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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 15 May 2009 9:36 pm Flashback Friday: I Saw The Decade End is on hold as my well-being teeters on the verge of September 2007-type behavior. Just went to the doctor, and while he says I'll live, I don't believe the prognosis. Anyway, I was halfway through writing the latest installment when I decided I didn't like my head being as hot as Carlos Beltran has been at the plate, so I'm going to put aside what I was working on (even though it's got that topical thing going for this Friday in particular) and present a Best of FAFIF from the greatest Mets West Coast trip ever. Please travel back, won't you, to June 8, 2006 and enjoy my unsurpassed talent-evaluation skills as they appeared under the headline “Suddenly Smitten“.
I'm reading a pretty good book called A Great Day in Cooperstown about how the Hall of Fame came to be and the festive occasion its opening was. All the immortals who were still alive in 1939 — Walter Johnson, Cy Young, Tris Speaker, a recently retired Babe Ruth — came to Upstate New York and caused quite the commotion. I wondered what it must have been like to have witnessed modern baseball in its formative years, to have seen these players create the game as we know it, to possibly bump into one of them on Main Street when they showed up to get enshrined.
It must have been tremendous, I decided, but it's all right that I wasn't there then because if I had been, I wouldn't be around now. And if I weren't around now, I wouldn't be seeing Lastings Milledge in his formative years recreating the game we will know in the 21st century.
That's how far gone I am over this kid who's been a Met for a week and change. I had held it in check until last night, but by this morning, as I savored the back page of the late edition of the Daily News which documented his ARM & HAMMER…well, WOO! as the scoreboard often says. I'm head over heels for Lastings Milledge.
Yes, he's to be mentioned with the residents of Pantheon Row. Of course I'm searching my mental database for whether we've ever had anybody like him (we haven't) or whether we've produced and employed a trio of homegrowners like Reyes, Wright and him simultaneously (we also haven't). I've skipped over the ifs in record time, slid around the ands, and slammed the buts over the leftfield wall. No ifs, ands or buts, Lastings Milledge is as awesome a Met as I could imagine.
Xavier Nady? Swell fella. I hope Willie finds him some at-bats.
I've flipped through all the obvious precedents. He's not Ron Swoboda. He's not Mike Vail. He's not Alex Ochoa. He's not Benny Agbayani. He's not Victor Diaz or Craig Brazell or Mike Jacobs even. I have no evidence, only intuition, and I'm likin' what I'm feelin'. He's not Darryl Strawberry, either, though after watching him do everything right last night, I no longer mean that in the “don't compare him to a superstar yet,” but rather “Darryl was no Lastings, not at this stage of his career”…career meaning, if I'm not mistaken, eight games to date.
It's not much of a sample, but what sample it is makes me want to order the complete set right now. Lastings Milledge has filled up my senses like a night in the forest, like the mountains in springtime, like a walk in the rain.
Holy Honus Wagner! He's hitting, he's running, he's throwing, he's got me channeling John Denver.
I'm gone, baby. Waaaaaaaay gone.
by Jason Fry on 15 May 2009 6:54 am After you get used to the season having really arrived and settled down to stay a while, baseball can be like a good dog — at your side and ready to match whatever level of devotion you're giving that night. Want to focus with laser-beam intensity on each and every pitch? Baseball's up for that. (Chase this ball for the 254th time? I can do that!) Busy doing other stuff and so limited to occasional peeks at the TV or close listens to the radio? Baseball may not agree with your priorities, but it'll hang with you nonetheless. (I'll just lie here and snooze until I think you might be getting Doritos.)
This was one of the latter kinds of nights in my house, with the combination of a West Coast game, sleeping wife and sleeping house guest removing the TVs as viewing options and plenty of work making my attention to Howie and Wayne less than perfect. But they were back there anyway, up on the dresser behind my head, and when I'd cock an ear their way it was clear that they had a fairly nutty game to chronicle. Like couldn't anyone pitch? Would both catchers leave their position in disgust over the various cruelties being meted out to them? And how was this crackpot affair going to end, anyway?
For a while this had the look of a Mets game adhering to a rather dreadful blueprint, one we've seen and heard all too often from San Francisco: an early lead squandered, a young pitcher exposed, a wretched loss endured. (Which always comes with the added knife twist of having stayed up way too late for the privilege of being aggravated.) But somehow Bobby Parnell's crumbling was followed by an even bigger gag job by Brian Wilson, and we prevailed.
