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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 14 February 2008 4:05 am Some of this conversation actually took place last month while I was in Vegas for a bachelor-party weekend:
Me, approaching cashier: I want to place a wager on the New York Mets winning the 2008 World Series. What are their current odds?
Cashier: 8-to-1.
Me: Huh.
Cashier: How much do you want to wager?
Me: Well, that's a good question. Let's see. During the season I watch each game, plus a bit of pregame and at least a bit of the wrapup afterwards. So that's about four hours a day. Then I probably spent two more hours worrying about them if they've lost or exulting if they've won. And, I dunno, throw in another two hours checking news, blogs and various Internet chatter, and of course writing this blog. That's what, eight hours a day for half the year? In the offseason I usually think about the Mets for about two hours a day, I guess. It was probably only an hour a day during this latest offseason, but that's because I was really busy and mad at them and didn't want to think about that absurd contract they gave Luis Castillo or why in hell they traded Lastings Milledge. But I did TiVo a bunch of Met classics and watched the '69 Series games with my kid. So I dunno, let's say 90 minutes a day during the offseason. I'd have to put a value on that, which isn't easy to —
Cashier: Sir —
Me: And of course what I'd put onto the table would extend far beyond this year. I mean, I still think about '86 and '88 and '99 and '00 and '06 and every other year that's not so easily pinned to extra games in October. I'm still fuming about 2007, after all. I can work myself into snit subconsciously while working on something and not realize for 20-odd minutes that I've been fuming about Benitez letting Paul O'Neill get on base or Reyes's drive not quite getting over Edmonds' head or Gl@v!ne hitting freaking Dontrelle Willis. So you're talking hours and hours and hours into the future when I'll be thinking about the 2008 Mets, for better or worse.
Cashier: Sir, if I could —
Me: And what about the Mets' effect on the rest of my life? Like making plans around day games, or arranging my life so I can at least have my little radio in one ear, or the fact that Emily and I got married on September 30th so our anniversary would never conflict with a playoff game. That ought to be worth something, right?
Cashier: In fact —
Me: And then there's all the stuff. I mean, I don't go to as many games as I used to, though Joshua will be nearly six by season's end, and he can now sit through an entire game without getting too horribly wiggly. But I'll go to a bunch, and hopefully there'll be a lottery for postseason tickets, and I'll beg my friends to remember me if they win and I don't. And there are all the baseball cards I collect, and The Holy Books in which anybody who's ever been a Met gets enshrined. And shirts for Joshua and caps for us — do you know how much we spent last year when Joshua announced what he really wanted was pictures of David Wright and Jose Reyes in the same frame? And books if there are new books. And blog server costs, right? Mustn't forget about those.
Cashier: Sir —
Me: I know I'm just scratching the surface, but that's a start. So, I hope you were keeping track of all that. How many hours is that, and how shall we value those hours now and into the future for as long as I live? And the cards and caps and the rest of the stuff? Do we amortize that, or what? Look, I know this is complicated — however you want to value all this, I trust your judgment.
Cashier: Look, buddy —
Me: And if they don't win, that's OK. Well, as long as it's not like 2007, it'll be OK.
Cashier: I've been trying to tell you. All we take here is cash. Not your eight hours of thinking a day, or the daydreaming, or the time spent watching the games, or the social and economic toll of rearranging your life around a baseball team, or the value of the tickets and the baseball cards and all the stuff, or your stupid blog costs. Just money, pal. Cash on the wood.
Me: Oh. Really? Gee, that seems kind of mercenary.
Cashier: Really.
Me: Huh. OK. Fifty bucks then.
Cashier: You got it. Here's your stub.
Me: Oh, and $20 on the 2008 Tampa Bay Devil Rays. They're a 150-to-1 shot!
Cashier: And how much unquantifiable crap do you have vested in them that you need to tell me about?
Me: The Devil Rays? Ha! What am I, insane?
by Greg Prince on 11 February 2008 3:29 pm There was a time when I wanted to be Billy Joel. In tenth grade, a teacher asked everybody in the class to name the person, presumably famous, he or she would be if being that person were possible. I wrote down Billy Joel. And I think I meant it.
52nd Street was out then and its lead single, “My Life,” spoke to me, maybe for me. It followed The Stranger, which also spoke to and/or for me. I was 16 years old and from Long Island. If Billy Joel couldn't speak for me then, he was in the wrong field and I was on the wrong Island.
