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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 4 October 2023 10:35 pm For all you completists in the crowd, it’s our privilege to report a final final score: Mets 1 Marlins 0 in eight rain-shortened innings last Thursday, ensuring the Mets were 75-87 in 2023, rather than whatever it appeared they were when the tarp went on; no resumption was attempted; and nobody from MLB told us for absolute certain what the hell was supposed to happen vis-à-vis the W-L-T columns of the standings. Hopefully, Buck Showalter has a lucrative bonus clause that kicks in as a result of his having managed this extra win whose conclusion was delayed by a mere 132 hours.
Also, let us not overlook that this was an additional loss pinned on the Marlins the morning after they dropped Game One of their Wild Card Series versus the Phillies, and the morning before they were about to be blown out of Game Two in that best-of-three, ending their postseason in two flops of a fish’s tail. Hey, if they wanna swing by Citi Field to take care of that ninth inning now that we have nice weather and they have nothing else to do…nah, they probably don’t. But they’ll always have the memory of taking a lead that no longer exists, not to mention the hits and runs that have been wiped away by a slowly but surely applied rule that, truthfully, is kind of stupid. But so were all alternatives.
So we lost our last game of 2023, on Sunday, but we came away victorious with our final result, on Wednesday. Nothing like going into winter on a quasi-winning streak of one with an asterisk.
Plus a new episode of a new episode of National League Town!
by Greg Prince on 3 October 2023 10:50 am In a few weeks, David Stearns, Billy Eppler and perhaps Steve Cohen will gather in the Shannon Forde Press Conference Room at Citi Field to introduce the 25th manager in the history of the New York Mets, a day to which I look forward, ’cause ya gotta have a manager. We had a manager until Sunday — a four-time Manager of the Year whose most recent year wasn’t gonna win any awards — but a VACANCY sign blinks in that office at present. It’s a big enough deal when you bring in a manager or a general manager or a president of baseball operations that you turn on the lights in Shannon’s room or, if necessary, ask the credentialed media to log in over Zoom, and meet the new essential person tasked with helping make the Mets a winner.
The Mets should be as forthcoming and transparent as possible with the press. They should place their leadership front and center to share their philosophies and respond with clarity to all reasonable inquiries. But, in terms of making the kind of introduction they made on Monday or the one they will make pretty soon, they really have to stop.
You got your president of baseball operations.
You’ll have your manager.
You’re apparently satisfied with your general manager.
The owner of the team seems to be enjoying his long-term investment and doesn’t figure to be going anywhere.
Great! To everybody in those roles, please be really good at what you do and make the Mets as great as they can be and don’t make us wish any of you away. If you are that good at your assignments, don’t decide to move on for a while. Don’t necessitate more introductory press conferences.
We’ve seen enough of them.
It was right around six years ago we met a new manager, five years ago we met a new general manager. Four years ago we met another new manager…and one right after him, before a single game had been managed. Three years ago we met the new owner (who we greeted as a liberator). The new owner reintroduced us to the previous general manager who’d be serving for a spell in some loftier capacity (I always enjoyed seeing him, though I was surprised he was suddenly back on our scene). The old/new executive introduced us to a new general manager…which led to an interim general manager pretty quickly once the new general manager did what again? Something like what one of the recent previous managers did, but we didn’t find out about that manager doing what he did until he was gone from here. Anyway, the interim general manager proved very interim, and a new full-time general manager was introduced, then another manager, one with lots of experience and lots of gravitas, embodying lots of reason to think we wouldn’t be needing a new manager for years to come.
Two, exactly.
So we’ll get the new manager to replace Buck Showalter, who replaced Luis Rojas, who replaced Carlos Beltran (technically), who replaced Mickey Callaway, who replaced Terry Collins (whose seven years in the dugout made him a veritable Met FDR longevitywise) when the Metless postseason is over. He’ll put on a cap, maybe a jersey or perhaps a windbreaker and be ready to take charge as all the others were. The new manager will report to Billy Eppler, who replaced Zack Scott, who replaced Jared Porter, who replaced Brodie Van Wagenen, who replaced an ad hoc GM group that took over for Sandy Alderson when Sandy Alderson’s health wasn’t its best, though we were happy to learn Sandy was doing well enough a couple of years later when Steve Cohen replaced the Wilpons altogether and Alderson came in to temporarily more or less run the show as president of the Mets, which isn’t the same as president of baseball operations, which is what Milwaukee wunderkind David Stearns is here to be, the first ever, we’ve been told, to fill that particular position atop the Mets hierarchy or decision tree or whatever term of art is in vogue these days.
It’s hard not to sound cynical, a symptom of suffering from OIPCO Syndrome (that’s Offseason Introductory Press Conference Overload — ask your physician if PresOp is right for you). Perhaps if we weren’t on our umpteenth new era since the 2017 season ended, I’d be a little more relentlessly upbeat about the arrival of Stearns in Flushing, a presidential homecoming if ever there was one. I’m pretty upbeat as is. You don’t think I lapped up every answer Stearns gave about growing up a Mets fan? He had me at reminiscing how he loved listening to Gary Cohen, Bob Murphy and Ed Coleman, in that order.
Listing Gary Cohen first was shocking to anybody who always, always, always puts Murph first, but by the portion of the 1990s that young David had locked in on being a Mets fan, it was Gary who was on the radio every game, with Bob pulling back a little more every year. And Ed Coleman? Who thinks to remember that Ed Coleman did semi-regular play-by-play over WFAN? That’s bona fide fandom talking.
Which was great. The references to sneaking into Shea and interning for the Cyclones were great. The excitement about getting to raise his kids as Mets fans after their allegiance was held hostage in Wisconsin was great. The ease in the press conference spotlight was great, as if being in Queens is second-nature to him, not just another chance to trot out familiar execuspeak about building an organization that will make us all proud or whatever else he said, because, honestly, after so many of these types of press conferences, I’ve already forgotten the nonanecdotal stuff, because just go ahead and do it, David. Build this organization. Collaborate collegially with resources. Whatever. When you have a spare minute, tell Steve Gelbs how you really felt the day you learned Todd Zeile would be replacing John Olerud, and all of us (Zeile included) will nod and chuckle.
