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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 31 July 2023 12:21 pm Having ten days earlier properly commemorated the 50th anniversary of making Flushing my recurring personal destination, I opened my second half-century of going to Mets games Sunday afternoon by taking a left field Promenade Box eye’s view of The Great Justin Verlander proving effective enough to a) quell the Washington Nationals by a score of 5-2, and b) restore a grain of dignity to the entire New York Mets enterprise after the actions of the night before. The night before, the Mets on the field shambled to an 11-6 loss that would have been embarrassing had this season been capable of any longer generating on-field embarrassment…though it’s not like many will remember the night before for the loss on the field.
Saturday night, the Mets traded The Great Max Scherzer to Texas for, technically, a highly rated prospect, but mostly to put a bizarre relationship behind them. Whether Luisangel Acuña emerges as one of the great time-release trade deadline gets or ultimately has us coupling his name with Dilson Herrera (rather than Luisangel’s older brother), the key to the deal, beyond the involvement of lots of money, was the sense that something was over. What it was I’m not quite sure.
 Scher, why not? If the Max Scherzer Appreciation Society had a Metropolitan Area chapter, I wasn’t its president, and I neglected to remit any dues. For a while I felt I felt a tad guilty that I never exactly vibed with Max as a Met. I welcomed his arrival as one would have been silly not to, and I definitely didn’t feel the orange and blue was disgraced by his presence in the colors. This was Max Scherzer, multiple Cy Young winner, world champion, competitor of competitors, and he wanted to be a Met! Or he took the Mets’ owner’s megabucks, but he could have gotten paid handsomely by anybody. Scherzer stood as a validating figure on the eve of the 2021-22 lockout. This is a serious team that attracts serious players with serious money. This could be some kind of era we’re heading into.
It was. It just didn’t last as long as we might have liked. We should probably learn to expect that.
The Scherzer who merits generous dollops of appreciation, no matter how it ended, flickered in and out of sight. Some starts were markedly better than others. Some streams of his consciouness were more agreeable than others. He took care of his minor league teammates when on injury rehab assignments. He hosted impromptu graduate seminars for his fellow starters after he took a dugout seat upon completing his best sets of innings. That was in 2022. As Steve Gelbs noted Saturday night (and I had been thinking in the days before), Scherzer U. seemed to have shut down in 2023. Maybe the old professor didn’t feel he had any lessons to share once his outings stopped earning high grades.
The Scherzer who positioned himself to go unmissed was the one who didn’t come through in the two biggest games he pitched as a Met. That’s a pretty transactional way to process a future Hall of Famer, but Max was here for the bottom line, and so are we sometimes. What bugged me more than his sliders flying over fences versus the Braves and Padres was his insistence, after the latter occasion, that he’d figured out what he’d done wrong and it was gonna be or would have been fine in the next playoff start that never came, as if it were that easy (which it wouldn’t be when 2023, the pitch clock and sweat and rosin came along). A friend of mine remarked Scherzer’s Met stay replicated T#m Gl@v!ne’s. Nah, I replied, retaining my utter disdain for the Manchurian Brave ever donning Met duds — at least Gl@v!ne won a couple of playoff games.
Now and then, Scherzer would conduct his postgame media scrums while wearing his Mets cap, yet as hard as I’d stare into the TV and want to see Max Scherzer, co-ace of the New York Mets, he came across as Pedro Borbon in the aftermath of the Pete Rose-Buddy Harrelson brawl. Borbon was the Reds reliever who got into it with Buzz Capra, and was in such a rage when it was over, that he mindlessly picked up and put on a Mets cap (before realizing his faux pas and taking a bite out of it). Free agency has made player/team identities far more malleable, but some guys can make the hats and the jerseys fit better than other guys. Scherzer always looked like he should be wearing one of those obviously fake uniforms in a commercial whose sponsor hires the player but can’t license his accoutrement. A script “Max” across his chest would have fit Scherzer perfectly.
When Max told reporters, after a refreshingly splendid start Friday night, that the deletion of David Robertson from the Mets’ plans meant he needed to have “a conversation” with those determining the construction of the roster, that should have been a signal that a Lyft had been summoned. During the winter, Kevin Durant nodded upstairs in a similar direction when the Nets rid themselves of mercurial (to put it too kindly) Kyrie Irving. Shorn of Irving and reunited with Spencer Dinwiddie, the Nets were going to be a more pleasant bunch to live and die with, but probably not an immediate title contender. The fan in me thought maybe Durant would internalize the challenge of leading a different, pluckier kind of squad, and…nah, KD wanted to chase another ring ASAP. One of the best players I ever rooted for on a regular basis couldn’t bail fast enough. Now I root for Mikail Bridges and Cam Johnson, the guys the Nets got from Phoenix for Durant. Fandom goes on like that.
 If you listen in, you probably won’t hear any mention of the fans. Fandom went on Sunday minus Scherzer, who the Mets were reportedly in the process of trying to move to Arlington anyway before Max cleared his throat, but still with Verlander. Whether Verlander is here by Tuesday at 6 PM is part of the remains-to-be-scenery that serves as backdrop to the trade deadline runup. Four months ago, conventional wisdom wouldn’t have dreamed the Mets and the trade deadline would have anything more to do with one another than the fetching of some bench or bullpen reinforcement for the drive to October. The drive to October now clearly has a U-Haul trailer hitched to the Porsche. A dozen teams will go to the postseason. Maybe Verlander will pitch for one of them. On Sunday, as my LIRR train pulled into Jamaica, a voice called out, “anyone know if Verlander’s been traded yet?” It wasn’t asked with the tone of someone rushing to Flushing to wish Justin a bon voyage.
When I stepped onto Mets Plaza Sunday afternoon, I half-expected to be overcome by the aroma of season tickets burning in the adjacent parking lot. That’s what Giants fans infamously did in the Meadowlands to express their disgust as 1978, the 15th year of continuously lousy football, wound down. In virtual corners of Metsopotamia, we’ve been holding bonfires since April, lighting them on our keyboards rather than with matches. In real life, you’re not going to see people show up at Citi Field on a bright, sunny Sunday to set fire to their season tickets. For one thing, are season tickets even flammable anymore? Wouldn’t you have to set your phone ablaze to register your protest these days? For another, if you’ve trekked to a Mets game, no matter what the Mets didn’t build and how they’re compelled to disassemble it, you’re not there to register a protest. You’re voting in favor of baseball.
It was a beautiful day for a ballgame, all those pesky rain delays from the past week having led to clear skies and cooler temperatures. The Promenade Box location I chose averted the beating sun from the second through the ninth inning. Save for an audible grumble directed at a Daniel Vogelbach groundout, I heard no boos while seated Sunday. When the NOISE METER was activated, I heard nothing neither my friend Mark nor I was saying, but that sort of interruption was held to a blessed minimum. If the crowd GOT LOUD, it was to convey enthusiasm for Francisco Lindor homering and collecting three hits; for Jeff McNeil legging out a triple; for Pete Alonso knocking in two runs; for Omar Narvaez knocking in one; and for Met for the rest of his contractual days or until his conversation with the front office/ownership has its intended effect Justin Verlander.
The prevailing “thrilled to be here even if Max apparently wasn’t” mood enabled us to enable the Mets. If the Mets didn’t make us regret our mood, all the better. I learned twice in 1999, once in September and once in October, that no matter how mad “everybody” is at the Mets — in those cases for having lost in piercing fashion the days and nights before and thereby endangering the thread-hanging season — most everybody who actually attends the game will give the Mets the benefit of the doubt before the game starts. The two episodes I’m thinking of involved the 1999 Braves as opponents. Of course we cheered our heads off for those Mets despite cursing out those same Mets on our way to Shea. If you couldn’t bring yourself to root for those Mets against those Braves, you might as well have burned your tickets.
