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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 1 May 2009 11:09 am Welcome to Flashback Friday: I Saw The Decade End, a milestone-anniversary salute to the New York Mets of 1969, 1979, 1989 and 1999. Each week, we immerse ourselves in or at least touch upon something that transpired within the Metsian realm 40, 30, 20 or 10 years ago. Amazin’ or not, here it comes.
Sometimes the best trades are the ones you don’t make (even the ones you dare to darkly fantasize about aloud in service to your surprisingly deep-seated disgust-driven desire to Get Rid Of Almost Everybody after two-plus years of Amazin’ frustration with the stagnant status quo that has strangled your team in the mire of seemingly immovable mediocrity…logic as regards sending 26-year-old stars to division rivals for lesser talents notwithstanding). Yet sometimes you make a trade in the course of the season and it’s absolutely for the best.
Did any in-season trade ever work as immediately and dramatically well as the one the Mets made for Donn Clendenon? If you were to go with sudden, results-oriented impact, you’d have to say no.
Mind you, the Keith Hernandez trade floats above all Mets trades, in-season or otherwise, in a league of its own. When Keith was acquired exactly fourteen years after Donn, he brought with him a transformative effect that would take root soon enough. Everybody points to June 15, 1983 as a turning point in the history of the franchise and rightly so. If there’s no Keith Hernandez, there’s no glorious era to follow. But on June 15, 1983, the Mets were in last place, 14 games under. 500 and 9½ games out of first. Four months later, their season two weeks over, the Mets were in last place, 26 games under .500 and 22 games out of first. And that was actually progress. The trade of Neil Allen and Rick Ownbey for Keith Hernandez bore seedlings in 1983, honest-to-goodness blossoms in 1984 and bushels of delectable fruit en route to a championship grove on October 27, 1986.
But the Met evolution signaled by the acquisition of Hernandez would proceed at a glacial pace when compared to what happened when the Mets got Donn Clendenon. On June 15, 1969, the day the Mets made their deal with Montreal, they were in a better place — second — than their 1983 successors, an astounding (for then) four games over .500…but a similar 9 games out of first. What would happen as Donn Clendenon took over half of first base for the Mets over the next four months would reveal itself as both unprecedented and, as of today, yet to be matched.
From 30-26 on June 15, the Mets would finish 100-62. That’s 70-36, just a shade under .667 for a span covering two-thirds of the season. Of course the Mets would make up those nine games on first-place Chicago and win their division by eight. And of course the Mets would breeze through Atlanta and take Baltimore in five. Four months plus one day after the Mets sent perennial prospect Kevin Collins and three minor leaguers — Steve Renko, Bill Carden and Dave Colon — to the Expos, they were champs of everything.
Donn Clendenon didn’t pitch, didn’t hit one through nine, didn’t field every position. Heck, he only shared first base with Eddie Kranepool. But his impact was immediate enough and positive enough to trace the Mets’ growth from pleasant surprises in mid-June to world beaters by mid-October directly back to his acquisition.
Now that’s what you call a successful in-season trade.
Teammates would forever recall Donn Clendenon, then in his ninth season in the bigs, as the steadying, stabilizing influence that was needed on such a young team, the absolute definition of a clubhouse leader. He was also a bona fide slugger in a lineup that perennially lacked stick. Jim McAndrew told Bill Ryczek in the essential The Amazin’ Mets, 1962-1969, “As far as I’m concerned, the big difference in the club was Clendenon. He was the one guy who could strap you on his back and carry you for a week or two if he got hot. That’s what he did. Instead of losing 1-0 or 2-1, we were winning 2-1 and 3-2.”
To look at Donn Clendenon’s 1969 stats is not to be overwhelmed. In 72 games as a Met, he drove in 37 runs. But about a quarter of them came in one very key stretch of road games, in the prelude to the first Big Series the Mets ever played, the instantly legendary three-game set against Chicago at Shea, which encompassed the contests that would make the names Don Young and Jimmy Qualls indelible footnotes to Mets history. But let’s not forget how the Mets arrived on the doorstep of the Cubs’ consciousness, by creeping up on them prior to that July 8-10 showdown.
The Mets sat eight games in back of the Cubs entering play on July 2, with five games in St. Louis and Pittsburgh ahead of them. The Mets would win all five, cutting their deficit in the N.L. East to 5½ by July 8. Clendenon would start four times and would produce each time he did.
• The second RBI of a 14-inning 6-4 victory over the Cardinals on the Second of July.
• A two-run single that helped build an 8-1 blowout at Busch on the Third of July.
• A two-run tiebreaking double that set up an 11-6 victory in the opener of a Fourth of July doubleheader at Forbes Field.
• An RBI double in the first and, coup de grâce style, a three-run homer in the sixth to give the Mets a lead they would never relinquish as they beat the Buccos 8-7 on the Sixth of July.
In the first game of that series against Chicago, it would be Clendenon, as a pinch-hitter, coming through yet again, doubling off Fergie Jenkins (a deep drive the dashing Don Young couldn’t quite snare) and scoring the tying run in the sunsplashed ninth inning, the one that shone on the Mets and rained on the Cubs’ premature parade.
