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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 13 June 2008 8:47 am Welcome to Flashback Friday: Tales From The Log, a final-season tribute to Shea Stadium as viewed primarily through the prism of what I have seen there for myself, namely 371 regular-season and 13 postseason games to date. The Log records the numbers. The Tales tell the stories.
7/2/82 F Philadelphia 3-1 Swan 7-14 W 8-4
8/3/86 Su Montreal 2-2 Ojeda 1 16-25 W 4-3 (10)
5/15/87 F San Francisco 1-1 Fernandez 3 18-27 W 8-3
5/3/97 Sa St. Louis 6-4 Reed 1 51-56 W 5-1
6/8/98 M Tampa Bay (A) 1-0 Reed 7 64-62 W 3-0
10/8/00: NLDS @ Shea Mets 4 Giants 0 SP-Jones
4-1 Mets win series 3-1
4/26/02 F Milwaukee 7-0 Estes 1 138-102 W 1-0
6/20/02 Th Minnesota (A) 1-0 Trachsel 7 141-104 W 3-2
9/29/07 Sa Florida16-13 Maine 10 195-162 W 13-0
5/15/08 Th Washington 4-8 Pelfrey 4 199-168 L 1-0
It all made so much sense. Every time. This had to be the night. Or the day. All the stars were aligned. I could think of so many reasons that the first Mets’ no-hitter was going to take place at Shea Stadium with me on hand to witness it.
Start with the most basic premise: Wouldn’t it be crazy if it happened while I was here? The franchise has waited since its inception for it, I’m at a minute percentage of games, yet it’s unfolding right here, right now…with me in attendance! What’re the odds?
I don’t remember learning definitively that the Mets had never had a no-hitter. It was just one of those things I knew. I don’t remember learning about America being founded in 1776 or that 2 + 2 equaled 4. You don’t learn it, you simply understand it and accept it and take it from there.
The Mets have never had a no-hitter. Of course they haven’t.
Funny thing, the second game I ever went to — my first win — was a one-hitter. Jon Matlack shut out the Cards on June 29, 1974 with such ease that his one-hitter seemed unremarkable. The one hit was by the St. Louis pitcher, John Curtis, in the third. By then the Mets were winning 2-0. By then I had watched my first Old Timers Day, most noteworthy for Maury Wills playing with a headset on as he covered it for NBC. My other big observation was the filling out of All-Star Ballots. I’m sure I voted for Johnny Bench over Jerry Grote because I took my responsibility serious as death. The observation part was two guys a few rows down from me arguing the point. “Grote over BENCH? You’re voting for Grote over BENCH?” The guy had to have said it a dozen times. I learned that people like to repeat themselves.
Matlack had a one-hitter. It didn’t seem worth mentioning let alone repeating. The Mets were always having one-hitters. Seaver had thrown approximately one a year for as long as I could remember (which at age 11 I have to admit wasn’t all that far back). One-hitters were Confederate currency in terms of pitching gems. I always laughed when announcers referred to pitchers losing a one-hitter, as in giving up a second hit. What’s to lose? It was right there with “he almost made a great play” in terms of achievement.
A no-hitter would be different. A no-hitter was rare, and not just for the Mets. No-hitters got their own list in the paper. Someone threw a no-hitter anywhere in baseball and it was on the back page. First sports record book I ever owned, a New York Times almanac that covered the events of 1968, printed the boxscores of every no-hitter from that year, The Year of The Pitcher. Catfish Hunter threw a perfect game. Ray Washburn and Gaylord Perry exchanged no-hitters against each other’s team on consecutive nights. Those were pitching feats. That’s what I wanted.
I would wait. I’d have been happy to have seen one on TV, heard one on the radio. I was not going to be even that happy. As the years went by, the yen grew a little deeper. TV…radio…no no-hitter. At Shea? C’mon, that was never gonna happen.
But the first sign that it possibly could have was exhilarating. It wasn’t just a no-hitter, but a perfect game. For three innings in 1982, Craig Swan gave up nothing to the Phillies. The Mets never held an opposing team off base for three consecutive innings, let alone to start the game. With one out in the fourth, Pete Rose walked. There, Joel and I told each other, goes the perfect game. But Swannie retired the next two Phils. No hits through four. No hits through five. We didn’t talk about it, but we were watching a no-hitter, the first no-hitter in Mets history take place.
Of course we didn’t talk about it. We knew better. We’d been schooled in protocol. Mets fans didn’t need a no-hitter in order to know how to act. Somebody slipped us the notes, probably somebody on the Astros where they had a no-hitter every ten minutes.
The silent act stretched into the sixth when, with two out, it was Rose again. He singled off Swan. There went history. We stood — everybody stood; it’s what you do — and applauded Craig Swan’s effort. The Mets were winning 7-0 by then and, honestly, did you really expect him to pitch a no-hitter?
Stronger no-hit bids emerged as the Mets improved. Doc Gooden came oh-so-close at Shea in 1984, surrendering just an infield hit to Keith Moreland of the Cubs, one that could have been scored an error on Ray Knight and nobody could have complained. That I watched on TV in Tampa, saying nothing to anyone in my dorm, but thinking no-no all the way. A year later, Sid Fernandez seemed en route to destiny at Shea against the Reds. I was so sure that this would be the one that after six spotless innings I unwrapped an audio cassette to record the final innings on WHN. Davey Concepcion led off the seventh with a homer, Sid fell apart and the Mets lost.
I was chastened. I not only was reminded not to say anything aloud, I learned that thinking it was bad news. But good thoughts are so hard to shoo away when the one great moment in Mets history that hasn’t happened is in sight. I couldn’t shoo away the thoughts in 1986 when Bobby Ojeda took his no-hitter into the seventh when with one out Luis Rivera singled. It was the magical year of 1986, I was with two of my best friends and a no-hitter seemed greedy, so I let it go. The following May, El Sid was doing it again. That no-hit stuff that was always being talked up was in effect. Five hitless for Sid. Then he leaves with a knee or a hip or the gout. That was Sid. The combined no-hitter died after 5-1/3 (thanks Sisk). But again, it was too good a night to mope about the no-hitter. It was my first date with Stephanie. I’d only begun to lightly hint that we were witnessing a possible baseball, never mind personal, milestone when it evaporated on the spot.
(The Sid bid lives on in our wedding video wherein best man Chuck reads the letter I wrote him after that night, me babbling on about Sid’s flirtation with history…and, oh yeah, my flirtation with this blonde I’d just met.)