But seriously. Just be great at this. Get a great manager who will manage great for more than one year, or at all for more than two years. The owner can erect his casino, and the GM can work the phones, and the Manager to be Named Soon can communicate/motivate/make correct calls to the bullpen, and you can be the person who brought your childhood team to new and steady heights, a president whose transformative tenure can outlast that of even Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s.
Mostly, I’m sick of offseason introductory press conferences, save for the one officially announcing Shohei Ohtani’s record-breaking pact or any applicable get-together of that nature. Otherwise, enough meet and greet, enough dog and pony. Go, David. Sneak us into the promised land.
by Greg Prince on 2 October 2023 9:32 am Everybody had a hard year
Everybody had a good time
Everybody had a (M)et dream
Everybody saw the sunshine
—Lennon and McCartney, more or less
When I left for Citi Field early Sunday afternoon, Buck Showalter was the manager of the New York Mets. Before I arrived at Citi Field a little later Sunday afternoon, Buck Showalter let it be known that he would soon no longer be manager of the New York Mets. As I was leaving Citi Field as Sunday afternoon was morphing into Sunday evening and the National League baseball season in New York was officially over, there seemed to be a tad of confusion as to who exactly decided Buck Showalter wouldn’t any longer be the manager of the New York Mets — did Buck proactively decide to step aside, or was it sternly suggested to the reigning National League Manager of the Year that he should move along to create space for the club’s incoming grand operational poobah’s selection machinations?
Me, I was just trying to go to a ballgame, Closing Day, my twenty-eighth seasonal au revoir in a row (not including 2020), my thirtieth overall. The suddenness and the murkiness of the Buck Showalter exit kind of overshadowed the farewell to the season, as did that lingering ND from Thursday night. It was three days since the Mets and Marlins had their rainy game suspended, the one the Mets led, 1-0, at the end of eight, only to have the Marlins pull in front, 2-1, before the top of the ninth, let alone the bottom of the ninth, could be completed. When I wasn’t joining in the standing ovation for Buck during a sweetly choreographed lineup card exchange while THANK YOU, BUCK beamed from the EnormoVision screen — “there goes Vince Lombardi, having coached his last game for Washington” was the thought that popped into my head as the imminently erstwhile skipper saluted his players who were saluting him — I was continually checking my phone for definitive word of any ruling from MLB as to whether I had witnessed a win, lose or draw versus Miami the other night. With us finishing out the end of our string, and the Marlins being all but set for the postseason, I concluded I’d be comfortable having it called however it would be called. What I really wanted was for it to be called. The string should not be put into the books with a frayed end.
 Sunday in New York like it oughta be, managerial dismissal, unresolved record and blowout loss notwithstanding. So Buck’s drama had some of my attention, as did some combination of the Diamondbacks, the Marlins and Rob Manfred’s minions (the out-of-town scoreboard made clear there was zero reason the proposed delicious four-out scenario would unfold on Monday), the combination of which served to distract me somewhat from the annual communing with finality I relish on Closing Day. That’s too bad, in that we had a perfect shirtsleeve Bobby Darin “Sunday in New York” First of October to sit in the ol’ ballpark one more time in 2023, a reminder that baseball played under sunny skies on a dry field is preferable to all alternatives.
Little was special about the season that was coming to its merciful end on Sunday, and little turned out special about Buck Showalter’s final game as Mets manager, Jose Butto’s six solid innings and Tim Locastro’s no-doubter home run notwithstanding. Yet I looked forward to this Closing Day in particular because of what it represented personally vis-à-vis how the baseball year began, and that element of Game 162/Decision 161 delivered.
Three days before Opening Day, my wife went into the hospital for what I chose to identify in conversation and correspondence as “a medical procedure,” because I didn’t choose to use the word for what the procedure was intended to address. Let’s just say she was diagnosed with that thing Major League Baseball urges everybody to Stand Up To during the World Series. Stephanie stood up to it courageously, and modern medicine (along with health insurance) did the rest. What she had to be operated on for was a version of that thing, a friend who is a researcher in the field told me, that is among the most treatable. You never want to get any form of it, he added, but if you have to get some form of it, this is the one to get.
Sure enough, the procedure played out as doctors described in advance, and the recovery proceeded without incident, which is easy for me to say, as I wasn’t the one recovering. The biggest post-op moment — and, as far as I’m concerned, the biggest victory of 2023 — came the morning of what was supposed to be the Home Opener, the one that got rained out because they thought it was going to rain, but it didn’t. The phrase we heard that day, ten days after surgery, was, “Your labs were better than your biopsy.” It carried the power of a thousand Outta Heres.
Followups have followed, and all has flowed smoothly against the backdrop of the first half becoming the second half and the Mets going nowhere across six months, yet I eagerly anticipated our going to the last Sunday of the year together. I always do, but this time more so and differently. It would have been nice had the Mets put together something more closely resembling a winning effort en route to their 9-1 loss to the playoff-bound Phillies. It would have been nice to have left the park not subject to bulletins from what has been institutionalized as the franchise’s biennial managerial search. It would have been nice to have known for certain if the Mets’ final record is 74-87, 75-87 or 74-88. But mostly it was nice sitting in Section 328 for two-and-a-half hours with who I was sitting with, occasionally clapping, occasionally groaning, constantly aware that in ways that elude the box score, it doesn’t get any better than this.
by Jason Fry on 1 October 2023 12:04 am It finally didn’t rain and the Mets finally got to play, and so for your recapper’s final go-round of the season our heroes presented one game that turned into a nail-biter, one Calvinball farce that was pretty entertaining for all its sloppy meaninglessness, a doubleheader sweep that didn’t matter, a depressing thought, and a happy memory for winter.
Which is a lot for an afternoon and evening!
First the nail-biter. It started out with Tylor Megill looking effective against a vaguely serious lineup of playoff-bound Phillies, showing off a forkball he learned from Kodai Senga and dubbed “the American Spork,” cheerfully deriding it as an off-brand Ghost Fork. The new pitch’s effectiveness seemed to vary, as did Megill’s early on, but he persevered and wound up capping a run of pretty good pitching with his ninth victory of the year, which is probably more than you figured he had.
Megill, David Peterson, Joey Lucchesi and Jose Butto have pitched pretty well as members of the Then Again, Maybe We Won’t Mets, sparking endless debates about whether garbage time is any different in an era of multiple wild-card teams and smaller September rosters. I don’t know the answer to that one and neither do you and neither do most front offices — we’re all waiting for another generation’s worth of data. But I do know that those pitchers’ collective competence has gone from surprising to heartening, which isn’t a bad thing to take into winter no matter how much of a mental discount you affix to it.