In less than four weeks from his arrival in New York, the Mets had gone from a distant second to challenging for first. We know they met their challenge and we know it was Clendenon leading the charge at the very end. He didn’t see a wink of action against Atlanta in the NLCS thanks to the Braves throwing righties and Gil Hodges sticking with his lefty lineup (team first, baby), but we do know that Donn did extraordinary damage to southpaw 20-game winners Mike Cuellar and Dave McNally in the World Series, homering off the former once and the latter twice en route to earning MVP honors. In each game that he homered, as if to underscore McAndrew’s point precisely, Clendenon’s shot provided the exact margin of victory.
The Mets have had two World Series Most Valuable Players and both were in-season acquisitions. Ray Knight would take home the hardware in 1986 after coming over from Houston in August 1984 (not impacting the race all that much in ’84 or ’85, however). Both were considered positive forces off the field, too. Funny that one tends to think of the offseason as the time when all the scrupulous planning that can create a champion takes place, yet here are the Mets, with two titles to their credit, and each was sealed, you might say, on the fly. A great deal can break out at any moment.
Lifting Clendenon from the Expos was almost certainly GM Johnny Murphy’s finest hour on the job. Considering most of the pieces that became the 1969 World Series roster were just about in place before Murphy took over for Bing Devine, the two best things Murphy did as general manager were trading for Clendenon and turning down proposals from other teams that would have cost him young pitching. The only youthful moundsman Murphy had to surrender via trade who ever amounted to the proverbial hill of beans was Steve Renko, who pitched with some success for Montreal and lasted clear to 1983 but was never particularly missed as a Met (though he gets his Red Sox due of sorts here, courtesy of the sublime Josh Wilker). He was certainly fair ransom for a World Series MVP who would drive in nearly a hundred runs as a defending champion Met a year later.
To draw one more parallel between Donn Clendenon and his descendant in June 15 first base thievery Keith Hernandez, it will be recalled that Mex was an unwilling participant on the “Stems” as he said the Mets were thought of in baseball circles in 1983. He loved St. Louis, feared New York and didn’t plan to stay at Shea once his trial period was up. The Hernandez mythology has it that it took convincing from his impeccably wired dad and Frank Cashen to remain a Met after ’83, that they assured him help was on the way from the minors and that he bought into the promise. The decision was in Keith’s hands, and aren’t we glad he made the right call? In 1969, the decision was in Donn’s hands, too, which was highly unusual considering there was no free agentry in his day. Part of the Clendenon legend is he almost didn’t see ’69 in the major leagues due to his reluctance to play for some perpetually dismal club — though in his case, it wasn’t the Mets but the Astros that turned him off.
As recounted in Ryczek’s book, Donn was left unprotected by the Pirates in the 1968 expansion draft. Chosen by the Expos, he hesitated to join the expansion team — he wanted to get to a World Series — but eventually warmed to the idea and planned to report. But before ever getting to take a single swing at Parc Jarry, Montreal dealt him to Houston for future Met Rusty Staub. This he wanted no part of given his distaste for manager Harry Walker whom he didn’t like playing for in Pittsburgh and wasn’t going to like any better in a more Southern venue. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Clendenon had options. At 33, he decided to retire from baseball and take a job as an executive with the Scripto Pen Company where he’d already made an impression in previous winters. Such leverage allowed him to write his own ticket out of Houston, a personal power play that offended baseball’s establishment greatly. But an option is an option, and baseball’s only option was to save face on the eve of the season opener by allowing Clendenon to return to Montreal and sending two Expos (Jack Billingham and Skip Guinn) to Houston as compensation. Donn wasn’t active when the Expos began their existence at Shea Stadium, but he’d have plenty of time in Flushing as 1969 proceeded. You wouldn’t have forecast it in April. You surely knew it by October.
***
The Mets announced this week that they will honor the fortieth anniversary of the Miracle Mets on Saturday, August 22. Mark at Mets Walkoffs recently offered up some great ideas on how they could make the occasion even more of an affair to remember.
Donn Clendenon’s first year as a Met is also where another story begins in earnest: 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. And join Jason and me as we ride the Seven Train to Shea with Matt Pignataro, Sunday night at 7.
Plus, the long-awaited Podcast from my recent appearance with Mark and AJ on SportstalkNY can be heard here.
by Greg Prince on 30 April 2009 5:21 pm Back up a truck.
—Giants manager Leo Durocher's player personnel report to owner Horace Stoneham, 1948
The Mets need a heart transplant, a new set of guts and a severe makeover. There are two trades that will never happen, probably couldn't happen, maybe shouldn't happen, but let's say they did.
1) The Mets send David Wright, Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran, Tim Redding and Ramon Castro to Philadelphia for Jimmy Rollins, Shane Victorino and Ryan Howard.
2) The Mets send Carlos Delgado, Brian Schneider, John Maine, Brad Holt and Ike Davis to Toronto for Roy Halladay, Rod Barajas and Kevin Millar.
In concomitant moves, the Mets shift Daniel Murphy to third base, call up Fernando Martinez and have Oliver Perez and Bobby Parnell switch roles.
Our new starting lineup:
Rollins SS
Victorino CF
Sheffield/Martinez LF
Howard 1B
Millar/Church RF
Tatis/Murphy 3B
Barajas C
Castillo 2B
The bench would include Jeremy Reed, Omir Santos, Alex Cora and the platoon third baseman, leftfielder and rightfielder who aren't starting on a given day.
