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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 6 March 2009 9:35 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.
One supposes every season brings with it change you can be counting on in advance of knowing what’s actually going to happen on the field. Entering 1999, we knew a few things beyond the annual recomposition that each year brings to the roster.
• We saw an all-black cap, the NY in blue with white outline and orange drop shadow, and an all-black road uniform with NEW YORK in block letters.
• We saw no names above the numbers on the back of any of the three different home uniform tops the Mets might wear on any given day.
• We saw no Mets on Channel 9 but found them now and again on Channel 11.
That’s the sort of stuff that will shake you up going into Spring Training if you’re the kind of fan who pays attention to every little detail. These changes wouldn’t go unremarked upon in the months or decade that would follow.
Let’s take them one at a time before moving on to one other Spring 1999 change definitely worth noting.
Black. It was the second season of the Mets either enhancing or corrupting their color scheme, as 1998 saw the black Mets script debut at home and be worn generously on the road. It also saw the black dome/blue bill cap in action for the first time. Judging by how many heads I saw them on at Shea beginning on Opening Day 1998, it was considered less an affront than a mod new look by those who bought in. Plenty seemed to buy in; plenty must have passed, but it did spawn a blacker variation a year later. I first saw the new cap in the offseason press conferences that announced the acquisitions of Bobby Bonilla and Rickey Henderson, then in person at a Lids in Roosevelt Field. It was a strange sight, but by May, I bought in (same interval I waited a year earlier to buy the black and blue). I liked the black NEW YORK jersey enough to cough up $70 in May of ’99 to have for my trip to see the Mets in Arizona — representin’, as it were. I’m not a jersey-buyer (too cheap), so I must have really been diggin’ on it.
The all-black cap and the all-black road jersey have become entrenched in the Mets wardrobe, though the team has pulled away from both somewhat these past three years. I think I read somewhere that the jersey may be left in storage when Charlie Samuels is packing for road trips in 2009, but we’ll see what we see. Most Mets fans who are vocal about it see only ill tidings in the black shirts and the black caps, a renunciation of our blue and orange birthright.
I’m way easier on the black caps and the black NEW YORK tops than much of the Metsnoscenti. I liked them in 1999. I like them now. They say or indicate New York Mets in an official capacity, which is about all I need to sign off. Black goes well with anything, as they say. I thought it went well with blue and orange though I’m willing to accept the argument that there’s no improving on blue and orange. I never got on board with any of the well-intentioned online petitions demanding a return to blue caps only and, though you won’t hear me say this all that often, I trust the Mets to dress themselves most years. The only uniform I absolutely hated was the block letter NEW YORK pullover introduced in 1988, yet on the first day the Mets wore them, they swatted six homers at the Big O, led by Darryl’s tension ring blast, so even those kind of worked out OK.
The Mets wore black when they re-entered the playoffs in 1999 at the BOB; they wore black when they took two from the Cardinals at Busch an October later. They’ve had their moments in the togs they first slipped on in 1999, and anything that reminds me of 1999 is always going to be at least a little blessed in my eyes.
Nameless. Oh, except for not wearing names on the back of the home jerseys in 1999. I thought that was pretentious for the era. The practice had a dry run the first two games of the Subway Series in 1998, something about Nelson Doubleday like the home Red Sox look and wanting to do something special for a big occasion. Since the Mets lost both of those NY-NY games, I didn’t think it was all that special, but there the Mets were in 1999, a bunch of no-names.
It didn’t work, especially on the rarely seen pinstripes. The numbers were set too low. It should have evoked not the Red Sox of Doubleday’s fantasies but the Mets of ’62 to ’78 when there were no names. It just evoked obscurity. The Mets seemed determined to hide their identities in plain sight, to place themselves in witness protection in front of their home fans. With hindsight, it’s a bit charming because it was 1999. For example, you know if you’re seeing an unspecified 6 scampering from third to home in the late afternoon shadows of an early October Sunday, you have that extra beat before you realize you’re watching Melvin Mora run us into some semblance of postseason baseball in 1999.
Not that you need much help to figure that out, I’m guessing.
The most important element the Mets removed from their backs in 1999 was not their names. It was the monkey that had resided there since the final five games of 1998, all losses of a playoff-eliminating nature (in quainter times, we called that a collapse). We recognized October baseball when we finally got it the next year. And the year after that, 2000, it was good to see PIAZZA definitively be PIAZZA at Shea. Thrilling to know sometimes the Mets are capable of correcting their mistakes.
Channel 11. Man, this was weird. Thirty-seven seasons of Channel 9 gone. Now the over-the-air home of the Mets was the former over-the-air home of the Yankees. Those fine fellows slid down to Channel 5 and, to make things just a little more bizarre, took Tim McCarver with them. Meanwhile, we replaced McCarver with Tom Seaver, which — in Metlike style — couldn’t get accomplished without a heaping helping of storm and stress.