No-hit attempts would come and go with me off-premise. Gooden took another one against the Cubs deep until Damon Berryhill ended it in the eighth in ’88. I swear I thought David Cone was going to nail his down in ’92 against the Astros, but Benny Distefano got a hit with five outs to go. Gooden and Coney seemed like such good bets for no-hitters, too. Anyway, I wasn’t at those games and by the ’90s, when a no-hitter appeared possible on television, I started talking it up while in progress. It wasn’t working the old-fashioned way, so what the hell?
However, when next faced with the actual possibility of a no-hitter in my midst, I clung to tradition. I thought for sure Rick Reed was going to do it in 1998. It was too good not to happen.
First off, it was the Devil Rays, the first-year Devil Rays, the horrendous 26-35 Devil Rays. What a setup! I was at the first Devil Rays game at Shea as part of my six-pack. I would have sought them out anyway for novelty’s sake, but still. Who thinks in terms of the Devil Rays? Even then?
So it was strange having them there, but strange is what you need, right? Plus Rick — the only Met I actually, sort of, kind of knew, friend-of-a-friend style at that point. Because of my once-removed relationship with Rick, wouldn’t it be fitting if he got us off the schneid and did it front of me? He was having a dynamite 1998 and nobody, by my reckoning, deserved it more. For what it was worth, he carried a no-no into the fifth when I and about 2,000 people watched at Shea the previous May. It seemed silly to consider a no-hit bid then, Reed a non-union interloper, the ’97 Mets only starting to find their footing. It didn’t seem silly in June of ’98.
I’m sure there were other reasons it seemed like a such good idea. Like Mike Piazza clubbing his first Shea Met home run that night. And Reed himself driving in a run. And the Mets never having had a no-hitter before.
Actually, it was a perfect game. Rick Reed had set down the Devil Rays twice through the order. It was that easy, it was that obvious. As the night went on, the electricity hummed. Slowly, through the fourth, the fifth, definitely the sixth, everybody figured out what was going on. My friend from work who joined me that night heard the cheering, looked at the scoreboard then looked at me and said “I just realized what’s going on.” That was the sixth.
Yes, we all realized what was going on. It was perfectly apparent. Perfectly!
Quinton McCracken popped out to lead off the seventh. A roar! Miguel Cairo grounded to Ordoñez. A mighty roar! Ohmigod, it’s really gonna happen! Tonight! It’s…
Wade Boggs doubled.
Shit.
We were up on our feet, as we were in 1982 for Swannie, as were in 1986 for Ojeda, as would have been for El Sid in ’87 had he not hobbled off because of injury. It was a helluva run for Reeder and it would wind up being a helluva game: 3 hits, 10 strikeouts, a complete game shutout. So close, but plenty good. On the way to the 7 turnstiles, some dopey kid held up a cardboard sign urging that if we wanted to see “real baseball,” we should go to 161st Street in the Bronx. I saw some of the realest baseball I’d ever see right here at 126th and Roosevelt.
Problem with coming close to a no-hitter is you kind of expect another chance soon. It’s like the time I caught a foul ball in my first Spring Training game. I assumed they’d just keep bouncing my way. They didn’t. As I started to go to Shea fairly regularly, I looked for it as I never looked for it before Reeder’s effort. Now I wanted in. It seemed the 36+ years had taken a toll on everybody’s psyche. It used to be the occasional wise guy would greet the first opposition hit with “there goes the no-hitter, chuckle, chuckle”. I’m sure I began to hear it a lot more around 1998. I know I said it to myself, oh, practically every day.
Yet when faced with the next legitimate in-person no-hit opportunity, I was too chicken to really take advantage of it. Well, it’s more up to the pitcher and his teammates, but as Game Four of the 2000 Division Series got underway and Bobby Jones began mowing down Giants, it was hard not to notice a perfect game in progress. If we were entering the fifth inning of any other Mets-Giants game at any time in the history of the world, of course I’d be there with my no-hit thinking cap screwed tight to my head.
But this was a potential clinching playoff game. Would it offend the gods if I rooted for a perfect game, even a no-hitter when there was more pressing business at hand? Job one was defeating the Giants and advancing to the next round. Now if Bobby should happen to decide to not allow any hits, that would be great, but to make that bargain would be mighty tricky, though on the other hand…
Kent led off the fifth with a double. My negotiations were for naught. On the very bright side, he threw a one-hitter, the Mets won the series and the non-no-hitter was no more than delightful trivia. Still, maybe if I’d had a little more confidence, the drought would have ended.
What’s confidence got to do with it? I was confident as all get-out in 2002 when newcomer Shawn Estes was taking care of the Brewers, another innately unlikely opponent, with ease. Too many things were happening. The Milwaukee pitcher was Glendon Rusch, an ex-Met. An ex-Met. Had to be a sign. Jay Payton homered in the second and nobody else scored. It was tighter than tight. Estes kept responding. Alex Ochoa was in the Brewer lineup. Another ex-Met! Rusch’s catcher was Raul Casanova…OK, it would be cheating to imply I knew Raul was a former Met farmhand let alone a future Met backstop, but still. The Brewers being in the National League had always seemed a mite absurd. And Shawn Estes? Shawn Estes was kind of my generic ballplayer name for when I needed an example of some pitcher who was a little above average. No, I wouldn’t trade him for somebody like Shawn Estes, I’d answer hypothetical swap proposals contemptuously. But now in 2002, the Mets had Shawn Estes and Shawn Estes was pitching the game of his and possibly my life.
Did I mention this was a perfect game for six innings, too? That Shawn was that good? That the leadoff hitter in the seventh for the Brewers was Eric Young, who I once heard grew up a Mets fan in New Jersey? That everybody at Shea was riding on every pitch, that nobody was saying a word as to why? That Young singled clean to left?
Shit!
The exercise would be repeated to a certain extent a couple of months later when the Twins came to Shea for the first Interleague time and the most absurd Met hurler of them all, Steve Trachsel, flirted with the feat that would not accept amorous advances. Another American League team on busman’s holiday; another eighteen up, eighteen down; another night of exchanging knowing glances and clearing throats. Steve Trachsel…the Twins…me here…it was too ridiculous to contemplate seriously.
Steve lulled Jacque Jones into a leadoff groundout in the seventh but then slowly gave up a line drive single to Cristian Guzman. Again, we stood and applauded. Trax pitched great, even fast, but this was now beginning to feel self-parodying. If Steve Trachsel, the Heinz Ketchup of the Mets’ rotation, could almost pitch a no-hitter…if I could be on hand for the longest, most baffling streak in Major League history to continue again…how bleeping hard it could be to actually see one of these damn things to its fruition?
I wanted our no-hitter. It didn’t have to be mine. It would belong to all of us. It would pop up as a possibility at Shea with me in other places. Trachsel would give it another shot the next year (I listened on the radio as I walked 23rd Street, convinced this was it); Gl@v!ne seemed unhittable while I sat through the opening number of Bombay Dreams (sure, it has to happen while I’m at a show…and it has to be him); Pedro, sweet Pedro, was as certain to bury the curse or the streak or whatever it was against the Astros as Cone was thirteen years earlier. Chris Burke took care of that dream.