JV has continued to traverse his comeback from ordinary to extraordinary, definitely tilting in the desired direction Sunday. If five-and-a-third innings of one-run ball versus the one team in the division certifiably worse than yours isn’t a Cooperstown signifier, Verlander did that thing a person loves to see from a starting pitcher. He worked out of trouble in the first (one run) and got stronger as the day went on. The Mets hit Old Friend™ Trevor Williams enough to give Justin breathing room, and when Verlander left the mound in favor of David Peterson, most of us rose to applaud the starter. Maybe it was for the five-and-a-third; maybe it was for the 250th career win that three-and-two-thirds of adequate relief would secure; maybe it really was for a Justin-case fare-thee-well now that we were in an even better mood.
Much as I was excited at the beginning of July when I realized I was going to see the Justin Verlander pitch in person, Mark was similarly delighted when he checked the probables a few days earlier. As we shared in this rare treat of witnessing a 249-game winner striving to reach an even more exalted plane, we got to talking about Great Pitchers We Have Seen and found ourselves not watching Verlander all that closely. Mark and I don’t meander from the action when we go to football games together. Football games demand your attention. Baseball games gently suggest we invoke “ancient names out of thin air,” to use Mark’s phrase. Soon enough, the phones we didn’t burn were out, and we were scrolling the list of the 200+ Win Club.
Mark, whose baseball fandom goes back to the waning days of the Giants calling the Polo Grounds home and the Dodgers hosting visitors at Ebbets Field (even if his grandfather refused to take him to Brooklyn), personally witnessed a lot of the greats and damn goods. Mark saw Warren Spahn pitch for the Mets (before Spahn, like Scherzer, made it known he couldn’t take the losing anymore). Mark is pretty sure he saw Billy Pierce pitch for the White Sox against the Yankees. Luis Tiant? Check. Steve Carlton? Absolutely. Mark wasn’t as certain if he ever saw Juan Marichal, though we both claimed Gaylord Perry. I got my glimpses of Frank Tanana in a Mets uniform. Mark had plenty of looks at Bob Gibson; I hope he ducked. He didn’t see Pedro Martinez, he doesn’t think, but I sure did. Our Seaver sightings culminated in No. 299 at Fenway (me) and No. 300 in the wrong New York stadium (Mark). Neither of us caught Max Scherzer pitching for the Mets, but together we saw him toy with our side as a Nat in 2016.
And so on and so on. There was Justin Verlander doing his thing very well in a Mets uniform, but we didn’t direct the bulk of our concentration toward him, or Peterson, Adam Ottavino and Brooks Raley preserving that thing he did. We went to a game and talked about other games. We talked about the Mets as much in the abstract as we did in concrete terms. As Mark will in lesser Met seasons, he tries to discern that one good push that will somehow inject them into the race. Neither of us really believes it’s a possibility right now, but Mark measured the distance from .500 (five games) and I appraised the overall strength of the current Wild Card contenders (“none of them is that great”) and concluded absolutely nothing that would truly ignite our dormant optimism. But it really was a beautiful day for a ballgame.
On the train ride home, I caught up on Verlander’s desire for a Scherzerian conversation about the club’s trajectory and whether he sees himself as a part of the “repurposing” Billy Eppler has begun talking up after studying hard for the euphemism portion of the SAT. I honestly don’t blame employees for flexing their empowerment muscles, even if there’s a piece of me that wishes everybody first and foremost felt they were a part of our team. It is our team, you know, even if we don’t compose it or own it. We’re the only ones who care about it ’til death do us part. That gets overlooked in the trade deadline conversations. Scherzer and Verlander aren’t going to bring up the fans. Eppler and Cohen aren’t going to bring up the fans. It is left to the fans to bring up the fans, but all the fans want, mostly, is a team whose season will extend deep into October.
That would be swell, but you know what I find myself wanting most? I want an era of Mets baseball. A very good era of Mets baseball. I want to feel as if everything isn’t going to change just because 6 PM Tuesday is fast approaching. I want to get to an offseason and not click refresh incessantly in search of the next multiple Cy Young winner being satisfied enough with an enormous monetary offer to model our clothes for the cameras. I’d like trades that aren’t clever in theory though we’ll have to wait for history’s final verdict, but trades that fill the lone need we have immediately because, except for that one missing piece, we have everything we need in this era. I want to know my team and experience my team and not have to acquaint myself with a wholly new version of my team just when I’ve gotten to know the one I thought was gonna stick around for a while.
Plus they should be very good. It’s obviously not a dealbreaker, but if I’m having a conversation and I’m listing my needs, that would be near the top. But stability — not to be confused with stagnation — would be most ideal. When the Mets were stumbling in June and the manager was making some questionable bullpen decisions, a murmur of FIRE BUCK began to be heard over the noise meters. Such resolution was never a serious possibility in the moment, but man, did I not want to hear it in any case, less out of personal loyalty to or affection for Showalter, but because, geez, haven’t we done this already? Haven’t we cycled through hapless managers and yearned for a steady hand attached to a mind that seemed to know what it was doing more often than not? Didn’t 2022 land us in that place to stay, at least for a few years? Are we really ready, I asked myself, to toss Buck Showalter overboard because it’s been a weird year and a horrid month? And wasn’t Steve Cohen supposed to represent the end of all this?
Maybe 2024, if Buck’s still here and the floundering continues unabated, will indicate the hair-trigger types had the right instinct, so why did we wait? Or maybe 2024 will shake out the insipidness that has enveloped Mets baseball in 2023 and we’ll have returned to the right track, led by Lindor who’s gonna be here for years, and Nimmo who’s gonna be here for years, and McNeil who’s gonna be here for some years, and Alonso, unless he has a conversation with somebody in which he shares his long-term doubts and free agency desires. Sometimes Lindor overswings or Nimmo slumps and I calculate how much of their probably immovable contracts (though never say never with Uncle Steve) are left, but generally, it’s nice to know some guys aren’t going anywhere. We finally got a beautiful team to cheer toward a World Series in 2015, and the gutsy 2016 bunch who strove to a Wild Card was already tangibly different. I reveled in the hot finish to 2019, thinking we were young and set for years to come, and the years came, and much of the core of that team was steadily peeled away
 The Fab Five, before they broke up. The 2022 Mets of exactly one year ago were the team I was prepared to grow a little older with. I’ve aged plenty watching the 2023 Mets, but I recognize them less and less. As the Max Clock ticked, I thought not only of those dugout seminars that were no longer in session, but of a clubhouse picture that circulated after the Mets clinched their playoff spot in Milwaukee. The starting rotation of Scherzer, deGrom, Carrasco, Bassitt and Walker came together and posed as one. It could have been the Beatles on the roof of Apple Corps, never again to publicly get back to where they once belonged.
If Scherzer had to go, he had to go. If Verlander has to go, he has to go. As I’ve entered my second half-century of game-going, it’s apparent I’m not going anywhere besides 41 Seaver Way. More than ever, I appreciate the company of those friends and those Mets who also wish to stick around for a while.
by Jason Fry on 30 July 2023 12:01 am So now we know how Max Scherzer‘s conversation with the brass went — it turned out to be an exit interview, as Scherzer is on his way to the Rangers (along with $35.5 million through next year) in return for Luisangel Acuna, whom you probably didn’t know is the younger brother of Ronald Acuna Jr. For those keeping score over more than a generation (and if so, applause), the Acunas’ father was a Met minor leaguer in the early aughts. Here’s hoping — for all sorts of reasons — that Luisangel proves a valuable major leaguer; if not, rest assured Greg and I will be ready with sneaky references to Mike Maddux and Pedro A. Martinez for a decade or more.
If I’m feeling paleolithic, the monetary aspects of the Scherzer trade feels at least mildly absurd: $35.5 million is a lot to pay for a prospect, even a good one. But in all walks of life it’s good to resist being paleolithic. Scherzer gave the Mets 90% of a superb initial season, a disappointing finale to that first go-round, and then followed that with an iffy, worrisome sophomore effort. He wasn’t going to get any younger (none of us will), and there was no guarantee that 2023’s issues were going to be behind him. So the Mets sent Scherzer to a contender, added a bonafide prospect in return, and will retool their starting rotation without him.