Two different issues, really. Seaver would have been in for McCarver regardless of frequency. It had been grumbled that Bobby Valentine got the honest/hypercritical McCarver off the telecasts through his alleged Machiavellian maneuverings. If so, it was a pretty thin-skinned thing to do…and absolutely the right call. I had had it up to here (my hand is under my chin) with Tim McCarver by 1999. He was no longer fresh or incisive or teaching me something new every time I turned on a Mets game the way he was so often in the 1980s. He just harped and harped and harped. Was he too hard on the Mets? I honestly don’t remember. I was just sick of him (and Gary Thorne) by ’99. I celebrated the return of Seaver to the Met fold and if McCarver was the McCollateral Damage, so be it.
Seaver wasn’t much of an analyst, but he was Seaver. In 1999, that was enough.
As for it all playing out over Channel 11, weird. Not as weird as it might have been in the ’70s or ’80s when there were loads of over-the-air games, but strange on those stray weekends when the Mets didn’t pipe their performances through Fox Sports Net New York. It took some remembering which channel to click to; to this day, once or twice a year I flip to Channel 9 and wait for Ralph Kiner. That said, it wasn’t as weird in 1999 as it would have been in 1979 or 1989 because the Channel 9 we generally recall with such warmth didn’t really exist by 1999.
Four of the Mets Classics that have aired on SNY are Channel 9 productions, the last of which is from 1997: the Mlicki game. It didn’t feel like Channel 9 the way the ’86 game at San Diego or the ’91 homecoming of Darryl Strawberry did. It felt like a UPN 9 game, a difference that transcends a single digit. To my way of thinking, Mets games on Channel 9 stopped being Mets games on Channel 9 in the classic sense once Lindsey Nelson bolted for San Francisco after 1978 and lost a little beyond that when WOR-TV became WWOR-TV in 1987. On Ralph Kiner Night two years ago, we were treated to a montage of Kiner’s Korner klips on DiamondVision and none of them predated the mid-’80s. None of them had that Rheingold or even Schaefer feel to them. Small pity. Channel 9 remained the TV home of the Mets clear through 1998, but Channel 9 ceased to be Channel 9 quite a while earlier.
That said, it was weird to go to Channel 11 and, ten years in, it’s still a bit strange.
We knew of those changes in the spring of ’99, but it would take me until after the season began to learn of another at least as momentous shift in the Metscape that would alter how I looked at the Mets in the years to come.
One day at work, I get a call — not an e-mail, but a call (signifying a Met alert) — from Jason urging me to check out this new Web site devoted to the most awesome topic ever: a site devoted to which Met wore which number. You’re gonna love it, he said.
I did. I still do. It was the first Mets site of its ilk to which I had been directed and, with it having outlasted generations of Internet newcomers, I don’t know that I’ve ever found anything else that tops it in terms of mission, execution and the combination of joy and certainty it brings me as a Mets fan (though this also indispensable ten-year-old site ties it in that regard). I never have to guess who wore what. I can go to MBTN.net and feel secure that it’s all right there. So, with due respect to the all-black road ensemble; the nameless uniform backs; and changing channels, the most enduring addition to the Mets consciousness to come out of the spring of ’99 is Mets By The Numbers, which just turned ten. I think I speak for countless (countless — get it?) Mets fans when I say we wouldn’t know Sisk from Viola the way we do if it weren’t for Mets By The Numbers.
Aside from entertaining and enlightening us for a decade, Jon Springer set a solid standard for every aspiring Mets site that has come along since, including this one. The book he wrote with Matt Silverman also created a nice little literary legacy to live up to for those of us trying our hands at that now.
So Happy Tenth to Mets By The Numbers…and here’s to a decade of it having made more interesting everything attached to that which is blue and orange and intermittently black.
It’s Mets by the angst (a little) in Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available for pre-ordering now via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other fine retailers.
by Greg Prince on 5 March 2009 9:29 am While my curiosity and maybe even my enthusiasm regarding the next ballpark where any of us has yet to see a ballgame inches ever wider, I used Wednesday night as the launching pad for my latest trip in the other temporal direction, to the team I never saw and the park where I never saw them. Both were as alive and well as they could be on a Wednesday night in 2009, which means that it was another New York Baseball Giants Nostalgia Society night in Riverdale. I try not to miss those nights seeing as how I missed the days that made them necessary.