Of course it didn’t happen in ’03 or ’04 or ’05, just as it didn’t happen in ’02 or ’98 or ’82 or any year you’d care to name. It wouldn’t come close for reals until the very, very end of the 2007 season when, à la Bobby Jones in 2000, John Maine pitched a must-win game with no-hit stuff. Maine and the Mets had to win, that was what was important. But the team was up by double-digits in runs and Maine kept a zero on the board under H and godammit, with September going as September had gone, wouldn’t it be nice — no, wouldn’t it be justice — if John Maine threw the first no-hitter in Mets history against the stupid Florida Marlins in Game 161 with just about everything on the line?
Absolutely would have been. Absolutely didn’t occur. This was the most agonizing non-no-hitter of them all in my Log. Paul Hoover, who I didn’t even notice entering the game (he replaced the ejected, repulsive Miguel Olivo after the other sidebar of the day, the Mets’ first brawl in eleven years), ended it with two out in the eighth on the slowest of nonentity rollers you’d ever want to shield your eyes from. When stupid Hoover reached base, the capacity crowd rose to give John his due. I clapped twice and headed to the men’s room. My superstition wouldn’t allow me to go there earlier. The men’s room also had a door I could slam against a wall.
I wasn’t really fooled when in the middle of May Mike Pelfrey teased me onto the same ride I’d taken so many times before. I was willing to hold it in for six innings. I was willing to find signs that this was the day (Gary, Keith and Ron broadcasting from the Upper Deck was a nice, surreal touch). I was willing to go through the nodding and winking motions with my companions. I was willing to believe the tenth time was a charm. That the Mets hadn’t scored yet added to it an ounce of legitimacy. It was like listening to Tom Seaver getting to two outs in the ninth of a nothing-nothing game in Chicago in 1975 only to hear Joe Wallis ruin everything. I was crestfallen that Aaron Boone ruined the illusion leading off the seventh. But I wasn’t surprised.
I’ve never seen a Mets’ no-hitter at Shea. I will never see a Mets’ no-hitter at Shea. Maybe in the next joint. Maybe in the next life. Maybe if I stop thinking about it altogether.
No matter where I stand, how I sit, what I do, if I whiz, the Mets keep not getting that no-hitter. History, too, likes to repeat itself.
by Jason Fry on 12 June 2008 9:07 pm booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
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booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
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booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
/deep breath
booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
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booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
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booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
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booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
/stare at own feet
by Greg Prince on 12 June 2008 9:07 pm Something about the way the sun hits Shea in late afternoon when almost everybody's gone home appeals to me. Probably because it reminds me of the playground at East School. That's where I did most of my balling, if you could call it that, in my youth. It's where I played kickball and stickball and softball and basketball and football when I was in my single-digits and teens.
Never mind that I wasn't any good at any of it. Never mind that there was often some character of low degree waiting to target and harass the contemplative and unathletic. Never mind all that. I liked the East School playground, something about the way sun hit it in the late afternoon when almost nobody was around.
That's Shea at the end of a weekday afternoon like this one. That was Shea today. It looked a lot like it did at the end of April when almost everybody vacated the premises via good sense. Then it was 13-1. Today it may as well have been.
I stand by my statement of clarity: the Mets suck. A team does not have this stretch of games without internal suckitude defining its very soul. A team does not get the trademark Johan Santana start for which all had been waiting and then throw it away without some incredible suck.
Billy Wagner…somebody check his middle initial. I'll bet it's an S.
Let's not completely blame the bullpen. Let's blame the offense, too, the one that finds ways to leave tack-on runs forever untacked, the one that aims its line drives at Diamondback gloves until all it has left to give are wan popups. Let's blame Willie for whatever it is Willie did or didn't do while we're at it. There are no innocents when 4-0 leads are blown and 5-4 losses appear in their stead.
So much for momentum. So much for saving up energy by not effusively mobbing last night's game-winning hitter. So much for whatever illusions linger about the 2008 Mets. They are as scattered as the tenth-inning spectators were at Shea Stadium today, the playground abandoned, the sun setting on this very sorry team.
by Greg Prince on 12 June 2008 6:57 am The Mets were pretty darn fired up. And eventually they were ready to go…though by the time they were ready, a good bit of the thrill had already gone.
Mike Pelfrey, that ol' sonofagun, clear outpitched Brandon Webb Wednesday night. It was a performance to behold as I listened to much of the first eight innings on radio; the most explosive sound of the season had to be Howie Rose declaring “pitch count, shmitch count!” in lobbying Willie Randolph to leave him in to start the ninth.
Pelf earned it. You might even say he earned the chance to pitch out of trouble, if you consider a leadoff single when up by three runs a heap of trouble. Willie did and out went Pelfrey (8 IP, 5 H, 2 BB, 8 SO) after 112 pitches/shmitches.
Billy Wagner is supposed to be able to collect three outs with a three-run lead more readily than Pelfrey. Except Pelfrey was pitching better than he ever has and Wagner's been pitching about as badly as possible. Conventional wisdom says call on the closer and Willie, after five straight losses, wasn't about to get unconventional.
While listening on the radio, I heard Wayne Hagin non sequitur one of Howie's points by noting Frank Robinson was in the ballpark. I thought of that watching in the ninth when Wagner hit Mark Reynolds on the shoe and Jeff Nelson failed to find shoe polish on the ball. Frank Robinson's been around Shea for shoe polish incidents, you know. Reynolds was denied the base replays indicated he was entitled to. So what happens next?
Let's just say the Mets aren't always as lucky as they seem where shoe polish plays are concerned. Reynolds' having to stay at the plate didn't do Frank Robinson any good but it nearly sunk the home team to even deeper depths. Goodness knows the Billy Wagner Fan Club meeting broke up early, right around the second Reynolds' three-run bomb disrupted air traffic into LaGuardia. And boy did Shea go quiet. As Gary Cohen astutely pointed out, the Mets got runners on in the bottom of the ninth, potential winning runs, and the dugout was stone silent. The crowd, too. This might have been a good night to shut the automated cheerleading off. It was tacky.
It became one of those games after a fashion when somebody was going to have a worse relief pitcher than somebody else and for last night (with Jorge Sosa nowhere in sight), it was the Diamondbacks and Edgar Gonzalez, he who entered with a 6.87 ERA, served up a two-run game-losing homer to Carlos Beltran and left with his earned run average lowered.
Beltran circled the bases triumphantly and was met by crickets at home plate.
