The blog for Mets fans
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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 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.
by Greg Prince on 9 June 2008 4:00 pm 4: Thursday, September 25 vs Cubs
Listen closely, ladies and gentlemen, to the following recording:
From beautiful Shea Stadium in Flushing, New York, the New York Mets are on the air.
That was the very first sentence ever spoken on a home team radio broadcast from this building. The second sentence from that momentous occasion tells you everything you need to know about whom we are proud to honor via the removal of number 4 in our Countdown Like It Oughta Be:
Well hi everybody, this is Bob Murphy with Lindsey Nelson and Ralph Kiner, all set to detail every exciting moment of the historic opening of Shea Stadium as the New York Mets meet the Pittsburgh Pirates.
That, in two sentences, is the sound of home, the sound of the home team, the sound of Shea Stadium.
You didn't need to be at Shea to hear that voice, the voice of Bob Murphy; nor did you need to buy a ticket to hear the voices who joined him on April 17, 1964, Lindsey Nelson and Ralph Kiner. These three sons of Oklahoma and Tennessee and California formed a brotherhood and bridged the gap from the ballpark in Queens to the Mets fan who, for whatever reason, couldn't be here. They painted the word picture of the first Shea Stadium opener, just as they did at the Polo Grounds, just as they would do on the road. They did it, no matter that they came from elsewhere, as true New York icons.
They did it together and they did it forever. Or so it seemed.
From 1962 through 1978 — a mind-boggling, heartwarming seventeen seasons of balls and strikes, wins and losses, ups and downs, missteps and miracles and always, you just knew, another Mets game — they did it brilliantly. The trio of Bob Murphy, Lindsey Nelson and Ralph Kiner was beloved, of course. They were rightly celebrated, famous far and wide and esteemed in the ears of all of their colleagues around baseball. But did you, the loyal Mets fan, realize that when you listened to Bob and Linsdey and Ralph that you were part of history, as much a part of history as any of the 50,312 in attendance for Shea's first game? You were listening to the broadcasting triumvirate that endured as a three-man team longer than any in the annals of Major League Baseball.
If you grew up a Mets fan between 1962 and 1978, you never knew there could be another announcer. You didn't need another announcer. You had the three best in the world. You had the home team.
Nothing lasts forever, we know. The trio broke up at last after 1978 when Lindsey Nelson left for the West Coast. Other announcers, fine announcers, came and filled in. Other voices would weave themselves into the Met tapestry. But there was something about those first three that made them forever the home team at Shea Stadium.
Fortunately for Mets fans, the rest of the team stayed intact. Ralph Kiner and Bob Murphy may have taken on different roles for most of the quarter-century that followed Lindsey Nelson's departure; Ralph was television, Murph radio. But there was no doubt they defined home for the Mets as much as Shea did, as much as any player could have. When you dropped by Kiner's Korner or you reveled in the Happy Recap, you knew you were nowhere but at a Mets game. It was as if you had come to Shea for the day after all and were, as the song promised, guaranteed to have the time of your life.
“Plenty of good seats still available,” Bob and Lindsey and Ralph used to remind the motorists who might be tooling by on the Grand Central. Yet, we can now say without fear of undermining walkup sales, there was no better seat at Shea than the seat closest to the speaker of your radio or your television between 1962 and 1978. Taking in a ballgame with Bob Murphy, Lindsey Nelson and Ralph Kiner was an experience not to be topped — only repeated into blissful perpetuity.
Lindsey passed away in 1995. We lost Murph in 2004. Ralph, thankfully, remains with us to this day. You have heard him on SNY in 2008 as you heard him on Channel 9 decade after decade; as you heard him on Opening Day in 1964 over WHN radio; as you heard him narrate the Mets' birth, the Mets' youth and the Mets' maturity as the Mets and you grew up in tandem.
Ralph Kiner, we know your Korner originated in left field at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh where you established your Hall of Fame credentials, but for tonight, we beg your indulgence as we ask you, Bob's wife Joye Murphy and Lindsey's daughter Nancy Nelson Wyszynski to pile into the backseat of our 1964 Cadillac convertible — what else for a home run hitter? — and be chauffeured out to right field by two of your most faithful protégés, Gary Cohen and Howie Rose. Number 4 was your number in your playing career and number 4 is for you to represent once more — for you; for your Hall of Fame broadcasting partner and brother Bob Murphy; for your Hall of Fame broadcasting partner and brother Lindsey Nelson; and for your family of an audience, the incalculable millions who joined you at Shea from wherever they sat year after year, whether you could hear them or not.