Rotation: Johan Santana, Roy Halladay, Mike Pelfrey, Bobby Parnell and Livan Hernandez (until Jon Niese merits replacing him)
Bullpen: Frankie Rodriguez, J.J. Putz, Oliver Perez, Sean Green, Brian Stokes and Pedro Feliciano (with Nelson Figueroa on speed dial should another arm be deemed necessary)
Why would the Phillies go for it? Castro gives them some catching depth, with Ruiz recently injured. Redding, once he heals, is another arm for a club that desperately needs arms. Those guys are deadwood on this team. Obviously it's the three bigger names that will make this happen, three players with a world of talent and a pretty impressive track record, all of whom have produced at Citizens Bank Park. Reyes is younger than Rollins. Beltran is a bigger power threat than Victorino. Wright sends Feliz to first to platoon with Dobbs, potentially making up for Howard. They still have a batting order with four legitimate all-stars, including Chase Utley. Wright and Reyes are still relatively inexpensive for a while. That franchise has already won a World Series. The can think long-term.
Why would the Blue Jays go for it? They're not going to stay in first place. They're probably not going to compete for the playoffs. Halladay's a free agent after 2010. It's unlikely they'll hold onto him. Carlos Delgado is going for 500 home runs. He was a big deal in Toronto and his milestone march where he established himself would create great goodwill. That's for the short term. Maine and the two prospects are for the longer term, understanding you have to give up a lot to obtain a Roy Halladay.
Why would the Mets go for it?
Why not?
All right, seriously, why not? Where are we going with the core we have? The core four, we can all agree, includes three of the most talented players in the National League plus an all-time power hitter with some legitimate pop left in his bat. But the Mets, it should be painfully apparent by now, aren't going anywhere as presently constituted. So why pretend anymore?
Rollins and Victorino are exactly the kind of players we're always crying out for, guys who talk the talk and walk the walk. Rollins isn't as fast or as dynamic as Reyes but he brings us similar dimensions, plus more power and maturity. Victorino is close enough defensively to Beltran and surely knows enough to slide. Wright, the face of this franchise, is becoming, no kidding, a frowny face. As productive as he's been, he may have peaked in New York. He's no longer draped in Teflon. Howard strikes out more than Wright (though not much more) yet he may possess the one power stroke in baseball that could thrive at Citi Field. We've already seen anybody can triple here, but he may be the only guy who can consistently homer here. We'll be down a little in overall power, but have you seen how this place plays?
Halladay is in Santana's class. The two of them, with a few runs behind them, give you a leg up in every series in which they pitch. You have Johan under contract, you get Roy under contract. Barajas for Schneider, I confess, is dog and cat. Millar, however, comes for much the same reason Victorino and Rollins do: fire, dirt, the whole bit we're always despairing we're missing. These are guys who play to win, not to simply get one more game crossed off the schedule. At this stage of Millar's career, that's almost his sole equity. It's a valuable one to have on this club.
As for the internal moves, if Fernando Martinez is going to be the future of this club (along with Ryan Howard), let's get him out there and see what he can do. You've got Sheffield for a year, so it's not all on the kid. Murphy needs to forget about left field. Eventually he becomes the everyday man at third. Until then, let him be spelled by Tatis, who deserves more at-bats and, more to the point, helps the club by playing, not sitting. Millar might not have much left, but let's maximize him and Church. Jeremy Reed should get some starts somewhere along the way as well. He and Tatis can add outfield depth should Martinez falter and need a brush-up in Buffalo or Sheffield go kaput (though his bat speed and eye still seem fine).
Santana and Halladay explain themselves. Pelfrey's too promising to trade, thus he stays over Maine if the Blue Jays want a pitcher. Parnell's too promising to waste in the bullpen; he was a starter his whole career 'til the end of last year. Perez is too risky in the rotation. He could be an incredible set-up man to Rodriguez in short spurts (Putz is only signed through this year and I can't believe he'll want to stay in an eighth-inning role). Like Castillo in the offseason, you simply can't move him, so you have to hope he finds himself and you have to help him find his way. With as much upside as this new rotation should have, let's carry one fewer pitcher in the pen and see what happens.
There. Done. New team. Grittier team. Less talented lineup but still capable (particularly in Citi Field) and probably way heartier — to say nothing of being able to throw two absolute aces every five days. You'd miss the guys you've grown to love, but there was a time you didn't love them. There was a time you'd never heard of them. You'd love a different brand of baseball, a winning brand of baseball, if it introduced itself to you, whoever was making the introductions. There was a time a couple of these new guys weren't your enemy. If they do for you what they've done to you, you'd grow to like them plenty.
These two trades are never going to happen. But let's say something like these trades were to happen. Seriously. How about it?
Don't wait on Omar to make this acquisition: Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.
by Greg Prince on 29 April 2009 10:43 pm Citi Field is beginning to grow on me. The Mets are beginning to feel like fungus.
Spent a lovely afternoon in Section 509, my favorite section to date. First spot I've sat where at least 95% of the field was available to me. Crisp but not uncomfortable weather for Weather Education Day. My buddy Rich made his CF debut, his first retro park appearance of any kind. Yes, we agreed, afterwards: this was definitely a Retropolitan type of outing. The Mets have been playing like this more often than not since 1962.