No, not really. There were a good three or four of his teammates waiting for him. All right, I'm exaggerating low. Jason tells me he TiVo'd it and counted a dozen Mets. That means a dozen Mets weren't there. That fact doesn't show up in the boxscore any more than half the roster didn't show up for the traditional plate jump, so it's probably a meaningless statistic. Still, only the 2008 Mets could bring us a thirteen-inning walkoff blast and have us groping around at how horsebleep they looked celebrating it.
Wonderful night for Pelfrey. Smashing night for Beltran. Winning continues to edge losing. But somehow, victory pried from the jaws of defeat pried from the jaws of victory notwithstanding, typical night for the 2008 Mets.
“Fuck this team,” my partner wrote to me minutes after they emerged atop what was technically a thriller. “One walkoff home run changes nothing.”
I tend to agree. I raised a fist for Carlos and churned acid for Pelf — it was probably as into a game as I'd been all season — but it was one grain of smooth sand against a tidal wave of tepidness. The Mets have been sucking for a long time and they're going to need more than thirteen innings to turn that tide.
Sometimes, said Freud, a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes, we find, a fantastic finish is not a prelude to a monster winning streak. Sometimes it's just a fantastic finish. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but sometimes you need to see a lot more to not believe the Mets are through sucking.
Until further notice, the Mets do not appear to be done sucking. Yet you know what I don't completely mind about it? The clarity it has wrought for me.
I have to admit that while I do by instinct still spout a stray curse word and occasionally pound a couch cushion when things go wrong for the Mets (which is almost invariably), it's really not eating away at my insides as bad stretches did in almost every other season I can remember.
For example, when the Mets dipped below .500 in June 1999, I was morose. I'd assumed we'd never win another game once our losing streak reached eight. I'm not kidding. I couldn't see a way out and I was miserable.
The Mets are below .500 in June 2008. I'm not morose. I assumed we'd win another game even though we'd lost five in a row and Billy Wagner pushed the envelope ridiculously close to a sixth. When they and we do break losing streaks, I'm less thrilled than relieved to the extent that I emote at all. I'm more like unmoved.
Don't take this as some sort of white flag of latent maturity on my part. I'm not going to tell you that I've suddenly discovered there are more important things than baseball, more pressing matters than the Mets. Screw that; there aren't. But in 1999, to continue with that example, I believed…Believed…the Mets were better than their Ralph Wiggum of a record. How could my team not be playing to its capabilities? Mets fail baseball? That's unpossible!
Pick another year and I'll tell you a similar story. The Mets were down and I couldn't and wouldn't accept it. That's been my M.O., my Metus Operandi since I was six.
It isn't at the moment, even a moment that includes a 5-3 win a little while ago and Johan Santana in fewer than a dozen hours.
The Mets suck. And I know it. And not only doesn't it really bother me in a transcendent way, I almost — almost — find comfort in knowing it.
This is not one of those 1979 scenarios in which I understand completely the Mets suck but I hate living in an epoch that is defined by hopelessness. This is not one of those 1993 situations from which the bottom has not only fallen out of the Mets but conked a polar bear when said bottom hit Antarctica. I hated having to be a fan of the 1993 Mets, but I never questioned that I had to cheer them on to each and every one of their 59 stirring victories. This isn't even a 2003 doppelgänger, the kind of year when I don't feel too terribly bad that they're losing a ton because it will mean the end of an arrogant general manager I don't want around and the dispatch of a malingering ballplayer I can't stand to watch. The best part of 2003 that didn't include Jose Reyes' promotion was the end of the tenures of Steve Phillips and Roberto Alomar. To maintain their dual elimination as sincere and abiding personal goals indicated I cared deeply about what happened to the Mets.
In 2008, I don't have that. I don't expressly want Omar Minaya and Willie Randolph dismissed, but I won't shed tears if they are. And while I'm not aching for any particular player to be released or traded, I don't particularly care if any particular player stays beyond tomorrow.
To be honest, no matter how bad I felt about Pelfrey's effort swirling down the Billy drain, I haven't cared with great conviction whether the Mets win or lose any given game this year.
There, I said it.
I'm not sure I understood until now that this is my 2008 Mets thought process. I've known something's been awry since Opening Day when my annual enthusiasm felt surprisingly forced, yet I've held back on taking this “Tastes Great!”/“Less Filling!” internal dialogue public. I'm aware that even as some of you are quite forthcoming about expressing your pointed dismay over the Mets' many shortcomings, there are others among you who prefer the positive be accentuated always. I don't think either camp is wrong in its approach to fandom. I'm often in both at the same time. I don't want to play Paulie Pollyanna and tell you I see great things in Mets baseball but I don't want to be Captain Bringdown either. My default position has always been “I just want the Mets to win.”
I still do…I guess.
Don't mistake this for “I've had it with baseball.” I haven't. Baseball's my thing. I wouldn't sit here and churn out however many words a week about baseball that I do, labor-of-love style, if it weren't. Trust me: I don't have anything better to do or anything I'd rather do. And don't mistake this for a resignation of my commission from the United States Mets Corps. It's not. I don't consider myself one bit less a Mets fan at this juncture of this season than I would say I was in any other season. God knows I'm not switching sides or doing anything repulsive like that. I can't even say that I'm giving up on 2008 per se. The Rockies of '07 were no better in their June, the Astros of '05 measurably worse, and see where they wound up.
Then again, their respective rebounds were considered quite unlikely.
Last month, Steve Keane of the Eddie Kranepool Society, in one of the thousands of angst-ridden posts conceived within the Metsosphere to attempt to explain away what the hell is wrong with the Mets, hit on the head the Mets fan's attitude for eternity and how it's been tested of late:
The manager and his players can’t get it through their closed minds that WE REALLY, REALLY ADORE THE METS. Now I didn’t say we adore the players but it’s the team, the whole Blue and Orange universe, that comes with being a Mets fan that we all embrace. I get a sense from fans I talk to that there is a real disconnect between Mets players and management and the fans a/k/a the folks who pay the freight. That comes from mismanagement by the higher-ups in management.
Yes, exactly. You find yourself irritated by the Mets, annoyed by the Mets, at odds with the Mets, but you never stop loving the Mets. You don't stop caring about the Mets even as you — I, anyway — discover you — or I — have stopped being bothered by the Mets.
I'm just not that moved by what happens to the Mets, even if my daily actions would indicate otherwise. I genuinely look forward every day to first pitch; I turn on every game at the appointed hour; I watch the action; I listen to the announcers; I think about what to write; and I write it with much gusto…but the results of the games themselves are not penetrating my head or my heart or my soul in any way that is familiar to my system. I maintain a vague preference for the Mets' winning and I disdain, in theory, the idea that the Mets would lose. But the wins, certainly the ones I'm not in attendance for, don't crackle for me. I may walk away from the television relatively satisfied with the Mets victorious, but I hardly ever leave it overjoyed. And the losses…they only bother me in the sense that I'm a Mets fan and the Mets losing is antithetical to the crux of that identity.