The game nearly got out of hand once Megill exited, with Adam Ottavino having another shaky outing as closer du jour — the Phillies were poised to tie it but Jake Cave had a strangely tentative at-bat, looking at Ottavino’s only perfectly executed pitch of the inning for a called strike three with a runner on third and one out. Ottavino then got the light-hitting Cristian Pache and the Mets had escaped.
Escaped into the nightcap, which was madness — a fusillade of homers and hit batsmen and other lampshade-on-the-headery. No one got particularly exercised about the HBPs, which was a relief but not particularly a surprise, as both teams seemed to be in a bit of a Let’s Not Play Two fog with the exception of Francisco Alvarez, who sent two homers to nearly the same spot — the facing of the second deck a very long way away. Which led to … nope, I’m saving that one.
In the middle of the game Steve Gelbs came up to the booth for a report grappling with velocity and pitcher injuries, which was diligently researched and well-intended even if I didn’t think it particularly broke any new ground. (Honestly, read Jeff Passan’s The Arm, likely to remain The Book on this subject for quite some time.) The best thing that came from Gelbs’ endeavors (which I really did like, lest you think I’m damning with faint praise) was that he got Ron Darling talking about how he would have been a different young pitcher in an era where everybody from teams and front offices to agents and potential draftees are chasing velocity — Darling talking pitching in general and his own missteps and regrets specifically is always worth a listen.
Listening to the booth hash things out, though, I had a depressing thought, one I kept waiting to see if one of the SNY principals would echo. (OK, the PIX principals at that point, but never mind.) My thought was that there’s no solution to the vicious circle of velocity/lack of control/injuries because baseball already has a ruthless one that works perfectly well: When a pitcher breaks, you just get another one.
Think of the parade of hard-throwing right-handed relievers who’ve trudged up and down the Citi Field mound in recent years, from Jacob Rhame and Jamie Callahan to Drew Smith and Phil Bickford — who, as if on cue, hit a Phillie during the earnest conversation about velocity and the ability to pitch. All those guys are in The Holy Books but in my brain they’re a blur of radar guns and never finding reliable secondary pitches and getting DFA’ed, because they’re all essentially the same guy.
And this ruthless strategy isn’t anything new. Decades ago, when young pitchers came down with a “sore arm,” the lucky ones turned into junkballers and the unlucky ones turned into truck drivers. Tommy John surgery has essentially let baseball double the pool: Now you can stick your broken pitcher on a shelf for a year and try him again, or let someone else take him home. Combine that with more international talent than in previous generations, with Asia now supplying a new influx, and you’ve got an effectively endless supply of interchangeable, disposable arms. And if you’ve got that, what’s the incentive for the people who control how those arms are used to do anything differently?
Maybe that point was a little too Marxist for SNY, or a little too depressing. Certainly it’s too depressing for me to end with, which is why I’m going back to the memory I hope will sustain me through the winter.
I love the way Francisco Alvarez devours baseball whether he’s got a bat in his hands or is encased in the tools of ignorance — he approaches the game like it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet and he was just delivered from a month on a bamboo raft in the Pacific. But my favorite sight of all is the Alvarez home-run trot. Alvarez has given us epic bat flips and gun-flexing and million-watt celebrations, but what really makes me laugh is the way he picks up his knees when rounding the bases, like one of those carefully coiffed and trained show ponies.
The season’s ending with three meaningless games against a team headed for the brighter lights. (With, perhaps, a farcical 15-minute coda that no one wants.) It’s not what any of us had in mind. But the first two of those games had their pleasures, and I can already guarantee you when I look out through blowing snow I’m going to be thinking of Alvarez high-stepping along between second and third, beaming and gesticulating like a leading man playing to the back of the house, and I’ll sigh and think about how happy it made me the last time I saw it and how eager I am for the next time to come around.
by Greg Prince on 29 September 2023 4:24 am I’ve never felt more like Jack Buck after returning home from a ballgame, for “I don’t believe that I don’t know what I just saw!”
Did I see the Mets play the Marlins? Pretty sure I did. That was important to me, as, entering Thursday, I had not seen the Mets play the Marlins in person yet in 2023, and I’ve seen the Mets play the Marlins in person at least once (usually too much) in every non-pandemic season since 1997. I can confidently write “Miami” in The Log after having personally observed them in action versus the Mets.
Did I see the Mets beat the Marlins? I don’t think I did. True, the Mets led the Marlins, 1-0, at the end of the eighth, the last completed inning of the evening before a downpour made the field unplayable during the top of the ninth. With all those qualifiers, and knowing what we know about an official game, it kind of reads like a Mets win. But I was there, watching through the press box window, and I’d have to swear on a stack of media guides that I did not witness a winning effort on the part of the home team. For a few minutes, I thought it might be. I thought it might be rued in Marlin lore as The Rafael Ortega Game once the little-used outfielder, subbing for Brandon Nimmo once Nimmo left with an injury, drove in, after seven-and-a-half scoreless innings, the game’s only run. What lovely reprisal for not only [your choice of crime inflicted upon Metsdom by the Teal Menace], but Jesus Luzardo’s ten strikeouts across seven-and-a-third innings.
 The Citi Field tarp is perpetrating a coverup, preventing us from finding out whether the Mets won, lost, tied or even played Thursday night. Did I see the Marlins beat the Mets? We were likely getting close to that eventuality, what with the Marlins usurping that thin 1-0 lead of the Mets and transforming it into a 2-1 edge of their own in the top of the ninth off noted closers Grant Hartwig and Anthony Kay. Hey, it’s only a game with an impact on the entire postseason picture. Might as well try whoever you have out in the pen to finish off a contender. Ah, what’s a closer but a label? Neither Hartwig (who did put up a zero in the eighth) nor Kay lived up to the example set by David Peterson, who not only shut out the Marlins for seven innings (with 8 Ks and a touch of help from a six-minute two-team video review challenge that correctly removed a Marlin run from the scoreboard), but has never given up a run the three times I’ve attended starts of his: 19 IP, 0 R. How am I not on Peterson’s pass list? Reed Garrett became the third pitcher of the ninth just in time to give up a hit and then be overtaken by a tarp that was about as welcome in the ninth inning as a skunk at a picnic…or the Marlins anywhere.