From roughly the end of junior high to the middle of college, Billy Joel was my spokesman and every album Billy Joel released was a personal milestone, each a defining benchmark in my life; go ahead with your own life; leave me alone. Every year for a half-dozen years, BJ (as one stoner kid in that class called him — “yeah, BJ!” — when Mrs. Alcabes read my answer aloud) came through with those deep thoughts I was sort of thinking or was bound to if he hadn't already thought them up. Things were OK with me those days when I had Billy declaring he'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints. His suggestion that sinners had much more fun was all the license I needed to cut ninth-grade geometry, even with finals and a Regents on the horizon. And if I never cruised the Miracle Mile per se, I knew it was on the North Shore somewhere, in the same county I lived, in the same county where he grew up.
My life. My troubadour. My favorite artist.
It's thirty years later and by no means would I say I want to be Billy Joel nor have been Billy Joel.
• I would have made a ton of money, but I would have been gamed out of it by relations.
• I would have married a supermodel, but I would have divorced a supermodel.
• I would have bought a sweet ride, but I would have driven it straight into a tree.
• I would have written some gems, but halfway through these three decades, I would have would have stopped writing almost altogether and I would have gone from The Stranger to just getting on strangers' nerves.
Billy Joel wasn't an ideal role model, not even retroactively. Sometimes a fantasy is best left unfulfilled. But he was still my piano man, my angry young man, my main man straight through The Nylon Curtain, the album whose “Allentown” made me think, whose “Laura” made me wary, whose “Pressure” made me nervous, whose “Goodnight Saigon” made me well up with tears. One side, four songs, total immersion…and “She's Right On Time” awaited on the flip side.
By god, how I loved Billy Joel for that roughly five-year period marked, in my mind, from the first bottle of red to the final whistle that blew ominously on those steelworkers in Pennsylvania. He was it for me, a category unto himself. There were two kinds of music by my reckoning: Billy Joel and everything else, in exactly that order.
So why am I not unqualifiedly thrilled that he's going to play the last non-Merengue concert ever at Shea Stadium? Why does this melding of two of the avatars of the two passions of My Life, music and Mets, not feel quite right? Why do I want to tell everybody who's been leaving nasty comments under the picture of Billy Joel in a Mets cap, cutting this awesome entertainer down to 3:05, to cut it out but can't quite convince myself to be his most forceful advocate on this particular issue?
NO, IT'S NOT the Yankee thing, not really. Sure, it's always annoyed me that the carrier from Norfolk (the Tidewater area, for crissake) picked the Yankees up for free. And I never liked that the Yankees grabbed the headlines every time (though Pete Rose could always go screw himself). And if “Brooklyn's got a winning team” and “Mickey Mantle/Kerouac” could be a part of “We Didn't Start The Fire,” then “Amazin' Mets” could have been subbed for “Bernie Goetz”. In fact, every time I sing along, I indeed insert “Amazin' Mets” after AIDS and crack (though maybe that's not very good company). It's not that or the pictures of him a couple of times in the vertical swastika. I can only do so much ideological purity on non-baseball matters. “You spoke to me and for me, Billy, but you invited Rick Cerone up on stage one night in 1980 — get lost.” Can't do it.
NO, IT'S NOT the lack of Met thing. Billy Joel's Mets cap last week fit all right (once they gave him one that wasn't a size too small). He sang the national anthem before Game Two in '86. “New York State of Mind” was a postgame staple circa 2001. His concert at the Garden on October 15, 1986 made for legendary accompaniment to the winning of the National League pennant. He even managed to pull the name Vinegar Bend Mizell out of the recesses of his memory at the press conference (available for and worth viewing at mets.com if for nothing more than the theater of it) that announced his July concert. I give him the celebrity dispensation, same as I've given the likes of Paul Simon and Chris Rock, New Yorkers who have shown up at Shea and other local stadia as mood and opportunity dictate. Paul McCartney became running buddies with Joe Torre circa 2003 while Bruce Springsteen was trading licks with Bernie Williams and forgetting whose pitching he featured in the “Glory Days” video. Do we rip their faces out of the they-played-Shea montage? Celebrities, with rare exception, are too busy becoming and staying famous to be fans like the rest of us. That's probably why we appreciate it so when one of them truly commits to a team (or detest it even more when they commit to the wrong team).