Without Scherzer and now, it seems pretty clear, without a bunch of other dudes: Seeing what happened to David Robertson and Scherzer once tarp hit field, Tommy Pham, Mark Canha and Omar Narvaez have got to be wondering if the next rain delay will mean their departure. And how funny would it be if the Mets trade Justin Verlander back to the Astros, pitting their two 2023-on-paper aces against each other for an AL division crown?
Stepping back further, though, I keep resisting the impulse to be appalled by the amount of money being thrown around. It’s Steve Cohen’s money, not mine or yours or a kitty that otherwise would go to feeding orphans or building schools, and I keep coming back to the thought that the Mets’ 2023 plan seemed sound: pay a short-term premium for top-shelf starters, try and charge through the window of contention that spending pried open, and then turn to a hopefully restocked farm system.
It didn’t work out — and because it didn’t, the 2023 Mets will be trotted out as a cautionary tale for decades — but so what? Does the plan having failed necessitate some sort of hairshirt nonsense where the Mets pare back spending and take a couple of years to be morose about it? Cohen has enough money to try a modified version of the same plan, only with a younger starter in Scherzer’s place, and maybe one in Verlander’s slot as well, and if you’re thinking about Shohei Ohtani, well, so is everyone else. (I don’t think Ohtani would come here, but hey, half a billion dollars is an excellent way to change someone’s mind.)
I also keep thinking that the outcome of seasons can be plotted on a bell curve. (I should have dressed this up with a fancy graphic, but hey, 2023.) A season in which everything goes right — rookies blossom, veterans find fountains of youth, bounces go your way — goes on the right-hand side on the curve, down below that mountaintop of middle. Think 1969 or 1986 — and hey, 1999 and 2015 and 2022 are over there on the descending right as well. But there are other seasons, ones in which prospects turn into suspects and veterans get old and bounces work out for the other guys. Those go on the left side of the curve — and 2023 may as well be Exhibit A.
Here’s the thing, though: There are no half bell curves. To have a chance at landing on that magical right-side tail, you have to accept that you might wind up on the dismal lefthand side instead.
There’s 1969 … and there’s 1992,
There’s 1986 … and there’s 2004.
There’s 2022 … and there’s 2023.
That’s the way it goes — and frankly, that’s the way we should all want it to go. We just have to grit our teeth when we realize a given year is destined for that lefthand side, and wait with as much patience as we can muster for fate to flip our position.
* * *
Oh yeah, the game: Your chronicler was out to dinner with his in-laws and it was 7-1 Nats when he reported for duty, meaning he missed Carlos Carrasco reducing his trade value essentially to zero by getting strafed (with some oh-so-2023 defense not helping) and a whole lot of unpleasantness. I also missed newest Met Reed Garrett, but here’s betting there are some more debuts ahead.
I did see Francisco Alvarez connect for his 20th homer — now there’s something that’s gone right — and Mark Vientos follow Alvarez’s blast with one of its own, which isn’t bad for a kid who’s been buried on the bench. Poor Brett Baty even doubled, a welcome tonic given that Baty looks both frustrated and like he’s running out of gas.
Does any of it matter? Not particularly — but then nothing else the Mets do on the field will much matter until next April. That’s when we’ll get a chance to assess whatever the new plan is, and to wonder where the new season will land on the bell curve.
by Jason Fry on 28 July 2023 11:58 pm It’s not quite Max Flack and Cliff Heathcote switching teams between games of a doubleheader, but spare a moment of consideration for David Robertson, who was a Met when it started raining and a Marlin when it stopped.
That’s a strange one.
A strange one, but probably not the only oddity heading our way: There was a palpable hum around the Mets as they squared off against the Nationals Friday night at Citi Field, with any player so much as going down the dugout tunnel drawing a curious look. Has Tommy Pham been traded to … oh wait, he just went to the can. Carry on!
At least the Mets played like they were more or less unruffled. OK, maybe an emphasis on the “less,” as Max Scherzer said he needs to have a conversation with ownership about the team’s direction and his future — a reminder, as if you needed one, that $43 million employees are not like most employees. Scherzer will get a friendlier hearing if he keeps pitching the way he did Friday: He was nicked for a homer when he tired in his final inning of work but otherwise superb, with his oft-disobedient slider mostly sliding as directed.
On the other side of the ball, Pete Alonso certainly looks to have shaken off his summer doldrums, connecting for a majestic three-run shot off MacKenzie Gore in the fifth that might have saved the Marlins some money had Robertson waited a night and hopped aboard, then following that with a merely impressive two-run homer to seal the game in his next AB.
With Robertson gone, the Mets are on to Plan C as far as closers are concerned; by Tuesday new possibilities may have unfolded as far as outfielders, middle relievers, starting pitchers and backup catchers are concerned. (Robertson’s replacement is someone named Reed Garrett, whom I confess never having heard of, though rest assured I’ve already secured a card of him for The Holy Books.) Where this will leave the team is of course unknowable; my own quiet hope is that having seen the white flag waved we’ll all be able to let go of this sour, dissatisfying season and simply enjoy the games for themselves. Y’know the drill: One day at a time and the good Lord willing it’ll work out.
Speaking of transitions, we’re on our way to Maine with a weekend pit stop at my in-laws in Connecticut, which meant the game unfolded on the radio via the MLB app. Which, to be clear, is fine: Howie Rose and Keith Raad are good company, though we rolled our eyes at Howie’s extended product placement for some kind of chicken wrap and were mystified at what Keith could have gotten up to in a Nathan’s that couldn’t be shared on radio.
No, the problem is that MLB has pretty much two ads that it runs every half-inning. First you get Spectrum One, advertised via an actually not bad rap, though Emily insists I’m wrong that its lyrics mention “ass down low speeds,” about which I’ll have no comment because I know what I heard. Next you get a radio couple subjecting listeners to an unfunny “you talk in your sleep” bit involving an HGTV lottery and meeting someone named David Bromstad. I have no idea who David Bromstad is but I’m pretty sure if I met him I would punch him in the nose, because I have to hear his name 16 or 17 times if I listen to a ballgame.
There’s a long list of things I think MLB could do better at, and I know most of those things aren’t going to change and are simply the way the world now works. But surely they could sell ads to more outlets than I can count on one hand? Failing that, perhaps they could pay for the straitjacket in which I’ll spend the rest of my days, ass down, moving at low speeds and waiting for David Bromstad to tell me I’ve won whatever the fuck his lottery is.
by Greg Prince on 28 July 2023 11:23 am So much for well-intentioned inertia. The fourth-place Mets aren’t content to do nothing. Fourth-place they appear resigned to, but they’ll be damned if they don’t keep busy while maintaining it. David Robertson was not looking to be moved, yet moved he’s been, to his seventh major league team, traded late Thursday night to the Miami Marlins as the raindrops on the Mets’ 2-1 win over the fifth-place Nationals were still drying. The Marlins, in the absolute thick of a full-season playoff race for the first time since Miguel Cabrera was a rookie, are buyers. The Mets, a little too far outside the Wild Card action to be termed looking in, are sellers. When the Mets opened their high-expectation season at Miami on March 30, I’m sure we all saw this scenario unfolding four months hence.
Robertson, brought in as setup man to Edwin Diaz, then promoted to closer when Diaz’s right patellar tendon had other ideas, was a) mostly successful in his unexpected assignment and b) pitching under an expiring contract. Those two factors will make a non-contender shop a fella who can save games. The Mets went to market.
They brought back two kids, an 18-year-old infielder named Marco Vargas and a 19-year-old catcher named Ronald Hernandez. They’ve never heard of you, either. The ideal scenario is sometime in the mid-to-late 2020s, when David Robertson is an answer you’re kicking yourself for not filling in on that morning’s Immaculate Grid, we will be benefiting in some way from having grabbed such talented youth at the deadline that season when things weren’t going according to plan, but they sure worked out down the line, huh?
