpstart the damn thing three weeks ago but because a new stage seems to require new characters. The Mets required six flu-riddled innings from John Maine Sunday, to be sure, but somehow this month has been about Citi Field Mets more often than not. Playing key roles in victory Sunday were Gary Sheffield, Omir Santos, Fernando Martinez, Bobby Parnell and Frankie Rodriguez…Met names not cemented as such at Shea Stadium. Maine and Wright and Beltran and Santana aren't going anywhere soon, and they are no doubt fit to bridge the gap from ballpark to ballpark, but I'm reminded of what I've read of the Dodgers when they moved to Los Angeles. They still had several Boys of Summer on the roster, but who was the face of the transplants who won the pennant in 1959? Someone who never played back east.
“He helped establish the new identity that distinguished the team from its Brooklyn ancestors,” Neil Sullivan wrote in The Dodgers Move West. “Hodges and Snider were familiar stars of a club still associated with Ebbets Field, but Wally Moon, by way of the St. Louis Cardinals, was the first star of the Los Angeles Dodgers.”
Wally Moon had the jury-rigged L.A. Coliseum configuration working in his favor in '59. Omir Santos has the stars aligned for him at Citi Field a half-century later.
You never know what you'll find when you look to the sky.
***
The steps from the Dodger clubhouse are nearly clear of people. Thomson has gone back inside but there are fans still gathered in the area, waving and chanting. The two men begin to walk across the outfield and Al points to the place in the left-field stands where the ball went in.
“Mark the spot. Like where Lee surrendered to Grant or some such thing.”
Russ think this is another kind of history. He think they will carry something out of here that joins them all in a rare way, that binds them to a memory with protective power.
***
We needed some new history Sunday beyond what Log II was privileged to record, beyond my good times with Jeff, the shirts, Swoboda and our A.M. tailgating friends from Jersey and Connecticut. We needed to beat the Florida Marlins on a Sunday at home, wherever we call home. We didn't do it the last three times we had a chance, two of those, notably, being the final game of 2007 and the final game of 2008. Those are inscribed in my original Log and remain charred on my brain. No need to dwell on the significance of those particular results.
The last time the Mets defeated the Marlins on a Sunday at Shea was August 12, 2007. I was there for that, too. The day included a pregame ceremony for a Mets pitcher I never particularly wanted pitching on my behalf. But he had just won his 300th game and the Mets were honoring him. I snorted and sniffed through his ceremony until I'd thought I'd come to an understanding with him. By the end of the gripping and grinning and golf ball presentation, I was on my feet applauding T#m Gl@v!ne, New York Met.
As I approached Citi Field Sunday morning via mass transit, I thought back to that day, how I decided to go along and get along with the prevailing sentiment of Metsopotamia even though it remained anathema to me. By August 2007, as he was being toasted for his career accomplishments, I was one of the last anti-Gl@v!ne holdouts. Maybe, I decided, I was being unnecessarily stubborn about a pitcher who was in his fifth season as a Met and had pitched some fine games in our uniform. So I dropped the anti-Gl@v!ne thing for the next several weeks.
I can't swear there's a connection to the Mets never again beating the Marlins on future Sundays at Shea when it really, really mattered, but I was untrue to my instinct that day and, karmically, I paid for it. I paid for it on September 30, 2007 and I paid for it again on September 28, 2008.
Having decided while riding the 7 (of all numbers) that there might be a connection, Sunday May 31, 2009 became about not just extending the winning streak but breaking the curse of he whose name I cannot bring myself to spell without swearing. The curse, maybe, was broken. Or nothing had to do with anything. Still, it all floats toward the top of my mind because T#m Gl@v!ne was the last piece of Mets merchandise I mistrusted the way I've mistrusted Citi Field. Slowly I've been moving off the mistrust angle. It's a ballpark. It's a ballpark where my team plays. It's not perfect by my reckoning and I will always resent it at least a little for replacing the imperfect place I loved, but I don't want to be anti-Citi Field for the rest of my days — not in the way I absolutely can't stand the thought that Mr. Brave, Mr. Players Association Hardliner, Mr. Disappointed N. Devastated was one of us.