Lots of storylines in this one. Like John Maine looking like he would crumble, staggering through an ugly first and then watching two out, nobody on turn into its own ugly reflection — two on, nobody out — after Alex Cora turned a double-play ball into an error in the second. But Maine somehow got through that unscathed, labored into the sixth, got Emmanuel Burriss to end the inning and got two outs in the seventh besides. Like David Wright going 3-for-3 with four steals, tying Roger Cedeno's record on a night the Mets set a club record with seven swipes. (And is it fair to say that the Franchise II has played Cedenoesque ball at times recently? Vince Coleman also swiped four, but let's not connect those two Mets in any way. I won't even write their names in the same sentence.) Like Carlos Beltran stealing third again, though once again an umpire's discretion played an uncomfortably large role. By the way, between the steals and the snatches of chin music and the outcome, I wouldn't be surprised to get a Bay Area forecast for “chippy with possible squalls of rancor.” (Which kind of sucks because Tim Lincecum and the Big Unit throw hard.)
There were storylines before the game as well, though they weren't the kind we like. I'm least concerned about Jose Reyes's stiff right calf, since that mild injury corresponded interestingly with Jose's stiff right cerebral hemisphere, or whatever ailment it is that's caused him to forget how to run the bases. J.J. Putz's elbow is more worrisome but not the stuff of panic, though my first, second and third instinct is to join the crowd blaming the stupid WBC for his troubles. (Did you know the WBC also gave AIG bonuses, caused me to gain five pounds and betrayed Miss California by blowing her top open during an innocent photo shoot? All true!)
And Carlos Delgado is the most worrisome news of all — a torn hip labrum is what kept A-Rod on the shelf for nine weeks, and he only had the problem partially repaired and is a good deal younger. It hampered Mike Lowell badly. Chase Utley played through it, but … well, he's Chase Utley. If Delgado needs surgery, that could be the year, the end of his Met tenure, and a rather uncertain patch-and-paste job with Fernando Tatis and Gary Sheffield and Alex Cora and Daniel Murphy and Nick Evans and goodness knows who else over there. Life with Delgado is certainly a roller coaster — looking back at last Opening Day through today, this is one ride pregnant women and people with a heart condition are strongly advised to avoid, and the rest of us might want to hang onto our hats and sunglasses while strapped into.
We won, and that's great. But I wonder what we may have lost.
Random Note: You can now subscribe to Faith and Fear for the Kindle. Costs $2 a month, but … um, it's on the Kindle? (Seriously, I don't quite get the Kindle. But if this makes someone happy, we're happy too.)
Want something all great? Try Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.
by Greg Prince on 14 May 2009 7:19 pm For the first time in eleven years, the Mets are making an old-fashioned West Coast swing: they are visiting the Giants and the Dodgers on the same trip. Thanks to expansion and whatever else influences the schedulemakers, there has not been a “traditional” SF-LA (or LA-SF) itinerary since August of 1998, a tour that included the Padres for good measure. FYI, the Mets went 5-4 then. I hope they go 1-0 tonight in San Fran and, to invoke my all-purpose phrase of conditionality, take it from there.
But I really hope they stick it to the Giants and the Dodgers, because I hate them all over again.
I just got through reading an engaging book called After Many a Summer by Robert E. Murphy. It examines the many steps taken by Walter O’Malley and Horace Stoneham toward California and out of New York. You’d think there might be enough of those books out there, but Murphy finds some new ground to tread, particularly where the Giants, forever overshadowed in the nostalgiasphere, are concerned. What I liked in particular was Murphy’s refusal to assign easy blame. Too often in the story of the Dodgers’ bolt, it is either all O’Malley’s fault or all Robert Moses’ fault. No, the author reminds us, it takes many to tango out the door.
The dynamic among the Mets, Giants and Dodgers, given the not-so-incidental roles two of them played in creating the third, could be viewed as a bizarre love triangle. It’s not so much that the Mets wouldn’t exist without the departure of their predecessors. It’s that they wouldn’t exist without the stubbornness of those who were departed upon. The National League was willing to continue without New York; it was New Yorkers who refused to be sated by being part of a one-team market and by being left only one league — the wrong league in their judgment.