Maybe that happens. Who I am to tell a couple of teenagers their dreams won’t come true? Who am I to tell myself that our dreams won’t intersect with those of a pair of prospects? For now, Vargas and Hernandez are people the more ambitious among us will pretend to know something concrete about before they show up on the next MLB Pipeline list.
The reactions in the Met clubhouse provided a few insights into how business is business. You had the determinedly upbeat veterans, Francisco Lindor and Pete Alonso, insisting the Mets’ chances weren’t wholly snuffed as they searched for the right words to show their esteem for Robertson. Lindor called him a great father. Alonso, perhaps indicating that the hitters and the relievers don’t hang out that much, talked about how “decorated” David is in this game. Mark Canha — whose bases-loaded eighth-inning sac fly that followed a sudden 97-minute rain delay delivered the now-forgotten winning run — and Brandon Nimmo emitted the vibes of weary pros who’d attended this rodeo in too many previous lost campaigns. Canha didn’t bother with too many brave words about how it was still possible for the Mets to make a run. Several days remain until the trade deadline. The next run Canha makes may be to catch a flight wherever he is sent.
Kodai Senga, whose six innings of one-run ball typified the effectiveness he’s given the Mets most starts since the middle of June, seemed a little baffled by the late-July rituals unfolding around him. This doesn’t happen much in Japan, he said through interpreter Hiro Fujiwara, adding, in so many words, the most honest thing any ballplayer on a non-contending team may have ever said: this doesn’t really affect me. Kodai explained he meant he still has to prepare for games, and David’s a great guy, but the season goes on.
That it does. For four months, it was essential to have David Robertson rested and ready for just the right moment, whichever inning it arose, usually the ninth. Save situations are what New York Savings and Loan checks were to Leonardo DiCaprio as kiter extraordinaire Frank Abagnale in Catch Me If You Can. As he told the high-end call girl played by Jennifer Garner, the one who only accepted cash, they’re like gold. Robertson was able to cash most of the save situations he laid his hands on, 14 of 17, no questions asked. God help Buck Showalter if he used somebody else and the decision proved counterfeit. Why didn’t you use Robertson? Now Buck will use Adam Ottavino, or Brooks Raley (as he did to raised pre-trade announcement eyebrows Thursday night), or Drew Smith, or whoever emerges as Diaz’s placeholder. In 2018, the going-nowhere Mets traded decorated longtime closer Jeurys Familia to playoff-bound Oakland. Familia was leading the Mets in saves. Their season went on with somebody else closing games. When the season ended, Familia was still the club leader in saves. In seasons when you’re ready to ship your usually reliable closer elsewhere, it likely means you’re not winning enough games to take saves seriously.
There’s a trumpet player who’s a fixture on Mets Plaza before and after every home game. He plays for tips and elicits them by performing the crowd’s presumed favorites: “Take Me Out To The Ball Game”; “Lazy Mary”; “Meet The Mets”. The last game I went to, last week, I noticed he started his postgame set with “Narco,” still the song we think of when we think of protecting ninth-inning leads. David Robertson’s entrance music was “Sweet Home Alabama”. I guess the Mets Plaza trumpeter didn’t make it one of his standards. Good call on his part.
by Greg Prince on 27 July 2023 11:42 am In one of the climactic scenes of the first season of Mad Men, ad agency head Bert Cooper instructed impatient Pete Campbell, by way of exonerating a man originally named Dick Whitman for shadily assuming the identity of the late Don Draper, “The Japanese have a saying: A man is whatever room he is in, and right now, Donald Draper is in this room.” I woke up the morning after Wednesday night’s Mets 3-1 winnable yet ultimately elusive loss to the Yankees drawn to this insight because after playing 101 games, I couldn’t tell you who the 2023 Mets are, nor could I tell you I have any swell ideas to make them better.
They no longer bear any collective resemblance to the team that won 101 games in 2022, even if individually many of the players from then are the players from now. In hindsight, it was a mistake to put much stock in recent past performance, to rhetorically ask, “what’s wrong with these Mets, they won 101 games last year?” because that was last year, and last year left the room last year. Some years more or less pick up where the years that preceded them left off. This year made a mysterious clean break with last year.
The room the Mets are in currently defies easy identification. They are not a powerhouse. They are not a contender. They are not completely out of it. They’re not good. They’re not so bad that they can be completely written off for this year or, given who’s on the team, next year (instantly putting aside some of what I just concluded about one year having a limited relationship to the next). With the trade deadline fast approaching, they do not profile as a buyer. They may not be a seller in that they don’t have that much to sell that anybody is going to go out of their way to buy from them without square pegs, round holes and dollar signs being carefully applied to any transaction of substance. I’m not sure what the purpose of selling would be beyond a vague sense that something is getting done amid a season when something happens every day yet little changes and nothing improves.
Is somebody soaking up playing time and blocking somebody who deserves reps? That’s one of those situations a fan whose team’s immediate aspirations aren’t serious sees as trade deadline catnip. Move Asdrubal Cabrera, get Jeff McNeil in there every day, that sort of thing. Maybe one fewer veteran outfielder clears space for Ronny Mauricio, and I wouldn’t begrudge either Mauricio — who’s still figuring out his potential position — or us from a glimpse or two of what Ronny might do. Finding a taker for Tommy Pham or Mark Canha would accomplish a vacancy, though you never know with this organization if that would mean Mauricio gets a crack at filling it or it just results in more time for DJ Stewart. It’s quite possible you’re quite happy with Stewart or Pham or Canha as human beings representing your team several at-bats per game. You’re entitled.
Do we merely seek catharsis? I’m not putting down catharsis. Catharsis literally feels good. The best part of the cruddy 2003 season, after Jose Reyes was called up, was the dismissal in the weeks that followed of Roberto Alomar, Jeromy Burnitz, Armando Benitez, Graeme Lloyd and Rey Sanchez, each sent away by Jim Duquette, whose elevation to general manager occurred once the Mets got rid of Steve Phillips, whose offing also felt like a cause to light a postcoital cigarette (as I’ve seen done in movies). Sometimes your team is just so bad and you so don’t want to look at those characters anymore that you’ll take action that jettisons a batch of them as a spiritual victory. None among the players who returned in trades in the summer of 2003 directly swung Met fortunes upward — even Duquette didn’t last beyond 2004 — but it literally felt good.
Yet 2023 isn’t 2003. Nor is it 2017, a less toxic but no more competitive setting. At and around the deadline six years ago, the Mets sought and secured takers for Lucas Duda, Addison Reed, Jay Bruce, Neil Walker and Curtis Granderson. The season didn’t get tangibly better or worse. Youth had been served, which generally appeals to our future-leaning instincts. The housecleaning seemed necessary in the will ya look at the dust on everything? sense rather than as an echo of 2003’s geez, it stinks in here, grab the Lysol! Bringing out the vacuum doesn’t always mean everybody you’re trying to remove from the premises sucks. And vacuuming sometimes only accomplishes so much. Drew Smith was the only young player who arrived in those 2017 exchanges to establish roots in Flushing, though promising kids Amed Rosario (now a veteran who gets traded at deadlines) and Dom Smith were called up. Brandon Nimmo received more playing time as that August progressed, and Nimmo’s still here, too. Mostly, the season wound to an end, and the next season came. New problems arose. At least they weren’t the same old problems.