What can you do with a game in which Santana is plenty good (if not otherworldly), we get twice our daily allotment of triples, a disputed home run call goes our way and we are presented with a surprise (shocking, really) appearance by the backup catcher at the very last minute? You can win, but the Mets refuse to not lose. Intimidating AC/DC fanfare notwithstanding, J.J. Putz failed to leave the Marlins thunderstruck. His post-Johan performance was disappointing and ultimately fatal, but he merely picked up the smoking gun. The culprits who killed today's chances all carried bats, particularly when there were runners on base.
And hoo boy, were there runners on base.
The chicken nachos, the gentle sunshine and the company, planned and otherwise (I've been fortunate to run into some very nice FAFIF readers every game I've gone this homestand), made it too nice a day to complain virulently or send up distress signals. Indeed, Rich thinks it's too early to push the panic button. Me, I think Citi Field should stock the cupholders with emergency flares, but maybe he's right. The Mets had an afternoon game like this last May: midweek, hopeful and eventually futile. We lost it by one run. We missed the playoffs by one game. But it wasn't the end of 2008, just as this, despite our ugly 9-12 mark, wasn't the end of 2009.
Merely a discouraging continuation of everything we've seen.
If you're not going to push the panic button, at least click on 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.
Meanwhile, a Mariners fan says Mets fans will love the book…even if Mariners fans will only like it.
by Jason Fry on 29 April 2009 3:44 am On a lot of nights, the New York Mets are a pretty unstoppable baseball team from about 7:20 until about 7:45.
Unfortunately, the nights drag on, and so do the Mets. The orange-and-blue hare begins to coast. To hop only now and again. Then it goes to sleep somewhere, and you feel yourself go rigid at home on the couch or out in Flushing in your new properly angled green seat. You can feel it coming. Then you watch it happening.
Tack-on runs not scoring. C'mon, Mets.
David Wright striking out AGAIN and looking perplexed. Get UP, Mets.
Starters not going deep enough. The game's not over!
A little insurrection put down and now the lead is less comfortable. METS!
Some reliever comes in and is fine. More runs, please, fellas! Please?
Another reliever comes in and is not so fine. AUUUGGHHH!!!!
Fizzled rallies and strikeouts and it's over, the tortoise has won, and you are so not surprised. You realize you felt this marching towards you since about the third inning or so, and it arrived sure as the thunder and lightning followed the racing clouds and the treetops bending and pitching. Only the Mets are the ones out there soaking wet, looking perplexed.
I really don't know what it is with this team. They look poorly constructed and rickety and mismatched, and logy and lead-assed and dull. I'll just go for the lethal comparison: They look like the plodders who bumbled along under Willie Randolph's sour glower for half of one season and then half of the next. I thought Jerry Manuel had at least exorcised that evil spirit, but here it is again spitting bile and showing off its alarmingly flexible vertebrae. I'd call it the Ghost of Shitty Baseball Past, but a 9-11 record and a run differential of zero isn't exactly past. This phantom is all too Present, and the Future scares me.
Speaking of the past, HEY, HAVE YOU BEEN TO MY WEB SITE LATELY? As if things weren't irritating enough.
* * *
A more interesting note: Over at Keith Olbermann's blog, he's discovered another Almost Met — a guy with the Only In Baseball name of Wilbur Huckle, who suited up for the Mets in September 1963 but never got into a game. Huckle becomes the ninth Almost Met — the others are Jim Bibby, Randy Bobb, Billy Cotton, Jerry Moses, Terrell Hansen, Mac Suzuki, Justin Speier and Anderson Garcia. But Huckle joins Cotton and Hansen in having tales that are not just odd but tragic, from a baseball point of view: The other six Almost Mets played at least one major-league game in another uniform, and so became Real Something Elses, but not those three. They never crossed the white lines to find a home in the eternity of the Baseball Encyclopedia. (Olbermann calls the sad ranks of such players the Bill Sharman Society, after a Brooklyn Dodger phenom who suffered the same fate. Elias, less poetically and more cruelly, calls them zombies.)
I've been obsessed with the Almost Mets for some time, and the line I always use — because I haven't been able to improve on it — is that Terrell Hansen would give his eyeteeth to be Moonlight Graham. Think about that some night when 3 a.m.'s sitting on your chest and you know it's going to be a while.
Anyway, Ken Takahashi — if you're warming up for your debut and feel a little tight, maybe you should just go on out there anyway. Trust me on this one.
You know what looks good next to the Baseball Encyclopedia? 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.
Remember, at midnight you can turn to WOR 710 AM, when Greg joins Joey Reynolds to talk Faith and Fear and whatever else comes up. Besides, like you want anything to do with the FAN after this debacle.
by Greg Prince on 28 April 2009 6:36 am We were not shown the time machine that would make it possible for us to adjust our career choices in order to earn what it will take to afford a seat at the Excelsior Club conference table.
—The author, after visiting the Citi Field Preview Center, September 27, 2007
First class is what's wrong, honey. It used to be a better meal. Now it's a better life.
—Dorothy Boyd to son Ray, Jerry Maguire, 1996
Omir Santos is no mere Santos. And a seat on the Excelsior Level isn't your typical perch at Citi Field, at least not as I've experienced it in its young life.
It was on something of a lark that for the first post-Shea Mets home game I ever bought tickets to I went for something identified as Caesars Club seats. Back in March, I had no idea what that was, but I figured the proverbial Monday night in April against the Marlins — a Value Date during which the true value was delivered by our new starting catcher and a return to form by an old starting pitcher — would lack the demand later, sexier appointments might inspire, thus giving me a semi-affordable shot at how the other half would be living. Nothing against Porches, Promenades and the other proletariat positionings placed up and away from the action, mind you. Just wanted a feel for what I'd be railing against.