NO, IT'S NOT that somebody else would be more or perfectly appropriate. The Beatles can't come together in 2008. I would assume that somebody reached out to Paul and he said no, so if you can't get him for your stadium show, then it's up for grabs. Ringo? Liberty DeVitto's seat is waiting. Ringo can totally sit in (Ringo's current single “Liverpool 8” includes the line, “In the U.S.A./When we played at Shea/We were number one/And it was fun”; all hail Ringo). Hard, however, to see Ringo fronting Shea all by himself, even with his All-Starr Band. The Beatles would be more appropriate than anybody to play the last concert at Shea. Everybody else followed in their footsteps. The Beatles opened Shea Stadium to rock 'n' roll. Everybody else was just playing where the Beatles played. While it would be nice, on merit, if somebody whose commercial and creative peak came after Jose Reyes was born were a logical candidate, it's not so bad that someone who has never not attributed his rock 'n' roll inspiration directly to the Beatles kind of squares the horseshoe.
NO, IT'S NOT that the honor of playing the last non-Merengue concert at Shea requires a blood-soaked loyalty oath to the New York Mets and to the republic for which it stands. Unless you want to save the date for Yo La Tengo based on actual baseball fandom or Baha Men by pleasant association, Billy Joel of Hicksville is as appropriate as anybody else for this gig, more appropriate than most. (By the way, isn't Shea a city facility? If the Parks Department wanted to schedule An Evening With Mike Francesa as its closing act, would the Mets have veto power?)
NO, IT'S NOT the decline of his output followed by the dearth thereof. I bought An Innocent Man as soon as it came out in 1983, just as I did The Nylon Curtain and Songs In The Attic and Glass Houses when they came out. I liked a lot of it, but it struck me as overly self-indulgent. I bought The Bridge as soon as it came out in 1986. It was the first Billy Joel album since high school that I hadn't attempted to memorize every lyric from (though I appreciate that the otherwise cringey “Modern Woman” is the only song I know of that clearly mentions “1986”). I bought Storm Front as soon as it came out in 1989 and realized if Billy Joel were Joe Blow, I wouldn't have bothered. I bought River Of Dreams as soon as it came out in 1993. By then I was reconciled to being a creature of habit. I would have bought the next new Billy Joel album after that, but there wasn't one. Now it's fifteen years and counting, if not exactly waiting. I've bought the live albums and the compilations and such, but I can't say I haven't found other music to occupy the interregnum. From that last quartet of increasingly disappointing albums, however, there are enough gems to have created maybe a pair of good ones. Add those songs to all that Long Island soul-searching that got me through high school and a chunk of college, and I'm confident he could still blow everybody else's set list away.
All my Billy Joel concerts — I've been to four — came after I was sold on his brilliance as a songwriter and a spokesman for me. All his so-so recordings were what were being toured behind when I saw him in '84, '86, '87 and technically '93-'94 (New Year's Eve at the Coliseum). It didn't matter. Even the numbers I didn't care for from the studio exploded in person. I had never been to a big-time concert before Billy Joel at the Bayfront Center in St. Petersburg. It turned out to be the one I was waiting for. That night, he turned the title track “An Innocent Man” into heartache live whereas it was schmaltz on cassette. I had the same kind of reaction to “Big Man On Mulberry Street” and “This Is The Time” on The Bridge tour.
• The afternoon after that St. Pete performance, I was up and at 'em and back across the Howard Frankland Bridge to take in the Mets and Jays at Al Lang. In a 24-hour period I saw Billy Joel and Dwight Gooden for the first time.
• In December '86, after his almost-Christmas show at the Coliseum, I stopped at a 7-Eleven on Hempstead Turnpike for a cold beverage and found the RC Cola cans that celebrated the National League and World championships of two months earlier; I loved him the most when the Mets were at their worst and now I could connect him to the Mets at their best. I still have those cans.
• Five months later at the Brendan Byrne Arena snapped a streak of 188 consecutive Mets games attended, watched or listened to, one that ran from April '86 to May '87, postseason gratefully included…and three nights later I met my future bride.
• I can't peg anything specifically Metsian to New Year's Eve 1993 except maybe that the warm way Stephanie and I and 16,000 stood and sang “Piano Man” as one has made me think it would work a lot better than “Sweet Caroline” at Shea. I'll bet it will be pretty good there even without a ballgame. (It was also lovely to officially end 1993.)