This team, no matter our roughly every-other-night gripes, isn’t The Worst (a distinction one didn’t think would need to be delineated this year), and its components, for the most part, aren’t people a fan can’t stand to look at one day longer. If you can stomach these guys, however flawed they’ve proven themselves as a unit, maybe you do them a favor regardless and find them a good home with a team that already knows it’s a contender. But then you read an ideal chip like David Robertson tell Newsday, nah, no thanks, I like it here. Robertson’s one of those steady veterans who’s moved plenty in his career. He signed with the Mets. He probably thought he’d signed with the playoff-bound Mets, but Mets is good enough for him for now. Barring a Zack Wheeler-type return from the Carlos Beltran expiring contract auction of 2011, do we really need to shop around a professional who’s fine where he is? Sixty-one games remain. Some will need to be saved in the ninth inning. Somebody else could try and probably succeed, sure, but I, too, am mostly fine with David Robertson and his colleagues where they are for two more months.
I’ve been a fan for 55 seasons. I can withstand two months of well-intentioned inertia.
Theoretically, you shed salary by trading veterans with big contracts, but under Steve Cohen, what does that even mean? Nobody’s taking millions and millions off Cohen’s hands, and, though I would never discount millions and millions (I’m never gonna see millions and millions, either), that doesn’t seem like a motivating factor on Seaver Way. Didn’t the Mets eat Eduardo Escobar’s salary? Didn’t they eat Chris Flexen’s salary just for the pleasure of paying Trevor Gott? The owner was once quoted, within the context of a real estate deal in which somebody offered him a million dollars to disengage from negotiations, “What am I going to do with a million dollars?” Uptown problems, as Brad Pitt as Billy Beane said in Moneyball.
So, no, I don’t believe somebody’s going to engineer a Max Scherzer trade nor a Justin Verlander trade, nor, probably, should the Mets be seeking such resolution. I mean, yeah, listen to everything and everybody, but have you seen the Mets’ pitching depth? Neither have I.
With the approximately two months remaining to this season, is there anything the Mets can do, as a very savvy buyer, to catapult themselves from fringe of the periphery of the multiberth playoff jumble to an outside shot at competing for the six seed, a goal which is not mathematically unattainable and is anecdotally enticing? The individuals from 2022, and a few who were added in advance of 2023, still appear capable of that one sustained drive that might push a ballclub 7½ games out to maybe 4½ games out with a splendid week or two, and if you’re that close, who’s to say you can’t get closer? Of course we’ve been saying something like this across the approximately four months the Mets have been playing, usually on the nights they’re not stagnating. Then stagnation kicks in again. If it were that easy, the Mets would be something more than 5-8 since their mirage of a six-game winning streak in early July.
Still, Pete Alonso, whose bat looks alive, will almost certainly be here in 2024. Jeff McNeil, who made three nice catches at a position that isn’t really his, is signed for a while. Brandon Nimmo is signed for much longer. Francisco Lindor is signed forever. Hopefully Starling Marte, also under contract for a little longer, finds relief from his migraines (those things are no joke). Francisco Alvarez and Brett Baty are being given every opportunity to speak for themselves. As much as 80% of the rotation doesn’t give me pause in a good week. Even if coming out of 2022 guaranteed nothing about 2023, I really don’t think we’re groping for scraps of hope like we might have been coming out of a 2003 or 2017 any number of years. And if we’re not satisfied come the end of the regular season, we’ve got an entire offseason to disassemble what isn’t in bolted in place and start semi-fresh.
With 61 games left, there are 549 innings of Mets baseball to be played. Maybe a few less if it rains too much, maybe a few more if there are ties after nine. I’m not expecting miracles. I’m not thrilled with what the first 101 games have yielded, but some years I root for the playoff-bound Mets, and some years, even if it’s not really good enough for me, I just root for the Mets.
At National League Town this week, the subject of Five-Tool Fandom occupies our minds.
by Jason Fry on 25 July 2023 11:52 pm What are the stakes in a Subway Series where both sets of partisans would just as soon not?
The Mets and Yankees have not too dissimilar records (the Mets are bad in a meh way, the Yankees are just meh), are both mired near the bottom of their divisions, and have both stumbled through the summer with their fans shaking their heads and muttering that everything about them is just … off. Injuries, bad luck, bad decisions, bad vibes … like I said, just off.
If you’re me, you show up for the game with a sense of duty … and then find that a game with no stakes can be kind of refreshing.
I was watching with my mom in her new tower lair overlooking Brooklyn Heights and New York Harbor, which has the added attraction of giving you plenty to look at if the baseball becomes too painful and you need to avert your eyes. Which, for once, didn’t happen — the Mets weren’t exactly flawless, but they looked a lot more like the on-paper version of the 2023 Mets than the shabby, smudgy copy of a copy of a copy of a copy we’ve been stuck with. Justin Verlander was a reasonable facsimile of his former All-Star self, Jeff McNeil and Pete Alonso and Daniel Vogelbach all had non-miserable nights in mostly miserable seasons, and we even got an unlikely hero or two. (If you saw Dominic Leone as the solution to the problem he was handed, well, I’ll have what you’re having.)
Meanwhile, the Yankees looked borderline hopeless, with all three outfielders playing as if mildly concussed, wearing cement shoes or both — I was honestly a little worried that former Met Billy McKinney was going to hurt himself or a teammate stumbling around out there. There were a lot of no-name bats, some bad relief … in short, the Yankees looked a lot like that other New York team nobody in the city wants to talk about.
Speaking of things nobody wants to talk about, my mom and I had a moment of shared inattention and so wound up watching the TBS telecast — we were startled late in the proceedings when the TBS crew showed the occupied SNY booth, but stayed where we were broadcast-wise because hey, everybody knows you don’t fuck with a winning streak. Honestly, TBS wasn’t a terrible accidental Plan B: There was a lot of gee, the Mets have been inexplicably bad, but that’s been true in these humble precincts too. On the other hand there was also a lot of trade talk, which I’m already heartily sick of. I guess that counts as another silver lining: For most of the night I was thinking about how it would be nice to beat the Yankees, instead of wondering which mildly useful Mets will get helicoptered off the embassy roof before next Tuesday.
There will be time enough for that, but one more night of simpler fare sounds maybe sort of not so bad right now. Hey, it would be nice to beat the Yankees. It worked out for one night; let’s give it another go, fellas.
by Jason Fry on 24 July 2023 3:53 pm The Earth keeps going around the sun; the Mets keep going in circles.
On Sunday night they dropped the rubber game of their series with the Red Sox in numbingly familiar fashion: no hitting, bad pitching, bad defense. To which we might add that they looked torpid and useless, trudging around morosely while being dismantled by Boston relievers no one had ever heard of. (OK, I’d heard of Joely Rodriguez. That didn’t make it better.)
If this is the setup for a wild-card run, well, it’s sure one hell of an okie-doke.
Another week of playing like … well, like the 2023 Mets ought to bring a merciful end to delusions about contention, formally shifting the conversation to what the Mets might be able to obtain as sellers. Which is … what, exactly?
Sure, someone will probably help themselves to David Robertson, and a veteran reliever such as Adam Ottavino or Brooks Raley would likely find a market. But beyond that, who wants what we’d be selling?
Who’s paying some pro-rated chunk of $43 million to watch Max Scherzer gamely explain yet again that he’s working hard on not being bad, or to see if Justin Verlander can consistently be more than a No. 4 starter? Who’s going to think they’d get a Carlos Carrasco different than the guy who was strafed at Fenway while the ESPN crew embarrassed themselves asking Rafael Devers moronic questions about ice cream? Who’s going to pay for Tommy Pham and his obviously still not healed groin? Is someone going to see Mark Canha and his middling production as a difference maker? Starling Marte can’t even endure bright light right now, to say nothing of big-league pitching.
Not even full Blow It Up mode is likely to work: What would you get for Pete Alonso given that he’s been an offensive nonentity for a month?
Rather than speculate about the depressing returns for these various old, hurt or underwhelming commodities, I’d like the Mets to consider another tack: trade me.
Think about it: Wouldn’t it be wonderful to wake up as a fan of the Orioles or the Reds, dreaming of the postseason, marveling at your new surroundings and thinking about how you might be able to help your new club?