I don’t know if it’s possible to fully comprehend if you weren’t around prior to 1958, or didn’t at least come of age as my generation did when the stories were told again and again by those who had been, what it meant for New York to be a National League town. This wasn’t Philadelphia or Boston or St. Louis where one team endured and one went substantially unmourned once it relocated. This was New York, for crissake. This was where we had two teams and two fanbases in the same league, not just the same sport. League delineation meant far more then than it does now. The New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers were one-quarter of the National League. Blindered dolts like Warren Giles, the N.L. president, were willing to abandon that in quest of California gold. All the Senior Circuit owners went along. A pox on them.
And a blessing, as ever, on Bill Shea for leading the charge to right the historical wrong and give New York’s National League fans what they craved and what they deserved: a baseball team. My next read is Michael Shapiro’s Bottom of the Ninth, which picks up the story where After Many a Summer leaves off. I’ve peeked inside a bit and am intrigued that someone is telling the tale of the never-was Continental League, which all students of Metsiana surely recognize as the launching pad for our franchise. I look forward to reporting back to you what Shapiro has to say on Mr. Shea and everybody else involved.
But I’m still sore at Stoneham and I’m still sore at O’Malley. How dare they — how fucking dare they — leave New York to the Yankees? One was extraordinarily greedy, one was as incompetent as he could be; both, as Murphy reveals repeatedly, said whatever suited their aims on a given day. I don’t wish either or both had stayed so I could have grown up a Giants fan enmeshed in a rivalry with the Dodgers (or vice-versa, possibly), but I’m just offended from a historical basis. You were National League baseball in New York and you didn’t value that. You may have explored your options and you may have required new venues, but you took a flying leap when a subtle shift would have sufficed.
One team played in Manhattan. One team played in Brooklyn. Either of them could have relocated to Queens as the Flushing Meadow site was ripe and ready for building in the late ’50s just as it was in the early ’60s. Queens? No, that would never do! Instead, they became California clubs and New York went barren until 1962. It’s revolting to even consider.
Just because we more or less like what we received as compensation doesn’t mean the thieves should be let off the hook for snatching what belonged to us. We should despise the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers like we disdain the Philadelphia Phillies and the Atlanta Braves. We who attempt to honor the memory of the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers for who and what they were prior to 1958 should be especially virulent in our dislike. Those Giants and those Dodgers, the ones who were here before they were kidnapped? They’re all right. They got this thing going. They were, individually and together, baseball in a very tangible way. The Giants practically invented the modern game in the early 1900s. The Dodgers gave it a much-needed shove into the second half of the 20th century. Bully for them and the respective niches they carved in our heritage. But then their owners both turned their backs on us. The moment they went coastal is when they should have earned a permanent place on New York’s cosmic enemies list.
Unless either is playing the Yankees, who committed a far greater crime against the city’s sense of humanity by staying.
This western swing will end and I’ll probably go back to not worrying much about the present incarnations of the Giants and Dodgers, but it galls…it really, really galls that two owners would do to New York what Stoneham and O’Malley did. They took National League baseball away from where it thrived and where it lived. Others may have stood by or not done enough to stop them, but it was they who did the deed. They decided it wasn’t worth their trouble to be the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers. Don’t let revisionism get in the way of that fact. Ptui! to Walter O’Malley. Ptui! to Horace Stoneham.
Foul. Just foul.
For aficionados of the team that made the Dodgers and Giants largely irrelevant, there is 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 13 May 2009 11:15 pm Last September 24, after the game that made third base infamous, I asked my friend Mark, he of Mets Walkoffs‘ bottomless bag of statistical tricks, if he could find out how many times the Mets had lost a game in which a Met had hit a grand slam. Carlos Delgado’s four-RBI connection had just gone to waste on the heels of many Met miscues; it always takes many Met miscues to neutralize a grand slam’s goodness, but the one we all remember and that some of us can’t quite forget was the failure of David Wright to drive in Daniel Murphy from third with nobody out in the ninth inning of what had become a tie game against the Cubs.
Wright wasn’t the lone culprit that dismal Wednesday evening. Ollie Perez wasted a 5-1 lead. Duaner Sanchez wasted a 5-3 lead. Brian Stokes wasted a 5-5 tie. All the Mets could muster in the way of scoring following Delgado’s third-inning slam off a clearly discombobulated Carlos Zambrano was a bases-loaded walk to Ramon Martinez. But come the ninth, the Mets were even at six. Then Murphy tripled in the ballpark where triples weren’t everyday commodities. He was on third and the Cubs were at ease. They had clinched. They weren’t even particularly trying. If Murphy was going to go to third with nobody out, no skin off their playoff-bound noses.