Yet my identity in my eyes is solid. It's so solid that it's never depended on cumulative wins and losses to reinforce it. It's now apparently so solid that I'm not disturbed by losses nor elated by wins.
It's weird but it feels kind of normal.
It's not that I don't care. It's maybe that I've maxed out on caring until further notice, as if something has short-circuited in my Met receptor. I click it on and off but it's not connected to anything. Maybe it flickers for a pitch here or a hit there, maybe it hums if stimulated by enough aural and visual cues when at the ballpark — but it doesn't last. It just doesn't.
How did this happen?
I don't think the possible causes are all that difficult to divine:
1) Last year never ended, particularly last September.
In one of my 50 or so postmortems to The Collapse, I attempted to gauge how miserably 2007 rated in comparison to its hard-luck Met predecessors. I made a reasonable case as to why 2007, no matter the horrors of its final chapter, wasn't so bad: at least we contended; at least we were in first place a lot; at least it was noisy; at least there was much on the line. What I never considered was that none of the good stuff would resonate whatsoever and that all of the bad vibes would carry over. As poorly as 1987 and 1998 ended, they were history by the time the springs of '88 and '99 rolled around. As bad as '79 and '93 and '03 were, at least there was next year, and next year is sacred. But 2007 just would not and has not gone away. As much as I try to shoo it from my consciousness, as much as I try to buy into one season being a separate proposition from another, it clings like bubble gum to the soles of my shoes. As an outside political consultant told a key White House insider regarding President Bartlet's mishandling of a grave matter on The West Wing, “You guys are so pissed at him you don't even know it.” A month had gone by on the show when he said it. Time doesn't always fly when you're pissed.
2) Indifferent play elicits indifferent response.
Geez, if the Mets can't pick themselves up, dust themselves off and start all over again, why should I? Why should I outcare them? The Mets are trying to motivate themselves through meetings and mottos. Their fightin' words are now “We B4 I”? I'd sooner they be hooked on winning than hooked on phonics, but whatever. Even if I don't subscribe to the notion that they don't care (they must) or that they're not trying (of course they are), they have a frustrating way of showing it. For how long can one be expected to accept the idea that they're just trying so darn hard that none of them — none of them — is delivering? Somebody in the chain of command by now should have told somebody down the line to stop gripping the bat handles into sawdust, to stop squeezing the baseballs until they squirt yolk. Somebody has to be better than they've shown. One player has played above his head in 2008 and now his head has finally been decreed off-limits from the playing field. While I now realize adding an acelike pitcher to an uncomfortably elderly and thin roster did not guarantee the comeback of the century for which I fervently hoped in February, I am still miffed at the stubborn mediocrity in our midst. This is the perfect sub-.500 team, if a sub-.500 team could ever be categorized as perfect. It is perfectly impossible to become energized or even enraged by that sort of packaging. No wonder so many of them didn't bother to greet Carlos Beltran at home. They suck too much to do well something so associated with winning.
3) A wrecking ball is aimed straight at my memories.
I fucking hate Citi Field. Perhaps one year from today I will be enjoying a Shake Shack burger and all the sparkling amenities the new world-class home of the Mets has to offer and I will wonder what I ever could have dreaded because this place is faaaabulous! I wouldn't necessarily bet against my adoring it on merit once I'm inside it. But right now, in 2008, with a proliferation of logos telling me that there will not be a 2009 where I've sat since 1973, I fucking hate Citi Field. I hate it and I resent it and I wish I didn't have to face it every time a fly ball is hit in its direction. I don't argue with the economic model that suggests a sports franchise will compete more effectively with a modern facility. I don't carry a brief that insists, even on its deathbed, that Shea Stadium is ideal for any activity other than freezing, shvitzing and standing in line for the men's room. I understand why it was deemed necessary to supplant a 1960s multipurpose stadium with a 2000s baseball throwback. But I fucking hate Citi Field for infringing on my psychic and Shea's physical space in the here and now. Why couldn't have they thrown a tarp over the damn thing 'til it's done? I don't like it staring down Shea. I don't like that for all its ballyhooed “intimacy,” its light stanchions are taller than Shea. I don't like that it's nudging Shea ever closer to its fate as Parking Lot A and concomitantly attempting to fray the bond I've shared with my team since the first time I saw my team on TV nearly 40 summers ago. By extension, I suppose I'm not happy with the people who are doing this clearly for their own interests first and foremost. Again, check back in a year. I may be 180'ing and loving it. Right now, I'm not.
Mad at the Mets for last year. Mad at the Mets for this year. Mad at the Mets for next year. Add 'em up and maybe it's just too overwhelming to overcome. But I'm not sold the answer's that easy because, even when enduring all the finished-basement basement finishes I lived through, I could at least throw my hands up forcefully and blurt “I've had it with them!” This doesn't feel like that. I'm unable to get my full Met on. It isn't really anger and it's not exactly apathy. I can't pin down why I've become so numb to the Mets' fortunes even as I don't for a second believe my fervor for the Mets has diminished.
Thus, while I'm confused to find myself wandering through a spiritual desert where the Mets are concerned, I also find myself having arrived upon an eerily calming oasis of clarity. I don't completely understand why I'm not spectacularly upset by a 31-33 enterprise, but I do understand that I'm not upset. I'm not really waiting for the big turnaround, the 2008 equivalent of the 40-15 revival that followed the 27-28 stutterstep in 1999, my favorite year of them all. I'll take it if it comes, sure. It may even snap me out of whatever funk I'm in. But I'm neither counting on it nor secularly praying for it. Actually, it seems kind of an insult to 1999 to even mention 2008 in the same breath.
Perhaps the clarity comes from knowing this is going on, knowing that another loss isn't going to make things materially worse, knowing that another win isn't going to make things materially better, knowing that I'm getting by either way, knowing that I still love the Mets even as I am compelled to confess that I don't really give a damn what happens to them next.
I don't know who should play here the rest of the season and who shouldn't. Despite my impulse to slot into the lineup every Nick Evans and Fernando Tatis who blows by like tumbleweed, the short-term solutions are ultimately unpleasing and ineffective. I couldn't tell you who to trade and who to keep. I don't feel much attached to anyone anymore.
The best I can come up with for next year is replace everything and everybody. It'll be just like starting over.
New ballpark next year? I've resisted its allure, but fine. New ballpark. The old one is obviously haunted by failure. Let's get moving on disappearing Shea Stadium.
But let's not stop there.