Our guest speaker was a truly passionate historian named Peter Laskowich, filling us in on all kinds of nooks and crannies of New York baseball lore, such as why the clubhouses at the Polo Grounds were situated in center field (geology), why you couldn’t take a trolley car to where a team named for those who dodged trolley cars played (politics) and why Manny Ramirez and Vin Scully have more to chat about than Manny’s money (they’re both from Washington Heights). Peter traversed both big picture and minute detail, and should you ever have the opportunity to take one of his classes or tours, I recommend it highly. Peter can tell you about the old Polo Grounds; he can tell you about old Ebbets Field and its transit-deprived predecessor Washington Park; he can tell you about Hilltop Park, home of the Highlanders as well as that place where the Highlanders wound up after their decade stopover at the Polo Grounds.
He can probably tell you about Shea Stadium, if you ask, but it never occurred to me that Shea Stadium would ever require a historian to explain it. Shea Stadium was a living, breathing organism until quite recently. It was a carnival, a playground, a town square set down conveniently in a parking lot.
Now it’s just a parking lot, and everything else about it no longer “is” — it’s all was.
Well, shoot, we know that. We know they finished playing at Shea Stadium and they finished tearing down Shea Stadium and that Shea Stadium has already received orientation toward its celestial incarnation. But hanging with those New York Baseball Giants fans Wednesday night drove home all over again that the Shea Stadium that operated on Earth is history and that Shea will eventually be one of those places that somebody will need somebody else to explain.
Everybody at our dinner learned something about the Polo Grounds from Peter Laskowich, but not everybody needed Peter Laskowich to explain the Polo Grounds. Our Nostalgia Society is brimming with members who saw the Giants there and they will never forget what it was like. In the restaurant where we gathered, those folks were in the majority. Outside Josepina’s of Riverdale, they are relatively few. The Polo Grounds is the stuff of history a mighty long time now. Someday, it will be strictly historians who can give you the fullest account possible of that place.
Nowadays, that’s not the case with Shea. Everybody alive who has ever been to a Mets home game has been to a Mets home game at Shea Stadium (save for a handful of hardy cranks who washed their hands of the whole thing by September 1963 and not counting those cameos in Monterrey and Tokyo). There is no shortage of us.
Soon enough, as any actuarial table can tell you, our ranks will diminish. It won’t be a substantial reduction at first, not for a very, very, very long while. Total attendance for Mets games at Shea between 1964 and 2008 was close to 100 million. Even accounting for those of us who went more than once, that’s a lot of people. Somebody’s going to be at a dinner or a luncheon or maybe a breakfast of New York baseball devotees I don’t know how many decades from now and there’s going to be somebody who went to Shea Stadium.
At some point, though, there will be fewer and fewer, and Shea Stadium’s existence will grow more and more distant. Details will dissipate and facts are bound to fog up. Shea Stadium will require an in-depth explanation on the scale of its ancestors. Historians who want to give a complete picture of the old ballparks of New York won’t be able to treat Shea as a footnote after all the ancient stadia have been covered. Shea will be, for all intents and purposes, as ancient as the Polo Grounds, as Ebbets Field, as Washington Park.
It makes me wonder what history, once separated from euphoria-tinged comparisons with that which is new and shiny, will tell those who ask about Shea Stadium. While I didn’t know until Wednesday night that Manhattan schist made the building of traditional clubhouses prohibitively expensive, I have picked up a few foundation facts about the Polo Grounds over my years of fascination with it. I do know that certain games constituted its signature events, that certain architectural quirks made it stand out from its peers, that its location in place and time made it very special to those who saw games there. Yet I can only imagine what it was really like, in the way those of us who saw games at Shea Stadium will always know what the historians will only piece together.
So tell me — what do we tell the future about our old ballpark, the one we saw but it never will, so the future can get its story straight?
There’s history and then there’s intense personal history, such as that you can read when you pre-order Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or other fine retailers.
by Greg Prince on 4 March 2009 8:48 pm 
Received an advance copy of my book yesterday and couldn’t resist introducing it to some, if not all, of its inspirations. (I couldn’t bring myself to include anything by Roger Angell in the picture. It’s shocking enough to me that I can place something I wrote on the same shelves that hold The Summer Game and Five Seasons.)
Faith and Fear in Flushing exists. Make it a part of your baseball library by pre-ordering it today from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or other fine online booksellers.
(And thanks to this guy for the headline inspiration.)
by Greg Prince on 3 March 2009 12:31 pm “South Carolina,” declared John Rutledge, the fair colony’s delegate to the second Continental Congress on the occasion of that body’s 380th meeting, 7 June, 1776, “that is our country.” At least he said so in 1776, the restored director’s cut. As Rutledge was portrayed as a foe of American independence (and not big on the proposition that all men are created equal), I’m not in the habit of quoting him/his character to make my points for me. Yet on the occasion of this body’s deliberations as they concern the second World Baseball Classic, color me a little South Carolinian.