Did I see the Mets-Marlins game suspended? Not until after I bolted the hermetically sealed comfort of the press box to take on the rain, the rails and the ride home. Good call, I have to say. When I exited Citi Field, the rain delay was about 50 minutes old. When I walked into my living room and flipped on SNY, the delay was well past the two-hour mark, and an impromptu Amazin’ Finishes marathon was in progress, punctuated by live shots of the tarp sitting on the infield, nudged off the infield, and returned to the infield — with Skip Schumaker registering his displeasure with Mother Nature’s timing and nerve. Altogether, it took three hours and seventeen minutes of steady precipitation for the powers that be to decide no more baseball would be attempted in Flushing this early Friday morning. What could have been The Rafael Ortega Game devolved into that night we kind of inconvenienced the Marlins.
Did anybody see or hear anything definitively conclusive about concluding the Mets-Marlins game? MLB, in whose hands this rests, basically replaced that batter in its logo with a shrug emoji. Late-breaking consensus, however, has formed around the Marlins having to fly back to New York from Pittsburgh to finish the game Monday if necessary to determine Wild Card clinching…or maybe just in general. Baseball likes its games completed, though if Miami already has a playoff spot in the bag (they’ve got a half-game lead on the Cubs plus a tiebreaker), one isn’t sure why the hell they’d wing their way to Gotham to secure what I hate to call a meaningless win, because we see meaning in everything in baseball, but c’mon. If there’s no berth and no seeding at stake, what lures the Marlins for an inning-and-a-third rendezvous with density?
Yet if the game isn’t over — and it’s not — and they don’t pick it up, what exactly happened Thursday night?
The ol’ “in the event of rain, the score reverts back to the last complete inning” rule that would effectively erase the two runs Hartwig and Kay gave up doesn’t exist any longer, so there’s no slipping this one into the win column for the Mets on a technicality, but you really can’t say the visitors have prevailed if the home team isn’t granted last licks.
I’d get a kick out saying I saw the first Mets tie in 42 years, but it wasn’t tied when the tarp came out to halt play.
The Marlins could forfeit on the grounds that by Monday, if they’ve clinched, they’ll have better things to do, like prepare for the playoffs ASAP, but Schumaker doesn’t appear to be of a mind to give the Mets anything other than another piece of his mind.
The game could magically disappear from the team’s respective won-lost records, sort of a virtual tie, with all player stats standings, but what’s the basis for that, exactly? MLB has been suspending and resuming otherwise obvious rainouts for a few years now, sometimes insipidly, but to date, a suspended game with real ramifications and little time to tighten its loose ends hasn’t had to absolutely, positively be finished. Finishing it with the Marlins’ and the Cubs’ and maybe the Reds’ playoff fates in the balance would be one thing (even if it’s for four outs and would be a nuisance to every Met whose U-Haul will be double-parked on Seaver Way), but to finish it because every team is required to file in its ledger 162 indisputable results?
I live for the bookkeeping of baseball, but even I think there ought to be a classy way out of finishing this game if there are no serious implications on the table. Yet I did go to this game, and my Log wants to know what I just saw. As of this moment, I can’t write it down as a loss, I can’t write it down as a win and I can’t write it down as a tie. I can’t even pencil it in as a suspended game if I don’t know for sure that it will be rescued from suspended animation. I’ve already written down that I saw the Marlins, as I have in every non-pandemic season since 1997, and I’ve already written down that I saw Peterson, who clearly loves to pitch in front of me. But I can’t write down what “my” record is against the Marlins at Citi Field (it was 22-13 coming in); or “my” lifetime record at Citi Field (currently 179-132 with one dangling “?”); or the W/L aspect of the game; or its final score. I’ll need a dab more information to finish this entry, thank you very much.
Come in from out of the rain and listen to a new episode of National League Town.
by Jason Fry on 28 September 2023 12:32 am It wasn’t raining Tuesday night. The problem was one of tenses — not what was happening weather-wise but what had happened. It wasn’t raining, but it had rained. Considerably. Considerably as in “enough that they give the concentration of rain a proper name and track it over the ocean like it’s an invasion fleet.”
An amount of rain, in other words, that might make you cover an infield.
The grass-mowing, sod-tending members of the Mets didn’t do that while the bat-swinging, error-making members of the Mets were losing games in Philadelphia. Why? Beats me. The reason hasn’t been made clear, perhaps because it can’t be made clear. I’m neither a meteorologist nor a groundskeeper, but it seems to me that the presence of a tropical storm suggests a tarp be deployed.
No rain Tuesday, no game Tuesday. The field was unplayable, the Marlins’ reaction was unprintable, and I can’t say I blame them. If Francisco Lindor had offered the Marlins a jaunty “let’s play two” on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, one of them might have punched him in the face, and I wouldn’t really have been able to say I blamed them for that either. The Marlins are scratching and clawing for a postseason berth; any scratching and clawing done by the Mets makes you back away worrying about fleas.
Despite their wrath, the Marlins didn’t exactly come blazing out of the gate Wednesday afternoon. Pete Alonso homered and Lindor homered and Mark Vientos homered and Joey Lucchesi motored through the Miami lineup. You could see when the Marlins quit in that first game — Jorge Soler showed no particular interest in participating while in right field, which means the Little League remedy for such aptitude was already unavailable — and I wondered if they’d bring anything to the fight in the nightcap.
But they did: The Mets bent Johnny Cueto, as Lindor hit his third home run of the day and joined the 30-30 club, but couldn’t break him. Meanwhile, Kodai Senga struck out his 200th guy in his season finale, but also gave up a pair of homers, resulting in a stalemate.
The second game looked like it was going to turn when Jake Burger was at the plate with the bases loaded, two out and the score tied 2-2 in the top of the seventh, facing a rather shaky looking Phil Bickford. But Burger had to deal not only with Bickford but also with home-plate umpire Ramon De Jesus, whose strike zone was the kind of abstract art that makes you sniff that “my kid could do that.” (And if you’re right in that appraisal, please discourage your kid from both art school and umpire school.) De Jesus punched Burger out on a pitch that was clearly outside, then ejected Burger when he slammed down his helmet in thoroughly understandable disgust, tossing Skip Schumaker for good measure when the Marlins skipper came out to remind De Jesus that no one came to Citi Field to watch him.
