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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 Jason Fry on 20 June 2009 4:14 am It's been a while since we treated Brian Schneider like an All-Star. But can you blame us?
Schneider arrived from Washington as either the first or second incredulous “Who?” we offered after hearing the Mets had exiled Lastings Milledge (along with his mouth, rap career and casual schedule) to the Nats for the former Expo and Ryan Church, then chiefly known for his misadventures in religious studies. Installed as the Mets catcher by default, Schneider immediately began bumping his helmet into metaphorical boom mikes: He allowed an alarming number of passed balls and runners scoring in his vicinity and was hurt sufficiently often that we got to shiver in the wan light of the Robinson Cancel-Raul Casanova-Gustavo Molina era. Schneider's final line for 2008 — .257 AVG, 9 HR 38 RBI in 110 games played — all but stands up in its seat and yells “average catcher.” The only thing he does that's demonstrably better than average is throw out runners, and even there a historical-minded fan is mostly left wondering why today's catchers nab so few. When Schneider got hurt again this year, none of us seemed particularly interested in giving him another take. For fans who aren't particularly stat-minded, the anger that greeted Ramon Castro's departure had less to do with whether or not Omir Santos is incredibly lucky — rather, it was that Castro was going instead of Schneider.
Nothing that happened tonight really changes that — Brian Schneider is still a thoroughly average catcher with a doofy Toyota ad that's been shown enough to burn out untold ganglia in what passes for my brain. But he hit a baseball exceptionally hard at exactly the right time, driving a 2-1 Andy Sonnanstine fastball 415 feet or so into right-center. That was the key blow for a Met win over the Tampa Bay Rays, about whom I care about even less than I do the Baltimore Orioles. If not for a cameo by former Met nemesis Pat Burrell, whose new uniform and facial hair make him seem vaguely like Tom Hanks in the latter stages of “Castaway,” who could work up much antipathy about this one? I suppose you could yell at Dan Wheeler for not being useful as a Met five years ago, or hiss at the Rays for foiling Rick Reed's attempt at closing the Clubhouse of Curses in a previous millennium when they were the Devil Rays. I'm not exactly feeling the hate either way.
(Actually, I have reason to be irked at the Rays: Last January in Vegas, I put $20 on the Rays — then a 150-to-1 shot — to win the 2008 World Series. Fucking Phillies.)
No, most of tonight's displeasure seemed to be directed at the very real possibility that another Met lead (built on the thoroughly unlikely one-two punch of Schneider's power and Fernando Nieve's pitching) would unravel: Since being handed J.J. Putz's old gig, Bobby Parnell has spit the bit rather determinedly; Sean Green looked emphatic (in his IT-guy-who-just-pwned-somebody-in-Halo-way) in getting himself out of trouble, but then the trouble was of his own making; Pedro Feliciano needed to make an acrobatic play to retire Carl Crawford; and Frankie Rodriguez didn't look quite right just yet, greeted in the ninth with a long flyout from Dioner Navarro.
But we won, as we somehow have more often than not in this thoroughly weird season. Reyes and Delgado and Maine and Perez and Putz are hurt, the bullpen is iffy, the defense is suspect, and the Mets regularly do something so dunderheaded that you're left staring at the TV or the field with your mouth hanging open. And yet somehow we stay above water and the Phillies continue to stagger, and though our internal standings show us about 12 back and sinking fast, the real-world standings insist that we're just two games out. It doesn't seem possible, and probably it isn't over the long-term. But you never know. Maybe we're living through the best lousy year ever.
Our thanks to everybody who came out to Two Boots for Metstock. For the uninitiated, Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.
by Greg Prince on 19 June 2009 7:39 pm 
First home game World Series home run hit in Mets history? As we were reminded during the otherwise forgettable Interleague interlude from Baltimore, it was by Tommie Agee against eventual Hall of Famer Jim Palmer, leading off Game Three of the ’69 Fall Classic, Shea Stadium’s first World Series contest ever. But in a way, Agee was the next link in a chain that had gone untended for 15 years. The last National Leaguer to hit a home game World Series home run while wearing an NY on his cap before Agee? Agee’s fellow Alabaman, Dusty Rhodes of the New York Giants in 1954. He was born James Lamar Rhodes, but as Arnold Hano explained in A Day in the Bleachers, he was known as Dusty “because all ball players and most little boys named Rhodes are called Dusty.” Dusty was called on to pinch-hit for Monte Irvin in the bottom of the ninth of Game One, two men on, one man out, score between the Giants and the Tribe knotted at two. A lefty swinger could angle the ball just right at the Polo Grounds, and that’s exactly what Dusty did against eventual Hall of Famer Bob Lemon, dropping one down the right field line, just inside the foul pole, just over 257 feet from home plate, giving the Giants a 5-2 victory. You want crazy angles? The Polo Grounds came by them organically. “The Polo Grounds was a lovable freak,” Leonard Shecter would later write.
Dusty was lovable, too, as evidenced by the affection his teammates poured on him as he touched home plate to end Game One and as evidenced by the nice things the men who played ball with him had to say upon learning of his passing at the age of 82 Wednesday. Monte Irvin on what was no small consideration back then: “Even though he was born in Alabama, he was like a brother to all the black players. Dusty was color blind.” Willie Mays: “I’ve never had a greater friend.” His Times obituary, from which the above AP picture is borrowed, included Dusty’s quote about himself: “I ain’t much of a fielder and I got a pretty lousy arm, but I sure love to whack at that ball.”
Keenly self-deprecating or uncannily accurate, Rhodes took another couple of whacks the very next day. First, as a pinch-hitter, he lined a two-run single into center to give the Giants a fifth-inning 2-1 lead. Remaining in left, he smacked what would prove to be the final home run in Polo Grounds history, “a long loud blast onto the right field roof,” as Noel Hynd put it in The Giants of the Polo Grounds. It came off yet another eventual Hall of Famer, Early Wynn, to start the bottom of the seventh inning of Game Two, putting the Giants up 3-1, which was how the final New York (N.L.) World Series home game to be played until 1969 ended. The Giants would go to Cleveland and sweep the Indians. Rhodes would finish the Series with a robust 4-for-6 and 7 RBI in just three games. His OPS, though nobody calculated such things then, was a staggering 2.381. His place in New York baseball history should be just about as lofty.
by Greg Prince on 19 June 2009 4:00 pm 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.
Is nothing sacred? Duffy Dyer’s 1969 World Series ring was stolen. If you know who took it, tell the thief to give it back.
This is Duffy Dyer we’re talking about. Duffy deserves his ring.
I read in last Sunday’s News that the most revered piece of jewelry imaginable, a ring identifying someone as a 1969 Met, was taken from Dyer’s locker in the Dominican Republic last summer when he was out on the field coaching some San Diego Padre prospect. That’s what Duffy Dyer does nowadays. According to Anthony McCarron’s article, coaching’s what Duffy Dyer’s been doing pretty much forever, or at least since he stopped catching.