They sure heard you.
Number 5 was revealed here.
Number 3 will be counted down next Monday, June 16.
by Greg Prince on 9 June 2008 3:02 am He overslept? Because he thought it was a 4 o'clock start local?
Oh Ramon, you do keep everybody loose.
Me, I'm theoretically in stitches because the Mets have passed the point of being a team I can truly stress over and are on the verge of being a team I have no choice but to laugh at. Or with. Whatever. It's all good. Or as good as it's going to get right now.
This is a silly, silly team. They lose three games by the exact the same score because they can't generate more than three runs total. Then they generate three runs in the first inning of the fourth game. Then they lose anyway.
And Ramon Castro overslept or didn't understand time zones.
Somebody hits a batter with the bases loaded and the game ends. Somebody on our side is safe on a rundown between home and third and we get almost nothing out of it. Somebody is sent into battle again and again despite two concussions despite a heartbeat in his head and finally he's definitively sat down. The other team has a runner run into a batted ball twice and they win those games. Finally, the backup catcher who doesn't play more than twice a week can't make it to the ballpark on time to catch a future Hall of Famer.
If it's not ha-ha funny, then ain't that peculiar?
The Mets are absurd. For all their ungoodness; for all their astounding lack of depth; for all the scoring they don't do when they pitch and all the pitching they don't do when they score; for all the name players that don't add up to what you could accurately call a team; for the seven of nine they somehow won before dropping four straight to the heretofore worse Padres; for their one rock of stellar performance who isn't shy about calling teammates out yet nailed the coffin of this trip shut by giving up a three-run homer to somebody who used to share a number with Mr. Met.
They are absurd. They're still working on lovable.
by Greg Prince on 8 June 2008 4:51 pm Addendum to Mets Stuff Worth Knowing About: You can meet No. 1 prodigal son Darryl Strawberry Tuesday night between 6 PM and 7 PM at the Best Buy Rockefeller Center store, 559 Fifth Avenue at 46th St. No, he's not the stuff in question (though he surely had the right kind in his day); rather, Straw''ll be signing copies of Essential Games of Shea Stadium and another DVD that sounds so cool that even I didn't know about it 'til just now (not to imply I'm at all cool): Shea Goodbye: 45 Years of Amazin'. Matthew Broderick narrates and it touches all the Shea bases, the big Met moments, the beloved Shea traditions (Banner Day!) and even the non-baseball stuff.
Sounds pretty good even without Darryl's signature.
MORE DARRYL: Strawberry's return to Shea as a Dodger is Monday night's Mets Classic on SNY, 7 PM. Spoiler alert: we win.
by Greg Prince on 8 June 2008 6:58 am Last Sunday evening at Shea Stadium, jockey Kent Desormeaux threw out the ceremonial first pitch to Willie Randolph. Saturday each shared a problem: They had no horse.
No Triple Crown for Desormeaux's mount. Three consecutive 2-1 losses for the Randolph's stallions. Big Brown finished last. The Mets are running well out of the money and the remainder of their course looms longer than that at Belmont.
Do the Mets appear capable of pulling from the back of the pack to nose ahead of those Phillies at the wire? What is it horses say again? Oh yeah…
Naaaaaay!
I know nothing about horse racing except that a horse with a crack in his hoof probably isn't poised to win the most challenging race of his life. That and every time they tell us this is the year there'll be a Triple Crown, it means it won't happen.
I'd like to think I know a few things about baseball, but I have no idea when the Mets are going to start scoring some runs again. None at all.
I might have bet on Wright in the third at Petco, galloping as he was when that old nag Delgado set a fast pace by doubling to the right of the right field jury box. Wright could have cantered home given Brian Giles' throw from the pole position. Alas, Sandy Alomar was as cautious as Kent Desormeaux and pulled the reins in on David. Fernando Tatis then put the inning — and the Mets' offense — out of its misery for the rest of the night.
The Mets trotted into San Diego winners in seven of their previous nine starts knowing they wouldn't have to face Maddux or Peavy or Young. They've scored one run every night anyway. What were the odds of that happening?
Short, apparently.
by Greg Prince on 7 June 2008 8:34 pm Why haven't the Mets placed Ryan Church on the DL? Why do they schlep him on flights east, west, north and south like he's the title character of Weekend At Bernie's when every single night Gary and Keith come on and inform us that he doesn't look quite right, that he's still a bit glassy-eyed, that it's telling that he's not starting or pinch-hitting? They do not seem to be alone in their analysis of his state.