I can see why I will resent this level. Because I want in. “I want to go to there,” as 30 Rock's Liz Lemon would put it. I want very much to be in da club. I won't be, not at those well above 50 cent prices most non-Value Date nights carry. Yet now I understand what they were trying to tell us at the Citi Field Preview Center nineteen months ago when I had a hunch that I should've gotten rich or died trying in anticipation of the day when the pretty nice seats for Mets games would grow out of my general reach.
This is the World Class part of Citi Field. Or at least it's the phenomenal upgrade that we were promised as we lined up for propaganda and flowers at that Preview Center. Taste of the City might be the home of the tangy tacos, but Excelsior is where they keep the good china.
If you've ever squeezed a packet of Dijonnaise, you can relate to understanding Excelsior as the Logezzanine. That's all it is, really. If they took Mezzanine, scaled it down and lowered it a little to more or less where Loge was, you'd have Excelsior. You'd be covered, you'd have some sightlines (not all of them — still couldn't see a portion of the outfield, right this time) and you'd feel if not that ballyhooed intimacy, then at least familiarity with your 2009 New York Mets. That's all any Sheafolk could want, structurally: not an improved-in-spots Upper Deck, but an objectively better Mezzanine.
I'd strongly suggest taking a stroll through Excelsior, getting a sense of the amenable ballpark view, maybe sampling some of the fare at the Caesars Club if the Mets are up by five or six runs and you're comfortable following the action on a few dozen HD screens for a couple of innings…but you won't be doing that because this is the part of the park where they turn you away if you flash the wrong ticket. The right ticket can be yours for the correct combination of presidential flashcards — that's baseball in 2009 — but you're on your own there. I'm on my own after this fluky Value Date purchase. Each of my tickets Monday night was $45, about the upper limit of what I can/will ante for a single game of a nonhistoric nature. Hence, next homestand, when the Bronze Buccaneers sail in from Pittsburgh, the same very nice if not particularly spectacular right field seat in Section 308 would cost me $60. A glimpse at the Silver-tinged World Champion Phillies from that very same longitude and latitude would set me back $75. A fan-friendly quote no doubt exists to remind me there are affordable seats up in Promenade, that for $15 Bronze and $19 Silver, I can sit in something that isn't as high as the Upper Deck at Shea. And indeed, I've sat there four times already, in the company of good and gracious friends with whom I could gather anywhere and feel enriched.
But y'know what? These seats are better. Not the best, but better. Better and essentially unaffordable to me and, I'm guessing, most people I know. Maybe that's my fault for having waited 'til I'm deep in middle age to achieve a scintilla of accomplishment and a nugget of recognition in my chosen field — or for going into writing instead of hedge fund management when that kind of thing was clubworthy. Maybe it's my fault that I cheered as Beltran was signed and Delgado and Santana were acquired, forgetting not just that you get what you pay for but you pay for what you get. Maybe I shouldn't have put such an emphasis all winter on shelter and groceries. Or perhaps I've been so brainwashed by sports that it is I, the forty-year loyal fan, who feels I've failed myself and my team by not being able to sit in pretty nice seats for its games whenever I wish. I'm not asking for Sterlings, Deltas and Ebbetses. I'm asking for an occasional evening in the Logezzanine with a price tag that doesn't make me wince hard. I don't remember Loge or Mezzanine being almost uniformly and almost unfathomably prohibitive. Excelsior, with its Caesars Club entrée, kind of is. I expect to see Omir Santos hit another grand slam before I can see paying more than I did for a single evening in Section 308.
Not that Santos doing what he did wouldn't look good from any sightline.
Read it on the level of your choice: 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.
Stay up after tonight's Value Date to listen, come midnight, to WOR 710 AM when I join Joey Reynolds to talk Faith and Fear and whatever else comes up.
by Greg Prince on 27 April 2009 11:55 am Some Atlantic League general manager will eventually decide to unite Daniel Murphy and Elijah Dukes in the same outfield because crowds have always been attracted to trainwrecks. May the Good Lord have mercy on that craven GM's soul.
Manny Acta sat Dukes yesterday. Jerry Manuel started Murphy. Dukes' team won. Hmm…
Murph seems the polar opposite of Dukes in terms of personality. Everybody agrees he works real hard and occasionally he runs toward and dives for a ball, resulting in a spectacular if momentary success for the Mets. Then a ball is hit at him and, as Daniel himself admits, those are the toughest ones for him to handle, no matter how much he practices catching them instead of, as he did Sunday, flopping to the ground. “It just comes off a little different in the game — a little harder, a little firmer,” the kid was quoted Sunday.
You feel bad for the kid. You really do. The kid, however, is a starting Major League outfielder. And these games count in the standings. Hmm…
Daniel Murphy could be the Mets' next big marketable star, assuming the Mets discover the sense to position him properly. They mustn't pretend they know he's going to excel. Emphasize the excitement inherent in never knowing what you're going to get from Daniel Murphy. Bill him as the Human Box of Chocolates.