That substitution looked fateful two innings later, when Adam Ottavino loaded the bases with nobody out (sigh) and found himself facing not Burger but Yuli Gurriel. (If I weren’t too tired, I’d try for a Hamburger Helper joke here. Let’s just pretend I did and it was funny.) Gurriel smacked an Ottavino sweeper right at Brett Baty, and all Baty had to do next was throw the ball home and watch Omar Narvaez step on the plate and then watch him heave the ball to Alonso at first, which would turn the inning around, and then…
…except Baty did what I just did. He tried to make the throw before he caught the ball and … oof. It’s been that kind of year for the kid.
Baty turned two outs into none, it was quickly 4-2 in favor of the finny visitors, and soon after that the Mets were done and the Marlins had not only survived but also pulled into a tie for the last wild-card spot. A split — which, if you think about it, wasn’t bad for a day’s work, as it required beating the Mets (well, once at least), the Mets’ groundskeepers, bad umpiring, a tropical storm and some measure of unkind fate.
You could almost admire it … well, if it weren’t the Marlins we’re talking about.
by Greg Prince on 25 September 2023 12:44 am • The Mets lost, 5-2, at Citizens Bank Park on Sunday night, completing a weekend in which there was a definitive milestone of futility planted every step along the way. Sunday’s wasn’t as momentous as clinching a losing record (Thursday), being mathematically eliminated from postseason contention (Friday) or assuring the 2023 Mets would drop further from their previous year’s record than any Mets team before them (Saturday), but by losing, the Mets did fall to 14 games under .500 for the first time this season. There are always new depths to plumb with this team.
• The Mets were swept four by the Phillies, who had plenty to play for and played like it. So much for the spoiler role fitting this team like one of Francisco Lindor’s designer gloves.
• Impromptu Sunday Night Baseball — a 6:05 PM start was set Saturday night when the Phillies realized the scheduled one o’clock first pitch did not mesh with the ominous forecast — isn’t such a bad proposition when ESPN isn’t involved. Good advance contingency thinking rather than telling the fans to come to the ballpark and wait and wait for a window.
• The Mets lost on Fox/Channel 9 Thursday night, Apple TV+ Friday night, SNY Saturday evening and PIX11 on Sunday night. Four consecutive losses in the same series on four different frequencies must be some kind of record, unless you listened on the radio, in which case it was a lot of same spit, different day.
• Ronny Mauricio left the One Met Homer Only club, which is a fine club to join, but not so great a club to linger within. Mauricio exited by swatting for his second home run a Cristopher Sanchez pitch that was a little more than a foot off the ground when Ronny connected with it. It came down over the left field wall, 389 feet from home plate, having departed the young man’s lumber at a velocity of 112.9 MPH (which experts say is quite the thwack). A runner was on base at the time, the time being the top of the sixth inning. Up to that point, the Mets trailed, 5-0, indicating Mauricio was responsible for the entirety of his club’s offense.
• Sanchez went untouched by the Mets, except for that home run ball (which would have been a scorekeeping ball had Mauricio declined to swing, because it was barely off the ground). The Phillie starter lasted through seven, striking out ten, allowing only three hits and one walk. Jose Butto, on the other hand, took a step back from the progress he’d shown in recent outings. Only four innings for Jose, with four runs and four hits. Fours were not lucky in this case.
• Butto’s presence on the CBP mound had me thinking back to 2022, which is a dangerous exercise for anybody who’s been watching the Mets throughout 2023. Butto, called up to make his big league debut in Philly, started The Mark Canha Game, which became The Mark Canha Game (also The Nate Fisher Game) after Butto dug the Mets a relatively deep hole that cloudy Sunday, leaving the Mets down, 7-4 after four. Four wasn’t altogether unlucky in that case, as the Mets came back to win, 10-9. The 2022 Mets would forge that kind of comeback now and then. Those were the Damn Thing days, my friend…we thought they’d never end. Or at least go on for another year.
• Hello to Long Island’s Own Anthony Kay, the 1,218th Met overall and a fellow who can be said to have waited longer than most Mets to become Mets. We drafted him in 2013 (didn’t sign). We drafted him anew in 2016 (he did sign). We traded him in 2019 (for Marcus Stroman, who had one of those eventful Met tenures that a couple of years later doesn’t seem like it actually happened). We grabbed LIOAK back on waivers recently and called him up to fortify the bullpen from the left side, which he did with a scoreless inning-and-a-third Sunday. Who says you can’t go home again for the first time?
• So long to Peyton Battenfield, who was called up Friday to replace Jeff Brigham, yet was not afforded the opportunity to tell his friends and family that he was the 1,218th Met Overall. Buck Showalter, apparently, was not lovin’ a Battenfield. Peyton sat for two games and was optioned to Syracuse to make room for Kay. Given that the Triple-A season is over, that’s a pretty cold place to send somebody. And Syracuse gets pretty cold as is.
• Hi from across the field to brand new major leaguer Orion Kerkering, hot Phillies prospect who came into pitch the eighth and made three Mets batters appear totally ineffectual. I mean more than usual for this weekend. I wouldn’t normally get caught up in any opponent’s success at the expense of the Mets, especially not one who could be haunting us in the division for years to come, but a) Kerkering’s dad was caught on camera in absolute tears at the sight of his son’s debut; and b) Orion Kerkering is a USF Bull. Or was until he was drafted by the Phillies in 2022. I, too, was/am a USF Bull, albeit of a much earlier vintage. For one eighth inning on one Sunday night when the Mets were sleeping through their classes, I’ll give a Horns Up to the kid.
• Congratulations to my and Orion Kerkering’s USF Bulls for beating the Rice Owls, 42-29 in Saturday’s college gridiron action. Our USF Bulls haven’t made a habit of winning at football lately. Given that the Mets couldn’t take even one of four games from the Phillies; and that neither the Giants nor Jets could succeed between Thursday night and Sunday afternoon; and that even the formidable ladies of the Liberty were pretty much trounced in their WNBA semifinal playoff game, I need to bask in whatever victory I can find. Orion Kerkering and I are thus stoked about our Bulls boiling Rice.
• Happy Elimination Day, which arrived a couple of hours before Kol Nidre services, to all who observe. Like the Mets’ lack of postseason plans, the Yankees’ absence from October had been a virtually sure thing for months, but why let a festive annual occasion, however low-key it may feel this fall, pass without acknowledging its blessed nature? Good luck to every remaining American League Wild Card contender. Each of you is a winner in my eyes.