Thing is, thirteen games in to my life with it, it's not a stretch for me anymore. I don't love Citi Field, I may never love Citi Field, but I don't hate it. I don't reflexively snarl when I see it or think about it. I don't have to be talked into liking it. I do like it — kind of. I don't plan to be unduly influenced by what anybody who claims to love it says about it and I don't plan to be unduly influenced by what anybody who claims to hate it says about it. I respect all opinions, but I have to keep forming my own.
Right now, I know I like it OK. Maybe a little more than OK at this moment because I got a genuine piece of intense personal history out of it when Frankie struck out Ronnie Paulino to secure my seventh straight win.
But I am having a hard time with something from early in Sunday's game and I do instinctually blame Citi Field for it the way I will never stop blaming T#m Gl@v!ne for the culmination of September 2007. It was one of those pointless text polls Verizon sponsors. This one was a multiple-choice quiz that asked a pretty easy question:
Where did the Mets originally play their home games?
The results:
• Shea Stadium: 7%
• Ebbets Field: 52%
• Polo Grounds: 41%
A majority of those who responded got it wrong. When Alex Anthony read the tally and identified the correct answer, he sounded embarrassed. As for the sound I made, if you heard a distant yowl of pain coming from the general direction of centerfield on PIX11 this afternoon, it had nothing to do with Angel Pagan's groin.
How?
How does this happen?
Does it happen because someone owns a team and doesn't care about portraying its history in any meaningful fashion?
Does it happen because he cares mostly about the team that left town more than a half-century ago and therefore erects tributes to its former players and ballpark while practically ignoring the actual team that's on the premises?
Does it happen because his organization does not see fit to mention anywhere within the current home of that team that the identity of its first home was, in fact, the Polo Grounds?
You could just slough it off on Generation Text being young, uninformed and goofy enough to cluelessly respond to a poll like that, but I can't. It is a disgrace that Citi Field's slobbering evocation of Ebbets Field and the Brooklyn Dodgers have made a question about where the Mets first played baseball unanswerable to so many visiting it on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
So Citi Field and I…we have that, too, and that will be an issue until Mets management makes its own history — not just half of its heritage — a priority.
But I'm a Mets fan, so I'll hold out hope that it will actually happen. Being a Mets fan is all about hope. After all, I never gave up hope I'd someday see them win seven games in a row in person.
***
All the fragments of the afternoon collect around his airborne form. Shouts, bat-cracks, full bladders and stray yawns, the sand-grain manyness of things that can't be counted.
It is all falling indelibly into the past.
—Don DeLillo, Pafko At The Wall
***
If you somehow missed it or just want to relive it, you can follow Jeff Hysen's January journey through Fantasy Camp starting here.
Jason and I had a blast Sunday evening with EJ & JB on the Happy Recap radio show. Go here and click on the 5/31/09 show.
And for more intense personal history, try Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.
by Greg Prince on 31 May 2009 5:21 am Perhaps you remember Carlos Beltran's introductory press conference in which he declared that the heretofore bedraggled, woebegone organization he'd signed with was no more, that these fellows with whom he'd thrown in his lot for lots of money were instead the New Mets.
That was January 11, 2005. On May 30, 2009, Beltran didn't make any big public statements, but by his exit from Saturday's game, he could have been saying we were looking at the even Newer Mets.
Once Beltran left the game with a stomach virus as the top of the sixth commenced Saturday, there wasn't a single Met on the field who was a member of the 2005 renaissance men or the 2006 National League East champs. In fact, with 2007 acquisition Luis Castillo having pinch-hit in the fifth only to sit down thereafter, there would be, for the remainder of the day, no player in a Mets uniform on the field who had been a Met before 2008. Brian Schneider, technically the most recently activated Met on the roster, was the most heavily tenured Met of anyone who played from the sixth through ninth innings.