Fire the manager. We've been itchy to detach the pink slip from the pad for weeks, maybe months, so bye-bye Willie, Willie bye-bye.
Omar? You can't let Omar Minaya stick around. Adam Rubin broke down the GM's failings in damning detail the other day:
“You are watching the painfully slow demise of The New Mets, the vision Omar Minaya articulated four years ago but built as a house of cards.”
Omar's gone. Who else, then? Surely a team in this kind of mess rots from the head down. Lousy management ascends to ownership, so Messrs. Wilpon and Wilpon, please sell the team. Put in a deposit on seats at world-class Citi Field on your way out if you like, but next time you come to a Mets game, please use the rotunda.
You too, Saul Katz.
Tony Bernazard ain't stayin'. Nor is the crackerjack medical staff. Whoever decided black uniform tops were a grand idea can fold them up for good. The scouts haven't scouted so hot either. Scout out a new employer, fellas. You're yesterday's news, just like everybody in the front office, everybody in stadium operations, everybody who's ever run his hands up and down my sides at Gate E.
It's an epidemic. No one can be spared.
The players? In the name of Moises Alou's uncle Jesus (yes, he is that old), why would the players get a pass? They all go. David Wright…go be the face of another franchise. Jose Reyes…keep running so the door doesn't tag you on the way out. Johan Santana…use your J.R. Watkins Apothecary Liniment elsewhere. Billy Wagner…exit, sad man.
If we're gonna off the stars, the scrubs must surely follow. Pretty much everybody is a scrub on the 2008 Mets, so it's been nice knowing them (it hasn't; I'm being sarcastic). The whole 40-man is now no-man's land.
Empty roster? Oh well. We'll work with the commissioner on restocking. The White Sox overcame eight men out. We'll start even fresher.
So let's see…new ballpark, new management, new ownership, new players, new vendors, new ushers, new everything…am I leaving anybody out?
How about a new name? Mets isn't gitting-r-done anymore. Mets isn't Amazin', isn't Magic, isn't Miraculous. The new owners can hold a contest. Given that this organization has sponsorship deals with not one, not two, but three different banking institutions, I'm sure naming rights can be sold to a highest bidder. The Capital One Citi Sovereigns has as nice a ring to it as anything else — and only one fewer ring than the New York Mets (1962-2008) earned as the result of world championships.
Done and done. Let's Go Sovereigns!
But let's assume that won't happen. What then?
Ideally, the Mets will remain competitive through 2008. Did I say “remain”? I meant become. If they can avoid a 1993-style plunge through the earth's surface and achieve a level of plausibility for playoff contention — say five games out of the Wild Card on August 1 — I might be satisfied. The 2001 Mets pissed me off something awful clear into the middle of August, but when they began to pat themselves on the back for digging themselves out of the hole of their own slothful making (the Shea PA blared “Ain't No Mountain High Enough” after wins began, at last, to be strung together convincingly), I didn't scoff for too long at their gall for pretending to be scrappy underdogs one year after landing in the World Series. I patted them, too, and urged them on some more.
I doubt I have another round of Met backpatting in me, but who knows? Maybe I'll be that easy. Maybe I just want a little taste of plausibility before moving day arrives. Don't totally embarrass Shea. Don't totally embarrass me. Let us leave on a high note if I can't leave on the highest note. Don't send Shea into history with a chorus of Smashing Pumpkins: “Shakedown…1979.” Shake us down as you will, suck if you must, but ease up on the Hebnerian dismalness at some point, OK? I'm not asking for a pennant. I'm not even asking for a genuine pennant race. Just seem interested when you're tied in the ninth, exuberant when you win in the thirteenth, professional the rest of the time.
Play ball.
by Greg Prince on 11 June 2008 10:44 pm Dear Mets and Mike Pelfrey,
Wanna start converting some skeptics into believers? Beat the best pitcher in the National League tonight.
Your opponent, lifetime at Shea:
4 starts, 2 wins, 1 loss (a 2-1 affair in which Victor Zambrano went deep, throwing the game of his life), 29 innings pitched, 29 strikeouts, 5 walks, 18 hits, 1 earned run.
Brandon Webb's earned run average in those four Shea outings: 0.31
This year overall, Webb is 11-2, toting a 2.58 ERA and wielding a WHIP of barely more than 1.
Alou isn't available (the sun shifted imperceptibly this afternoon, requiring Moises to undergo an MRI). Chris Aguila is apparently up, Abraham Nuñez undeniably down. The Mets are riding 'round in a hole in the ground.
Want us to believe you're worth believing in tomorrow? Beat Brandon Webb or at least his team tonight.
Cordially,
F.U. in Flushing
F.U., of course, stands for Fired Up.
by Greg Prince on 11 June 2008 6:17 pm 
Happy 25th birthday to No. 7 in your program and he who turned in maybe the No. 1 most exciting offensive season any Met has ever produced. May Jose Reyes return to playing the real game of baseball well enough to inspire many video sequels.
by Greg Prince on 11 June 2008 4:00 pm We should be careful not to read too much into an isolated incident, but it stood out for me as a metaphor for a Met career that had veered off track and still wasn't quite where it needed to be. On April 15, Jose Reyes was having one of his periodic breakout games, one of those nights when Jose was getting back to being Jose and all that Jose means to the Mets, one of those nights when the bat and the eye and the glove and the legs were all gearing into overdrive.
He singled to lead off. He doubled in the third. He tripled in the fifth. He singled in the seventh. He was both a home run shy of the cycle and a hit of any kind short of 5-for-5.
Who wouldn't want to see that? I know I did. So did Jason and so did Jon and Matt, the Mets By The Numbers authors who invited us to join them at Shea that Tuesday night. So did everybody in the park. We collectively urged Jose on to go for it.
He listened to us.
He swung at three pitches in his eyes.
Jose Reyes should have known better.
Today is Jose Reyes' 25th birthday, which seems impossible unless you decide 25 is the new 15, in which case, OK, Jose is something of a rambunctious adolescent when it comes to baseball. It's adorable when it works. It's frustrating when it doesn't.
Too much of the time, it doesn't. Too much of the time, Jose doesn't know better. Too much of the time, Jose Reyes has not grown into the ballplayer almost every one of us in Metland thinks he will be and probably thought he already was.
Happy birthday Jose. You've given us a great deal to consider ever since you reached your twenties.
When we first laid eyes on Jose Reyes, he was 19, hours from 20. His debut on June 10, 2003 came just in time to make him the last of ten teens who have played for the Mets. It's mostly trivia (Ed Kranepool, Nolan Ryan and Dwight Gooden stand out; Jim Bethke and Jerry Hinsley don't) but it tends to reinforce the notion of forever young where a player is concerned. How is it possible Jose Reyes is 25? He just came up when he was 19!