Up stepped Wright and down went the Mets when Wright didn’t step up. David struck out with the winning run on third and the Wild Card and division hanging in the balance. Wright, again, did not act alone. After two intentional walks, Ryan Church and Ramon Castro most decidedly did not get the job done. In the top of the tenth, sic transit closer Luis Ayala allowed three Cub runs, and that was all she and Kerry Wood wrote regarding Shea Stadium’s final extra-inning fiasco.
That was going to be a great night. It had been, for a while, a wonderful night. That was the second and final night I spent in the Pepsi Picnic Area, an event arranged by Matt Silverman who decided early in ’08 to buy up a block of bleacher seats and put on a party under the tent just because. The food was as Shea-good as Shea food got. The company was Shea-sublime. The occasion was almost transcendent. I spent the late afternoon with David G. Whitham, someone I was proud, for a day, to call “my photographer,” as he made pictures that would appear in my book. I reacquainted myself with Dana Brand, already author of one essential Mets work and, at the time, closing in on a second. Of course there was Matt, and there was Jon Springer, and there was Mike Steffanos, and a whole lot of friendly, informed faces. There was even the little bonus of being interviewed that evening for a documentary commemorating Shea’s final season (and its final concerts two months earlier).
Yes, a great night. That turned into a horrible night. How did we lose that game? How did we go from up 5-1 to over 9-6? Mike, Matt, Jon, David, Dana, me, tens of thousands of others…we were disgusted deer in the headlights of an oncoming choke. We didn’t know what was hitting us and we wanted to ram our antlers into the first windshield we saw.
Wright’s failure to bring home Murphy, and everybody else’s complicity in the third-to-last loss in Shea Stadium history, resulted in three baseball atrocities:
1) Painfully altering the pennant race;
2) Irrevocably tarnishing what had been a perfect day;
3) Unforgivably wasting Delgado’s grand slam.
You get four runs on one swing, you should win. I didn’t think it was possible to lose in those circumstances. You’re +4. How do you wind up -1? Ever? In the wake of September 24, 2008, I remembered only one other incident when it happened. Gary Carter hit a grand slam at Wrigley, also against the Cubs (natch), also during a stretch drive, also for naught. On September 25, 1985, Ron Darling, my future fellow Mets author, couldn’t make a 4-1 lead hold up. By the end of six, it was 4-4. In the bottom of the ninth, with two out, Jesse Orosco walked Davey Lopes. Lopes took off for second…safe. Lopes took off for third…safe. Carter and Orosco couldn’t quite get their signs straight. Bob Dernier then walked. Finally, Chris Speier did what seemed just a matter of minutes in the making but also seemed impossible: he drove in the winning run in a game in which the Mets hit a grand slam. I seem to recall Gary and Jesse sniping at each other a bit in the paper the next day.
That was my only other Mets slam/Mets lose memory before last September. I had to ask Mark, is that all? Were there others?
There were. David’s negation of Carlos was the tenth such episode in Mets history. Shame on me for forgetting that the ninth occurred within the Faith and Fear era, on a gloomy Wednesday afternoon in September 2005, Cliff Floyd having put the Mets ahead of the Nationals 5-4 one one four-run swing of the bat (off Liván Hernandez). The Mets were in freefall that late summer and this was their final plummet, Braden Looper giving up the lead in the ninth, Roberto Hernandez giving up the tie in the tenth, another hundred people getting off of the bus whose ride had seemed so promising just weeks earlier. Little could anyone foresee that the Mets would turn around what was left of their season directly thereafter, finishing with their best record in five years and setting the stage for 2006. What we knew on September 15, 2005 was everything about losing a game in which one of your guys launches a grand slam sucks.
“The home run doesn’t mean jack,” Floyd reflected after the loss. Just like Delgado’s didn’t last September. Just like Todd Hundley’s bomb in the very first Coors Field contest, April 26, 1995, one the Mets would squander to hot-dogging Dante Bichette in the fourteenth inning. Just like Joe Orsulak’s in May of ’94, Kid Carter’s in ’85 and the five other grand slams the Mets wasted in 1962 (Frank Thomas), 1966 (Eddie Bressoud), 1967 (pitcher Jack Hamilton), 1971 (Tommie Agee) and 1973 (Rusty Staub). As you can see, it’s so rare a phenomenon that you need a Mets Walkoffs to look it up for you.