C Brian Schneider: March 31, 2008
CF Angel Pagan: March 31, 2008
3B Fernando Tatis: May 13, 2008
1B Daniel Murphy: August 2, 2008
P Brian Stokes: August 9, 2008
2B Ramon Martinez: September 7, 2008
LF Jeremy Reed: April 6, 2009
PH Omir Santos: April 21, 2009
P Ken Takahashi: May 2, 2009
RF Fernando Martinez: May 26, 2009
SS Wilson Valdez: May 27, 2009
Wow, that was quick.
Extenuating circumstances, of course, explain how our good old Mets became Club Nouveau. Beltran was feeling icky. Jose Reyes and Carlos Delgado are on the DL. Oliver Perez is experiencing yet another setback. Slumping David Wright was judged to require a rare blow (though he did make it as far as the on-deck circle in the ninth). There was no pressing lefty-lefty matchup with which to bother Pedro Feliciano. Mike Pelfrey pitched Friday. John Maine pitches Sunday. Ramon Castro catches for the Chicago White Sox.
I haven't checked with Elias or anybody like that, but there's no way we've had a lineup so lacking in core Mets of the recent past for even a fraction of a game since before the Age of David kicked in. There's always a Wright or a Beltran listed on the manager's card and, before this last road trip, there was usually a Reyes. Each of them plus Delgado played in no fewer than 159 games last year. (Reyes, Wright and Beltran all sat to start this memorable affair from May 17, 2007, but Delgado was in the whole way.) But just like that, for four not so solid innings, the team fielded eleven players who are, relatively speaking, Metsies come lately.
Not that there's anything wrong with that if they win. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that even if they lose, which is what they did behind starter and loser Tim Redding, an active Met for not quite two weeks. There is no magic inherent in having been a longtime Met per se. But it was strange to notice this kind of September lineup in late May, and by September, I mean the kind of Septembers the Mets endured before Carlos Beltran blessed us with his talent and signature in January '05.
For part of a day, life went on without all the Mets we've automatically identified as Mets for years. It just didn't go on very well.
Familiar names and faces dot Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook. Read all about why you'll want to read FAFIF: AIPHOTNYM at Transplanted Mets Fan and join Jason and me on The Happy Recap radio show tonight around 6:10.
by Greg Prince on 30 May 2009 3:00 pm Omir Santos drove home Gary Sheffield Friday night while driving away Ramon Castro. He may be our most versatile catcher ever.
As we click our heels over Santos, we are destined to remember Castro fleetingly…which is just about the only fleetness to be associated with Ramon. Yet in the annals of Mets backup backstops, he was actually quite the latter-day stalwart. By starting Wednesday when oh me/oh my/Omir was sidelined by a bruise to the shin, Ramon nosed ahead of Vance Wilson for ninth on the all-time Mets games caught chart, 256 to 255. I know — just what every kid receiver aspires to, but that left him behind only Ron Hodges, Duffy Dyer and (by five) Mackey Sasser among those who were never designated full-time starters behind the plate. Castro caught more Mets games than Wilson, than Chris Cannizzaro, than Paul Lo Duca, than Todd Pratt, than the legendary Choo Choo Coleman even. Ramon Castro was his name and he was here for quite a while, bub.
I'm guessing we all have versions of three impressions of Ramon, in no particular order:
• He was injured a lot.
• He was the clubhouse cutup.
• He hit a big home run against the Phillies ages ago.
The injuries were unfortunate. Without them, he would have passed Mackey Sasser with ease, maybe even Duffy Dyer (who I could have sworn caught 500 games a year every year when I was a kid but was never actually behind the plate for more than 91 in any given season). The cutup stuff, which seemed to involve gaseous outbursts according to various reports, lost its charm when he'd do unfunny things like miss his wakeup call in San Diego and show up late to the park. But that home run he hit on August 30, 2005 — and the one that followed the next night as the Mets briefly closed in on serious Wild Card contention — helped establish Castro a going cause for those in search of forehead-slapping answers to the Mets' recurring hitting and catching woes over the next few years. Why doesn't Ramon play more? came up time and again these past five seasons. It wasn't a bad question, but he never came as close to catching as many games as the 99 he got in in '05, the year Mike Piazza was being eased out, the year Ramon Castro was the Omir Santos of Shea Stadium.