Which I would have guessed was five minutes ago, but it’s longer.
Duffy Dyer was going to catch for the Mets forever by my reckoning. Duffy Dyer was a fact of life when I was growing up. Second games of doubleheaders; two-week stretches when Jerry Grote would go on the Disabled List; nights in July for no particular reason. Suddenly Duffy Dyer was catching and, most likely, hitting eighth.
Duffy Dyer hit .231 in consecutive seasons, 1971 and 1972. Then he fell off. That was Duffy. How could anybody who went by the first name Duffy in the last half of the twentieth century (when only Ed Sullivan’s Chyron operator called him Don) bat higher than .231? He batted .257 in his first full season, which was 1969, but of course every Met reached for the stars that year. For Duffy Dyer, the stars shone a little shy of .260.
But who noticed? He was the backup catcher. Backup catchers didn’t have to hit, especially on the Mets (even though Dyer’s pinch-hit three-run blast on Opening Day 1969 was the first home run the Montreal Expos ever surrendered; last home run surrendered by the Expos was hit by Met catcher Todd Zeile, FYI). Pitching and defense was our early ’70s calling card. Defense started with the catcher and extended to the backup catcher. And backup catchers stayed in one place. Duffy stayed with the Mets from a callup cameo in 1968 clear through to 1974. It never occurred to me the Mets could continue National League play without Duffy Dyer on their roster. He was the 410 sign, the orange foul poles. He was part of the scenery. His job was to catch Seaver and Koosman and everybody else. His catcher’s ERA in 1969 was 2.07 for a pitching staff that generally allowed just under 3 runs per game. If he hit .231 and the like, well, what did you want from the man?
Duffy Dyer spent one year as the Mets’ de facto starting catcher, 1972, when Jerry Grote and everybody else was out hurt. Dyer hit 8 home runs that year, a figure that would be the rough equivalent of Sammy Sosa hitting about 800 homers in 1998, juiced or not. The Mets were so strapped for hitting in 1972, Duffy batted fifth 10 times. In every other one of his Met seasons, Duffy batted as high as fifth never.
And he threw. Boy could he throw. In ’72, 79 runners attempted to steal a base against Duffy Dyer; 40 of them were cut down. Too bad whoever stole his ring wasn’t trying to take it to second. Duffy would have nabbed him. When Grote was healthy that year, incidentally, he threw out 20 of 38 would-be thieves. Who consistently throws out more than half of enemy baserunners like that anymore? Who tries to steal bases that much either, come to think of it?
Having flexed each of his muscles in ’72, Dyer dipped to .185 in ’73 and dropped behind Ron Hodges on the backup catcher depth chart. Duffy got an at-bat in the 1969 World Series. He received no such consideration in 1973. He had outlasted J.C. Martin, who saw more memorable action in the ’69 World Series, as well as a flock of transitory backup catchers (Francisco Estrada, Bill Sudakis, Joe Nolan, Jerry May), but Ron Hodges was Duffy Dyer’s Kryptonite. Hodges’ ascension in 1973 made Duffy, hitting .211 the next year, dispensable. He was traded in October 1974 to Pittsburgh for speedster Gene Clines.
I had high hopes for Gene Clines. I had lost hope for Duffy Dyer. The net effect was negligible however you sliced it. Clines was a bust in New York. Dyer toured Pittsburgh, Montreal and Detroit through 1981. I never missed him, just as I never particularly missed Ron Hodges, Luis Rosado, Butch Benton, Alex Treviño, Ronn Reynolds, Junior Ortiz, John Gibbons, Clint Hurdle, Ed Hearn, Barry Lyons…just as I don’t miss Ramon Castro. Backup catchers, unless they hit you a home run that wins you a playoff series, don’t really stick in the mind as long as they used to stick on a roster.
But reading about Duffy Dyer’s stolen ring brought back a sense of certainty that’s been missing around the Mets for ages. It was only parts of seven seasons, but damn, Duffy Dyer stuck around. You didn’t have to think who backed up Grote. Duffy Dyer did. Couldn’t hit. Could surely catch and throw. That he put in seven seasons with three other teams didn’t stop me from immediately thinking “Met!” when I read about him in the Daily News. On some level in my mind, Duffy Dyer is always the backup catcher on the Mets. Jerry Grote is always the starter. Every catcher who’s come along since they stopped being a tandem, from John Stearns through Omir Santos, strikes me intrinsically as a temporary condition.
McCarron’s article reveals what an honorable baseball career Duffy Dyer’s been conducting his entire adult life. He’s caught and coached, managed and scouted. He’s been in the majors, the minors and the independent leagues. These days he roves for the Padres. He’s also instructed Mets fantasy campers. I met one St. Lucie alumnus Thursday night who told me he empathized with Luis Castillo because he dropped an easy pop fly in one of those fantasy games that wasn’t so easy if you didn’t know the correct way to catch it. Who taught him exactly how to handle the next one that came his way? Duffy Dyer, that’s who.
My first thought upon hearing this anecdote was where was Duffy Dyer when we could have used him a week ago? My next thought was Duffy Dyer was there quite often when we needed him when I was a kid. My final thought was whoever has Duffy Dyer’s 1969 World Series ring — give it back.
He’s Duffy Dyer. C’mon.
Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.
by Greg Prince on 19 June 2009 6:01 am I can't decide whether having had a wonderful time in spite of the Mets losing a tough ballgame is a sign of a healthy outlook on life or proof that I've got my priorities all screwed up.
Well, I did have a wonderful time at METSTOCK: 3 Hours of Pizza and Baseball and I'm pretty sure that save for one severely unpleasant detail toward the end on TV, everybody else there did, too. A few things did not go as arranged — one author, one camera crew and one rousing victory cry apiece did not materialize — but mostly it was what I had hoped it would be. It was an evening to revel in our fandom in a setting that couldn't have been more perfect. My thanks to Skyhorse Publishing editor deluxe Mark Weinstein for pulling this off and for filling in ably for Stanley Cohen by reading a lovely passage from A Magic Summer. My thanks to blolleague and old friend Jon Springer for putting those Amazin' numerals together so intriguingly over the past decade at MBTN.net and presenting a literal fistful of them as he read from Mets By The Numbers. My thanks to our hosts at Two Boots Tavern, worth a visit at 384 Grand Street on the Lower East Side even if nobody's reading aloud to you. You'll come for the pizza, you'll stay to both finish your pizza and carefully eyeball every bit of baseball memorabilia that's everywhere you turn.
My ultimate thanks go to all who attended, listened to my spiel and said hi. It was an incredible mix of people I know very well, people I know pretty well, people I know a little and people I'd never met. It says something good to me that all those people would come out at the end of a long and soggy day to celebrate their love of the Mets, listen to a couple of writers talk and root, root, root for the road team. We didn't win, and that's a shame, but as is proven time and again where our affection for the Mets is concerned, you can have the great pizza; you can have the cold beer; you can have the three diagonally positioned 1967 Bill Hepler baseball cards on the wall; you can have tales of Jeff McKnight's revolving identities, of impromptu October ticker tape blanketing a city and of a 14-year-old unknowingly snubbing Lee Mazzilli in a Catskills resort elevator; you can have a room full of true believers who all attempt to lift each other up until they all go down together on a bases-loaded walk and a bases-loaded single in the bottom of the ninth…but you can't have everything.