I don't know that Billy Joel can vocally deliver a concert in 2008 the way he did in those halcyon days when I saw him previously. Every time I've heard him attempt a high note on TV, the results haven't been pretty. But he'll work it. He'll be Al Weis if he can't be Donn Clendenon. He'll get the job done, and whatever band he convenes will throw strikes like Seaver, Koosman and Gentry. I don't doubt Shea's last non-Merengue concert will be a great show, even at 2008 prices (when Billy said at his press conference that he insisted prices be kept reasonable, as in under $100, I nearly gagged). I think those tickets to the Bayfront Center 24 years ago were fifteen bucks.
So it's not I don't think he'll be very good. It's not that I've gone from considering him an idol in teens to a bit goofy in my forties. It's not that — despite trying his best last week to invoke “The House That Casey Built,” seeing, he swears, more Mets games than Yankees game in his time — his favorite baseball team isn't our favorite baseball team. And it's certainly not because I consider myself some sort of Murray Hewitt and would write him off as not rock 'n' roll enough for the occasion or that it's somehow to his discredit that he can write memorable songs in a wide variety of styles. Why am I not utterly enthused that in mid-July on a Wednesday night, Billy Joel will crash our party and play Shea Stadium as the last non-Merengue act ever to do so?
I have two theories:
1) I don't want anybody to play the final anything at Shea Stadium because of all that implies.
2) When Billy Joel played Yankee Stadium in 1990, he said that when trying to nail down a venue for a really big show, he first considered Shea because the Beatles played there — but then he remembered Grand Funk played there and decided their legacy made Shea Stadium a far less special place for him. I found and still find that one of the most unnecessary and snotty things an artist on top of the world could have said about another act which by then had limited cachet in music circles. Unless Grand Funk Railroad trashed the Hassles' amps or TP'd their tour bus back in the day, that quip, more than any subsequent public or artistic misstep taken by Billy Joel, revealed feet of clay on my adolescent idol. Wouldn't play Shea because Grand Funk had defiled it? You can take your Downeaster Alexa and ram it into a tree, too, for all I care. Plus I saw Mark Farner at Jones Beach in 1988 on a Super '70s Fest bill that included Bachman-Turner Overdrive (who closed the evening, incidentally, with “Takin' Care Of Business”) and he was excellent.
Yeah, it's got to be that business about Grand Funk.
by Greg Prince on 9 February 2008 10:39 pm Hit or an error? Look to your right. The scoreboard transmits the official ruling. Look to your left. The Sign Man tells you what you’re thinking.
Before there were helpful little gadgets any more exotic than a transistor radio, you had two sources of information to enhance your Sheagoing experience. You had the biggest scoreboard in baseball over the right-centerfield fence and you had Karl Ehrhardt the Sign Man, in that one-of-a-kind derby of his, sitting behind third. The Manufacturers HanovEr sign would tell you it was an E. The Sign Man would make it clear the ball should have been caught.
The most famous images of Karl Ehrhardt, who died this past week at 83, relate to the Mets in triumph, which is as it should be. Karl was the superest of the superfans, and if you saw a picture of the Sign Man after the fact, it was because the fact involved the greatest of Mets moments. His most iconic sign, at least to me, was the one he held up as the Mets became world champions the first time: THERE ARE NO WORDS.
Yet Karl did not pull punches, right down to the end. He disappeared from the Shea crowd after 1981, a result of some dispute with management over admission — perhaps management’s myopic focus on being the new broom sweeping out the old miasmic atmosphere, as if Mets fans couldn’t differentiate between hating a few lousy ballplayers and disliking themselves. Anyway, he was still there in ’81, the year of the baseball strike, the rupture in the summer I graduated from high school. I remember seeing Ehrhardt interviewed once the stoppage was settled. First bad Met play (and there were bound to be a few), he promised to tell the Mets what we would all be thinking: GO BACK ON STRIKE.
And he did. For all his joyous acknowledgement of THAT OLD MET MAGIC and his victory-bound queries of BELIEVE IN MIRACLES?, it was the brassy honesty in editorial comment that stayed with me after the Sign Man became the stuff of legend. I hated that the Mets didn’t arrange for Karl Ehrhardt to keep sitting where he had from the early days of Shea Stadium, but I loved that the Mets couldn’t buy off the Sign Man. I loved that as the years went by, you would inevitably meet somebody at a game, somebody you didn’t know but you knew was one of you, and he or she would ask, “Hey, remember the Sign Man? Karl somebody? He came to every game at Shea and he had all those signs and he’d pull them out at a moment’s notice and he always held them way up over his head and it would be the exact right thing to describe what was happening right then and there…Karl Ehrhardt, yeah, that was his name…the Sign Man. Wasn’t he great?”