Now Omir Santos is the Omir Santos of Citi Field and Brian Schneider can go warm up Sean Green for all I care. But these things have a way of turning. BriSchnei, who just sucks the life force out of me by his very presence (a lower-key version of the sensation Jason experiences when he thinks of or looks at Bobby Jones, Jose Vizcaino, Steve Trachsel, Gerald Williams, Luis Castillo and Ramon Martinez; we all create and maintain our Met crosses to bear), had one of the biggest hits of 2008 in Philadelphia when he grew a beard and touched off a ten-game winning streak. If we're going to make first place our summer — and autumn — home, we're going to need all hands on deck, yada yada, so welcome back and go get 'em Mr. Momentarily Irrelevant.
Omir's latest big night coincided with my latest big night at the new ballpark where, for all my wariness of its charms, I've reeled off six straight Log II wins, as good a streak as I ever constructed in the old Log via the old ballpark. Consecutive Victory VI was witnessed from an unexpected perch in the Ebbets Club, an invitation that excited me more than it should have. It wasn't the prospect of clubbiness that revved me up or even the temptation provided by a seat closer to the action than I've had to date in the current crib. It's that I really wanted to see the Ebbets Club because it's been a bane of my Citi Field co-existence ever since I walked by it in early April.
Why, I asked myself over and over, is there something named for Ebbets Field at the Mets ballpark, particularly when there is nothing on the public premises designed to specifically evoke Shea Stadium or the Polo Grounds, which were the actual homes of the Mets before 2009? I sort of get why they felt compelled to clone Ebbets' exterior, spooky as it is to find miles from McKeever Place. I respect if not exactly embrace the Rotunda homage to Jackie Robinson (whether or not I'm “an intelligent, liberal New Yorker,” it does feel like social studies homework). Yet the Ebbets Club, every time I pass its guarded entrance, has irked the spit out of me. For a ballpark that opened for real not two months ago, Citi Field is already legendary for its unbearable lightness of Mets being. Thus I had to see for myself what else they were doing for the Dodgers — and conversely not the Mets — behind closed club doors. When I was offered an in, I was perversely psyched to go. Yes! I will be even more offended!
But y'know what? The Ebbets Club isn't even a good Brooklyn Dodgers tribute. I was actually a little disappointed that I wasn't Pee Wee'd, Oisked and Skoonjed to death in there. A little of it was having my high dudgeon deflated, but more of it coalesced into a new question: why have an Ebbets Club and not have it be an outstanding tribute to the ballpark and team that inspired it? Go all in or don't bother. There were like two pictures of the Ebbets exterior and nothing else of a Bummy nature that I recall. There were a few abstract pieces of Mets art, but nothing as simple as, say, a framed publicity shot of Ed Lynch. For a facility that's koo-koo for clubs, the three I've seen at Citi Field — Caesars, Promenade and Ebbets — could be injected into any golf course, any airport, anywhere in the United States that isn't interested in the New York Mets. (And the food was surprisingly institutional in quality; Aramark lives.)
But the Ebbets Club seating outside, the actual place where you watch the Mets game — very nice. Very, very nice. A Citi analogue to Shea's rear Field Level section between home and first, except comfier, cushier and spatially more exclusive. It doesn't rate the posted price tag ($160 on this Bronze evening), but I wasn't paying for it and neither was my incredibly gracious host. Not that I was in a hurry to leave such lovely baseball surroundings or turn away from Santos' baseball heroics, but I was particularly impressed by how close the EC is to the JRR which, in turn, is steps from the MTA and its Super 7 Express bullet train. The game ended near 10:30 and I had no problem making the 10:54 at Woodside. I always thought Shea had good subway access. Not compared to Citi Field it didn't.