Elsewhere in the most important movie musical of all time, Judge John Wilson had to be continually reminded he couldn’t second Pennsylvania’s motion being that he was from Pennsylvania — but we don’t have that rule at Faith and Fear, so I will second the motion of my fellow delegate from FAFIF: phooey on the WBC. Ditto, ditto, I hate it.
Now please rise and repeat after me:
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the Metropolitans of New York, and to the baseball season for which they stand: one Team, under Jerry Manuel, noncollapsible, with Johan and K-Rod for all.
You may now take your seats. And the WBC can take a back seat to the M-E-T-S, because to paraphrase from Donald Hall’s biography of the late Dock Ellis, the Mets are a country all to themselves.
Nevertheless, I wouldn’t want to disappoint or deprive the honorable baseball fan from England who shared his eloquent defense of the WBC with us in response to Jason’s enumerated objections. And as long as I’m quoting John Rutledge and praising the British, let me go for the triple play of 1776 heresy and echo John Dickinson when he says that in his own way he regards America no less than does Mr. Adams. In my own way I regard world baseball no less than those who favor the WBC. But I’m not joining its army and I’m not fighting in its defense. It’s not so much that I believe that fight to be hopeless. I believe the WBC to be a waste of my and our time.
It may not be a waste of time to those who want to see baseball take hold on all seven continents (I hear there’s a southpaw in the Antarctica League who throws a pretty mean snowball). It may not be a waste of time to the players we’ve never heard of from places we rarely think of, the way we once rarely thought about Venezuela or Venezuelans like Johan Santana and Francisco Rodriguez. It may not be a waste of time to fans whose attention will be focused on this once-in-a-triennium opportunity to see some if not all of the best players in the game on one stage.
Yet at the risk of forfeiting my station among those cool, cool considerate men who are willing to see the upside in all this, I’m saying it’s a waste of time to me, the medium-sighted Mets fan whose interest lies in the 2009 Mets mutually pledging to each other — and us — their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor in the 2009 baseball season. I’m saying it’s a waste of time to the 2009 Mets and their pursuit of championship happiness during the 2009 baseball season. As long as it’s a waste of time to the other 29 Major League Baseball teams, I suppose it’s a wash. But I don’t worry about them. I worry about us. And I see no good in this.
Except for what Jerry Manuel chooses to see. In the first Snighcast of the spring last week, Gary Cohen explained Manuel, while not crazy about the WBC concept, hopes the idea his tournament-bound players have expressed about playing for a cause greater than themselves stays with them when they come marching home to Port St. Lucie. For when the WBC ends, Cohen said of Manuel’s thinking, the Mets are their country. Just like it’s our country.
Jerry elaborated in the Post on Monday:
“I hope it has an impact on them as individuals to enjoy that camaraderie and bring that same feeling back here. I think it’s going to be a great experience for them to play for what’s on the front of their jersey and not what’s on the back.”
I’d like to think this isn’t a new sensation to the individual Mets, that whether they’re wearing the uniform of the USA or Puerto Rico or Venezuela these next couple of weeks that they’ve always gotten the idea of the team coming first in what is, for all the individual stats and glory, a team game. They’ve had some pretty piss-poor coaching and guidance their entire lives if it takes the World Baseball Classic to frame that they should be playing each game for the betterment of their team. But maybe that’s just Jerry being Jerry, finding a useful spin to put on any potentially detrimental situation. One assumes the reason the Mets didn’t capture what was right in front of them these past two Septembers wasn’t misdirected individuality deployed at the expense of the unit. One assumes they just kind of sucked at the very worst possible juncture in the schedule.
On the other hand, the last time the Mets made the playoffs was in the last season whose Spring Training was interrupted by a World Baseball Classic. I viewed the WBC in 2006 as something akin to a second flood, a simple famine, plagues of locusts everywhere as much as I do now, but despite the unwelcome break afforded for the piddling, twiddling and resolution of the WBC, those Mets raced out to their best start ever. By the end of that year, we saw fireworks; we saw the pageant and pomp and almost a parade.
At Tradition Field, how quiet…how quiet the chamber is. But when they turn ’round and the battle begins, hey Mets — look sharp. Get whatever you get from this foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy World Baseball Classic and take it to those obnoxious and disliked grenadiers of Philadelphia.
Let winning ring.
This Spring Training lull does present a great opportunity to pre-order Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or other fine retailers.
by Jason Fry on 2 March 2009 11:56 pm Send me to Baseball Gitmo — because I'm not rooting for the U.S. in the World Baseball Classic.
I'm not rooting for anybody else, either. I'm rooting for the whole thing to be snowed out or cancelled because of economic ruin.
Is there a worse idea than the World Baseball Classic? Let's count the ways in which it sucks.
1. It delays the arrival of real baseball.
2. It interferes with the development of team spirit and camaraderie and other things that I think are basically imaginary except when the alternative to them is the WBC.