Yeah. We remember.
by Greg Prince on 9 February 2008 11:46 am
by Greg Prince on 8 February 2008 2:20 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 358 regular-season and 13 postseason games to date. The Log records the numbers. The Tales tell the stories.
7/17/76 Sa Houston 0-2 Seaver 1 3-2 L 1-0
I have this thing about remembering exact dates when certain things took place. I always have, with more precision and frequency than most people. I had no idea I was unusual in this regard until others told me I was. It’s not necessarily that the date on which something happened resonates because of the event in question. Rather, it’s because I knew it was coming and I was looking forward to it for a very long time. It is the anticipation that fuels the recall.
That’s probably why I remember July 17, 1976.
The Mets are kind enough to print a schedule every year telling you when each of their games will be. It’s good information to have ahead of time. Gives you something to look forward to. I know the dates in advance now as I did then, but the filtering is different. If I choose now to attend a game in July, I will have gone to several games in between. But in 1976, at the age of 13, there was nothing between the printing of the schedule and July. I got to go to exactly one game that season. It would be July 17.
I wasn’t officially restricted to that one game for the year, but that’s essentially the way it worked. There was no picking up and deciding to go to Shea, not yet. I had to be taken. I was 13. A popular religion claimed I had reached manhood that January and by May I sprouted the slightest hint of a mustache (it has yet to come in fully), but those were technicalities. I wouldn’t have copped to it, but I was still a kid. If you can only get to Shea Stadium today if somebody takes you, then today you are not a man.
My sister had to take me. Well, she didn’t have to, but she did, just as she had taken me to a few Broadway matinees and one taping of The $10,000 Pyramid. Suzan was quite the sport to chaperone her little brother around, especially considering she had zero interest in sports (or game shows). We had constructed an annual tradition of going to Shea, one Saturday every year for three years. This was the third year. As had been the case in 1974 and 1975, the occasion would be the same: Old Timers Day. I got to choose and I always chose Old Timers Day. At 11, then 12, then 13, maybe I thought hanging around Old Timers would make me seem more mature by association.
I do not remember the date when I knew I’d be going on July 17, but it was on the calendar for months. Seventh grade was still in session when I owned this news. I was sufficiently enthused over it to tell the kid I shared a locker with in homeroom, a fellow everybody — everybody — called Ziggy. It was a play on his last name, which began with a Z and included a g. I went to his Memorial Day Bar Mitzvah and I’m not sure the rabbi didn’t call him Ziggy.
I’d known Ziggy throughout Hebrew School, but it’s safe to say you couldn’t really know Ziggy as he wasn’t the type to open up. But you definitely knew of him because there was only one Ziggy. Though larger than the average seventh-grader, Ziggy was not to be confused with Fat Dave from the West End (whose unfortunate nickname was alarmingly accurate). Rather, he was big-boned…and brooding…and a guy whose starter mustache was making greater strides at 13 than mine…and a guy whose calling card was distributing packs — packs, not sticks — of chewing gum as if obliged to by the Wrigley Spearmint Act of 1958. In the hall, on the bus, anywhere around school, you’d hear the same thing:
“Ziggy, got any gum?”
And you can bet Ziggy had gum.
Since I never asked for gum, our conversations mostly consisted of Mets chat or him telling me to Shut up, Greg when, in fact, I hadn’t said anything. Logically, I had a hard time processing this approach. Why is he telling me to shut up? I didn’t say a word. It took me until the end of high school to figure out this was Ziggy’s well-planned shtick and that he was quite proud of it. He actually wrote “Shut up, Greg” in my yearbook. After I crossed paths with him in 1994, I told a friend of mine who also knew him that I had just seen Ziggy. My friend asked, “Did he tell you to ‘Shut up, Greg’?” Sadly, I had to report, he did not.
Ziggy, upon learning I’d be going to Shea on July 17, didn’t tell me to Shut Up, Greg, but responded that he would be going to that game, which struck me as pretty wild: two guys, one locker, same Saturday. Ziggy never seemed enthused about anything, but he, too, anticipated Old Timers Day. Thirteen-year-old Mets fans were crazy for retired ballplayers in 1976.
Suzan and I left the house early the brilliantly sunny Saturday afternoon of July 17 to walk to the station. She was between her sophomore and junior years at NYU, so she knew the trains. We were walking to the station when a car pulled alongside us a few blocks from home.