When will Jose Reyes be a little less young? When will Jose Reyes be not the kid who seems to have been called up five minutes ago but a player who's been in the big leagues five years now and shows that he has learned a great deal? When does a five-year, 25-year-old player qualify as a veteran?
Calling out erstwhile wunderkinder does not come easy for me, particularly where this onetime wunderkind is concerned. I loved Jose Reyes from the moment he got here, and an office decorated generously in Jose Reyes' image would attest to his ongoing status as my favorite active Met. I gravitated to Jose in 2003 because, as Murray Kempton once wrote of Mayor Lindsay, he was fresh when everybody else was tired. Jose Reyes personified the break from the surly present of the moment and represented to me the future when the only thing that looked good to a dying-hard Mets fan was the suddenly distant past. June 10, 2003 was the moment, I surmised, when we'd come together to remake this great franchise so that it would always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.
He smiled.
And he ran.
And he hit.
And he ran some more.
And he got hurt, but you knew he'd recover. You knew he'd get hurt again, but he'd keep on healing. And at the end of too many days on the DL, he'd be off and running unstopped and unstoppable.
2005 was that year. 2005 was when Jose Reyes wasn't hamstrung, wasn't striding uncomfortably. First he couldn't take a pitch. He didn't walk for a full month. But then he settled down…and then he lit it up. Jose made the move in-season, jumping three levels as easily as he legged out three bases. In April and May, it was maybe he'd be better off if he were sat or sent down. By early summer, he was showing signs of getting it. By the middle of summer, he absolutely got it and was off and running with it.
Straight into 2006.
Roughly around the time of his 23rd birthday, Jose Reyes became a star. Inside a month, he was a superstar. By September, he was a legend at Shea Stadium. Come October, he loomed among the best players in the game. Given the combination of tools and the electrical charge his personality and ability gave them, it wasn't insane to think of Jose Reyes of the New York Mets as maybe the best player in baseball.
2007 did nothing to abuse you of that notion if you were indulging it. At least not until the last of his 24th birthday cake was gobbled up. The candles were blown out on Jose Reyes Superstar in the weeks that followed. Jose had been demoted: from best there was to merely extraordinary; from extraordinary some nights to alarmingly ordinary on others; from ordinary to worse by September.
The Jose Reyes I knew I loved and thought I knew…he's been kind of missing. And I miss him greatly.
I don't spend a lot of time dwelling on statistics. I watch the Mets too much to seek guidance from data, so I was a little surprised when I looked up what Jose has accomplished to date in 2008:
61 Games
75 Hits
17 Doubles
5 Triples
8 Home Runs
29 Runs Batted In
42 Runs Scored
23 Stolen Bases
.288 Batting Average
.352 On-Base Percentage
.485 Slugging Percentage
The batting average is a bit off, but the other percentages align favorably with 2006. Prorate the cumulative numbers for 155 or so games and they don't look too bad for a full season. Through Sunday he had more extra-base hits than any shortstop in either league. Throw in his recent 30-game on-base streak, and his 2008 is by no means terrible. It's actually pretty good.
But it's not great. Couple it with watching him, and it's not close.
He still runs. He still hits. He sometimes fields spectacularly (even if he sometimes pulls boners that would make 1993 Tony Fernandez moan in agony — and not just because of gallstones). He smiles his Jose smile, but it just doesn't quite light up a room like it once did.
Am I being too hard on the kid or am I just tired of waiting for the kid to definitively grow up? It's less a matter of chronological age than five seasons in the books, and perhaps less about statistics and performance than stature. Now and again we hear about good influences on Jose: that Jose Valentin was a good influence, that Luis Castillo is a good influence. Jose Reyes been at this Major League Baseball enterprise since 2003. Shouldn't Jose Reyes — two-time starting All-Star shortstop, erstwhile bona fide MVP candidate, the only Met I can ever remember being serenaded by name over and over and over again — be influencing some younger player for the good by now? Granted, the Mets' roster is dead last in wetness behind the ears, but where's the maturity? Where's the leadership? Where's Jose Reyes from 2006 getting better while gaining wisdom?
OK, I guess it is about statistics and performance as much as stature. And I guess I wonder if two years ago was once in a lifetime. Jose's 2006 was arguably the most exciting individual season turned in by any Met since Dwight Gooden's 1985. No way I didn't expect the most exciting individual season after Doc in '85 wouldn't be Doc in '86, then Doc in '87 and so on. Didn't happen. It doesn't happen. They're called career years for a reason. I'm beginning to suspect Jose's had his already.
And maybe he is who he is and maybe that's who he'll be when he's five years older if not necessarily five years obviously wiser. Every individual should be accorded his own learning curve. But he has such an excellent example to follow in his left side compatriot.
We should be careful not to judge too much from an isolated incident, but three nights after Jose's swing-swing-swing and miss for the cycle against the Nationals, David Wright was in a similar situation in Philadelphia. He came up needing only a four-bagger to forge a 5-for-5 cycle. He calmly accepted a walk when the pitches dictated that's all he could expect. David Wright is almost as young as Jose Reyes yet in another demographic altogether regarding development as a ballplayer and, as judged from afar and through several filters, a leader.
Maybe it's different for David. He's been talked up as captain-in-waiting since he was all of 23. I've never heard anybody articulate a co-captaincy as Jose's destiny. Nobody puts Jose out there as spokesman for anything more substantive than Wise Potato Chips. Nobody expects him to take responsibility for anything but getting on base and then stealing another one. It's tiresome, frankly, to listen to Wright tell the media hordes every night that we have to “dig down deep and make a stand,” but it is also as admirable as the Mets' current drought is long that he so dependably takes one for the team. Surely Jose could dig down deep and wave a few of the reporters over to his locker and spout a few clichés of his own, thereby taking the pressure off his overwrought teammate.
I'm not wishing for Jose to assume the visage of grim death in the losing clubhouse. Or on the field. I was never in the camp that attributed September '07 to his creative and interactive gestures; it wasn't what he was doing with his hands that killed us — it was what he wasn't doing with his head and his bat (his head, his bat and the similar equipment that belonged to about thirty of his coworkers). It's good to see Jose building a decent-plus season. It's good to see him race as hard to first in 2008 as he did to third in 2006. It's good to see him smile at every opportunity.
It's not just great is all.
by Jason Fry on 11 June 2008 2:10 am We're facing the Diamondbacks after sleepwalking (and sometimes plain old sleeping) our way through the Padres.
We're gonna lose.
Wait! Delgado came through with a clutch hit! And hustled to second! His uniform is filthy!
Then we're gonna get rained out.
Whoa, we're up 5-1 and will definitely get to an official game before the rain gets here!
Then the Diamondbacks will catch up.