We couldn't have the win. In promoting this event, it was haughtily suggested the Mets would stick it to the Orioles as they did in 1969, yet on Thursday night, Huff beat haught. Of course that was unplanned and unfortunate, but that ninth inning — you had to be there. Dozens of Mets fans intermingled all doing what they probably would have been doing in the privacy of their living rooms if we weren't promoting togetherness and three Skyhorse books. With our forces combined, it was a sight to see. Such energy. Such focus. Such a shared sense of purpose.
Such a shame it had to turn from “YEAH!” to “NO!” but that's baseball for ya. Great part is we'll all be back somewhere Friday. Maybe in a place like Two Boots (though there is no place quite like Two Boots), maybe at Citi Field, maybe in our living rooms. We'll all remember how disappointing it was to watch Frankie Rodriguez legitimately blow his first save of the year but we'll conveniently forget that that's the price we pay for our inextricable involvement in this lifelong affair we call being a Mets fan. Come 7:10 Friday we'll see a Mets team that has a chance to win a game. That's what we see when we look at the Mets. That's what we see when we look at ourselves.
It doesn't look so bad on us, y'know?
The spirit of METSTOCK lives on 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 18 June 2009 2:05 pm See what happens when you don’t built an insipidly high left field wall? You might see more than one home run per homestand. Matt Wieters hit a ball that would have been caught at the track by most Met leftfielders had it been struck at Citi Field. At worst it might have gone for two bases. Probably it wouldn’t have carried even close to the sixteen-foot-high fence. I’m thinking it falls in front of most Met left fielders for a bloop double.
But it doesn’t work that way at Camden Yards, America’s most beautiful ballpark, where — hush, hush — fly balls carry. The Baltimore rookie Wieters hit one Wednesday night that carried, as Tim Redding grumbled later, a full six inches beyond the left field wall. With a better jump and/or leap Fernando Martinez might have caught it, but I’m pretty sure the same has been said about Ron Swoboda going after Don Buford’s leadoff shot in the same city forty years ago. We lost Game One in ’69, we lost game two last night. We recovered then. We’ve got a whole new chance tonight.
Was it all about Wieters’ Camdenized fly? Not really, considering Aubrey Huff huffed and puffed and blew Pedro Feliciano’s delivery halfway to Eutaw Street in the seventh. Feliciano has been pitching effectively, so it’s tough to get down on him for bringing his gopher to show ‘n’ tell. In fact, it’s tough to get down on anybody for last night. It was one of those losses in which two teams played and one of them scored more than the other. Most Mets losses this season have felt like exercises in agony. This one felt like we could’ve won but didn’t, oh well.
Can’t get down on Redding who wasn’t super sharp but was reasonably competent. Fernando Tatis did ground into a rally-killing, bases-loaded DP, but it took a nice play to execute it and the Mets. Nobody on our side did anything egregious in the field and Alex Cora wove a seventh-inning stop & fling that was quite nifty, albeit after it was already 6-4 O’s.
Sometimes you lose and don’t want to release anybody.
***
Tonight’s rubber match will provide fine background scenery for METSTOCK: 3 Hours of Pizza and Baseball at Two Boots Tavern, 384 Grand Street in Manhattan, full details and directions can be found here. We start at 7:00. You’ll be hearing readings from three Amazin’ books: Stanley Cohen’s A Magic Summer; Jon Springer’s and Matt Silverman’s Mets By The Numbers; and my very own Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets. Each, like METSTOCK itself, is brought to you by Skyhorse Publishing. Please come on down and join us for reading, signing, schmoozing, eating, drinking and watching some baseball. (A little rain only enhanced Woodstock, and we, at least, will be indoors.)
My book — available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and fine local retailers — exists because of one factor more than any other: this blog. Without this blog, I would have been just some guy who was a Mets fan for a long time and had some stories to tell. With it, I’m that very same guy but with what is known in the business as a platform. I am, in the context of chronicling the relationship we all have with this team (simultaneously loving it and not being able to stand it), marketable. Putting aside that the Mets are a better story in 2009 than 2004 and that daily blogging has made me a far better writer now than I was then, I could have written a book like this five years ago, I’m pretty sure. But publication, distribution and promotion…hard for me to imagine all that would have been achieved without having this blog to prove I wasn’t just some guy who was a Mets fan for a long time with some stories to tell.
Besides mentioning that as a pretext to thank you, the FAFIF reader, for helping us build that platform, I bring it up in the context of something I read yesterday, by a well-known sportswriter despairing of the reaction his profession receives from readers these days:
All I hear is “You guys suck ass” and “If you idiots were doing this and that …” but I’m at a loss. What have we done so poorly? No, we don’t nail every story. And yes, we make mistakes. But — and I’m being 100-percent serious — what do you want from us?
I’m betting that’s not all the writer in question, The Bad Guys Won! author Jeff Pearlman, hears, but criticism tends to ring louder than praise, and incivility is easy to generate from behind a keyboard and a screen name. I’m not going to attempt to answer the question he posed in his headline — “Why do you hate us?” — because I think the question is misleading, misguided, slathered in self-pity and overly broad (though one of his other pieces yesterday, in which he essentially stuck his tongue out at readers so as to say “nyah-nyah, I knew it!” regarding Sammy Sosa, did not leave me feeling charitable toward the trade he practices). But Pearlman’s post did make me think about platforms.
Traditionally, sportswriters have had platforms while sports fans have not. On a given morning in the past, I might have read a great or terrible column on the previous night’s Mets game and have had no outlet for my reaction other than to nod or sigh. I might have had a thought on the same subject before I ever read what a professional wrote and I would have kept it to myself because there was nowhere else to take it. It used to annoy me no end that the version of events that got into print was so often unrecognizable in terms of what I had watched the night before and that the Met narrative I read day after day did not add up to the one I’d been constructing in my head for decades, one informed by my own observations and experiences.
I feel that way less and less, and not because professional sportswriting has so improved. I have an outlet now. I still read great columns and terrible columns, but they no longer carry the same sway in my mind, perhaps because they no longer carry the same sway in an at-large sense. Yeah, Wally Matthews is going to get more attention than anything Jason or I write, but more and more I can laugh that off. It’s just Wally Matthews (or whoever) being silly again. I don’t have to treat the bad columnist’s word as significant just because it appeared in a newspaper or on a newspaper’s Web site. We’re all doing this now. That one person has a press credential and one doesn’t doesn’t make anybody’s opinion or observation more or less valid.