What is to gain by allowing a concussed player, even if he was your best player before taking a knee to the head, to linger in anything close to semi-twilight? Shouldn't Ryan Church be allowed to rest fully and heal as best as he can without the extra pressure of these road trips? I'm not a doctor and I don't play one on this blog, but I find this near negligence of his well-being (in June, not late September when you could be all competitive about it and demand all hands on deck) a mite disturbing. Does Ryan Church say he's OK? Then tell him, OK, you get better than OK.
Maybe he strides to the plate tonight and goes 3-for-4 and homers as he did on Sunday against the Dodgers before he had to board his third long flight since the collision in Atlanta. Maybe he's so close to swell that his situation is being misread by amateurs and managers. But we're now almost three weeks removed from his second concussion of 2008 and there has been no indication that every little thing is fine.
Fifteen or so days without him now may be doing him and us a big favor as the season unfolds.
UPDATE: Church is shut down for “a few days,” reports John Delcos of the Journal News, because he's been feeling pressure akin to “a heartbeat in my head”.
So I ask again, why is he not simply disabled so this matter can be attended to thoroughly?
by Greg Prince on 7 June 2008 6:30 am The 2008 Mets and 2008 Padres both seem to be suffering hangovers after stumbling through the floor in 2007. If the 1965 Phillies could take on the 1979 Red Sox, this would be the weekend it would happen.
Grrr…reasonably well-played game, I suppose. Grrr…a shame someone had to lose. Grrr…if it had been a postseason contest, it would be talked about for some time to come.
Come to think of it, if Friday night's nailbiter had unfolded amid a playoff atmosphere, then we would have won, 'cause Trevor Hoffman would have blown the save.
Cheap shot! Particularly unseemly considering we lost. But cheap shots are all I got after two consecutive 2-1 losses to a Padres team I had been led to believe was far more pathetic than we are. On paper, they sure are. In direct competition, it's all about the same.
Who am I kidding? If these were the playoffs, we'd be as absent as they'd be based on most recent available data.
Pads owe us a couple now as payback for taking the heat they deserved as much as we did in the closing days of 2007. San Diego was a mirror image of the Mets last September, an under-the-radar West Coast version of no-way-they'll-be-caught but got caught anyway.
Seven up with 17 to go, meet one strike away. Not so pleased to make your acquaintance.
You may have some dim recall that Hoffman just needed to throw one more ninth-inning pitch by Tony Gwynn, Jr. — if I made up that name, you wouldn't believe me — to vault the Padres to the Wild Card they'd been positioned to win for an eternity. But with two outs and a 2-2 count, the son of the biggest Friar of them all lashed a triple down the right field line at Miller Park, tied matters up and sent the Padres to an eventual eleventh-inning loss. They lost the next day and then gave away, via the charitable impulses of Hoffman, a two-run lead in the thirteenth to the onrushing Rockies in Game 163.
Had you heard about any of this? Did you even notice the Padres doing a mini-Mets thousands of miles away? Somewhere during the final week of last season, a Mets-Padres NLDS was pretty close to a TBS coming attraction, almost certainly a probable occurrence. Surely a gross of commemorative t-shirts was manufactured for the occasion.
One can only hope those t-shirts went to a good cause.
It's next year now and the Padres likely won't have to worry about being caught from behind. They're eleven under and eight back in the West, leading only equally disheveled Colorado. The Trevorous travails of September in San Diego — a 4-1/2-game Wild Card lead crushed by a pile of Rox — received scant notice back east where we were obsessed with our own history-making ordeal. Therefore, I have to confess that not only did I enter this series unfamiliar with the 2008 Padres, I am completely surprised to be reminded that the Padres were ever en route to the playoffs in 2007.
Who besides Peavy and Young made the Padres such a mortal lock for such a lengthy portion of last year? Is the absence of their two aces the reason they've fallen off the map so quickly? Could a team whose entire offense can be summed up as Adrian Gonzalez and a prayer have been any good to begin with? Why doesn't Trevor Hoffman blow saves against us? Why is Heath Bell unhittable when in New York he was so not unhittable?