But it’s apparently not as rare as it used to be, because Wednesday afternoon, a mere 37 games since it happened previously, it happened again. Today it was Fernando Tatis driving in four runs at once, putting the Mets up 6-4 on the Braves in the fourth. The giveback was almost immediate, as Jon Niese couldn’t make it out of the fifth. By the top of the eighth, the Mets were behind again. In the bottom of the eighth, Gary Sheffield went all button-fly — home run 501 — on Rafael Soriano and it was reknotted. By then, Tatis’ grand gesture had become mired in a muddle of details you’d need SpongeTech to help you absorb. In the end, there was enough poor hitting, poor running, poor fielding, poor pitching and poor construction of dopily high outfield walls to waste, for the eleventh time in New York Mets history, a New York Mets grand slam.
It’s a shame to throw out such good salami.
Enjoy what David Whitham shot last September and whatever words lie between the covers of Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.
by Greg Prince on 13 May 2009 5:58 am In the parlance of boxing matches and hockey games, I went to a Mets loss Tuesday night and a Mets win broke out.
Weird night, to be sure. Thought we'd lose, not out of innate Met pessimism but based on it being an oppressive 3-0 tilted to the bad guys in the eighth while the Dutch version of Johan Santana wouldn't stop sticking it to us but good. I'd spent part of the night with Jason, part with Emily — one had a ticket next to me, one had a ticket upstairs with somebody else, so they King Solomoned the difference by swapping seats midgame — and part away from the action blowing into a cup of steamy Long Island Clam & Corn Chowder from the Catch of the Day stand. Because Long Island Clam & Corn Chowder isn't as strollable an item as I thought (and a little spicier than I would have preferred), I needed to sit on a bench somewhere and let it cool. As I slurped tentatively, the Mets slumped determinedly. While the chowder would eventually cool, the Mets' bats would warm to the task at hand.
Different perspectives, different companions (one lovelier than the one before), different dramatic trajectories and different culinary experiences were all part of the same story Tuesday night, but I never would have bet the ultimate blowing would involve the Braves' bullpen rather than the soup.
More disjointedness came from Section 135, which is Left Field Reserved in the numerical world in which we now live. It was reserved early but rowdy late, though not out of savvy support for the home team. While I was off blowing on chowder, 135 apparently won the Lucky Beer Inning or something. They all got tanked up and they all demanded obeisance to the wave. They didn't seem to understand that once they did their part to get the wave going, they were supposed to sit down and not block the views of those who like baseball. The wave blows even more than the Braves, especially when it takes place as a game is moving from 3-0 to 3-2 and there is pitching, swinging and whatnot somewhere out there on the diamond. Hi-def monitors are not luxuries in wave-obsessed 135; they are your lifeline. Especially the replays, especially on the ones that prove the umps aren't always on the take against the Mets.
We got a little lucky on Carlos Beltran's gutsy steal of third in the ninth, the daring dash that paid off when Luis Castillo lifted his can of corn chowder deep enough to score the tying run. Seems we were screwed earlier when Wright was called out at second. I was just enchanted that the technology exists to show me replays of close calls at the ballpark and no powers that be black them out. Whether Beltran was safe or not we've been owed a big one against the Braves since the day Angel Hernandez became Angel Hernandez, thus fair is fair. It couldn't have been fairer that the aggressive Carlos of the ninth was properly passive as he allowed bases-loaded ball four to take care of business in the tenth. Beltran leads the league in hitting and is right up there in on-base percentage. Now (with some help from teammates) he has won the Mets the first-ever extra-inning affair in Citi Field history. Even by just standing still, he can do it all.
Except for the wave. Even Angel Hernandez wouldn't do that.
Come from behind on your reading list and score a copy of Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Listen in as the author describes the writing and rooting process to Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf. And whatever you do, don't give away the ending to at least one diehard Mets fan.
by Jason Fry on 12 May 2009 3:47 am As predicted, the Mets returned to Earth. Heck, they practically burned up on re-entry, came down miles from the rendezvous point, panicked and managed to blow the hatch and flood the capsule while waiting for rescue. I'm pressed to think what was the least fun: the errors, the parade of unlucky or bad relievers or the carousel of Atlanta Brave baserunners.
No, wait, they're all second-place finishers: The least fun was watching Johan Santana in the dugout, gazing out in mild perturbation and puzzlement at the post-error wreckage of what had been a taut game.