• Back on our going-nowhere end of town, six games remain, all at home. That’s 54 innings of Mets baseball, give or take, until there are none. I’ll probably need another week to get altogether melancholic about that. Spoilerwise, the Mets can still debone the Marlins a bit. The Phillies should have the NL’s four-seed locked down by next weekend. Honestly, the implications are light. Barring rain that can’t be worked around, the 2023 Mets can win as many as 77 games once over is over, or lose as many as 91. There is no good won-lost record at the end of this rainbow. There will be goodbye, though. Some years, that is for the best.
by Greg Prince on 24 September 2023 12:55 pm The Mets haven’t been on the wrong end of any lopsided beatdowns this depressing weekend in Philadelphia, so we haven’t heard any wizened press box wag offer in a Burgess Meredith rasp the old chestnut that if this were a fight, somebody woulda stopped it by now. If these games were fights, at least the Mets might win a few rounds on points. They do look good in select half-innings. It’s a shame that only counts toward the cumulative score of a ballgame and doesn’t mean much on its own.
With the Statistical Triptych of Despair achieved with Rufless efficiency — losing record clinched Thursday night; mathematical elimination official Friday night; the worst year-over-year dropoff as measured by won-lost record confirmed Saturday afternoon — all that is left to watch for when the Mets play a contender, besides the possibility of a little spoiling (not happening since we left Miami), are those little spikes in the EKG that indicate we haven’t altogether flatlined. A few of them give us something to process as progress or at least convince us we aren’t beset by an onslaught of some of the worst innings of our lives.
I know, I know: we’ve seen some very bad innings in our lives, much worse than these. Yet allow me my hyperbole.
The top of the second had everything a Mets fan could want from a game against the Phillies, short of Chase Utley being catapulted from home plate out toward the general direction of Center City. DJ Stewart leads off with a walk against an uncomfortable Zack Wheeler. Ronny Mauricio singles into right. Brett Baty grounds a double play ball to Trea Turner. Turner opts to backhand it. The ball opts not to be backhanded and scoots instead into left, scoring Stewart. As the same uncooperative ball is jogged after and lobbed back into the infield by Kyle Schwarber, and Turner receives it with his mind clearly on his backhand gone awry, Mauricio takes in the tableau of nonchalance and distraction and races for home. It’s one of those decisions where, if it backfires, it’s a young player being a little too overeager and not aware of game situations and he’s got to learn. But it’s an outstanding decision, as Turner is caught flatfooted and throws to the plate a tad too late to stop Ronny in his aggressive tracks.
The Mets are ahead, 2-0, and they win the round. Or the half-round, because in the bottom of the second, Jose Quintana gives up a leadoff home run to Bryce Harper, and a couple of defensive miscues lead to another run, and it’s tied at two, so if we’re going with the boxing scoring system business, I suppose the entirety of the second is a draw. But, man, the top of the second felt really good.
So did the top of the seventh. Wheeler, lack of comfort on a chilly, windy, misty day notwithstanding, is still out there, outlasting Quintana, who went a yeoman six without having his craftiest stuff (Jose did strike out ten, but two of those were Schwarber, and that seems baked into any total of Ks before any game against the Phillies begins). Baty and Mark Vientos each singled to get the seventh going. Omar Narváez lifted a mighty fly ball to center that had no impact on the action except to record an out, but I really think one of these days, maybe under better climate conditions, Omar, sitting on one home run for the year, is gonna hit another ball out of another ballpark somewhere. It may not be this year, it may not be for the Mets, but I have faith in the guy.
Brandon Nimmo sends another fly ball to center. It doesn’t seem to carry the potential Narváez’s had, but Phillies center fielder Johan Rojas, a reputed stud with the glove, is playing too far in and doesn’t realize it for a few agonizing/energizing ticks, depending on your bias in this bout. The ball lands well over Rojas’s head, assuring Baty and Vientos of respective trips home and Nimmo of his sixth triple of the season. The Mets hadn’t been winning too many rounds or half-rounds since the top of the second and had been trailing, 6-2, via too many Philadelphia-beneficial plays I’m in no mood to detail. Yet for as gloomy a game as the Mets had been playing, they had suddenly cut their deficit to 6-4, a surmountable state of affairs if you’re thinking of averting another episode of statistical despair.
Then, to really make the top of the seventh sing, Francisco Lindor angles a foul fly ball to medium left in such a spot, near the railing, that once Schwarber catches it, Nimmo can confidently bolt for home. It’s no sure thing that he’ll score, and he oughta be subject to the same caveats rookie Mauricio would be for taking a risk if it doesn’t work out, but he is veteran Brandon Nimmo, and he knows how to slide and touch a plate and avoid a tag all at the same time. When Brandon has accomplished this multitasking, the Mets are behind a mere 6-5, one run from a full comeback. Given how this buoyed my spirits — and despite J.T. Realmuto making up for not tagging out Nimmo by driving in an insurance run off Reed Garrett in the bottom of the seventh — I’m totally giving the seventh to the Mets.
If it were a fight, we would have lost it on points by a lot, because, honestly, I don’t have any more to give the Mets from their 7-5 defeat. But we weren’t knocked out! Nobody had to stop the fight! We went the distance with the champs! Lest you forget, in the aftermath of the Mets-Braves duel for the division and each team exiting October ASAP, the Philadelphia Phillies did win the National League pennant last year, and their defense of their title is winding its way through another Wild Card berth that is almost entirely in the bag. All weekend, we’ve gone eye to eye and toe to toe against our ancient blood rivals/intermittently irritating neighbors, losing by only one run, one run and two runs.
Wow, even I don’t believe any of that’s particularly impressive from a Mets standpoint, but you know Bob Murphy would have sold it so sincerely…
Oh, the Mets have come so close this weekend in Philadelphia, falling short only by a base hit here or an unmade out there. You know, with a couple of breaks, Buck Showalter’s troops could have taken all three of these games against a very tough Phillies ballclub that is heading back to the postseason for a second year in a row. They certainly have a formidable lineup and will present a real challenge to whoever they face in the playoffs. As Mets fans know first-hand, righthander Zack Wheeler is one of the most capable pitchers in the National League. Zack’s had a marvelous time of it since leaving New York. What a fine young man.