It was Ziggy. Ziggy and his sister and his father, neither of whom seemed remotely Ziggylike. The Ziggys were driving to Shea. Ziggy remembered that I’d be going and, though I’m sure it was a coincidence, almost seemed to be waiting for us. Ziggy’s dad offered us a lift, not to the station, but all the way to the ballpark. Suzan seemed a little wary, as in “who the hell are these people?” I sort of liked the idea of the train and its whiff of independence from adult supervision, but Mr. Ziggy was quite insistent. Well, OK, we said, sure.
We piled into the Ziggymobile, where we learned that Mr. Ziggy worked for Nabisco. He wore an Oreos watch. There were Nabisco tchotchkes that we had to brush off the back seat. Nabisco engendered company loyalty, apparently. Suzan never quite seemed comfortable with the sudden change in transportation from LIRR to the Ziggy family car. She didn’t know from Ziggy. Not surprising, then, that when we got to Shea, she turned down both Mr. Ziggy’s invite to meet after the game for a ride home and a chance to forage the Ziggymobile’s trunk for our choice of Nabisco gametime snacks. Go ahead, he said, we’ve got plenty, as Ziggy and his sister picked out boxes of Ritz crackers and so forth. No, Suzan said, that’s all right, but thank you…and thank you for the ride.
I don’t think any gum changed hands, but I’m sure we could’ve asked…though I wonder if I would have been told to Shut Up, Greg.
Free of the well-meaning Ziggys, we entered Shea on the third base side. Our seats were Juicy Fruit yellow — field level, down the left field line. First time I ever sat that close. I had studied the schedule’s ticketing options and seating diagram that always looked a semi-circular piano to me, and once I determined that field level was the best bet, I asked Suzan to try for those. In 1976, field boxes were $4.50. Suzan was working that summer at a PR firm. She sprung for the whole nine bucks.
As Old Timers Day veterans, we had come to expect Casey Stengel to make a grand entrance. Two years earlier we had seen him delivered to home plate via horse and carriage, receive a massive ovation and milk the applause. I had to break it to Suzan that we wouldn’t be seeing Casey this afternoon as he was dead at the present time. She was kind of disappointed. I suggested they could still bring him out, he just wouldn’t wave back this time. We both laughed the laugh of people who are 19 and 13 and have no real concept of mortality or taste.
Yes, old people were funny to us then, just by their existence. The oldest Old Timer in 1976 was Lloyd Waner, “Little Poison” of the Pittsburgh Pirates from way, way back, like the 1920s. He was one of those players Ralph Kiner talked about, which meant he had to be old. Waner dressed up in the black and gold of the Bucs and not only took a bow but played in the Old Timers Game. He was 70, he swung and he singled. It was quite amusing then, a 70-year-old doing something. It wasn’t until I chortled about it to a girl I knew whose grandfather suffered from Parkinson’s did I realize old people weren’t necessarily any funnier than any other people.
A peanut vendor in our section filled the void between the Old Timers and the Mets and Astros by hawking “CARTER NUTS! GET YOUR CARTER NUTS!” Just that week, the Democratic National Convention had taken place at Madison Square Garden and nominated Jimmy Carter for president. Carter was a peanut farmer. It was in all the papers. “CARTER NUTS! GET YOUR CARTER NUTS!” I admired the peanut vendor for working on his material and making it so topical. Then, to cover his political bases, he switched to “REAGAN NUTS! GET YOUR REAGAN NUTS!” I think I was more impressed by the peanut vendor than I was by Little Poison.
What I couldn’t have known when the schedule for 1976 came out was that Tom Seaver would be pitching for the Mets that Saturday. What a bonus! My first Mets games were started by Jerry Koosman, Jon Matlack, Randy Tate and Jon Matlack again. Nothing wrong with any of them, but it had convinced me that I was somehow prohibited from seeing Tom Seaver, that I would have to settle for watching him on TV. It turned out that no, it was just chance who you got to see pitch. On July 17, I was getting Seaver, my favorite player since I was six years old. He was going to be on the field pitching and I was going to be on the field level rooting. What a deal!
That’s all the excitement I needed, even though one woman nearby didn’t realize it. She must have been a cheerleading coach during the school year, I gathered, because a) she was quite fit and b) was quite adamant that we all collectively urge on the Mets to victory.
“A-C-T! I-O-N! ACTION, ACTION — WE WANT ACTION!”
There was no reaction
“H-U-S! T-L-E! HUSTLE, HUSTLE — WE WANT HUSTLE!”