Of course the inevitable had to happen on his watch, wasting a gutty, brainy performance in which he arrived with C+ stuff and pitched an A- game. Johan gets the L despite giving up not one lousy earned run — and has now had this happen to him twice and it's not even Memorial Day.
Why do his teammates give him no run support? Maybe it's awe. I felt a little tight myself, and I was a county away. Can fans press too? Of course they can — I caught myself cheering too hard, staring burning holes into the set and grinding my teeth. If I'd tried Let's Go Mets I would have been off the primordially simple beat. If we'd done the wave I would have fallen over the arm of the couch.
Johan Santana is what we wonder if we deserve. Bistro d'Johan is the fancy restaurant at which we knock over our Cokes and get our tie in the soup and wind up getting dragged out by one arm. The Johan Santana Collection is the art exhibition at which we theatrically sigh and fidget and whine so appallingly that we leave early and there's yelling in the car. The Santana is our uncle's new fancy Cadillac whose ashtray we put bright blue gum in for some unfathomable reason. Johan Santana is the losing pitcher, with an 0.78 ERA and a record of 4-2.
Johan Santana — or more properly our squandering of his vast gifts — is the reason we can't have nice things.
A nice thing we can still have is a copy of Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets. Check it out at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.
by Greg Prince on 11 May 2009 12:13 pm 
Spotted in the window at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble, at Broadway & 66th, is Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, keeping company with some other recent releases in the baseball genre. FAFIF: AIPHOTNYM is proud to stand adjacent to Ron Darling and a couple of spots over from Bruce Weber in such rarefied retail space. Also pictured: whatever.
If you’re in the neighborhood, stroll right into the store and buy yourself or someone else you like a copy. If you don’t happen to be on the Upper West Side, find it in other fine B&Ns or order it online right here or here.
by Greg Prince on 11 May 2009 12:00 pm 
Every day is now DynaMets Dash Day in the Citi Field parking lot, where kids and adults can run the Shea bases and even stand at the Pitcher’s Plate, as the plaque and rules insist the pitching rubber is officially called. You might deduce from the hint of a crowd gathered around this marker that Mets fans are particularly intrigued by where third base sat. It is said a ninth-inning Mets rally is actually buried underneath the asphalt, where it expired ninety feet from home. But I think that’s just an urban myth.
by Greg Prince on 11 May 2009 11:50 am 
Johan Santana’s been towering over everybody of late. His left arm is indeed the new home of Amazin’. And my head practically fits inside his glove.
by Jason Fry on 11 May 2009 2:57 am Baseball is full of hoary cliches that have become overused because they contain a fair bit of wisdom. Among them is the caution that no team is actually as bad as it looks when it's on the skids or as good as it looks when it's on a winning streak.
It will come as a shocking surprise, tomorrow or the day after or later this week or sometime fairly soon, to watch the New York Mets lose a game. They will pitch badly or make errors or fail to show patience at the plate or pop the ball up or just get beat, and we will fret and grumble and moan and they will lose some more games and we will view them with suspicion or derision or despair. In other words, we'll take a series of baseball games and contort them as required until we've fulfilled the basic human need to impose a storyline on potentially unrelated events.
It's utterly irrational, and you know what? That's fine. Shrugging away the season's ebb and flow as statistical noise is undoubtedly a more accurate way of viewing the world, but it sure makes things dull in the telling. It's important to be able to remind yourself that no, David Wright will not strike out every time from now until the sun goes dark, just as Carlos Beltran will not finish the season at .374 and play with a blank back to his jersey for the rest of his Met career because we'll retire his number posthaste. But once you do that, let go again — whether it's to exult or suffer.
Right now would be to exult. Right now it rains overnight and just enough so you don't have to water after work, the cops are handing out warnings instead of tickets, the bank errors are in our favor, the chef sends out an amuse-bouche with each course, and the toast always lands butter side up. It won't be like this often, so soak it up.
Certainly the Mets can do no wrong — being down 2-0 with Livan Hernandez missing his spots and Ian Snell crackling fastballs and arcing sliders to all sides of the plate felt like a momentary inconvenience, and indeed it proved so. Livan found himself, Snell lost himself, Livan and Jose and David played sparkling defense and the hapless Pirates played their trademark lousy kind. (I cannot figure out why Brian Bixler is on a major-league roster.) Reyes and Luis Castillo pulled off a double steal, Daniel Murphy caught everything hit his way even when it looked like Jerry Manuel had waited too long to bring in Jeremy Reed, and Castillo even hit his 20th career sacrifice fly.