I don’t want to read about Double-A lottery tickets who might prove valuable if they improve their mechanics or strike-zone judgment (spoiler: they won’t). I want a reason to care about baseball and a goal that isn’t awaiting me in some other season.
Hey Steve: Trade me!
by Greg Prince on 23 July 2023 11:30 am These first-place New York Mets keep building on what they’ve accomplished. They’ve been doing it from Day One of this season. They’re still doing it. They have to keep doing it, not only because the second-place Atlanta Braves, currently three games behind us, are as formidable an opponent as the 1984 Cubs or 2022 Yankees, but because there’s little chance somebody will stand before a throng of Mets fans 38 years from now and wax rhapsodically about the 2022 Mets who showed what a group of talented athletes — some if not all young, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed — they were unless there’s a payoff in October.
—from Faith and Fear in Flushing’s report on the 98th game of the 2022 New York Mets season
The Mets won their rain-interrupted Friday game on Saturday afternoon before losing their meteorologically copasetic Saturday night game, which was originally scheduled for Saturday afternoon, except it had to be pushed back in deference to completing the suspended Friday contest that would have been a washout under previous rules because it hadn’t gone at least four-and-a-half innings with the home team ahead, or five innings either way, thus Fenway Park wound up hosting a Saturday day-night doubleheader between the Mets and the Red Sox that wasn’t really a day-night doubleheader, except two different games were contested and resolved, one in the day and one in the night, and they were split.
Got that?
Through 98 games of the 2022 season, the Mets carried a record of 61-37. Through 98 games of the 2023 season, the Mets carry a record of 46-52. That’s 15 games worse. The only other time the Mets were as many as 15 games worse through 98 games versus the year before was the not so sainted year of 1993: 33-65, down from 48-50 in 1992, a season never to be confused with 2022, which, for all the carping it eventually inspired en route to a frustrating second-place finish and premature playoff exit, included 101 wins, a total we are 10 Met losses from guaranteeing we won’t see in 2023.
Got that?
Despite the Saturday night loss at Fenway, the Mets came away with the evening’s most shareable highlight when, in the fourth inning, Francisco Lindor singled, Pete Alonso doubled, and Jeff McNeil delivered everybody’s favorite kind of clip, the Little League Home Run. Technically, McNeil singled and took second on the futile throw home that didn’t nail Alonso. Alertly, Red Sox catcher Jorge Alfaro threw to second to try to get McNeil taking that extra base. Well, not so much to second, and not really toward second. That sucker sailed like it had eyes on the America’s Cup. Off to deepest center field it bounced, and around the bases our Squirrel flew. WHEEEE!!!! FOUR BASES!!!! Three runs, too, for a regrettably short-lived 3-2 Mets lead. Yet the real excitement came in realizing what we had just seen before seeing Jeff cross the plate. Lindor, Alonso and McNeil had all gotten hits in the same inning. When, I wondered, had that last happened? I had to look it up. This was Game 98 of 2023. It had last happened in Game 87 of 2023, July 6 at Arizona. Far more telling was learning the game of July 6 — 16 days before the second-ish game of July 22 — didn’t just contain the previous inning in which arguably the three mainstays of the Met lineup had gotten hits in the same inning; July 6 had been the last time Lindor, Alonso and McNeil had all gotten hits in the same game.
You get that, and you get a sense of why the New York Mets of 2023 are not just worse, but historically worse than the New York Mets of 2022.
That and Max Scherzer giving up four home runs and it not seeming all that surprising. A person didn’t have to look up the last time Max did that. It’s ingrained in the Mets fan memory that it came in the first game of the 2022 National League Wild Card Series, a round the Mets wouldn’t have been playing in had the Mets won 102 games, which, in retrospect, feels like a greedy ask, considering the Mets will likely fall dozens of bricks shy of their 2022 load of 101 in 2023, though, at the time, just beat the Braves once on that final weekend and you’re not playing the Padres, and no matter what happens in the playoffs, we’ve at least got a divisional flag for our collection. Except Scherzer (like deGrom and Bassitt and the offense) weren’t up to the task, and so try again to beam with pride that the Mets got anything at all for their 101 wins a season ago.
Anyway, Max gave up four home runs at Fenway, and the bullpen as a whole wasn’t as effective in keeping the game close on Saturday night as it had been in protecting Friday’s rainy lead on Saturday afternoon, which turned out to be a shame, considering the Mets roared back from a great distance in the ninth inning on Saturday night, cutting Boston’s sure-thing lead from 8-3 to a throat-clearing, collar-tugging, Dunkin’-spilling 8-6, and had the tying run at the plate with two out. The batter representing said run was Daniel Vogelbach, who had homered before Friday night became Saturday afternoon, providing the margin of 5-4 victory, and a similar swing might have catapulted either the Mets or Vogelbach’s trade value who knows where? Maybe as high as when the 2022 Mets traded for him? Except Vogelbach popped out, and the not-quite-doubleheader fell short of a sweep, and the Mets have to sweep most every game they play if we wish to kid ourselves a little that they’re playing for stakes beyond the mundane…though the mundane has its moments. By that, I mean DJ Stewart laid down a beauty of a drag bunt for a single in the top of the ninth on Saturday afternoon. It didn’t lead anywhere in terms of insurance runs, and it didn’t go viral like McNeil’s Little League Home Run, but it surprised the defense; it moved Mark Canha up to second; it put Stewart on first; it was Fenway Park in daylight; and it wasn’t raining. Sometimes you watch baseball to see things like that and hope for the best.
Sometimes you get what you get. This year, we’re getting the 2023 Mets.
by Greg Prince on 21 July 2023 1:26 pm Last week, Major League Baseball released its schedule for next year and I shrugged. It was the epitome of too soon. But last year, when this year’s came out, I figuratively unfolded it and zeroed in on one particular box in quest of pertinent information:
Would the Mets be home on July 11, 2023?
They would not. Nobody would be, except for the American League All-Stars playing the National League All-Stars in Seattle, both squads in uniforms best described as unfortunate and worse (with worse topping unfortunate, 3-2). The Mets wouldn’t be home again in July of 2023 until after the break, contesting a weekend series with the Dodgers. No, that’s no good. The Dodgers are too much of a draw and the weekend wasn’t what I was looking for. Next in, the White Sox. Maybe. A lower-profile visitor suited me, even if they were interlopers enabled by interleague inanity. I just can’t accept that we play every AL team every year. I should probably get over that some, because it’s not going away. Fine, the White Sox. The White Sox would do fine. Especially on Thursday afternoon, July 20, 2023.
Bingo. That was it. That was going to be my 50th Anniversary Game.
As some of you may have read in this space, I just passed the 50th anniversary of my first game at Shea Stadium, a milestone event in the life of a ten-year-old fan. I knew it was a milestone on July 11, 1973. I knew it would be a milestone before July 11, 1973. All I needed was the date in advance to mark it down as the start of something I’d continue to do for as long as it was possible. My first Mets game. Having been taken with the Mets on TV and in the newspapers in 1969, I waited long enough for it to happen. Needing to be taken to the Mets, I had to wait. Nobody was volunteering to take me in 1970 or 1971, and in 1972, when it was supposed to happen for the first time, I caught an overblown cold that kept me at home.
When I was signed up for day camp in the succeeding summer and saw the list of activities, my eye was drawn to July 11, Mets vs. Astros at Shea Stadium. It was finally going to happen. And, as detailed in this remarkably well-preserved report, it had happened. I had gone to a Mets game.