Beat writers have a specific job and it’s worthy of our respect and admiration. I’ve never bought into “they get to see games for free” as reasons to dismiss the obstacles they are prone to run up against. No job, even a job you love in a field you voluntarily entered, is without its drawbacks. Beat writers — and the Mets have several consistently good ones covering them — bring a valuable perspective to what we the fans know and might want to know. I wouldn’t have that Redding “six inches” quote above if an AP reporter hadn’t written it down.
But we the fans have a valuable perspective, too. We know our teams in our own way and we know why they’re our teams. We the fans think about it plenty and we the fans are, I find, fairly discerning people, not simply “die-hard blind loyalists” to use a Pearlman phrase. We know what it’s like on this side of the wall. We get the whole Mets experience in a way beat writers and columnists don’t or won’t.
And as long as sportswriters are blogging like regular people, I’d contend there isn’t as much of a wall between us as there used to be. Matthews writes something. Pearlman writes something. I write something. You write something. Whaddaya know? We’ve all written something.
Prior to blogging, my not quite fully formed gripe with the sports media was that I rarely read, saw or heard anything that reflected my understanding of my team. Thanks to blogging, I read it regularly. I get to write it, too, and some of it wound up in a book that you might have read…which is nice, by the way.
The left field wall at Citi Field is taller than I’d prefer, but I’m glad at least one barrier where the Mets and me are concerned continues to crumble.
You won’t need a referral from your primary care provider to visit the Doctor’s Channel for eighty seconds. Why would you want to do that? Click here and find out.
by Greg Prince on 17 June 2009 3:00 pm Is it only the presence of the designated hitter that makes games in American League parks so intrinsically boring? Is it the knowledge that the Mets are just passing through? That these games couldn't possibly count even though, after 13 seasons of this, they obviously do?
The Mets are 4-3 in A.L. parks in 2009, though it would be more gentlemanly to describe them as 4-2-1 vis-à-vis Friday night, and we'll surely take a winning road record wherever it's compiled, but boy are these games a contest of endurance when it comes to paying attention. That includes the sublime (when Omir hit the replay home run off Papelbon) to the ridiculous (the aforementioned gum on our shoe from Friday) to the inane, which was Tuesday at beautiful Camden Yards.
OP@CY is my favorite park still in operation and second only to old Comiskey Park all-time. Regular access to Oriole home games was one of the reasons I used to revel in MLB Extra Innings. But you put the Mets there and…yawn. Better to yawn in victory than defeat — by their defensive unpredictability, I glean that O's is obviously derived from castill-O — but still. I've watched the Mets hit every town in Ban Johnson's wildcat circuit since 1997 and I am almost never captivated. I went to Baltimore the first two years of Interleague play and saw them play the Birds three times and, as theoretically awesome as it was to see my favorite team play in my favorite park, the sensation was somehow less than scintillating. And that was when we had guys who could hit home runs out of a bandbox.
I haven't been a kneejerk Interleague basher, at least not in terms of relying on the common complaints you hear this time of year. I get why it exi$t$. I don't automatically dismiss the non-glamour matchups, a.k.a. any that don't involve the Yankees or Red Sox. I'm not going to roll my eyes at some putrid pairing of perennial basement dwellers because you never know when a series between two such teams won't look so bad (Rays vs. Rockies three seasons ago would have been the skunk at the garden party, but now they're the last two Cinderella stories facing off and they've both been sizzling). I've never subscribed to the notion that it's not fair we have to play six games against a well-funded neighbor while whoever we're fighting for a postseason birth inevitably gets a half-dozen shots at the Dregsville Dimwits or Kansas City Royals. We live in New York — we should play the other team from here if we're going to do this at all, and I like the home and home for it gives each fan base a chance to howl at the moon.
But these games, when in the A.L. yard, inevitably trend several degrees south of interesting, no matter the novelty or the occasional throwback appeal of a Fall Classic rematch like that which is in progress. Part of it is the hit & run nature of it all, the unfamiliarity of the opponent, the strangers passing in the night. But mostly, when we're the road team, it's the frigging DH. The frigging DH has been in the A.L. rulebook for 37 seasons now and I still see it as a cheap, transitory gimmick. For 150-some games every year I don't worry about it. For however many times we visit the places where it's allowed to roam free, I hate it. I despise it. I detest it. Somebody hand me a Thesaurus so I can find other things to do to it.
Gary Sheffield just hit a couple of homers at Yankee Stadium III as the DH. If it weren't for naked self-interest, I'd figuratively throw them back. I don't want the Mets to have a DH. I don't want anybody to have a DH. It may save Sheff some wear on his knees, just as it may have kept Piazza's bat in the lineup once upon a time, just as it gave Beltran a break in Boston…but it's wrong. It's not baseball. It's phony. It's a fraud. It's a sham. (Thesaurus, please…) It's a tenth man who doesn't do anything most of the time. Where I'm from, we call that someone who's not playing.
I'm not saying a darn thing you haven't heard before or perhaps thought yourself. That it's been repeated incessantly doesn't mean it's not worth restating when it's in our face. There is no defense for the DH, and I don't mean in the Delgado Shift sense. I don't care if it let Hank Aaron hit 22 extra homers or that it gave Edgar Martinez a Hall of Fame career or made David Ortiz lovable and beneficial to the Greater Good. It's artificial. The National League doesn't play on artificial turf and it doesn't use artificial players — artificially enhanced on occasion, but it's nine men and pinch-hitters and managers making decisions and complete games being actual complete games. It's baseball! Our National Pastime! What they've got in the American League is a longer, noisier, watered down imitation.
But as long as we're indulging them, good to do it more or less the way we did it Tuesday night. Nobody played ball like David Wright, who is presently batting .365, or a point a day to keep the doubters away. It's a bit of a weird .365, with more strikeouts than you usually see and, to date, a paucity of power (which makes him fit in perfectly among the popgun Mets), but it's freaking .365 which, if you're from Long Island, you understand as freaking awesome.
And the .365 was only the second-most impressive thing about David as we went about humoring the American League with our guest appearance Tuesday. Did you see him read the riot act to Mike Pelfrey on the mound during the righty's now-regular middle innings cry for help? That was just the warmup act. Pelf was out of the game already when David commenced to lecture him about the facts of life on the bench in the bottom of the sixth. He went on for several minutes and appeared to rise several decibels as he proceeded. In that episode, David Wright was a stand-in for every single one of us — fans, bloggers, what have you — who has wanted to grab a Met by the scruff of the neck and shake him for not maximizing his potential. That was toughlove David was dealing (seemed to be giving a bit of it to Brian Schneider as well) and it's what I've been dying to see any Met give to another Met these past three seasons. Maybe it happens out of camera view regularly. I'm guessing no. Later Pelf seemed pretty pleased to have been singled out for the older man's attention. David said something about lending guidance to the younger players.
David Wright is 26; Mike Pelfrey is 25. Way to take care of those kids, Dave.