Same idea could be and has been applied to Oliver Perez, albeit with more bittersweet overtones. Perhaps he rated his three-year, $36 million contract because the Mets figured they were getting two pitchers for the price of Ollie. But Good Ollie is apparently sequestered away down in extended Spring Training somewhere while Bad Ollie is right here sucking up the other guy's mojo. At this point, you're developing a pretty good sense of what you're going to get from Oliver Perez. And it doesn't involve anybody's money's worth.
Damn, are we back to this? Mocking two of Our Boys just because the unit as a whole was bush and lost to a bunch widely considered incapable of nine full innings of even fleeting success? Yeah, that's about the size of it. The Mets used up their weekly CQ (Crap Quotient) in St. Louis, so, no, they're not allowed the standard bad day exemption for a day this bad against Washington. Bad Mets! Bad!
There were 360 degrees of bad on display at World Class Citi Field (save for the company of my friends the Chapmans and the distraction of my lunch the tacos). Dismal starting pitching. Ineffectual relieving. Comical glovework. No baserunning acumen (Slide Carlos! Sli…oh never mind). No clutch hitting, of course, but no hitting would also cover that. The Mets were no-tool players Sunday. They are no-win players most every Sunday. Where in the basic agreement is it written that, on the seventh day, they rest? They're 0-3 on Sundays this season and haven't allowed us to experience an unblemished Sunday at home since July 27, 2008, which was a whole stadium ago. They won the back end of Shea's last day-night doubleheader in September, but that was a .500 Sunday…not that .500 doesn't look pretty good right now.
Casey Fossum has been designated for assignment and let's hope the assignment involves a very long field trip. I have nothing against this gentleman, but I have to confess watching a lefty in 47 — with the modern-day drop shadow (thus making those numerals Orosco-proof) — brought back memories of the one person I never again wanted to see during a Sunday 8-1 loss viewed from high above left.
Can't blame T#m Gl@v!ne for never exiting my subconscious just as I can't blame Casey Fossum for not magically erasing Perez's indelible mistakes. But here was my real problem with Fossum, and I imagine it was mine alone: his name is Casey. It is my instinct to urge on every Met pitcher I encounter with a simple “c'mon” followed by his first name. “C'mon Ollie!” “C'mon Sean!” “C'mon Whoever!” But when I heard myself utter “C'mon Casey!” I was stopped cold. I haven't called out to a Casey since my beloved second cat exited the game, so to speak, in 2002. Thus, every time I tried to call out to our pitcher, I couldn't get it out of my head that I was futilely attempting to communicate with a member of a species predisposed to pay my exhortations no heed. “Casey! No! You're getting mop-up hair all over the mound! Bad pitcher! Bad!” Mets long men, not unlike my own cats, rarely listen to what I have to say.
Like I said, nothing personal, but I'm kind of glad somebody brought out the big spritz bottle for Casey Fossum. And that I've never had a kitty named Ken Takahashi.
There are worse things than losing to the last-place Washington Nationals by seven runs — such as not securing your 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. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.
Listen Tuesday night/Wednesday morning midnight to WOR 710 AM when I join Joey Reynolds to talk Faith and Fear and whatever else he's got in mind.
by Greg Prince on 26 April 2009 12:18 am We don't wait for a panel of judges to score baseball games by holding up signs indicating what they thought of the precision and beauty of the respective entrants' execution. This ain't Blades of Glory (though it would be infinitely more entertaining if it were). So never mind that the Mets lacked a little crispness here and there or weren't particularly razor sharp (or even Razor Shines) around the edges. They showed up, they played ball and they won handily.
It helped that they were participating in the same game as the Washington Nationals.
If the Nationals were a bit ragged, it would be an upgrade. They are the worst team in the history of Citi Field. The St. John's Red Storm, the Georgetown Hoyas and whoever's frolicking out on that Wiffle Ball diamond have all represented the tenets of baseball professionalism with more distinction than the Nats.
We beat them by six runs Saturday. We should have beaten them by sixty. That's probably an indication that the lousy Mets of midweek haven't been altogether cured, but no judges showed up to look down their noses from a sea of 5.7s because of it. New York took the undisputed gold in this contest. Washington came in second in the competition yet didn't qualify for the silver. If there's a tar medal, Manny Acta should fire up his troops by exhorting them to, by all means, try for the tar. And maybe go for the nicotine.
The whole day, frankly, was a blur of stumbling outfielders, twin killings, pop flies and bases on balls. A few of those went against us. Most of it transpired to drown the Nationals who, as my host and seatmate Charlie Hangley put it, were already under two feet of water. They sunk only deeper from there. I wish I could be more specific about what I remember witnessing from Promenade 532 — me in fair territory, Charlie geographically if not personally just foul — but what I mostly recall is hoping fly balls to deep left and deep center elicited a useful crowd noise. Oh those World Class blind spots! It's a fly ball…let's hear if there's a groan or a cheer…never mind, Elijah Dukes is involved, we won't have to listen for long. First the Mets were winning by a substantial margin, then they were winning almost prohibitively. Usually I derive little warmth or security from a simple six-run lead. When you're playing a professional baseball team, six-runs leads aren't necessarily enough.
Today we played the Washington Nationals. Today I was pretty relaxed.
One thing I did see amid the fresh air far above and beyond left field: birds. Lots of birds winging around. I used to sit in Shea and notice the birds over the fence. The people have moved; the birds stayed put. Nobody told them to fly south, so they haven't. The Polo Grounds was infamous for housing pigeon coops and accumulating piles of what pigeons left behind. Given how close Row 10 felt to the pigeon skyline, maybe some of us are in for a Giants tribute after all.