I’ve been to quite a few since. I made it to 402 regular-season home games at Shea Stadium and, through the first day of July of this year, 305 regular-season home games at Citi Field, adding up to 707 and counting. There’ve been postseason games and exhibition games and games on the road, too, and they’re all filed and accounted for, but 402 and 305+ were my primary numbers entering Thursday. My tentative plan, assuming the owner of the New York Mets doesn’t decide to implode the current Wilpon-conceived facility and create a vastly superior CohenDome in its stead ASAP, is to live long enough and go regularly enough to match my Shea Stadium total of 402 at Citi Field, then seriously consider leaving it a tie for all eternity. But that somewhat morbid calculation is for another day. Yesterday, Thursday 7/20/2023, was for the numbers that started it all: 7/11/1973. My 708th Mets home game, which had no particular magic to it numerically. My 50th Anniversary Game, the concept of which had captivated my imagination for nearly a year.
Mets vs. White Sox at Citi Field. How could I resist?
I hadn’t said any of this out loud to anybody, because when you live so much in your head, you tend to think the things you think about need an Alan Suriel or Hiro Fujiwara to interpret them. The night before the day game, my wife happened to ask me, “When’s your next game?”
“Maybe tomorrow,” I said. “It would be my anniversary game: 50 years since my first game, more or less.”
“Your anniversary game!” she cooed. Stephanie thought it was adorable and appropriate, more evidence I married the right woman.
I checked StubHub for a cheap ticket. I wanted a cheap ticket, and not just for budgetary reasons. I wanted to sit in Promenade. It would be self-flattering to invoke Bill Veeck here…
I have discovered in 20 years of moving around a ballpark, that the knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats.
…but mostly the baseball experience tends to feel more authentic to me upstairs. There are real fans and knowledgeable fans everywhere in a ballpark, but Promenade says, at least to me, I simply wanna be here for baseball. Plus I’d be going alone, given that I was the only person I knew who would totally get what I would be seeking in this outing. Promenade is the official level of loners in a mood. That was gonna be me.
Not a bad mood, by any means. To the contrary. I found my cheap ticket, Row 8 of Section 518, and I had myself as company, I made a turkey and mozzarella sandwich and I was off to the LIRR. I looked up and down the platform at others in orange and blue clearly headed for changes at Jamaica and Woodside like I was. We were tacit co-conspirators in the late morning in the middle of the week. We were all going to the Mets game. We were all getting away with something. I ate my sandwich on the train. My mood was great.
Off the steps from the 7 usually recalibrates my mood because I’m thinking about lines and security and the sense that we’re all suspect at Citi Field, no matter what price our ticket, but I pre-empted all that when I arrived. I walked around the exterior in a manner I haven’t in ages. I ambled over to Shea Stadium home plate in the Citi Field parking lot. I’m surprised I still know where to find it, not at all surprised that I don’t believe I’ll find it, given that previous Mets management seemed intent on erasing 45 years of ballpark history when it opened its shiny edifice in 2009. Yet there it was, fourteen years since installation. People were walking by it as if it wasn’t sacred. Sometimes you’re just thinking about lines and security. I took off my cap and tapped the plate once. I used to do that on Opening Day. I haven’t been to Opening Day in a while.
 You gotta believe I saw the sign. I wanted to check out the banners affixed to the third base side of Citi Field, having been delighted to find so many evocative ones on the first base side a few weeks earlier. There I saw a literal sign: 1973 NATIONAL LEAGUE CHAMPIONS, replicating the marker above the highest right field stands. 1973! Fifty years! Citi Field was welcoming me as it rarely welcomes me! I saw more neato banners, like one with Tom Seaver and David Wright embracing at the 2013 All-Star Game and another with Robin Ventura and Todd Pratt embracing in the aftermath of Game Five of the 1999 NLCS, though maybe Tank should have just kept running, though then there wouldn’t be a banner, would there? I shifted to the first base edge of the rotunda and saw, as I always do, the brick that celebrates my first date with the right woman, May 15, 1987, four days after we met. We celebrate May 11 every year like I unfailingly commemorate July 11 in my mind. It was as if 41 Seaver Way had been trimmed specially for me, a sensation I rarely if ever have. All this looking around, yet I saw I had ample time before first pitch in the middle of the day in the middle of the week in front of the ballpark. My mood was off the charts.
Then lines and security and being told I beeped, please walk through the metal detector again. Which I did, and didn’t beep. Somebody else searched my bag and told me, “you beeped, so you have to walk through the metal detector again.” Which I didn’t, because, as I explained, I just did all that. Oh, OK.
Impenetrable barrier breached, I was soon inside and upstairs. Promenade for the first time this season. I did a little more walking around I usually wouldn’t bother with. It really is nice up there, especially on a warm day if you know where to sit for a 1:10 game. I knew where to sit without realizing how much. My row, Row 8, in my section, Section 518, fronted a Long Island day camp group. That was another sign. I was at my first game, on July 11, 1973, because I was in a Long Island day camp group. This was a different Long Island day camp, but my proximity made me an honorary camper for the day, I decided. A happy camper.
Hundreds of kids in blue and white t-shirts. I’ve never related particularly well to individual kids, but they were at a Mets game and I was at a Mets game and I hoped at least one among the hundreds would look back fifty or so years from this date, July 20, 2023, and think, “it’s the 50th anniversary of my first Mets game.” Or maybe they were all veterans of Citi Field by now. The organization of the counselors and the campers was something to behold. Kids, naturally, want to get up and get things. The counselors were prepared for “merch” or food runs, taking turns taking whoever wasn’t glued to the Mets and the White Sox to buy stuff, but in groups. There’s so much more to buy at Citi Field than there was at Shea Stadium in 1973. I bought a yearbook then. I didn’t see one kid come back from the “gift shop,” as one girl called it, with a yearbook. That’s all right. I’m sure they all have Baseball-Reference bookmarked on their phones.
Kids by the hundreds can be loud at a ballgame. They’re supposed to be, even the future loners in a mood among them. The first fly ball they saw they greeted as kids in day camp groups a half-century earlier greeted the first fly ball they saw, like it was gonna be a home run. Of course it wasn’t, because it almost never is. Judgment of fly balls would grow keener as the day went on. Shrieking would be intermittent but not intolerable to adult ears, despite the sadists in the control booth posting a NOISE METER on the enormous video screen. Like these kids need to be told to GET LOUD. No, they’ve got that covered, thanks. They were in great voice, singing along with the day’s Ballpark Karaoke winner, “Stacy’s Mom,” and you haven’t lived until you’ve been enveloped in hundreds of prepubescent voices celebrating the fact that “Stacy’s mom has got it goin’ on.” With the Mets down five runs in the middle innings and the White Sox batting, they also brought and sustained an impressive LET’S GO METS! chant. Loner in a Mood’s rules of order specifies LET’S GO METS! is best deployed tactically, ideally with a Met at the plate, but I’m going to tell hundreds of kids not to be excited about the Mets? You don’t last 50 years going to games quashing succeeding generations’ enthusiasm. The only thing I told any kid, a girl sitting directly behind me, was “Alvarez is DH’ing” when she absorbed the home team defense and asked, with Mets fan awareness that made my heart soar, “Where’s Alvarez?” (Don’t think it didn’t pain me to casually use “DH” in a sentence in a National League ballpark.)
The girl didn’t respond and I decided to let her figure the rest out for herself. Thus, when Omar Narvaez stepped into the box, and she greeted his appearance with, “Who’s that?” and Omar the Infrequent announced his presence with authority via his first Met home run, it made for a delightful surprise. As did (for me anyway) Jose Quintana’s solid five-inning Met debut, despite a few balls falling in early, and David Peterson picking a guy off first in relief. The delightful surprises were few and far between down on the field, as the Mets fell behind, 6-1, by which time I was quietly hoping that if the Mets weren’t going to storm ahead (as I once saw them do, at Shea after looking hopelessly flat most of a midweek afternoon game against Chicago’s National League entry), they’d give up one more run and lose, 7-1, because it was the score they lost by at my first game. That would be a pair of How It Started/How It’s Going bookends for the ages. But the White Sox were held to six, and Pete Alonso shocked all of civilization with an RBI single, and it would be 6-2 before it was over.
Ah, I didn’t need those bookends, anyway.