The funny thing about an ideal seating section like Ebbets Club is it reveals almost nobody who goes to a Mets game is ever satisfied with his assigned spot. Everybody there had good seats, yet people — not just the young kind — were always angling for something more. If you were in Row 7, you had to be in Row 5. If you were in Section 115, you had to drift to Section 116. And if the usher made it clear you weren't supposed to stand in the area reserved for the differently abled (even if there were no patrons in wheelchairs), you just had to stand in that area until ordered to move. I suppose if you told one of these ticketholders he was going to play second base, he'd sneak over to first when Jerry Manuel wasn't looking.
While the victory that counted wasn't secured until the eleventh, a clear win was notched in the Mets fan's ledger in the eighth when the sing-a-long was trumpeted and Neil Diamond went the way of Ramon Castro. “Sweet Caroline” was traded not for Lance Broadway but for “Meet The Mets”. Not just “Meet The Mets,” but two verses of “Meet The Mets,” one more than we got when it was a third-inning staple at Shea after “Our Team Our Time” imploded. Perhaps it was the novelty of “MTM” or the liberation from the Red Sox' anthem, but wow was it awesome to hear the Mets' song at the Mets' park during the Mets' game. Our little contingent of Mets writers not only sang along, but we clapped along during its playing and stood and applauded its reintroduction when it was over. It was like that Silly String commercial where the dreadfully dullest gathering imaginable heats up because somebody thinks to bring something incredibly fun to the party.
Besides Omir Santos, I mean.
Special guest book plug not just because he was generous with his access to the Ebbets Club but because he's always worth reading: check out Matt Silverman's work on Shea Good-Bye: The Untold Inside Story of the Historic 2008 Season, written with Keith Hernandez and everything else in the prolific Met Silverman portfolio.
by Jason Fry on 30 May 2009 5:05 am It hasn't been a banner couple of years in Flushing where roster management is concerned, but the Mets moved with rather un-Metsian determination and dispatch tonight, sending Ramon Castro to the Chicago White Sox for 25-year-old pitcher Lance Broadway even as Omir Santos was still raising his fists toward the klieg lights.
Of course, Santos helped make their decision more straightforward, lining a home run into the left-field stands at Citi Field for the Mets' first run and driving in their second and final run six innings later. (Would someone explain to me why the Marlins didn't walk Santos to load the bases and pitch to the immortal Wilson Valdez?) That was enough to support Mike Pelfrey and a parade of lights-out relievers, with Gary Sheffield serving as young Omir's supporting cast on the offensive side. Who knows how Sheffield will hold up in the summer heat, but right now you'd think it was 1999 — balls are leaving his bat blue-shifted, prompting third basemen to call their insurance companies. The mortar shot Sheffield bounced off the Acela Club set the crowd murmuring even if it was just a strike with 410 feet of asterisk attached to it; the single he whistled to start the 11th was a lesser liner but ultimately of greater import. (And meanwhile, David Wright continues to grind his bat to sawdust with games on the line. Nice to have that particular worry be the parenthetical, isn't it?)
Emily and I took it in from the Excelsior level, in a section that had apparently been reserved for feral children. But being in a “Lord of the Flies” outtake was the lone blemish on the evening: The ominous weather forecast had left us agreeing that this time we might actually see quite a bit of the Caesar's Club, instead of looking around it in brief bemusement on the way to and from the bathroom, but the skies yielded a couple of spritzes of subway-time rain and then remained peaceable for the balance of a very nice late-spring night. Meanwhile, down there on the field, the Mets did their part, surviving a pretty good-looking young lefty in Sean West and dodging Met killers Jorge Cantu, Cody Ross and Hanley Ramirez (in an unasked-for cameo).
On the 7 train back, your bloggers were exchanging rapidfire SMSes, celebrating all things Omir. A sampling:
GP: Santos has Godlike tendencies.