It ain't Johan Santana's diary, but it will do in a pinch: 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 Jason Fry on 25 April 2009 4:50 am 6 pm: Go over Nationals lineup. Feel pangs of pity. Decide to pitch to contact to minimize their embarrassment, maximize chance that I can pitch every second or third day to ensure we win games more often than every fifth day. Besides, no point making that Dukes kid mad.
6:31 pm: Sheffield and Tatis in the outfield? Hmm. Move to Plan B: Strike everybody out.
6:45 pm: Anthem singer is dry-heaving. Remind her of words, including additional three stanzas in case she wants to be historically accurate. Offer brief account of bombardment of Fort McHenry, history of Anacreontic Society and drinking songs of London social clubs, capsule biography of Francis Scott Key. She just stares at me. I get that a lot.
7:05 pm: Lay hands on blind and sick huddled down right-field line. Feel bad that I don't have time to cure mild astigmatism I spy in front row of Excelsior level. Remind myself I'm only one man.
7:06 pm: Pregame handshake ritual with teammates. For something a little different, do it with eyes closed, identifying teammates through combination of pheromone recognition and echolocation. Fossum keeps forgetting that the seventh and 21st steps in our handshake are the same movement in reverse. Must be patient with the new guy.
Top of 1st: Game on. Strike out side. Use 11 pitches to do so when nine would have sufficed. Enraged at own inefficiency.
Bottom of 1st: Offense doesn't convert one-out situation with runner on third. Allow self brief sigh. Take call from CDC worried about Mexican swine flu thing. Tear page out of Delgado's notebook, model quick redistribution of stockpiles of Tamiflu and Relenza. Docs grateful. Hey, we're all part of the same team.
Top of 2nd: Dunn singles. This annoys me. Strike out next three. Debate sending Dukes SMS saying “You out, dawg” with picture of baseball. Seems ungentlemanly.
Bottom of 2nd: Tatis misses home run thanks to 800-foot-high outfield wall. With my at-bat coming up, go down to expensive new batting cage. Unnamed teammate (I won't tell you whom — discretion is my watchword) is in there lashing line drives. Batting-practice pitcher announces “Runners on second and third!” U.T. looks at bat quizzically, tries to switch ends, misses pitch, falls down. I feel I should be more surprised. Go to Plan C: Strike everybody out and hit three home runs. Hit into fielder's choice instead. Puzzling.
Top of 3rd: Take mound still troubled by not living up to own standards on offense. Only strike out one guy in 1-2-3 inning. Revolting. As I've heard people tell other people, this game will humble you.
Bottom of 3rd: My teammates' inability to score runs is temporarily eclipsed by Nationals' inability to field. I have a one-run lead. Such bounty — perhaps I was traded and didn't notice? Teammates fail to score runner from third with none out. Guess I haven't been traded after all. Begin to tell myself I'm only one man, stop. Because limitations are loser talk. Set up lab for purposes of cloning self. After that debacle in St. Louis, it could be our only chance. Find Tatis in clubhouse, Googling “Citi Field” and “outfield dimensions” and “architect” with murder in his eyes.
Top of 4th: Allow hit. This annoys me, so I strike out Dukes again.
Bottom of 4th: Find unnamed teammate lost in clubhouse tunnel due to batting helmet facing wrong direction. This does not bode well even by low standards for Mets with runners in scoring position. Get on base. Running toward second after Castillo single, have two thoughts at once. One is new hypothesis about string theory that suggests intriguing possibilities about ultimate fate of spacetime. To be specific, when considering the product space of a five-dimensional Anti de Sitter space and a five-sphere … sorry, I forget you guys aren't interested in that stuff. Anyway, the other thought is “Wow, Luis Castillo is the greatest offensive weapon on the 2009 Mets.” Exquisite strangeness of both thoughts leads me to stray too far past second. Am tagged out. Small prize to pay for 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics. Oh, and run scores. A crooked number? For me?
Top of 5th: Remember line from “Bull Durham” that strikeouts are fascist. Decide to eschew them for an inning in honor of Ron Shelton's valentine to the greatest game of all. A private tribute. I live for the small moments, too.
Bottom of 5th: Now Tatis is Googling “chloroform” and “oil drum” and “shovel.” See that this will end badly, conduct quick seminar in Buddhist teachings, breathing exercises. Using more pages from Delgado's notebook, jot down new thoughts about string theory, send it to Nature. Keep ruminations on Castillo to myself.
Top of 6th: Nick Johnson homers while I'm pondering final wrinkle of how to resolve MTA funding impasse. As Roger Penrose used to counsel me when he could no longer keep up, “One thing at a time, Johan!” So irritated that I walk Zimmerman. Fool Dunn so completely he launches little parachute into the outfield. Ramon drops foul pop from Dukes. Restrain indignation and strike him out instead. That makes me feel better, so I fan Kearns too. Get Flores on pop to third. On way back to dugout, make mental note to erase TiVo recording of this game. Its imperfections make it unendurable.
Bottom of 6th: Teammates score third run for me — perhaps they're confused and think it's already my next start? This is out of even my control, and my work is done. Hit whirlpool.