…that we would have bought it in any late 1970s or early 1980s year of our youth. Of course we were younger then. We also bought tickets to watch Rocky Balboa and never for an instant saw any reason that an aging local club fighter with zero national profile and more than twenty career losses while getting punched around town couldn’t beat heretofore untouchable Apollo Creed. Or the menacing Clubber Lang, once Rocky ran on the beach in Los Angeles alongside Apollo to rekindle essential tigerlike optical properties.
A little bit of fight will do wonders to sustain your ardor for a given franchise.
by Greg Prince on 23 September 2023 1:24 pm Anyway, it’s turned cold and rainy here lately, but I like winter.
—Maya, in her answering machine message to Miles, at the end of Sideways
Pending iffy weather, the Mets are positioned to carve a statistical triptych of despair this afternoon in Philadelphia. Thursday night, they clinched a losing record for the season. Friday night, they were mathematically eliminated from their last remaining fraction of postseason contention. Their next milestone looms as the setting of the franchise record for most precipitous plunge from one year’s won-lost record to the next. Right now, at 71-83, they have a tie locked up, assured of being 22 games worse in 2023 than they were in 2022, when, for all our complaints about them through September and into October, they accumulated a mere 61 defeats. Our loss total at the moment relative to 101-61 in ’22 matches the decline from 1976 to 1977, the long-established standard for season-to-season Met falloff, one of those internal worsts it never occurred to me to look up until a season like this came along on the heels of a season like last season.
The Mets were nothing special in 1976, finishing 86-76 (though today that absolutely gets you into the National League playoffs). In 1977, the Mets avoided special like the plague, going 64-98, accelerating their ongoing descent into the abyss by trading Tom Seaver at the deadline. Forty-six years later, perhaps some analytically inclined junior executive in Flushing posited, “If we sent away one Hall of Fame pitcher in the middle of the season and we went to hell, imagine what would happen if we send away two…”
Gonna guess hardly a Mets fan alive decades from now will identify the days Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander were instructed to pack as the moment that signaled the end of childhood, and I don’t truly believe a 1978-style 2024 is on deck. Different times, different contexts. But 22+ losses worse is 22+ losses worse, although as much as I do remember about 1977, I don’t remember when exactly the 1977 Mets were mathematically eliminated. Being mired in last place in a pre-Wild Card world will take the edge off such details.
I almost forgot mathematical elimination had just happened to the 2023 Mets when the game that did them in, their 154th of a planned 162, went final. Watching a game on a streaming service on a tablet, some strange app’s pictures synced to familiar radio sound, will knock a person off-kilter, even a person who’s spent most of his waking hours monitoring an off-kilter team for 154 games for nearly six months. When the Mets didn’t take advantage of Brett Baty’s revival from imploded prospect to rising star — game-tying homer in the top of the ninth; game-saving defense in the bottom of the ninth — by not driving home their speediest ghost runner possible, Tim Locastro, in the top of the tenth, you figured the Phillies would find a way to end the whole affair quickly if not painlessly. How much one feels the sting of another 5-4 loss, this one on Alec Bohm plopping a single into short right, ensuring Philly apparition Trea Turner would motor in with the winning run, depends on how much feeling you have left in your Met epidermis with just over a week remaining in 2023.
I suppose it always hurts to lose in extra innings. I suppose it always hurts to lose in Philadelphia. I suppose it always hurts to see gumption like Baty’s go unrewarded in the course of an evening. I suppose Tylor Megill’s almost six innings of shutout ball flying over the left field fence, courtesy of one mighty blow off the bat of J.T. Realmuto, converting a 2-0 Mets lead over Old Friend™ Taijuan Walker into a 3-2 deficit, hurt from the standpoint of rooting a young pitcher along, but I honestly don’t know about the last one. Postgame chatter about the shame of Megill putting in almost six innings of spotless ball, only to have his valiant night besmirched by Realmuto, put me in mind of the night in 2013 when Dillon Gee carried a 1-0 shutout into the ninth in Atlanta, only to have Justin Upton single with one out and Freddie Freeman launch the game-winner/game-loser one batter later. Except Gee was trying to go nine, and it’s a national holiday when Megill can go six.
You’re lucky if you can feel anything from this team after 154 games and 83 losses, but the numbness was pierced when I realized, after clicking off the Friday night stream that, oh yeah, we were eliminated, weren’t we? This September’s Met discourse wasn’t infiltrated by one of those tragic numbers a fan tracks as a quixotic lunge for a postseason berth inevitably sputters. Rob Manfred would be disappointed to learn the 2023 Mets didn’t make as much as a ghost run at the playoffs.
Yet the finality suddenly hit me. We were done with eight games to go. We were done when there were seventy, eighty, ninety games to go, really, but math has a way of sealing the deal. To the televised postgame show, I said boo. I mean actually booed the TV. I booed Gary Apple. I booed Todd Zeile. I booed whatever inanimate object I could find. The Mets were pretty inanimate most of the year.
Stephanie stuck her head out of the upstairs bathroom where she was getting ready for bed. She inadvertently had the postgame show on the radio, me having helpfully tuned it to 880 for everybody’s listening convenience. I reported, with dark irony (as if it was worthy of a bulletin from an all-news station), that we wouldn’t be going to any playoff games this October. She is aware of the state of the Mets on a conceptual level — whether they’re good or not so good — but doesn’t check the standings multiple times a day. I wanted to confirm their current status aloud for somebody who wasn’t inanimate.
“I’m sorry, baby,” my wife replied from the top of the stairs. She really meant it, too. After all these years and all these mathematical eliminations, she understands. No need to calibrate for inevitability versus devastation.
The weekend we got engaged, which was exactly 34 years ago, I decided the best way to burnish our rite of coupling passage was by going to the Mets-Phillies game that Monday night. About 18,000 people joined us at Shea Stadium. The game story in one of the papers the next day referred to the lot of us as “entertainment-deprived”. Bobby Ojeda pitched against Pat Combs, nursing a 1-0 lead into the eighth. Tommy Herr played the role of J.T. Realmuto/Freddie Freeman on that occasion, belting the two-run homer that ensured a 2-1 ending and the ouster of the Mets from what was left of their semi-serious pursuit of the 1989 NL East title. It was Game 156 that night. There was no realistic chance the Mets were going to catch the first-place Cubs by then, but still. Mathematical elimination is mathematical elimination. Last out came and I just sat, which meant we both sat, which meant we had to put on speed to make our train, which isn’t something I make my wife of now nearly 32 years do if I can help it (the lady doesn’t like to be rushed). But Stephanie respected my Shea mourning ritual for the 1989 Mets that Monday night and did the same for the version I unfurled in our living room on a Friday night in 2023.