3. It means spring-training telecasts are even more scrub-eriffic.
4. It offers random hitting and pitching coaches a chance to screw up Met swings and Met pitching motions in a flurry of shameful sports adultery. (Sure, you could claim that such a brief affair could help our players, but we're Met fans.)
5. It offers the chance for injuries, whether it's a pitcher trying to coax May stuff out of a March arm in a fit of patriotic fervor, bad luck or some Kafkaesque turn of fate — imagine (with crossed fingers) Nelson Figueroa beaning David Wright. Which would be particularly ridiculous since last time I checked Nelson Figueroa was from frigging Brooklyn.
(Sure, Mets could get injured playing the Astros or Italy or Hofstra, but don't you interrupt me when I'm ranting.)
Hell, according to Johan Santana his bout of elbow whatever (BECAUSE IT'S NOTHING SERIOUS RIGHTRIGHTRIGHTRIGHT?) is WBC-related: He was hurrying to get in shape to defend the national honor of Venezuela. Even when our players don't play in the WBC, they get screwed by it.
Enough. In the 1993 All-Star Game in Baltimore, John Kruk found himself digging in against Randy Johnson. Or, rather, not digging in — Kruk saw one laser beam above his head and saw the rest of his at-bat with his back foot somewhere in the vicinity of Washington, D.C. When chastised for not exactly offering the Unit the old college try, Kruk pointed out that he played for the Phillies, not the National League. So should it be here: Whether their passports are American, Venezuelan, Dominican, Canadian, or what have you, once the orange and blue are donned I want our guys to think of themselves as upstanding members of the Metropolitan armed forces. All other loyalties are checked at the door, lest distraction or disaster rear their ugly heads.
6. David Wright will be hanging out with Derek Jeter and Chipper Jones. I rest my case.
Loyalists of all stripes should do their patriotic duty and pre-order Greg's Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other fine retailers.
by Greg Prince on 2 March 2009 1:16 am We have a saying around our house: We don't want to be on News 12.
In the first three years we lived here, our neighborhood was featured on Long Island's cable news outlet five times that I can remember for reasons that had nothing to do with a plethora of National Merit Scholars or our rousing Memorial Day parade. And we live in what I believe to be a pretty decent neighborhood.
• A car crashed through a bagel shop window.
• A high school teacher was apprehended for conducting funny business with one of his students.
• A would-be bank robber was pursued from yard to yard on foot.
• Natural gas leaked one morning, necessitating an evacuation of residents of an area co-op.
• And an apartment in the same co-op caught fire thanks to a halogen lamp meeting a fish tank.
The 2004 gas leak was in our parking lot and the 2007 fire took place in our building. I was wide awake for the fire, which was pretty scary to find out about while it was in progress. I learned of the gas leak evacuation on News 12, many hours after cluelessly sleeping through it.
We don't want our neighborhood to be on News 12. And we didn't want the back pages for our Mets this Sunday morning.
But we got 'em.
The back page of the News: SAY IT AIN'T SO, 'HAN!
The back page of the Post: SAY IT AIN'T JO
The back page of Newsday: OUCH!
No need to fill in the sub-headlines. You know what the fright was all about. You know that icy feeling you feel when the Mets are on the back page at the beginning of March for anything more topical than another round of team-to-beatery.
For what it's worth (hopefully a lot), news regarding Johan Santana generated since these papers were printed is sunnier. Johan has tested his left elbow, declared himself feeling loose and the Mets have decided against a flight to snowy New York to run an MRI on our ace's platinum triceps tendon.
Ain't that good news? Man, ain't that news?
It's March 1. Opening Day is five WBC-necessitated weeks away. Plenty of time to heal. Plenty of time for something to not heal, too. Bill Pulsipher was gonna be out maybe a couple of days. Pedro Martinez was just going to need to give it some rest.
Once the pitcher on whom you're counting makes the back pages for reasons that make you nervous, you just as soon sleep through it.
Unequivocally good news, I hope, is Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets is available for pre-ordering now via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other fine retailers.
by Greg Prince on 1 March 2009 2:25 am
by Greg Prince on 27 February 2009 10:53 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.
It was an iconic enough moment to have been included Wednesday in my partner’s recitation of Spring Training episodes that rise above the St. Lucie snooze to become genuine, generally unwanted news: “Right Fielder Punched the First Baseman on Photo Day.” I remember that episode. Everybody seems to remember that episode. I remember that episode for slightly more than Mets reasons.
The RF on March 2, 1989 was, of course, Darryl Strawberry. The 1B was Keith Hernandez. Until I re-read the details in Joe Durso’s piece in the next day’s Times I’d forgotten why, exactly, Strawberry took a swing at Hernandez and launched the hoary (but still hilarious) observation that it was the first time Darryl had ever successfully hit the cutoff man.