Nothing. Not even Van McCoy. The cheerleading coach sat down.
So did most of the Houston Astros upon facing Tom Seaver. He was everything in person that he was on that little Sony where I usually saw him. He threw hard and he threw strikes. Tom struck out Greg Gross to start the game, got Rob Andrews to ground out and then gave up a line drive to deep left to Cesar Cedeño. It wasn’t going to be caught but from our relatively nearby vantage point I didn’t think it was going to go out. It seemed to have hit just above the orange stripe on the green wall by the 341 mark, just to the right of the left field pole. It was ruled a home run by the width of a Ritz. Joe Frazier may have disputed the call or maybe I just wished he did. It was barely 1-0 by my reckoning. Seaver came back to strike out Bob Watson.
In the bottom of the first, the Mets had Mike Phillips on with two out when Dave Kingman stepped up. Kingman was the most exciting Met of 1976. He was leading the league in home runs by a comfortable margin over Mike Schmidt. I had conditioned myself to expect a homer every time he stepped up. Against Joaquin Andujar, he swung and hit one to left. Not a homer. Not fair. Into the seats. Seats right near us. Maybe four field boxes to our left. Thanks to Dave Kingman, I was now conditioned to expect home runs from him and foul balls toward me all the time. Thirty-two years later, only a handful of fouls at Shea Stadium have come as close to me. I’ve yet to grab one.
Kingman popped to short. It stayed 1-0.
And it never moved from there. Seaver was great. He struck out six after three and nine after six. Andujar was quite good — or the Mets just didn’t hit, which I was used to. The Mets wouldn’t put more than one runner on against him in any one inning. And none of them would equal Cedeño cheap shot to left. Tom would go eight, strike out eleven — every Astro at least once — and be lifted for a pinch-hitter, Joe Torre. Torre singled off Andujar, but Phillips flied to Jose Cruz in left and Felix Millan lined to Enos Cabell at third. Skip Lockwood pitched the ninth for the Mets, Joaquin Andujar (nuts himself, we’d learn years later) stayed on for the Astros. The score didn’t change. Mets lost 1-0. Not much A-C-T! I-O-N! except for S-E-A! V-E-R!
On a July afternoon twelve years later, the Mets would retire Tom Seaver’s number. Newsday devoted a special section to his career. One of the writers who covered him complied a Top Ten list of his best games. There was the 19-strikeout game against the Padres in 1970, the Qualls imperfect game from ’69, his World Series victory over Baltimore…all wins. Tenth on the list, however, was July 17, 1976, the day he struck out eleven Houston Astros but lost 1-0. He couldn’t have been more dominant, the article said, but sadly this was typical of the run support generated on Seaver’s behalf during his Met tenure.
Hey, I thought, I was at that game — one of only three Seaver starts I ever saw. The other two would have to wait until 1983.
The Mets, 47-44, weren’t going anywhere on July 17, 1976. The loss kept them glued 13-1/2 behind the Phillies who were enjoying a breakout season. We had Seaver and Matlack and Koosman throwing their guts out but rarely getting many runs with which to work. We had Kingman walloping homers, though not too many more beyond that Saturday afternoon (he fell on his thumb trying to corral a fly ball later that same homestand and was out long enough to let Schmidt overtake him in the home run race). An inexplicable stretch of superior baseball in August and September would lift the Mets to their second-best record ever, 86-76. But by the following year, that kind of competence would seem as distant as the prime of Lloyd Waner.
The July 17, 1976 Mets were the final Mets team of my childhood. It’s not as if they had remained the exact same club since 1969, but there was enough continuity so that it all felt reassuringly constant over those first eight years of my fandom. Seaver, Koosman, Kranepool, Harrelson, Grote and Garrett (about to be traded with Del Unser for Pepe Mangual and Jim Dwyer) were all there when I was 13, just as they’d been when I was 6. Matlack, Millan and Milner had been mainstays on the ’73 pennant winners and they played on in ’76, still Mets, still able in my eyes. You could even throw Ron Hodges into that group, though by then Ron Hodges was already Ron Hodges, even if he did homer in Pittsburgh on Memorial Day, the same day Ziggy was Bar Mitzvahed. Duffy Dyer homered, too — as luck would have it, he was a Pirate at this point and his team beat the Mets, 2-1. It’s the score the Mets lost by when they weren’t losing 1-0.