10:28 pm: Check in on cloning experiment. Something is amiss — there are several Oliver Perezes in the lab, balling up my lab reports and throwing them not terribly near wastebaskets. Of course — contaminant DNA from handshake ritual! Make note on iPhone: Buy more Purell.
10:42 pm: Game won. Why can every other team hit home runs in this park? Continue colloquy with beat writers on new ideas about motifs and alliteration, segue from there into Q&A session at locker. Remember to put pants on one leg at a time. Seems like wasteful extra step to me, but other people find it reassuring.
11:30 pm: Homeward bound! Should I walk on water, or transport self home through sheer power of thought? Decide to just drive. A good teammate isn't a showoff, after all.
Speaking of good teammates, my co-writer has spun the literary equivalent of a perfect game with Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.
by Greg Prince on 24 April 2009 8:24 pm Welcome to Flashback Friday: I Saw The Decade End, a milestone-anniversary salute to the New York Mets of 1969, 1979, 1989 and 1999. Each week, we immerse ourselves in or at least touch upon something that transpired within the Metsian realm 40, 30, 20 or 10 years ago. Amazin’ or not, here it comes.
Whatever comes of the Mets’ latent attempts to commemorate their nearly half-century of operation as New York’s National League franchise, they need to remember one non-obvious detail above all others.
Mark 1999 on a wall somewhere.
I’ve seen the World Series and pennant flags fly, framing the Pepsi Porch. It’s a good start, and if you’re going to have a pecking order, you start with the world championships you’ve won in 1969 and 1986 and then you make room for the league championships from 1973 and 2000.
Then you get to the three other playoff teams. And let’s be clear: all of them, for the purposes of commemoration, are equal.
Though one of them was more equal than others, technicality that one somehow seems lesser aside.
When a wise guy, perhaps one hosting a sports talk radio show, would want to find an eighteenth or nineteenth reason to put down the Mets when the team called Shea Stadium home, he might eventually get to “and they have a banner up for winning the Wild Card!“ because somehow making the postseason but not making all of its hay could be considered undignified.
I loved the 1999 season as no other, so it should be no surprise that I want it marked. But I loved that banner, too. I loved that it changed its wording once or twice. The Mets weren’t shy about posting something for 1999 in 2000. There was no flag to run up a pole, but a banner they could do (the Mets were always big on banners, you might remember). If memory serves — and, contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t always — they gave themselves credit first for just the Wild Card. Then they realized, no, wait a sec, we did more than that. Not that winning the Wild Card wasn’t something, considering how they had to get there. But the banner morphed into a celebration of the playoff victory over Arizona: NLDS Champs.
A little unwieldy, but accurate, even if I don’t remember once thinking, on the heels of Todd Pratt’s home run, “We’re champions of the division series!” Yet the real beauty of that 1999 team wasn’t a specific title — and without a division in its pocket, it was hard to identify one anyway — but the spirit it represented. The ’99 Mets’ shiningest moments may have glittered most strongly in their final two games, known in Amazin’ shorthand as the Grand Slam Single Game and the Kenny Rogers Game (except, of course, for the Kenny Rogers part). Yet “SPLIT LAST TWO NLCS GAMES” wouldn’t have looked quite right in right field, so the eventual compromise that became the 1999 banner…
1999
WILD CARD
& NLDS
WINNERS
…fit just fine. If it couldn’t be briefly explained, all the better. Baseball is about passing on stories. If someone ever wanted to know, “What’s the deal with Wild Card & NLDS winners sign?” you could pass a good half-inning nailing the nomenclature for the uninitiated.
The other two markers pasted over right field at Shea, one for the 1988 N.L. EAST DIVISION CHAMPIONS and one for the 2006 N.L. EAST & NLDS CHAMPIONS…bring those back, too, in some form. Like 1999, neither of those years was quite poleworthy, but they ought to be good enough to be scrawled on a wall and never erased. There’s nothing more you can do in the course of 162 games (or 163, if you’re 1999) then get to the playoffs. You can win a division title, and that can be an awful lot of fun, but it doesn’t guarantee you a trip up the flagpole. That’s why the three non-pennant playoff teams are equal…even if one, because of the magnificent hell they put themselves and us through, will always be a little more equal than the others, certainly in my heart.
The ’99 Mets were in stone contention for the division title most of that season, incidentally. They were alone in first as late as August 19 and within one game of the top entering the rollercoaster that the year became starting with a frightening plunge into Turner Field on September 21. From there, it was a freefall, but then — unlike what you might have noticed the last couple of Septembers — there was a rise, culminating in three consecutive wins at the end of the schedule, thereby necessitating a fourth game and a fourth win…which was won, on October 4, 1999. That pushed the Mets into the playoffs, which is the reason there was any kind of banner to script at all.
The Mets winning a few games when they absolutely needed them…shoot, that should be worthy of a wall unto itself.
Relive 1999 and all the other Mets season as you never have before in Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook. And for a touch of modest populist outrage at the disappearance of affordable middle-tier seats where the Mets play ball, check out, of all things, Variety.
by Greg Prince on 24 April 2009 8:21 pm 
When the Mets begin decorating their new house in earnest, the first order of business is to mark the franchise as proud participants in all seven of their postseasons, just as was done across the lot at Shea Stadium. The flags are already up for the World Champions and the National League Champions. The rest need to follow. Every October counts.
Photograph by the always championship-caliber David G. Whitham.
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