In other positive news, Sean Green and Pedro Feliciano continue their stellar setup work even as Bobby Parnell slumps. Together they retired six consecutive Orioles and haven't been the cause of any discomfort lately. They have worked so well in tandem that I have come to consider them Sedro Greciano. They could be Pean Feen, but I like the first formulation better.
You know what makes a game in an American League park really interesting? Being distracted for the first several innings of it by METSTOCK: 3 Hours of Pizza and Baseball, which is arriving in Manhattan, Thursday, June 18, 7:00 PM. Meet your favorite Skyhorse Mets authors — Stanley Cohen (A Magic Summer), Jon Springer (Mets By The Numbers) and yours truly (Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets) and dig on pizza, beer and shared hatred for the designated hitter rule while we relive the 1969 World Series and wallow in other great Mets moments. Details and directions here.
How's that? You still haven't secured YOUR copy of FAFIF: AIPHOTNYM? Or a copy for a loved one? Don't despair, just get to a Metropolitan Area bookstore or let your fingers do the clicking at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. We wouldn't want your dad and/or grad to go without a copy. Or you! Also, it makes everybody better informed for when they join the discussion at Facebook.
by Jason Fry on 17 June 2009 4:33 am How to keep up with the Mets when I'm away from New York City has been a question all my life. Picking between colleges in Connecticut and Massachusetts, I chose Connecticut because in 1987 that was within radio range of the Mets. Living in Washington, D.C. in the early 1990s, at the very edge of that radio range, I invested in signal amplifiers hawked by quack electronics outfits and spent summer Saturdays in the front seat of my little Honda CRX parked beside the Potomac River, which amplified WFAN's signal sufficiently to get it during the day. Visiting my folks in Maine one summer, I pulled in the FAN's stream every night for a week before realizing we were making toll calls to AOL. Later, I went old school and simply accepted that listening began when the sun went down and the FAN signal rose up out of the hum.
I'm used to this state of affairs, so a while back when Emily and Joshua and I made plans to join friends in Vieques for an extended weekend, I figured I'd be missing two-thirds of Mets-Yankees I. And after Luis Castillo cemented his place in Met infamy by transforming victory into horror, I decided that two days without Mets was exactly what the therapist ordered. Away from the things of Met? Perfect. Take that and a lot of beers and call me on Tuesday.
Vieques, for the uninitiated, is a sparsely settled, gorgeous island off the east coast of Puerto Rico. It's basically jungle hills and beaches plucked out of Corona ads — not exactly the place you'd expect to get a great cellphone signal. But the sprawling guesthouse where we were staying was a hill away from a huge cellphone tower, and so I had five bars of AT&T service, which is about four better than what I get in my apartment in Brooklyn Heights. (Oh, the ironies of the digital age.)
By Saturday evening we had arrived and unpacked and were drinking restorative beers, and despite my post-Castillo vow to give the Mets a bit of space, of course I had to check in on them — and of course I wound up stalking around the pool, Wayne and Howie filling the air as if I were on the Belt Parkway, while Fernando Nieve and Co. proved again the old adage that in baseball carryover is tomorrow's starting pitcher.
Sunday afternoon we were at the beach, and I left the iPhone behind, more out of fear of rain and salt and sand than out of a sense of decent behavior. But we got back at 3:30, and of course I made a beeline for the cellphone and MLB At Bat.
Another one of my many quirks: When I'm turning on the TV late or getting to a Web browser a couple of innings in, I'm interested in the moment in which you see how many runs each team has scored and process these two generally different numbers and their relationship to each other. You react, of course, but it takes a moment to add everything up before you can react. How long is that moment? Which number do you notice first? Does that moment have an emotional arc, or is it too brief? When I called up MLB At Bat around the sixth inning of Sunday's game I gave a kind of strangled cry and rid myself of the iPhone like it had burned me. Yankees 13, Mets 0? Really? (Later, a fellow vacationer who roots for the Yankees and I giggled over having done the same thing that afternoon: Both of us had snuck off for an Internet fix, read the headlines about the unrest in Teheran, and first read about Brian Bruney and Frankie Rodriguez exchanging unpleasantries. What's a potential insurrection in a nuclear-armed theocracy compared to MET AND YANKEE RELIEVERS YAPPING AT EACH OTHER DURING BP???!!!!!)
Tonight once we'd retrieved luggage and secured a cab back from JFK and parried the douchebag cabbie's innocuous question of which route to take (depends how much traffic there is, which we expect you to know), it was time to check in on Mets-Orioles, now a lackluster interleague matchup with a faded strand leading back to ancient glories. (Seriously. Who cares?) Technologically speaking nothing much had changed — the Mets were on the iPhone same as they'd been on Vieques — but it sure felt different. There we were figuring out that Mike Pelfrey hadn't allowed a hit as the eastern reaches of Atlantic Avenue yielded to the more familiar. And soon enough we were back home, sorting through laundry and books read and unread and mail to be similarly catalogued, with the Mets back on the TV, early-evening domestic life rotating around them as they, for a change, took advantage of someone else's gaffes.
Returning from a place you liked and a vacation you needed is always bittersweet — you're happy to get home and there's a certain satisfaction in reassembling the regular world even as you're dreading how easily you'll fall back into the lockstep of the routine you just escaped. And this is an oddly sour season so far, a nasty cocktail of injuries and malaise and questions Mets fans are really tired of asking, with the sometimes-startling chaser of remembering that the team driving us insane is in fact right in the middle of the nascent playoff race despite our certainty that by now they must be 20 games out. But for all that and Luis Castillo too, the Mets were filling the yellow cab and the living room and the New York night, and I found myself very happy that they were there.
Come to METSTOCK: 3 Hours of Pizza and Baseball, this Thursday, June 18, 7:00 PM. Meet the authors of A Magic Summer (Stanley Cohen), Mets By The Numbers (Jon Springer) and Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, talk baseball, watch the Mets beat the Orioles just as they did in '69 with us and have a generally great time. Details here.
Next time you go on vacation, take along 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 16 June 2009 5:22 am Said Ashburn: “Throneberry is the people’s choice and you now why? He typifies the Mets. He’s either great or terrible.” He paused and turned to Throneberry. “But you better not get too good,” he said. “Just drop a pop fly once in a while.”
Said Throneberry: “Aw, I haven’t dropped a pop fly in a week.”
—Leonard Shecter, Once Upon the Polo Grounds, 1970
Perhaps it’s the proliferation of 1962-style plays that made it such a perfect spot to stop along the way in 2009, though it’s not like the spirit of 1962 hasn’t come and found us time and again this year in the form of yips and yikes! that would have made the Original Mets of sainted memory blush. Just that very night, a Met named Emil Brown would pass a Met named Luis Castillo on the basepaths in Washington. Six nights after that, with two outs and the Mets up a run in the ninth inning, there was a pop fly hit to the second baseman and…well, let’s just say a little 1962 has gotten into these Mets and it won’t get out.