Straw was in a snit over his contract negotiations. Mex had been quoted in some stories that Darryl was getting bad advice. Strawberry didn’t need much to wind him up. Neither, by 1989, did Keith. As Bob Klapisch covered in The Worst Team Money Could Buy, the Keith Hernandez of ’89 was no longer the Keith Hernandez of ’84, no longer the rallying point for the young Mets. The Mets weren’t that young anymore. Darryl may have been slow to mature, but he was 26 in early March 1989.
Come to think of it, so was I.
Darryl stormed out of camp that Thursday because he didn’t like his job. I remember hearing about the tussle because I was attempting to storm into a job. The day they had their fight was the day my career would be defined for the next fifteen years, making their melee kind of momentous for me.
I tiptoed into freelance writing after college, a line of work I never really committed to. It represented an incredibly unambitious holding pattern that, like me, was getting old. After nearly four years as something of a timid dilettante, I knew it was time to find something permanent. Maybe not fifteen years permanent, but something steady.
My first interview for a full-time job was that Monday, February 27, in the city at a horrible trade magazine — horrible in the sense that I was bored just by the name. But a job is a job, I figured. The editor who interviewed me was kind of an Al Bundy type. Complained to me that people there didn’t like that he wore corduroy pants to work. I took that as a bad sign because he was wearing a tie when he said it and all I could think was, “Do I have to wear a tie in this place?” He gave me a proofreading test and then sent me to meet the publisher, a woman who acted very put out by my appearance in her office (although I was wearing a suit). The conversation seemed to hinge on the fact that I had been a freelancer and could I possibly transition into a staff job? That’s why I’m here, I said.
We left my future with their magazine unresolved. I eventually got a call offering me a trial: work here for a week and we’ll see if you can handle it. By then, I was en route to what I perceived as better things.
Thursday, Photo Day in St. Lucie, I drove to Great Neck and interviewed at a trade magazine whose bailiwick fascinated me: beverages. Always loved beverages, and not just with food that was too salty. I had a large collection of soda cans that I’d been stockpiling since the end of seventh grade. Brought soda to nursery school because I had a milk allergy. It was in my blood. I drank enough diet cola so it probably was my blood.
I had no idea a magazine devoted to beverages existed, let alone existed on Long Island, until I noticed a classified with the magic word in the title. Even then I didn’t pounce, just kind of filed it away until I figured I should call on spec. Got the editor on the phone and asked if there was any freelance work. Wanna be associate editor? he asked back.
It was just about that easy. Seems I called during a propitious interlude for hiring, just when the previous associate editor was packing up and moving to Chicago. I sent some clips and arranged to come in on March 2. I wore my suit again. I was the only one in the place who was that dressed up.
Nobody gave me a proofreading test in Great Neck. Nobody complained to me about their job or others’ impressions of their wardrobe. The editor who interviewed me likened the atmosphere to a big high school newspaper. I enjoyed my high school newspaper a great deal. About the only drawback I could divine was that when I instinctively peppered the conversation with references to Lenny Dykstra and Bobby Ojeda, the editor returned my Mets talk with a blank stare. He wasn’t a baseball fan. Oh well, you can’t have everything.
On the drive home, I heard on WFAN that Darryl came after Keith in the middle of the Mets shooting their team picture. I was horrified because I wanted (and still want) to believe that teammates all get along. Those Mets may have been “the bad guys” in other teams’ eyes, but did they really think that way of each other? Apparently at least a couple of them did. How discouraging.
Six days later, after Darryl and Keith shook hands, the editor called me and told me the job was mine. I went back up to shake hands on our deal Friday, March 10. The following Monday, March 13, 1989, I began what would become a nearly fourteen-year stay with that magazine. In late 2002, I left to helm a startup in more or less the same field. I didn’t stay at that post nearly as long, only into the second week of the 2004 season. Since that affiliation ended, I have remained involved in the beverage business, some days more than other days.
In honor of my impending twentieth anniversary in and around soft drinks and such, a six-pack (more or less) of salient points:
1) By the end of my first week on the job, I understood completely that teammates do not all get along. I had a particularly obnoxious co-worker to whom I was sorely tempted to give the Strawberry treatment — it took all my self-restraint to not hit the cutoff man. Whatever I’d been thinking of Darryl and Keith acting unprofessionally on March 2, I had to recant on March 16. Fellas, go after each other at will if either of you is really as bad as this guy at the next desk, but shake hands and play ball when it’s over. That’s what me and that twit from twenty years ago more or less did. Otherwise, save for my chronic inability to go to sleep at night and come in bright and early the next morning, I made the transition from freelancer to full-timer just fine, thank you very much.