Ugh! The Diamondbacks caught up! And here comes the rain!
I told you.
But radar indicates it'll blow through! We'll complete the game!
Then the — oh, you don't want to know.
by Greg Prince on 10 June 2008 5:44 am Sometimes you must feel you didn't ask for this, that 2008-style Met mediocrity was thrust upon you. You don't remember seeking out the Mets, yet they came and helped themselves to your brain. You're a Mets fan for so long you can barely remember why anymore.
Sometimes it's helpful to hear from someone who sought it out, someone who made a marginally conscious decision that it would be more fun to go through life loving the Mets than being oblivious to them. That they seemed the obvious choice. If geography is destiny, a man named Alastair Burgess was destined to know nothing of the Mets, certainly not enough to get tangled up in them.
But he discovered them and now he's one of us.
Poor bastard.
Alastair, who says we can call him Al, must have been moved by our recent pitch to sell t-shirts, because he sent us a picture of himself looking quite sharp in one of them. But he also sent us his story. It is, by any Met standard, fairly Amazin'.
First off, Al's from New Zealand (sporting an accent that he says is “more Bret than Jemaine,” correctly assuming the only thing at least one of us knows about New Zealand is Flight of the Conchords). Not a lot of Mets fans in New Zealand, one would guess. Al grew up loving cricket, but as someone “exiled” in Japan for the past 15 years, there's not a lot of cricket available.
But there is baseball.
We hear every now and then about baseball and Japan in this country, mostly that they're nuts about it and that Bobby Valentine is revered for it. Al confirms that he has “my Japanese hosts to thank for my turning to baseball” in order to compensate for his cricket shortfall. What Japan didn't do is make him a Mets fan, at least not directly.
Yet, “I'm naturally a Mets fan. A Mets fan who's not set foot in New York yet, let alone Shea, but still a fan.”
If you're as puzzled as Murray Hewitt (FOTC's manager, who urges all New Zealanders coming to New York to take back alleys and thereby avoid the dangers that lurk in crowds), well, you're not alone. I was trying to figure out how a New Zealander migrates to Japan and winds up rooting for the New York Mets enough to “loyally” read a rather intricate, parochial blog about them, let alone wear its shirt, when Al set me straight:
“Had I been born in NYC, I'm certain I would have chosen the right team.”
Well, I can't argue with an intrinsic sense of right and wrong, but there's more to Al's choice than instinct.
“One reason was Nomo's move to the Dodgers” in 1995, Al explains. “I was then new to Japan, working afternoons and evenings so I could watch all his starts (morning Japan time) with Vin Scully's (for ages I thought he was Vince Cully!) commentary. I started to appreciate the game of baseball from then on.”
So he followed the downmarket Hideo Nomo and his enormous ERA to the Mets? Not quite:
“Nomo's catcher was Piazza and he quickly became my favorite player. For some reason, though watching the Dodgers every five days, I couldn't bring myself to actively root for them.” The trades that made Mike a Met in 1998 represented for Al a “lucky escape”.
We'll say. Piazza to the Mets via the Marlins, Al to our side, washing off the stain of Dodger blue as quickly as he could. As he learned more about the Mets, he got in deeper.
“About this time,” the late '90s, “the other NYC franchise was fluking a few World Series wins and the Japanese, being the worst bandwagon jumpers you'll ever meet, lapped it up.” But no succumbing to inner…inner city pressure where Al was concerned: “Bloody sickening it was.” Thus, he rooted for Mike and he rooted for Bobby V, of whom he'd been a fan since his first Japanese go-round, and he rooted for what were now his Mets.
“Other less compelling reasons,” Al reveals, “were Seinfeld episodes sent on VHS cassettes by friends in North America ('I'm Keith Hernandez'), and my birth year of 1969.”
Less compelling? For someone who has yet to swipe his first Metrocard at Willets Point, who will never shake his hands dry because the men's room behind Section 8 of Mezzanine ran out of towels three innings ago, who hasn't had to point relentlessly at the yearbook pile in order to obtain the desired item from yet another ill-trained concessionaire…I'd say for someone who has hitched his star to the Mets independently and half a world away, there is no such thing as a less compelling reason.
They're all Amazin'.
Al's one of us, no doubt about it. He's also one of the Hanshin Tigers' followers, rooting for the club “who brought you such greats as Tsuyoshi Shinjo and Kei Igawa” (one of out two ain't bad). The Tigers are historically a little Metsian in their approach to success: sporadic and overshadowed too often (stupid Yomiuri Giants), though “unlike the Mets, the Tigers are doing well this year,” we learn.
I'd say that makes me a Hanshin Tigers sympathizer, but I can't imagine choosing a team and sticking with it in some place I've never seen and will likely never go. I find it exotic when Mets fans tell me they have a favorite American League team. But to suddenly align oneself with somebody in the Central League of Japan? Or the Pacific League, where Bobby V is plying his trade with the Chiba Lotte Marines? That would be the equivalent of what Al is doing with the Mets…except I'd have to come into it with no background in baseball, starting from a country that had only cricket, and then be smitten beyond belief from about 6,700 miles away.
Not many could do that. Al can. That's why I've got to tip my cap as Far East in his direction as possible.
“I even like saying 'New York Mets,'” Al adds. “Is that wrong?”
No, Al, that's absolutely right. As right as can be.
Ergo, I don't think any of you will argue too strenuously when we declare Alastair Burgess today's Best Mets Fan…in the WORLD!
Wanna rate up there with Al? Then for Shinjo's sake already yet, buy a shirt!
by Greg Prince on 10 June 2008 5:42 am 
Our friend Alastair Burgess, citizen of New Zealand, Japan and Metsopotamia, steps outside and shows off the four retired numbers of the New York Mets on his Faith and Fear t-shirt at Koshien Stadium, home of Tsuyoshi Shinjo’s alma mater, the Hanshin Tigers. Al (whose Shinjoesque orange wristbands are not pictured) informs us Koshien, built in 1924 and undergoing renovations, is one of the few non-dome ballparks in Japan.
I infer that Al took pity on my dizzying May 30 experience of standing up, moving out, backing in and sitting down for the thirsty young men in the upper boxes whose quest for Bud Light was neverending. “Notice the young lass behind selling beer,” Al advises. “They bring it to you! Sometimes she has a keg strapped to her back! So you only have to deal with weak-bladdered people or smokers getting up to squeeze past, but they generally wait until between innings.”
The custom wherein beer vendors roam the stands is, keg or not, is quite familiar to United States baseball fans. The idea that people would be courteous enough to wait for a break in the action to interrupt you? A totally foreign concept in Queens.
A young lass may not strap it to her back, but you can have a FAFIF t-shirt delivered to you just like Al did.
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