Yet you have to stretch like Marv Throneberry for a throw from Felix Mantilla to find it physically. You have to go outside your comfort zone. It’s not at Citi Field, where a text poll of attendees at one game revealed 52% of responding Mets fans thought the Mets used to play in Ebbets Field (which would have been a neat trick seeing as how Ebbets was demolished in 1960). It’s not in the parking lot at Citi Field despite 45 memorable seasons spent on that slab of blessed asphalt. It’s not even in Queens. You have to cross the East River and go looking for it. Better yet, you should be led there by someone who knows how to find it.
The Saturday morning before last, I was in the company of a man named Peter Laskowich, but he could have been Peter Frampton given what he accomplished. He showed me the way. He showed me how we got here, or at least how we started toward where we are.
You should let him do the same for you sometime.
I’ve sung the praises of Peter Laskowich in this space once before. He addressed the New York Baseball Giants Nostalgia Society in March on the subject of Manhattan schist and what on earth (literally) that had to do with playing ball where the Giants did. It was my favorite kind of history: hidden in plain sight. It takes a sharp excavator to dig it up for you when it’s practically right in front of you. That’s Peter’s kind of history, the kind that’s all around you, so obvious that you don’t notice it.
Peter gives baseball-themed history tours of New York. Or is that history-themed tours of New York baseball? Label it as you like, when Peter got in touch to offer me a space on his next walk ‘n’ ride expedition — bring a Metrocard, he said — I shook off my innate aversion to waking up early on Saturday morning and rushed to meet his group at Madison Square Park.
Why Madison Square Park? I won’t tell you why (beyond that it has nothing to do with it being the birthplace of Shake Shack), for that would spoil the fun. Take one of Peter’s tours and find out. What he tells you about how baseball got its start at 26th and Madison will enthrall and amaze you. He could tell it to you in an auditorium, a classroom or a restaurant (which is where he addressed us unrequited NY Giants lovers), but it works so much better when he unveils, in the flesh, what is hidden in plain sight and explains what it means to you, the baseball fan and you, the New Yorker.
We lingered in Madison Square Park. We spent time under and on the edge of Times Square. We sat in the shadow of the Ansonia Hotel. All along the route, Peter related why we were where we were and how New York and baseball helped invent and reinvent each other. When a local C train inconveniently morphed into an express, we received a bonus: we found ourselves in Washington Heights across the street from New York Presbyterian Hospital, site of the first home of the New York Highlanders. It wasn’t on the agenda, but it wasn’t even sickening to hear their story from Peter on this Saturday (if you’re not familiar with the latter-day identity of the Highlanders, Steve Keane will be happy to clue you in).
“We will not approach any stadium,” Peter cautions in previewing his tours. I wasn’t interested in any stadium, at least not any that are active in the five boroughs. I spend plenty of time at one and have little interest in the other. I hoped his warning hadn’t meant, however, that we wouldn’t approach any places where there used to be a ballpark. Not to worry. The reason we had journeyed so far uptown that we found ourselves at 168th St. by the hospital was we had overshot our C train destination of 155th St. and St. Nicholas Avenue. That’s where Peter was taking us.
Will not approach any stadium… Ha! Of course we would, even if took an extra 13 blocks to hoof it, even if there was to be no game on our side of the Harlem River. We were headed to Coogan’s Bluff.
We would be standing above the Polo Grounds. We weren’t going to overlook it.
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t made a pilgrimage like this before. Nine years earlier, my wife and I had some vacation time and we used it to kick around the Metropolitan Area. “You know what I always wanted to do?” I asked. Next thing she knew, we were on an uptown D train, hopping off at 155th and Eighth and looking for a plaque, which we found affixed to a Polo Grounds tower two blocks up. It marked the approximate spot where home plate was embedded for the better part of seven decades. I stood more or less where Bobby Thomson stood. And Mel Ott. And Monte Irvin. Where Carl Hubbell threw screwballs past American League All-Stars. I was there where New York National League baseball held forth. A great day in Harlem, indeed.
Two Saturdays ago, Peter’s tour, came at it from a different angle, literally. Walked down St. Nicholas. To our immediate left was Highbridge Park. There was a heap of that schist I learned about three months earlier. And there was the top of a staircase. Not just any staircase. The John T. Brush Stairway, named for the man who owned the Giants. We didn’t climb down. We didn’t get as close as I would have liked, but I could see the distinguishing characteristic, or what remained of it from 1913, two years after the final version of the Polo Grounds was reopened as Brush Stadium (which nobody ever called it).
THE JOHN T. BRUSH
STAIRWAY
PRESENTED
BY THE
NEW YORK
GIANTS
I’d been reading about this staircase since that summer day in 2000 when we traveled to 155th and Eighth. In one of those must-be-kismet moments, Vic Ziegel wrote in the Daily News that very morning about how the staircase was all that was left of the Polo Grounds. It was the only living remnant from where baseball was headquartered in this city and in this country when you get right down to it. Wrote Ziegel in the column published August 10, 2000:
A chain fence discourages anybody from walking the 78 steps from Edgecombe to the road that runs into the Harlem River Drive. Many of the steps are cracked. There are gaping holes on the landings. Three street lamps, from that long-ago time, are very close to stumps. The weeds are winning.
Nine years later, it’s still chained off, but, more importantly, it’s still there. An effort is ongoing to restore it and preserve it (read about that here), which is a noble idea and cause if the money’s available. But even in its less than desirable state it’s there. Almost a century later, that tiny piece of the Polo Grounds hangs on.
That’s not even what we came to see. Peter guided us around the park, past Edgecombe and across to the extension of the Harlem River Drive (or Speedway, as it was known in John McGraw’s day). We leaned against the barricade that forms a bike lane. This was Coogan’s Bluff. Down below, Coogan’s Hollow: the Polo Grounds, where the Giants roamed; where the Mets took their first steps, each of them as unsteady as those clinging to life on the Brush Stairway.
Our learned tour guide added to our understanding of the geography, the geology and the genealogy of New York baseball. Across the river, we could see both Yankee Stadiums, the one they just built and the one they haven’t gotten around to tearing down. You are reminded just how close the first one sat to the Polo Grounds, how they could have shaken hands across the Harlem (or perhaps given each other the finger). Over my right shoulder was a garage that offered parking for Yankees games, a short Macombs Dam Bridge walk away. We were uncomfortably close to the Bronx in that regard, but make no mistake: we were in Manhattan. We were where New York National League baseball was rooted. The Giants moved into the neighborhood in 1889 and stayed through 1957. There, right down there, below where we stood. If you wanted to see New York (N.L.), this is where you came. Less than five years later, on Friday the Thirteenth in April 1962, you were in luck once again. New York (N.L.) was back.
“It had been five years since a baseball was hit in anger at the Polo Grounds when the Mets got there,” longtime Post reporter Leonard Shecter recalled lovingly in Once Upon the Polo Grounds, written in the aftermath of 1969. “It was old and crumbling. yet there was a style to the old place, and a feeling. This feeling was a mixture of joy and despair, just the ingredients that made up the new team that had come to give the Polo Grounds its brief respite from inevitable doom. From the very first day the Mets got there till they left it forever after two seasons, that was the emotional mixture and the Polo Grounds, joy and despair.”