2) The guy who packed up and moved to Chicago, with whom my relationship consisted of a benign handshake when I came in for my interview…you’d figure I’d never see him again, right? Except he worked in an industry that overlapped with beverages and dropped by to say hello to our staff when we were in the Windy City to cover a trade show en masse. Upon discovering my baseball fandom, he invited me — in that loose way people have of inviting you to do something if they don’t really know you — to go to a game at Wrigley one of these days. Thing is, I’m one of those people who remembers those invites; how many people invite you to Cubs home games? We kept in touch from a distance, became very good friends over e-mail and, yes, took in a Mets doubleheader sweep at Wrigley Field one fine afternoon in 1998.
2a) Of at least equal significance, this fellow became my audience for a series of reminiscences I began writing and mailing (actual snail mail) after leaving that second beverage magazine job in ’04. My “Greatest Baseball Experiences” I called them, borrowing the name from what he said he had — one of his greatest baseball experiences — in 2003 when he showed up at U.S. Cellular Field for the All-Star Game, found no luck with scalpers and then, for no foreseeable reason, somebody simply handed him a ticket, no money asked. I mention this because the Greatest Baseball Experiences were the seminal essays that would morph into Flashback Friday in 2005 and help form the foundation of Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets in 2009. Hence, besides being fortunate enough to be friends with this very good guy, I can draw a line from our chance path-crossing in 1989 to this blog and that book.
3) Others with books coming out this spring: Keith Hernandez (ably aided by this accomplished author) and Darryl Strawberry. We each had an eventful first Thursday in March twenty years ago and now we’re all sort of in the same business.
4) Twenty years? Geez. It almost goes without saying that I can’t believe 1989 was twenty years ago. I can’t believe the other years in this series sit as far back from the present as they do, but 1989 in particular seems as much like yesterday as the cliché law will allow. Probably has something to do with me still doing, in some tenuous fashion, what I began doing then.
5) Thirteen years and nine months with that first beverage magazine wasn’t the plan. The plan was give me six good months, let me start making some money, let me find something more rewarding. But I stayed. Whether through laziness or loyalty, I tend to stay. I began grumbling to Stephanie that I really ought to leave in July 1990. Then again around June 1992. Then February 1994. Then pretty much every day for the next seven years starting in November 1995. I have no idea what path my career would have taken had I taken myself up on my threat, but I shudder to think about those I would have not gotten to know if I hadn’t stayed. In kind of a living, breathing Flashback Friday (except it was a Thursday), I threw myself a little tenth-anniversary bash at a bar near our office — by then in Manhattan — in March 1999. Somebody who probably sensed my frustration at never leaving said to me, “I’m glad you stayed.” At that moment, so was I. At this moment, too. It never quite lost that big high school newspaper feeling, while that sense of having found the exact right situation in March 1989 took almost forever to completely dissipate. A blessing and a curse, I suppose.
6) Beverages…there’s more to life and more to writing than beverages. When I was deep in my magazine tenure, I’d grown tired of being The Beverage Guy in social interactions with civilians. “Tell us about…” whatever beverage had penetrated the greater consciousness was a recurring request. Yet these days, when nobody particularly asks, I find myself volunteering bits of know-it-all minutiae about whatever’s being poured. I’m no longer The Beverage Guy, but what’s in your blood has a habit of sticking around.
Though I hear they have shots for that now.
I do my best to pour it on in Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available for pre-ordering now via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other fine retailers.
by Greg Prince on 26 February 2009 12:19 pm 
Hozzie the Cat can stop hiding now. The Mets return to something resembling action this afternoon at 1:00 on SNY, taking on…like it matters who they play. Jace is mostly right: Spring Training games are useless teases — except for the first one, which serves the same purpose as the adrenaline shot in Pulp Fiction. This is the injection that jumpstarts us back to life and gives us a reason to peek out from under our tarps, our shrouds and our Snuggies for another year.
Even the preternaturally reticent Hosmer is excited today.
by Jason Fry on 26 February 2009 12:00 am The Mets beat the Orioles somewhere down in Florida today, which means nothing except that it's no longer completely, utterly winter. Which isn't a bad bit of meaning to extract from a gray New York February day, but it's no longer transformative. At least not for me.
I'm even busier than usual this spring (three Star Wars books to push across the finish line), which isn't a great thing to combine with my usual disenchantment with spring training. I love baseball, but spring training just leaves me cold. Once upon a time, it took six weeks of calisthenics and wind sprints and exhibition games to get guys who'd spent the winter driving trucks or selling things into fighting shape. When I was a kid, baseball cards still occasionally mentioned what players did in the offseason; that's long gone unless Topps decides that “Joe spends the winter lifting weights, going to the batting cage and eating special diets in a nearly empty condo in Florida” would be a catchy thing to put on a cardback. Now, pitchers need spring training and everybody else tries not to die of boredom, including scribes stuck in St. Lucie and all of us back home. In theory, spring training is the renewal of hope and all that. In practice, the best you can say about it is it's nominally better than winter.