JF: He is an LES Artiste. (Hipster ref?)
GP: Brian Schneider to the white courtesy phone, your bus out of town is waiting.
JF: If only. He has many more Toyotas to sell, I fear.
GP: So did Bill Sudakis and we chased his sorry ass out of here. Santos 4-Ever!
(You see, we can be brief.)
What we didn't expect was that the other catcher would be the one to be paged in the clubhouse.
Ah, Ramon. The Round Mound of Pound arrived as a nice surprise, a Marlin castaway with surprising pop and a light touch in a clubhouse that could alternate between deadly serious and snoozingly vanilla. (What will Saturday matinees be without the bubble-stuck-to-the-hat trick?) But he was given several chances to claim the catcher's job for his own, and flubbed all of them because he could never manage to stay on the field long enough to put minds at ease. Granted, I also just described Schneider — but the demand for catchers who are lead-pipe cinches for repeated trips to the DL is rather limited, Schneider was due $4 million this year compared with Castro's $2.5 million, and that was more or less that.
Santos? Yeah, I know he's 28 and now has exactly 86 big-league at-bats on his resume. But he's got a short, sharp swing (that pinch-hitting farce was ridiculous, but Jerry was on to something), a pretty fair arm and calls a good game. And, of course, he has the flair for the dramatic that's made him a cult hero, from his first career homer to his undressing of Jonathan Papelbon to his lightning-quick second tag to tonight. You know what? Let's go for it and see if he can also move a Toyota or two.
Wanna be treated like an All-Star? Then read Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.
by Greg Prince on 29 May 2009 9:13 am 
The Faith and Fear t-shirt made its overdue New England debut a week ago courtesy of the KingmanFan clan, representing at the Fens in true blue and orange style. From left to right, that’s Sky himself, accompanied to Fenway by wife Lisa and daughter Lauren (their shirts are nice, too). Reports our longtime commenter, “Received many inquiries as to where I got “that really cool shirt”, even from some Sox fans. Sox fans were especially friendly and gracious, which I suppose comes easy when you’ve won two WS in five years. We talked baseball, they recommended restaurants (Cannoli from Mike’s are as good as any in NY), we mocked Yankee fans. A great time all around, thanks to Johan & co.”
To look that wicked good at home or on the road this summer, grab yourself a FAFIF shirt and stay in the game the way KingmanFan does.
by Greg Prince on 29 May 2009 8:57 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.
Rarely have I exhibited the self-awareness I generated on the final Friday of May twenty years ago. It was the beginning of Memorial Day weekend 1989, the quote-unquote unofficial start of summer. I’m sure that fun fact was pounded into my head by radio as I drove home from work that evening. This was the era of Z-100 and the Five O’Clock Whistle when they’d encourage you to bang on the drum all day because you had Friday on your mind and were thus going to Partytown (yeah, yeah). Add to that a holiday weekend that ushered in summer…well, who could resist getting caught up in summer gladness?
Once I stopped being a student, summer’s awesome impact began to lose some of its luster. When school’s end dovetailed with the official beginning of summer, as it did almost exactly from the age of five through the age of eighteen, that was significant. That was worthy of Alice Cooper. College ran on a different schedule, but finishing finals and the like, whether at the end of April or in the middle of July one year, still brought with it the instinctual sensation of having neither class nor principles.
Then came graduation and its phantom sensation. Sure, school was out for summer, but come 1985 school was out forever. No more pencils or books or stable underpinnings to my existence. Yippee, I’m…confused.
There were the Mets, of course. At 22, there were the 1985 Mets to ease the transition from student to who knows what. As Apu would suggest to Homer in the ’90s, I took a relaxed attitude toward work and instead concentrated on the baseball match, the Nye Mets being my favorite squadron. All I was really interested in upon graduation was the ’85 Mets. I came home to Long Beach partly from professional inertia, party because it had pretty good access to Doc Gooden and partly because my mother menacingly threatened to “burn a Mets pennant on your lawn” should I decide to remain in Tampa (what a kidder).