It was all kinds of wonderful, and we got to see it firsthand — as you know from Greg's kind birthday wishes, I turned 40 on Friday, which went into the mix with Emily enjoying her seventh Mother's Day and Joshua enjoying just being a kid at a ballgame on a spring day. Emily decided a while back that going all out at our new ballpark was just the thing for these intersecting celebrations, so we went to Citi Field in grandly over-our-heads style: brunch at the heretofore-unglimpsed Acela Club and seats in the Excelsior deck, behind home plate and a couple of rows below the SNY booth. (My goodness do I love my wife — while thanking God every day that she has such pitifully bad taste in men.) In case you're wondering, the Acela Club's food is very good — Emily had crab cakes and gave them high marks — though given Citi Field's other food options I think brunch makes more sense than dinner. Oh, and be aware that those window views you see on TV come with a surcharge, the exact amount of which we didn't quite nail down in friendly discussions with Mets folks. I think the extra would be worth it to eat good brunch and watch BP, but your mileage may vary.
Our seats were reached from the Caesar's Club, which is a comfortable, elegant space full of cushy chairs and generous couches and big windows that actually give the vista a bit of grandeur that makes you do a double-take when you remember you're looking at Flushing. To that, I must add that the Caesar's Club feels like it has nothing to do with the baseball game taking place not so far away. It would be heaven during a long rain delay or as a retreat for someone who doesn't care about baseball, but happily neither of those conditions applied today, so regarding things that were Caesar's we had rendered unto us nothing except a couple of bathroom trips and a glass of wine.
Emily and Joshua got to go on the field for the National Anthem, courtesy of Joshua being a member of the Kids' Club and Emily being a member of the Moms' Club. (I could pick them out with perfect ease from 500 feet away — like most fathers and husbands, by now I'm very familiar with the posture of my son when he's not really trying and failing to hold still and listen and that of my wife when she's offering well-deserved remonstrances. They arrived just in time for first pitch thanks to some speedy navigation of Citi Field's concrete bowels and still vaguely mysterious elevators, and we were off.
Our vantage point was perfect for continuing Joshua's baseball education, whether it was Ryan Church pantomiming making a catch of Ramon Vazquez's single with Robinzon Diaz on first or the Pirates playing in against Reyes and then retreating to halfway with two strikes. We also inadvertently furthered his education in other ways.
It was fun being 20 feet from Ron Darling and Gary Cohen, and I was inordinately proud of myself for (barely) managing not to loudly profess my admiration of them. To their left and directly behind us was Omar Minaya's suite, where our GM was entertaining folks with the windows open. (I also managed not to yell a grateful “Wilbur Huckle!” at Keith Olbermann.) As I noted to Emily, Omar's proximity led to the amusing spectacle of heads in our section swiveling to give Omar a direct dose of the gimlet eye whenever one of his acquisitions did something questionable.
This became relevant during Sean Green's rather unsuccessful working out of various kinks. Emily was tired and impatient by then, and our son was immensely more so on both counts, plus full of a dangerous amount of sugar. Anyway, Emily started barking at Green, which sent Joshua off, screeching (with a scary amount of both volume and venom) at our distant, hapless reliever that the idea was that he pitch well, not badly, and so stop annoying six-year-old Mets fans and their mothers.
This was amusing, except right about then Nate McLouth (why do the Pirates employ 75% of blond, mulleted ballplayers, anyway?) hammered a ball into the seats and one of us made the mistake of noting that Omar the GM of the Mets, who'd acquired Sean Green, was nearby. If you ever idly noted at a fraternity party that, hey, cups full of beer can be thrown as well as drunk, it was pretty much like that. Joshua yelled something out at the field at “Omir” and we, focusing on accuracy of charges rather than advisability of behavior, compounded the error by noting that Omir was blameless and Omar was behind us.
So up goes Joshua on his seat, turning around to stare like a gunfighter into the GM's suite and loudly give Omar advice about bad middle relievers and what ought to be done with them while everyone around us laughed and we tried to hide. If any of you attend tomorrow night's game and find that the cordon in front of the SNY booth has suddenly quadrupled in size, you'll know whom to blame.
Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets will further your baseball education without the whole yelling at the GM problem. Check it out at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.
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