Besides, spring training's not supposed to be about news. “News,” in this case, does not mean “trying out a new pitch,” “in the best shape of his life” or “playing with a newfound maturity.” Those are cliches, baseball slots waiting to be filled by a different player each March. In spring training cliches are noise; news is signal. And in spring training real news almost always signals something bad: Hoped-For Third Starter Felt a Pop and Is Flying Back to New York, Right Fielder Punched the First Baseman on Photo Day, or (and I'm sorry for being even more cynical than usual) Marginal Roster Guy Is Hitting .783. Because the last is inevitably a statistical fluke that will lead to Marginal Roster Guy being taken north and regressing to the statistical mean in a cruelly public fashion.
Of course we could be the Yankees, in which case “news” would mean This Year's High-Profile Player Apologizes for Taking Perfromance-Enhancing Drugs. Which is amusing for us, except for the fact that our guy's turn in the stocks will inevitably come. And I'm not even going to mention Expected Phillie and Unexpected Met Engage in Something That Can Be Inflated Into War of Words, because I'm tired of that whole charade.
No, I think David Wright had it right last week: “This is the way it's supposed to be –- quiet.”
In the absence of news and resistance to cliche, I found my eyes drawn to these two Hardball Times pieces by Brandon Isleib. They're part of a series looking at how baseball's pennant races would have played out if the leagues had always been divided into divisions and played unbalanced schedules. As you might expect, the 1962-1968 Mets aren't a factor in this baseball alternate reality either. The '69 Mets still get a miracle. (Though the Cubs make the playoffs in the pretend NL Central anyway.)
And then it really gets interesting.
In real life the story of the early-1970s Mets is a frustrating one: Three third-place, 83-win seasons before a lovably flawed near-miracle. It's the triumph of great pitching lifting lousy hitting all the way to the middle of the pack. But in Isleib's world, the smaller divisions and unbalanced schedule gives the Mets division titles in 1970 and 1972 in addition to 1973, with the Braves edging them by a single game in 1971. That's one final-day bout of dismay (can't imagine how that feels) in the middle of four postseason appearances.
But wait — you want to know about the 1980s. Well, the 1984 Mets are a second miracle, coming from nowhere to win the NL East. And it's the first of seven in a row. Imagine that!
What does all this mean beyond a welcome diversion from February? To me, it's that reputations are carved in stone based on surprisingly small taps with the historical chisel.
The '69 Mets wind up looking less miraculous, and more like the blueprint for building a team around pitching and defense. This isn't as good a story, but one the players and front-office personnel on that team would appreciate, since “miracle” has some pretty demeaning implications. (And let's not lose sight of the fact that those post-season checks meant a heck of a lot more back then.)
As for the 1980s, David Wright wears a different number today — because 5 would be on the Citi Field wall and the Faith and Fear in Flushing shirt, and we'd all know it immediately and instantly as Davey's number. There's no way Davey Johnson gets fired in the spring of 1990, not with a perfect track record. And therefore there's probably no way Buddy Harrelson's reputation gets cruelly but not unjustly diminished, or the Mets try to rebuild around a lemon-pussed outfielder whose hobbies include throwing explosives near little girls, or we ever have to talk about Jeff Torborg with anything other than the joyously red-faced hilarity he deserves as a bad manager for other teams. I'm also quite sure, though I can't prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Mets' string of triumphs also leads to a just and lasting peace in the Middle East, warnings being heeded about Wall Street risk models not reflecting reality, a Shake Shack as centerpiece of a revitalized Brooklyn waterfront, and my nearing 40 with a lustrous skein of golden locks that would make a TV anchorman seethe with jealousy.
In Isleib's reimagined world the Bad Guys Win all the time. The Mets of the mid-1980s aren't a parable for wasted talent and the perils of late nights, but a celebration of apology-free behind-kicking. The late-1980s Mets no longer look like a thunderous but spastic team of mismatched parts, and Gregg Jefferies is no longer the scapegoat for everything from second-place finishes to global warming. No, they look like a continuation of a Met winning tradition that would have been a bit ho-hum by then, though presumably not to us.
If all this had come to pass, what would we see looking back? A mini-dynasty and an maxi- one in the blue-and-orange history books. What would that do to our little-brother reputation in this town, the one that leaves us by turns irritated and not-so-secretly relieved? And what would it do to our sense of self as Met fans? Would it be better, or worse?
You'll get less cynic and more into-it if you buy Greg's book — Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available for pre-ordering now via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other fine retailers.
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