From a baseball standpoint, it was a good call. The ’85 Mets were a once-per-generation drama. They begat the ’86 Mets, not as gripping an act as ’85 but surely most pleasing in terms of grand finale. That I didn’t figure out what to do with myself on a going basis between baseball seasons didn’t really register with me in the interceding winter. It also kind of missed my radar in the world championship aftermath of ’86-’87; I was too busy floating on a cloud constructed of felt pennants to think of anything that wasn’t Metsie, Metsie, Metsie. This unproductive pattern held in the summers of ’87 and ’88 as well. There were new factors on the horizon then — meeting Stephanie, then still in college, in ’87, and my mother’s foreboding diagnosis of cancer in ’88. I continued to live at home, continued to eke out a freelancer’s existence, continued to keep more than one eye on the Mets. But I knew those sorts of summers couldn’t hold water for long.
That’s where the self-awareness came in, on the brink of the summer of ’89. By then I had swapped freelancing for a steady job as an associate editor on a beverage trade magazine because I knew my time in Long Beach was running out. Nobody said anything. Nobody had to. It had been four years since I graduated college, one year until Stephanie was going to do the same. She was due in New York by the end of April 1990. The future wouldn’t wait much longer. My talent for postponing a sense of urgency was being rendered inoperative. To this day I won’t do anything that nobody makes me. In 1989, the least likely person to force me to do something — me — was getting on my case.
Instead of school ending and indicating a gateway to summer, I was in an office all day every day this late May. The Mets were playing per usual, and not particularly well (they were in the middle of a California swing in which they’d lose six of nine and struggle to stay above .500). The Mets were the staple of summer every summer, even in this transition summer of 1989. I knew without even thinking about it that they’d be there. But whatever else was familiar was going, going, almost gone.
I came home that Friday night before Memorial Day to where I’d always come home, to the East End of Long Beach. My mother was in one of her remission periods, praise be. Since the previous fall, she was doing more or less OK. She wore a wig from the radiation and she was required to take a course of killer chemotherapy approximately every couple of months, but this was one of the months when she wasn’t going into Roosevelt for the necessary punishment. Mom and Dad were home, I was home, it was a Friday night. Consensus, as it often did, led to picking up Chinese food for dinner. It was second nature in our house. I called the order in and I went out to collect it.
I’d done this countless times since I learned to drive. Go to Panda Garden. Go to Park Jen. Go to Wing Loo. It was all basically the same: a nice box of Chinese food that always included some variation on won ton soup, a couple of dishes that involved chicken, a ton of white rice maybe an egg roll. Good dinner, plentiful leftovers. We didn’t have it delivered out of general mistrust that the order would somehow get screwed up and that would hence lead to interminable waiting for it to be returned properly. Better to call it in, inspect the box on-site and bring it up the stairs with confidence.
On the Friday night of Memorial Day weekend, it was Wing Loo. I went out, I drove the short distance, I parked, I got out of the car…and it hit me.
This is my last summer doing this.
This is the last summer I spend in Long Beach.
This is, essentially, my last summer.
I hadn’t been much of a beach person since I was a kid. We got central air conditioning installed in the house the summer I was eight and good luck getting me outside after that. But I grew up practically around the corner from the beach. Everybody from Long Beach grew up practically around the corner from the beach. In the early ’80s, there was a bumper sticker produced by the chamber of commerce: There’s Long Beach Sand In My Shoes. People actually stuck it to their bumpers. I don’t doubt summer is a big deal everywhere, but it was clearly Long Beach’s time to shine. My family moved there in 1962 after renting a summer house two years earlier. Long Beach attracted people with its summers.
This would be my last one there. It had to be. I had to get out of the house where I grew up, obviously. There was no reason I couldn’t have found a place to live in the City by the Sea, but I knew I wouldn’t. I’d just spent, except for college, my whole life there. Before the next summer came, I was sure I’d want to try something different, even if it would wind up being no more than a geographic stone’s throw away. It wouldn’t be summer in Long Beach again after this one, after 1989.