Mets…joy…despair…sound familiar? It started at the Polo Grounds. Nowhere else. You walk around and stand on Coogan’s Bluff and that fact, more so than the elevation, takes your breath away.
As I marveled to myself that right down there was where the Giants lived and the Mets were born, I’m sure I was still listening to Peter, but I don’t know that I was absorbing as much as I had previously when he was filling us in on the Boston Post Road; and the glue factory near Madison Square; and the 71 clubs in Brooklyn that together turned a gentlemen’s pursuit into the people’s game; and the Longacre Theatre; and Arnold Rothstein; and all that schist. The Giants part is always my favorite part of any New York baseball history talk, but late in this three-hour tour I was looking more than I was listening. Looking and marveling. Looking and comprehending. Looking and trying to grasp that this is where it all happened…the Giants…the Mets…baseball with a curly NY on the cap, the way we love it, the way I love it. It wasn’t just from books and scratchy film clips. It was real and it was spectacular. It was the Polo Grounds.
It was here.
Was.
The Mets were never going to stay in Upper Manhattan. They were bound for Queens from the moment they were theorized. The Polo Grounds was contingency housing. Yankee Stadium wouldn’t have them. Ebbets Field had stopped existing. The Polo Grounds graciously and gamely endured for a couple of extra years so it could serve as delivery room to the Mets: the 40-120 Mets and the 51-11 Mets who came on their heels, — the Mets who couldn’t play this game here but tried anyway. In 1962 and 1963, Peter was a kid who watched the Mets on TV and listened to the Mets on the radio. All their foibles, fables, follies and futility is the stuff of public record, but Peter, a blue and orange loyalist, swears to this day, “No other team in my experience comes close to the Polo Grounds Mets for sheer guts. Those early Mets had heart. With last year’s talent the Polo Grounds Mets would’ve won 140.”
I believe Peter. A man who brings you to the doorstep of Coogan’s Bluff can’t help but tell you the truth.
When he finished conducting his three-hour tour, our group gave Peter a hearty ovation. We turned away from the Polo Grounds, crossed the Harlem River Drive extension, then Edgecombe and approached the entrance to the C on St. Nicholas.
“Down there,” Peter pointed south. “That’s where Willie Mays played stickball. Not this block, but a few blocks south.”
Geez! What a tour!
Peter Laskowich conducts walking tours of New York regularly. His next baseball trip is scheduled for Sunday morning, June 28 and, as indicated above, is heavily recommended. To contact him, check here.
In the meantime, take a trip back in time without ever leaving your seat by joining us for METSTOCK: 3 Hours of Pizza and Baseball, coming to Manhattan on Thursday, June 18, 7:00 PM. Meet the authors of A Magic Summer (Stanley Cohen), Mets By The Numbers (Jon Springer) and Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets (your blogger right here), talk baseball with us, watch the Mets beat the Orioles just as they did in ’69 with us and have a generally great time. Details here.
And for you hopelessly sedentary types, sit and 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. For a serene West Coast take on the book, check out the blog Serenity, now.
by Greg Prince on 14 June 2009 11:35 pm The novice baseball fan might infer that a game lost by 15 runs is far worse than a game lost by one. I doubt there's a Mets fan after this weekend who wouldn't set the neophyte straight.
Sunday's blowout shutout in the wrong direction was, of course, a total embarrassment, but it was a standard whaddayagonnado? total embarrassment. Every team tastes a little of that medicine once, maybe twice a year. When 15-0 scores start being inflicted on you with regularity, then it becomes an issue. When it's novel enough so that your announcers are dipping into their mental archives for the time we lost 26-7 or the time Desi Relaford showed a pretty good fastball, it's less gargantuan of a biggie than it would appear at first glance.
That it happened against the Yankees made it less pleasant (if you were at Yankee Stadium III, you have my sympathies), but the unpleasantness meter has a ways to go before again approaching TILT! so soon after the unspeakable farce of Friday night. Even the Yankees looked bored after the fourth inning. That it happened not with Nelson Figueroa on the mound but with Johan Santana, well, that's certainly cause for concern. Johan swears he's fine. We have no choice but to believe him, just as we have no choice but to believe in him. It's been a little while since Johan was solving global crises in between opposing hitters, but he's Johan. He's entitled to a few less than Santanarrific starts, such as those he's been compiling since San Francisco, and perhaps one that's a total Brett Hinchliffe. If you can't have faith in Johan for the long term, you can't have faith in anything.
That it happened less than 48 hours after Friday night is what really gnaws here, because had Luis Castillo — still a Met, incidentally — caught that popup and (though you never assume anything) Fernando Nieve & Co. had still done their thing successfully Saturday, we could look at a hollow, punchless, gutless 15-0 loss not as an example of the Mets letting down, surrendering and stressing us about how they'll play the rest of this tough month, but as a sour note that ended an otherwise gratifying two-out-of-three trip to the Bronx. And had a couple of hits or breaks gone their way against Philadelphia during the week…word is ifs, buts, candies and nuts make great Flag Day gifts.
The only Met who showed a hint of fight Sunday, you might have heard, was Frankie Rodriguez, who told Looney Skip Bruney to stuff your sorries in a sack, mister after Bruney reportedly tried to apologize to K-Rod for mouthing off about…oh, whatever. It's Mets For Me covers the kerfuffle with its usual Amazin' aplomb.
My rule on this sort of thing is simple: the Met's point of view is the correct one. For example, if it were a Met complaining about Joba Chamberlain's idiotic histrionics, the Met would be correct. Because it is a Yankee whining that an all-time great like Frankie is expressing unbridled joy at helping his teammates win a game, the Met is right to take offense. Frankie Rodriguez didn't pitch in the series finale and he gets my vote for Met of the game.
Not that the Mets who did play provided anybody with anything resembling competition.
MUCH better Flag Day game recalled here, courtesy of the always fun Centerfield Maz.
METSTOCK: 3 Hours of Pizza and Baseball is coming to Manhattan on Thursday, June 18, 7:00 PM. Meet the authors of A Magic Summer, Mets By The Numbers and Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, talk baseball with us, watch the Mets beat the Orioles just as they did in '69 with us and have a generally great time. Details here.
Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.
by Greg Prince on 14 June 2009 2:21 am Ya gotta love ballplayers. They put the brutal loss behind them, they say. They show up at the park, to a man they insist they don't mention among themselves the devastating events of the night before, they drown out their bad memories by turning up the clubhouse music and they go get 'em.
Congratulations, Mets. You forgot you lost on Friday, or so you claim, and you won Saturday with no sense of drama other than that provided by the backdrop of having lost horribly Friday. We got a start that would have delighted us had it come from John Maine; because it came from heretofore unknown quantity Fernando Nieve, we can be ecstatic from it. Given the tenor of what enshrouded the Mets from Friday, I think we can catalogue Nieve's 6-2/3 innings as the best, most crucial start we've seen since Johan in Game 161 last September. It was definitely an effort that won't keep us all awake and drinking later tonight.