And how have we lost two incredibly tight games to such a bland outfit? Why didn't Wright's bomb go out? Why did it hang up just long enough for Scott Hairston to catch up to it? Why couldn't Johan have been just a little better? Why did Luis Castillo suddenly develop latent jet lag? When did this Gonzalez fellow become the Chase Utley of first basemen? Most of all, how come the San Diego Padres can collapse at the end of a nightmare year, stumble out of the gate into another, all but eliminate themselves by early June and we're the ones who look bad?
by Greg Prince on 6 June 2008 8:43 pm 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.
6/28/75 Sa Philadelphia 1-0 Tate 1 2-1 W 5-2
This is what C.J. Cregg on The West Wing would call a process story. It’s the process by which I had carried with me for almost three years a nagging insecurity and the process by which in the past several days I have shed it.
Last Saturday, I inscribed into The Log my 200th win. It was a great personal milestone for me and I noted it for all the world to see. The world, almost without exception, went about its affairs largely undisturbed by my moment, but that’s OK. Before I had this blog through which to shine a light on it, I’d regularly announce to whomever I was with what my record had just turned to as we left Shea Stadium. I strongly suspected whomever I was with would sleep soundly either way, but I liked to mark the occasion vocally before marking it down in ink.
After Fernando Tatis & Co. ensured my nice, round number, of course I wanted to let it be known it had been achieved. Two-hundred times I wrote “W” under “Result”. Two-hundred times, I bore witness to at least a portion of Met home regular-season victory. Two-hundred times, at the very least, I didn’t jinx my team.
But deep down, I was nagged. Was it really 200 last Saturday? Or was it 199? No matter what The Log said, was the true 200th win the next night? Was it possible that I took something as innocuous as the practice of writing down the essential details of every game I’ve ever attended and stirred up a searing statistical controversy, albeit a searing statistical controversy that robbed only me of rest?
If anyone could do it, I could. But I am relieved to declare — even if you are apathetic to learn — that I can rest easily now. 200 wins equals 200 wins for real, and not just in the “nine balls used to equal a walk” sense of processing old numbers in a modern context.
This is how I remember June 28, 1975:
For the second consecutive year, my sister and I got on a train, then another train and we arrived at Shea Stadium for Old Timers Day. It was cloudy. We watched the Old Timers introduced and play their game. We waited for the real game, Mets vs. Phillies, to begin. It got started. Then it started to rain. After an inning-and-a-half, play was called. It was raining hard. After waiting it out a while (I distinctly recall buying the “Shea Stadium Edition” of The Baseball Quiz Book, which featured Jack Davis renderings of Ruth, Aaron and Maris touching home while a tiny pitcher trembled), Suzan insisted we leave. C’mon, she said, look at how it’s raining, you know they’re not going to play. Besides, we’re coming back with mom and dad on Wednesday.
Reluctantly agreeing that it was pretty wet, we departed. To avoid a long wait at Woodside, we took the LIRR back into Penn Station (I saw the Amtrak trains to Philly and asked if it would be possible to go to Veterans Stadium some day to see the Mets there; she said that would cost something prohibitive, like thirty bucks). From there we rode back to Long Beach. And once in the door at home, we found our parents watching Kiner’s Korner.
The game had resumed. It was completed. The Mets won 5-2. I growled a bit at Suzan for giving up so soon but was otherwise happy for a Mets win. I would remember having gone to this game, started by Randy Tate, as my second win. True, I didn’t stick around to the end, but I was there and it happened. Good enough for me.
The rock on which The Log was built when it opened for business in 1981 was my memory which, even at 18, was considered by those who encountered it as exceptional. “How do you remember all that?” I’d be asked about whatever it was I was rattling off the top of my head like dandruff. I don’t know, I said, I just do.
But even at 18 I knew I couldn’t remember everything into perpetuity. I knew that although I could tell you the essential details of every one of the Mets games I’d attended since I began attending Mets games, I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to keep it up forever. So as a precaution against future fallibility, I finally jotted down, in a steno pad, what happened as I remembered it from the eighteen games I’d been to since 1973: Date; Opponent; Starting Pitcher; Result. After 1981, with what we’ll call The Original Eighteen put in the books, I kept it up on a game-by-game basis. I’d go to a game, I’d mourn or possibly celebrate its outcome and I’d make official what I saw by Logging it.
It never occurred to me as I moved through the ’80s, into the ’90s and past the millennial marker that I had ever gotten any of the Original Eighteen wrong. Dates, you see, were my strong suit. Some writers are geniuses at description; they can introduce you to a man or woman whose face is blessed or cursed by an “aquiline nose”; they will profile a powerful executive by the way he “tucks into his steak”; they can recount a ballgame without blurring a play Carlos Delgado made on Andre Ethier into a play he made on Jeff Kent.