That was my big self-awareness as I went to pick up the Chinese food. I can’t say it moved me to any great actions, save for the Friday night in July when I enthusiastically greeted Joel’s suggestion we go out drinking in the West End. As an East Ender, the West End, with its close-in bungalows and its decidedly different demographics (primarily Irish and Italian), always intimidated me. But I was 26. I had as much right to either end of town as I pleased. On the night of July 14, just after Sid Fernandez struck out sixteen Braves in Atlanta but lost when Lonnie Smith homered off him to break a ninth-inning tie, I went out with Joel and Fred. Long Beach was still home base to each of us. Since college ended, I’d see them as many weekends as not. We’d drive around, we might wind up at a bar in Rockville Centre. I generally enjoyed the company more than the drinking which was never really my thing. But on the night of July 14, 1989, I was determined to enjoy the drinking. This, I decided with more of that uncommon self-awareness, will be the last time I have a night like this.
I don’t know that it was. There’d be a business trip to New Orleans in December 2000 whose final night in town involved a few potent potables — specifically, three Hurricanes in three very tall glasses. That was pretty unbridled behavior for me. But that was business. This was home. This was Long Beach. This was the last time I’d go out and really drink with my friends. As most of my drinking stories go, it doesn’t get any more exciting than the decision to partake. Like I said, I’m not much of a drinker. But I definitely drank. I was definitely in another zone, and I don’t mean the West End. Yet I wasn’t totally far gone. In fact, I have a very vivid memory of the saloon where we wound up. More than once somebody selected “Sweet Caroline” on the jukebox and more than once the place went nuts. That — not Shea Stadium and not Fenway Park — is where I first heard the “so good, so good” refrain. Maybe that’s why I’m less prone to anger at hearing the Mets lamely co-opt it. I had fun singing along to “Sweet Caroline” in the West End of Long Beach on July 14, 1989. For all I know, the Red Sox stole it from us.
In my early days of my beverage magazine job, I had a knack for carving out niches that suited my interests and made me feel less like a trade magazine hack. Because it tangentially brought me into contact with government and politics, I took up the recycling/environmental beat. A study of municipal solid waste came to my attention that summer, specifically that beverages were being blamed for a proliferation of trash on beaches. It wasn’t earth-shattering, but it was an excuse to get some of that Long Beach sand in my shoes. One morning I let it be known I’d be coming in later (I was always looking for excuses to legitimize my nocturnal tendencies) because this report required some first-hand research.
I went to the beach — our beautiful nearly deserted on a weekday morning beach. Ostensibly I was taking notes and pictures of stray foam cups and potentially dangerous six-pack rings, but mostly I wanted one more visit to our city’s most famous natural resource. Sure, I could’ve gone on a weekend, but I didn’t really like crowds when it came to the beach. I liked solitude. Since moving home after college, my token visits had generally been when almost nobody was around. At the end of the tortuous summer of ’88, when my mother got out of South Nassau after her cancer was discovered and initially treated, I made my only appearance of the year at our beach on Roosevelt Boulevard. It was September and it represented splendid isolation. I guess I wanted one more taste of that sort of beachgoing before I kissed Long Beach’s summers goodbye for good. Since then, summer remains preferable to winter, given its lack of snow and surfeit of Mets, but it doesn’t really feel overwhelmingly different from any other time of year. That’ll happen once you’ve stopped postponing definitively growing up.
Long Beach remains nearby. I’ve never really strayed from what is known as the South Shore of Long Island, but I almost never get down there anymore. I indeed moved out in April of ’90. Mom died two months later and Dad sold the house within a year. He took an apartment on the boardwalk for a while but eventually moved to the North Shore. There is nothing particularly pulling me toward Long Beach anymore, not this summer, not any summer since my last summer.
Flash back to a whole lot of Amazin’ days with Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.
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