It felt really sad to realize definitively that the defending 1988 National League East champions would not be playing beyond their 162nd game. I can’t say it feels anything like that anymore vis-à-vis what the Mets accomplished in 2022. For a while in 2023, even as realization came early that These Mets weren’t likely going anywhere, a good inning or a good game would awaken the echoes of the year before, as if this team was still, in its soul, that team. The 1989 Mets were no longer the 1988 Mets, certainly not by September 25, yet, I decided, those Mets who remained from one year to the next couldn’t have possibly forgotten altogether how to be good.
C’mon, that’s Bobby Ojeda out there! He started both Game Sixes!
But, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, the Mets of “this” year are never the Mets of “last” year. Nevertheless, that year-after sense has carried me, sometimes to my own emotional detriment, through portions of 1970 and 1974 and 1987 and 1989 and 2001 and 2007 and 2017 and 2023 (the years directly after 1999 and 2015 are excused from this recounting as they actually kind of worked out). Then whatever was mathematically obvious about the present would overtake pleasing recent precedent, and I could no longer convince myself that whatever made 1969 or 1973 or 1986 or 1988 or 2000 or 2006 or 2016 or 2022 its own brand of special automatically renewed. That’s still a playoff team, no matter that their record says otherwise was how I thought for as long as I could.
Until the next time their record says something much different from what it says now, I won’t be thinking anything like that about the Mets at all.
by Greg Prince on 22 September 2023 11:16 am Despite indications it might never happen in the course of a year that had only just begun, in their seventh game of 2023, the Mets (3-4) fell below .500 for the first time. So much for white lace and promises.
In their 61st game of 2023, the Mets (30-31) fell below .500 for what turned out to be — if you’ll excuse the expression — good. Watchin’ the signs along way told you there’d be no return above the break-even point.
In their 153rd game of 2023, in which they were defeated by the Phillies in Philadelphia, 5-4, the Mets (71-82) made it official that they’d finish with a losing record.
And yes, we’ve just continued…to lose.
Eleven times over the past fifteen years, the Mets have lost more games in a season than they’ve won. By that very specific metric, this has been the worst fifteen-year period ever in Mets baseball, an enterprise that has been around long enough to contain multiple, overlapping fifteen-year periods and legendary amounts of losing. One wouldn’t intuitively think to measure the Mets by fifteen-year periods, except here we are, having finished under .500 for the eleventh time since 2009.
Which is to say this all feels a bit too familiar.
These past fifteen seasons have included four Septembers that have been more fun than not to blog during: 2015, 2016, 2019 and 2022. Those were the four seasons when the Mets finished with a winning record. This takes into account that the Mets’ bid for a Wild Card fell short in 2019 and the division lead was slipping away as 2022 wound down. Yet in both seasons they were a winning team overall. Until you’ve continuously covered, from an advocacy perspective, a ballclub that spends its Septembers almost never in a position to win more than it loses, you come to value the Septembers when the opposite is the case. A year like 2019, with no playoffs to show for a spirited second-half sprint, and a year like 2022, when a gaudy regular-season record isn’t quite good enough to clinch a division title, are, by comparison to what has otherwise been the norm in these parts, the stuff of a golden age. When you’re dealt years like 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021 and now 2023, the pennant run of 2015 and the followup surge to one night of the postseason in 2016 shimmer as if emblematic of a mythic dynasty — particularly as one remembers the practically unyielding doldrums preceding that two-year interlude in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.
Still here, though.
Still mining silver linings, like thinking it was encouraging that almost if not every time they fell behind Thursday night, the Mets came back to tie the Phils.
Still getting excited over the latest prospect who shows a little pop, like Mark Vientos homering again.
Still taking solace in a veteran hitting his stride when he earlier appeared unmoored from his previous form, like 2B-LF-RF Jeff McNeil continuing to play everywhere and hit everything (single, double, triple, a couple of runs, a couple of ribbies, even a stolen base).
Still tuning in whenever the Mets play, wherever they air or stream.
Still planning another trip or two to the ballpark to soak up the last of this next-to-last-place team’s endeavors before they end.
Still reading explanations and gleaning rationalizations for what went wrong this time.
Still writing about the experience for anybody who’s still interested more days than not.
Four winning seasons in the past fifteen. Three that have included extensions of the year beyond was what initially scheduled. One that has gone as far as participation in a World Series. No world championships in any of these fifteen seasons, nor any of the fifteen seasons before these, plus none in however many preceded those until you count back to 1986, which is as close to today as 1949 was to 1986 in 1986. Thirteen winning records in the twenty-two seasons spanning 1987 to 2008. We blogged the last four of those. A couple of Septembers therein admittedly tested the concept of fun with winning records, but any way you cut or collapse it, over .500 is over .500.
In a matter of days, perhaps hours, the losing-record 2023 Mets will also be mathematically eliminated from postseason contention, another formality. At that moment, the “haven’t won since…” clock ticks forward to 38 years, and the 2024/1986 temporal relationship analogizes to 1986/1948. The Cleveland franchise won its most recent world championship in 1948. By 1986, they had waited forever. By next year, their fans will therefore have waited two forevers, meaning we’ll have one under our belt. But, after a while, unless you keep count, you lose count, because when you lose more often than you win so often, it all feels like forever. Fifteen Septembers with eleven seasons concluding on the wrong side of .500 is enough losing to last you a lifetime that you devote to a ballclub that probably doesn’t mean to devote itself to losing, yet there they are, finishing another year when they’ve done exactly that.
And here you are reminding yourself and anybody else who shares your wavelength that first pitch tonight from Citizens Bank Park is at 7:05 PM on Apple TV+.
I’m also reminding you to listen to the latest episode of National League Town, which includes a paean to dashed expectations; a milestone-anniversary remembrance of one of the losing years among the eleven referenced above; and a tribute to someone we lost too soon. Believe it or not, it’s cheerier than it sounds.
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