I don’t do that. What I do is tell you that on July 17, 1976, for example, I went to see the Mets play the Astros. I tell you about who I went with and who gave me a ride and what they offered me from the back of their trunk and what the overactive, over-the-hill cheerleader type in our section chanted. I tell you Tom Seaver pitched. I don’t tell you how his breaking stuff tickled the corners of the strike zone because, quite frankly, how would I know?
I don’t know that stuff. I don’t notice that stuff unless I’ve got slo-mo and Tim McCarver in his announcing prime turning me into an advance scout. I don’t know and I don’t notice plenty. I don’t notice what people look like all that much. I don’t necessarily remember what people I’ve met several times look like. I went to a game last week with somebody I know mostly through blog and e-mail, somebody whose only defining physical characteristic I could recall from our one prior meeting was that he wore a Todd Zeile jersey. Thank goodness he was wearing it again or I might have circled Shea in search of him.
Thank goodness for The Log, for it makes clear without aid of statistically enhanced Web site what I saw when I was a kid. I saw Randy Tate in 1975. I saw Tom Seaver in 1976, Craig Swan in 1977, Jerry Koosman in 1978…
I didn’t see Jerry Koosman in 1978. I walked around for 27 years fairly certain Koosman started the only game I saw in 1978, the game I remembered better for what I got (and didn’t get) from a storage closet of Met merchandise. I remember being told wearing a Red Sox cap to Shea Stadium was a fashion faux pas. I don’t remember that on June 25, 1978 Jerry Koosman was actually Nino Espinosa.
No use fighting it once I stumbled upon the boxscore on some combination of Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference and Ultimate Mets Database. They all said the same thing: Espinosa pitched for the Mets (and the Mets still lost). I was compelled by research to put a line through Koosman and amend the STARTING PITCHER column to Espinosa for 6/25/78. That was all right in terms of history. I had seen Kooz once before. I could now say I had seen Nino.
But could I any longer be certain of all I was sure I had seen? Did I really get from 1973 to 1981 with memory intact? Were all my details correct?
I take great pleasure in introducing or at least being on hand for a person’s first game at Shea Stadium. It is my missionary work. I was thrilled to do it for Alex and Zack, the sons of my friend Alan, one of the least baseball-savvy people I’ve ever known well. Technically, it would be just older brother Alex watching the field; Zack had a cold and slept through the entire Mets-Dodgers game of July 24, 2005. Alex asked a few questions but, I’d be told in ensuing summers, didn’t really take the bait to become a Mets fan. Oh well. But it was a lovely afternoon nonetheless. The Mets won and my all-time total games attended at Shea, if I were to incorporate the eight postseason games I had seen in ’99 and 2000, was an even 300.
Such happiness. Such pride. Me, the kid from Long Beach who got to only one or two games a year in his youth…who didn’t get started at Shea until he was a ripe old ten, four long years after discovering the Mets in the newspaper and on Channel 9…who somehow never got to more than seven games in any one season until he was thirty…I had made up for lost time and how! I don’t know that I constituted much of an adult on any other count, but I had sure grown up to be the all the fan I could be.
Maybe it was a victory lap that caused me to explore Retrosheet in the wake of the perceived milestone. I just had to go back and look at some of my early work. I examined my third game, that Old Timers Day from 1975, the Randy Tate start, the one delayed for about an hour-and-a-half in the second, the one I had to leave but the one I was at, so it counted.
1:27 rain delay at start
What?
That’s what Retrosheet said, but that’s not how I remembered it. They played. The Mets and Phillies played the top of the first, then the bottom of the first, then the top of the second. I didn’t remember that Steve Carlton was the opposing pitcher, I only vaguely remembered each team scoring a run, but I did remember getting an inning-and-a-half in before the rain. That’s why it was so deflating to have the delay, so defeating to have to be dragged away. The Mets wouldn’t have started that game on June 28, 1975 if they didn’t think they could finish it. And they had finished it!
But did they start it? Specifically, did they start it before or after the rain? I knew they did. I was there!
I was also there for the Old Timers ceremonies, the whole shmear. They introduced the players from another era, then they had them come out and play one of those games that doesn’t count…
Hold on. Could have I mixed them up? Could it be that the Old Timers game was the one for which they had to clear the diamond and unfurl the tarp? Is that what I was remembering all these years? Is it possible I never saw Randy Tate fire a pitch that afternoon in 1975?