Jeff McNeil did not beat out any of his myriad grounders for base hits, despite repeatedly making the SAFE! gesture with his arms as he crossed first; it might not be the winning move he believes it to be. Drew Smith was not the effective reliever he strove to be, though I’m happy to report that in a ballpark full of kids out for a good time, he didn’t have to convince himself they were yelling “DROOOO!!!!” after he surrendered four runs, because none of the kids bought a scorecard, either, and none of them booed. Trevor Gott’s 1-2-3 top of the ninth was one I had to take mostly on faith because I got up to beat the day camp traffic as the eighth ended, an homage to my camp group fifty years ago leaving early to beat the Grand Central traffic. But I wasn’t bolting the ballpark. I decided a day dedicated to throwing it back to Shea wouldn’t be complete without a stroll down the right field ramps, Ramp, singular, I guess. On our last trip to Citi Field together, Jason and I were still mourning the passing of the Shea Stadium ramps, especially after a rousing win. No rousing win would be forthcoming on Thursday, but the ramp seemed just the way to roll. I would take my time and take it into field level and position myself to stand and watch the Mets storm ahead or, probably, be extinguished before turning back into a commuter determined to make the 4:24 at Woodside. That bit of watching the final outs from downstairs with the train on my mind was something I think I last did in 2011. I’m now officially capable of nostalgia for Citi Field’s early days.
A little ramp bonus if you ever want to try and time it correctly: If you’re somewhere between the suite level and the field level, you can see the mound if you peek in at the proper angle, and maybe you’ll catch a strike or two on your way down. I watched Trevor Gott retire his last batter that way, as if I was stealing glances while standing on the 7 extension they tore down after the 2007 season, and it was likely my favorite pitch of the day. I’m always officially capable of nostalgia for anything that evokes Shea Stadium, as long as it isn’t a moldy hot dog bun. Unfortunately, the Mets were not capable of a rally in the bottom of the ninth, and they fell to the White Sox by the non-bookend score of 6-2. No scores of a losing nature are terribly delightful, even when the rest of the day is. And though they’re not my concern, good for the White Sox fans who trekked to Flushing and got one win in three for their troubles. Bill Veeck once more, on the team he owned twice:
If there is any justice in this world, to be a White Sox fan frees a man from any other form of penance.
I don’t suspect any pennants are coming to the South Side of Chicago or the Queens side of New York this season. Tommy Pham left the game with more groin aggravation. Starling Marte went on the IL with migraine miseries. We’re however many games out with however many left, behind however many teams who are in our way. But enough with the undelightful aspects of fandom in general, Mets fandom in particular and my fandom most of all. This was my once every 50 years day. Sharing it with the campers, some of whom may still be talking about it today even if it won’t necessarily be on their minds on July 20, 2073, made it a win despite the loss.
Mildly funny thing to me is I actually remember what I was doing on July 20, 1973, nine days after that first game at Shea. It sticks with me because there was something sticking in my mouth. I had the first wires attached to certain of my teeth en route to a full set of braces, a joy I’d carry orally for the next six years (if they had metal detectors at Shea in the ’70s, I imagine the beeping would have been incessant). That date sticks with me because it was the fourth anniversary of the first moon landing, July 20, 1969. I’ve always had a thing for dates, historical and personal. It’s apparently unnatural, based on a lifetime of continually being asked, “How do you remember THAT?” and not in any kind of admiring way. The sense that you’re different from everybody else will turn a person into a loner in a mood, whatever the mood. But that, I figured out more than 50 years ago, is what baseball is for. Baseball we do together, even if we sit alone. Camp groups drift apart. As long as there are Mets, Mets fans will always gather at a ballpark, whatever it’s called. I now have 708 instances — 402 at Shea + 306 at Citi — to back up my assertion.
I won’t be visiting an orthodontist to commemorate the 50th anniversary of my getting braces. Being over 60, I will probably be aware of many 50th anniversaries of things I’ve experienced in the years ahead, but I doubt I’ll make a day of many of them. Knock wood/brick, May 11/15, 2037, would make for a nice ballpark trip, whatever ballpark the Mets are playing in by then. But I don’t like to get ahead of myself. Ruminating about a 50th Anniversary Game about a year in advance is the uppermost extent of my speed. Less preferable result notwithstanding, the Mets and White Sox indeed did fine.
Thus, I judge the mood landing on July 20, 2023 an emotional success. Plus, I made the 4:24 at Woodside with minutes to spare.
If you like a good anniversary of a bad team, listen to National League Town’s salute to the 1993 Mets, who gave at least one fan a season worth remembering 30 years later. You’ll also learn why “section captains” have emerged as the fans-in-the-stands equivalent of Jeff McNeil constantly calling himself safe at first.
by Jason Fry on 19 July 2023 11:34 pm Finally!
The Mets got the Justin Verlander they paid $43 million for — the fireballer who made opponents look silly as a Houston Astro, the no-doubt-about-it Hall of Famer, the top-of-the-rotation ace. And what a difference it made.
I was there, in surprisingly good Excelsior seats behind home plate (a crummy year has some silver linings), close enough that I could see location and pitch speeds, instead of peering at distant stick figures and cheering or groaning based on how quickly and in which direction they had to run around. And I could see the White Sox had no chance against Verlander — none whatsoever. Verlander could do whatever he wanted with them, and so he did. It probably helped that it was a more temperate evening than it had been for Verlander’s last start, when he was woefully inefficient and ill-used by the Mets, with a rocky seventh wrecking his chance at both a shutout and a complete game.
Not biggie, since Verlander handed a four-run lead over to the bullpen with just three outs to get, which meant they didn’t have enough time to screw it up, as they almost managed to do in whatever the hell that was on Tuesday night. The Mets didn’t set the world on fire, doing most of their offensive damage through walks against a wild Touki Toussaint, that long-ago Atlanta Brave, but we’ll take some fortunate sequencing after a season that’s been mostly buzzard’s luck. Not to be a bringdown, but I’m more than a little worried about Pete Alonso, whose frustration is a flashing neon sign visible from the uppermost row in the Promenade. Alonso’s body language has always been crystal-clear — the Polar Bear would be advised to never, ever take up poker — but he looks draggy and defeated, as you might expect considering he’s perilously close to the Mendoza line. (To say nothing of Jeff McNeil, whose trademark rage has curdled into a constant, simmering dismay.)
Not ideal, but once again — they won. Amazing what good starting pitching can do, isn’t it?
* * *
The night was a little warm but nothing like the smothering evenings we’ve had of late, and I think I would have enjoyed myself at Citi Field even if the score hadn’t been so favorable.
Still, it gives me no pleasure to report that the non-baseball part of my night at the park was consistently off-kilter. It started when I went to get a Nathan’s hot dog and fries and a beer, only to discover that the beer taps were mysteriously offline, a development reported with the kind of world-weary, whatcha-gonna-do shrug that was standard operating procedure as Shea crumbled. I secured a Plan B beer somewhere else and was most of my way through my hot dog when I noticed that the bun was spotted with gray-green. Yep, I’d been served a hot dog in a moldy bun, and I’d rather not think about the part I’d eaten without inspection. Later, the problem was broken soft-serve machines, resulting in one stand having a strangely long line for ice cream, to the bafflement of its beleaguered attendants. (Please note that we were in the semi-restricted part of Excelsior that’s sort of a club, where one would expect things to work a little better even though there shouldn’t be a difference in experiences.)
The folks who run the Mets can’t stop the pitchers they pay from hanging sliders or make the hitters they pay live up to what’s on the back of their baseball cards, but it should be within their power to ensure that hot-dog buns aren’t moldy, ice cream machines dispense ice cream and beer taps actually have something in them. That doesn’t seem like to much to ask.
On the other hand, though … for once there was no “Piano Man” to bring down the mood. Would I eat a moldy hot dog bun at a game in exchange for not being subjected to the moldy hot dog bun of self-loathing confessional ballads? I’d at least think it over.
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