Yet, at the risk of labeling them liars, I don't believe the Mets had total amnesia about Friday. Nor should they have. They should carry the way that game ended with them into Sunday's game, into Tuesday's game and for the rest of the season. The way they played Saturday indicates to me Friday weighed on them, which is good news. Something can weigh on you without necessarily crushing you.
Take our entrenched second baseman Luis Castillo, who apparently will be a Met clear to the final weekend of 2011 no matter what he does in the field or when he does it. His recent glovework is the most noteworthy aspect of his recent repertoire, but I'm thinking of Luis at the bat for the moment, specifically what he does once he puts the ball in play. I don't think Luis dogs it as a rule. I don't think any of the Mets dogs it as a rule. But every time Castillo hit something Saturday, he consistently busted it out of the box in a way I hadn't seen all year. It paid off in terms of a second base hit late in the game when Robinson Cano took his time on Luis's grounder and Castillo beat the throw to the bag by a half-step.
Was that single manufactured because Luis Castillo woke up Saturday with total amnesia about Friday or because he thought about the previous game a lot and wanted to atone?
The entire team's approach to baseball from first pitch to last seemed much improved, as if the Mets were the kid who was scolded by a parent for naughty behavior and then threatened with TV or computer time being taken away. “No, no, I'll be good! I'll hustle!” And off they went, darting from home to first and appearing interested for nine full innings. Still saw a little too much one-handed magic with the gloves, but Rome wasn't rebuilt in a day.
You wouldn't want your team standing and staring into space thinking “I can't believe he didn't catch it…” while their next game is in progress. You do appreciate that they might know more about the mindset it takes to play professional baseball than you do, including the importance they attach to having a short memory. But I don't want them forgetting Friday, and I don't think they did Saturday. My concern is they don't develop a brand new case of amnesia for Sunday, one in which they collectively decide everything is fine, nothing was ever wrong, let's settle in to our usual relaxed pace.
Remember Friday. Remember Castillo. We the fans will. You the players should, too. Short memories are fine, but selective amnesia can be dangerous.
We the fans will always have long memories, of course. That's our blessing and our curse — mostly our blessing. If we didn't care, we wouldn't care, y'know? Unless you were just introduced to baseball Friday night in the bottom of the ninth inning, there'd be no frame of reference to explain the immense, intense shock that set in when Luis Castillo didn't do what second basemen have been doing since Bid McPhee came up to the Cincinnati Red Stockings in 1882. If you hadn't been a Mets fan long enough to understand what it means to lose to the Yankees anytime but particularly with a one-run lead and 26 outs penciled into the books, you could dismiss Friday night as a novelty and flip over to Bill Maher on HBO.
That's not why we're fans, I don't think. Some who follow baseball seem to pride themselves more on adherence to isolated ideals or leading-indicator statistics than raw emotion and blunt passion. Most of us live somewhere in the middle, but some nights cry mostly for emotion, passion and a long memory. As long as you don't make good on your threats of violence to yourself or Luis Castillo, those are perfectly valid landing spots on those kinds of nights. Some moments are absolutely more immense and intense than can be plotted on a graph. Sometimes you gotta ask not “who's going to play second base let alone replace his on-base percentage if he's released?” but declare, “fuck it, get him out of here, fix this goddamn team.”
There's always the next day to recalibrate. There's always the next day for the Mets fan who's cheered every second baseman since Charlie Neal to wander back into his allegiance after swearing to swear it off. There's always the next day to not completely rue every single Luis Castillo sighting you're going to experience for the next 2½ years but to take a deep breath and say, all right Luis, get on and maybe Cora can move you over.
It may not satisfy a dark night's bloodlust, but next days are relentless, so you've to be prepared for every contingency, including that the Mets won't release the guy you don't really want to look at anymore for what should be considered the worst sin of them all: not not using two hands; not not throwing to the right base; but not beating the Yankees.
We don't root for the Mets to go 6-156, but if the Mets could only win six games out of 162, which six would you choose? Accomplished college football coaches have been shown the university door because they lose the rivalry game once too often. Auburn boosters, for example, have been known to communicate their priorities as such: we don't care what else you do, but beat Alabama. SEC, Big Ten, Pac-10…baseball ain't college football, but boy wouldn't it feel good to see a blue and orange penalty flag thrown for allowing the Yankees to encroach on our sure thing of a win?
However high they fly or low they skulk in the American League standings, the Yankees will always be the Yankees to us in terms of the one team to whom we do not want to lose, ever. We just watched three searing battles with our divisional archrivals and, from a comparative fan standpoint, it was a tea party. I've already forgotten how much I hate the fucking Phillies. They're a warmup act in that respect. We could play the '69 Cubs, the '85 Cardinals, the '99 Braves and the last three years worth of Philadelphians as prelude to a Subway Series and I'd forget everybody from Leo Durocher to Shane Victorino. It may not be the formula for securing a pennant, but for six games per season, who gives a fuck? Beat the Yankees…especially when up by a run with two outs and a pop fly is wafting softly into a mitt.
An encouraging development, at least as gleaned via television, is the Yankee Stadium aura & mystique bit may officially deader than Brian Bruney's sense of discretion. Remember how every time the Mets would go to Yankee Stadium II (1976-2008) and whichever of our players was new would be asked about what a thrill it must be to play on the (approximate) site where so many greats and so much history, blah, blah, blah? And our guys always went along with the script of what a privilege this was. I always thought that put us two runs in the hole before a pitch was fired in anger. But YS II is vacant and YS III is just another retro park that can't sell its best seats.
Yesterday I heard Mike Pelfrey interviewed about how great and exciting it must be to come to Yankee Stadium.
Oh yeah, he said, the clubhouse is really nice.
BAM!
And Nieve, answering questions about how well his mystery date went, was queried as to whether he was even more nervous considering it was the Yankees he'd be facing.
No, he said.
Just no.
DOUBLE BAM!
Pelf, like my wife, is from Wichita, and she suggested Mike was “just being a Kansan” about it (when asked how she liked Star Wars, Stephanie's grandmother responded, “It sure was loud”). But Fernando the Third — good for you. Don't let the media revive the dying “we're in such awe” narrative. You can use “it's important we beat the Yankees because we're the Mets” or just keep that in mind as you head to the mound. But no visits to monuments, nothing about ghosts, ixnay on all that tired “they're just such a great team” logorrhea.
And, it can't be stressed enough no matter what happened in the most recent game played, always use two hands.
METSTOCK: 3 Hours of Pizza and Baseball is coming to Manhattan on Thursday, June 18, 7:00 PM. Meet the authors of A Magic Summer, Mets By The Numbers and Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, talk baseball with us, watch the Mets beat the Orioles just as they did in '69 with us and have a generally great time. Details here.
Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.
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