Retrosheet said it was. And I depended on Retrosheet to fill in all my blanks.
I continued to function in 2005 and I continue to function to this day. It’s not debilitating to learn you may have had your facts confused somewhere between the ages of 12 when you saw what you saw and 18 when you wrote down what you saw and 42 when you were led to question if you really saw what you thought you saw.
I saw Randy Tate. I know I did! It’s in The Log!
No players’ names are written down in The Log except those of the starting pitcher. The starting pitcher’s identity is one of four prime identifiers, right there with the date, the opponent and the final result. The starting pitcher is a pelt, a notch. It is what I tack up over the fireplace, what I carve into the bedpost. Seeing Randy Tate, even if Randy Tate’s career lasted a single 5-13 season, even if Randy Tate is remembered primarily for not throwing a no-hitter (he held the Expos hitless into the eighth and wound up losing anyway), was a prize. I liked having written down “Tate” in The Log.
Who am I kidding? I loved having written down “Tate” in The Log.
In 2005, I was distressed by the information I had uncovered in Retrosheet. It’s not as if the game hadn’t taken place. But if it took place and I didn’t see it, did it really fall under the purview of The Log? In 1999, I arrived in the seventh inning of the opener of a twinight doubleheader against the Brewers. It started at four in the afternoon. I couldn’t leave work early, so I just had to take what I saw. Well, I thought, I’ve seen some of it. So I guess it counts in The Log. That became my guide: See one pitch, it counts. Show up between games of a twinbill, the first one doesn’t count. Respond to an emergency phone call before first pitch and bolt, it doesn’t count. Theoretically, if I show up at Shea, spend nine innings chatting with the lady at the mezzanine BBQ stand…well, why would I do that?
Let’s not lose sight of the issue. If, in fact, I was at Shea on June 28, 1975 but left the premises before any of the Mets-Phillies game was played, could I count it?
I decided in 2005 I could. I decided I was there in good faith. I decided it was part of The Log’s legacy, one-eighteenth of its foundation. I couldn’t be responsible if my sister was a wuss.
So it stayed counted. And when I occasionally let people in on my record, I included the Randy Tate game. When I counted up starting pitchers I’d observed in person in Flushing, I included it as well. Yet…yet even then, a little voice inside my head told me everything would have to be “plus one”. Want to say safely and soundly that you’ve seen 200 Mets wins? Make sure you see 200 plus one. Want to say, as I hope to before this season is out, you’ve seen 400 games, regular and playoff, at Shea Stadium? Make sure you see 400 plus one. I crossed my fingers last Sunday that I’d get my 201st win because, deep down, I wasn’t 100% sure I had actually gotten my 200th.
The curiosity nibbled at me Monday night. Retrosheet had never changed its story. Baseball-Reference and UMDB shed no light. The New York Times doesn’t let you go back that far for free.
But The Sporting News does. The Sporting News‘ archive is online at paperofrecord.com. You have to register and you have to hold tight to your password because it’s not one you get to make up and you have to find it every time you want to look anything up, but you can go straight to The Sporting News and look up almost anything from the distant past. That’s what The Sporting News was for back in the day. It was the Bible of Baseball. I began reading The Sporting News in 1975. They printed boxscores and summaries for every single game played in the Majors in the course of the season.
So I took a deep breath and logged on. I entered the name Tate. A targeted search brought me to the July 19, 1975 edition. I began to scroll. And there it was:
Staub and Kingman each drove in pair of runs and rookie Tate hurled four-hitter to give Mets 5-2 victory over Phillies. Staub singled home tally in first frame and delivered another with sacrifice fly in third. Kingman’s bases-loaded single snapped 2-2 tie in fifth. Game was delayed hour and 27 minutes by rain in last of second inning.
GAME WAS DELAYED HOUR AND 27 MINUTES BY RAIN IN LAST OF SECOND INNING!
I saw it. I saw enough. I saw enough to say I was there. Me and my sister and Randy Tate and the third game in Log history and the second win in Log history and all it represents to me.
“I write poetry, Toby,” Tabitha Fortis said in the West Wing episode entitled “The U.S. Poet Laureate”. “That’s how I enter the world.”
Me, I write down the date, the opponent, the starting pitcher and the score of every game I go to. I’m definitively 201-170 as we speak. 201-170 plus nothin’.
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