Regardless of roster turnover, the Mets as I had discovered them and embraced them were pretty much intact from the time I started first grade until I was getting ready for eighth. They were always a team that pitched well, scored little and hung around just above .500, just good enough to give me hope, never bad enough to take it away.
Those were the Mets of my childhood. Those were the Mets I saw on July 17, 1976 for the last time…the last time I was ever a kid at Shea Stadium.
by Greg Prince on 7 February 2008 11:36 pm 
| The other long-rumored appearance at Shea Stadium by a superstar performer has been confirmed, as Billy Joel (seen here gazing in awe toward the site of the legendary Johan Santana press conference) will indeed play the final concert at what VH1 Classic referred to recently as “the most hallowed turf” in rock. Given that the show will go on July 16, during the All-Star break, we hope it doesn’t become the most hollowed-out turf in baseball when the Mets return for the second half.For those of you scoring at home, Billy Joel leads the Top 500 circuit with nine separate hits, from “Only The Good Die Young” at No. 11 to “A Matter of Trust” at No. 466. Though he has not released an album of new material in 15 years, he has certainly grown as a person and as an artist. For example, his headwear is officially more awesome now than it’s ever been.
Big man on Roosevelt Avenue, indeed. |
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by Greg Prince on 7 February 2008 9:33 pm Years from now, you'll look back and you'll say that this was the moment, this was the place where America remembered what it means to hope. For many months, we've been teased, even derided for talking about hope. But we always knew that hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it.
—Random White Sox fan, Des Moines, Ia., January 3, 2008, presumably thrilled that the best pitcher in his team's division might be switching leagues real soon.
We are tentatively slated to post something on Johan Santana of the New York Mets every five days for six months over a seven-year span. May as well continue to get used to this new and delightful assignment by dwelling some more on his glorious alightment in Flushing.
The second day of the rest of our lives is underway. Johan Santana is still in a Mets uniform top and cap as far as we know; presumably he, like we, slept in them. The fine print says he is legally obligated to remain clad in such garments until early fall 2014, when the most recently born Mets fan is in second grade, when today's sixth graders are high school graduates, when I am slated to be disintegrating in my early fifties.
Johan Santana, world's greatest pitcher, a Met for the foreseeable future and then some…we should only live so long.
It will go by fast enough. Piazza was signed for seven years and before we knew it, 1999 was 2002 was 2005 and he was gone. I'm not necessarily campaigning for time to fly. It just does, except probably as we wait for Johan to take the ball and shove it down some Marlin throat. That can't happen soon enough.
That feeling of anticipation is alone worth some small percentage of the Santana contract. A few wins, a few big outs, a world championship or seven — those would be nice, too. It's February, so I'm eschewing all protocol and getting ahead of myself on that count. What the hell? For $150 million, dream big.
A dozen years ago, a friend won tickets to the ESPYs at Radio City and invited me along. It was quite the event, loads of stars, lots of sports, a good time. But what stays with me the most is a film ESPN showed to illustrate how quickly fortunes can change. From twelve months earlier, we saw clips of a dismal jockscape: baseball on strike, Michael Jordan in the minors, Magic Johnson in street clothes. By February '96, as the whole audience knew, baseball, Michael and Magic were back. Everybody in the hall got it. Everybody in the hall cheered. It felt so good to replace those dour images with something sunnier.
Make no mistake, this change of fortunes, this update in the video montage from Mets disappearing into their clubhouse to one very special Met materializing at the Diamond, is the turn that saved Mets fans' psyches. It shouldn't have had to, but it did. We should be mature enough by now to accept that while we were coming off something gruesome, it wasn't the trifecta of 2002, 2003 and 2004 when we didn't know where our next decent player was coming from, only that it wasn't going to be John Thomson, Rey Sanchez or Shane Spencer. We should have lengthened our memories far back enough to the acquisitions of Martinez, Beltran, Delgado, Wagner and Alou. We should have believed a little harder that the New York Mets under current management were capable of doing what it took to get Johan Santana.
Instead, not a few of us believed we'd somehow screw up everything that followed the provisional trade, that negotiations would fall apart last Friday afternoon, that the Santana party would ask for an absurd if suitable sum and the Mets would counter by offering a sack of talc. (I also believed that with :01 on the clock last Sunday that Eli Manning might hand the ball off to Larry Csonka's hip and Herm Edwards would recover it for a Patriot touchdown.) But it didn't happen that way. Jeff Wilpon said the Mets, when faced with a potential impasse, got “creative”. Creative? At $150 million, what does creative mean? Drawing smiley faces on the memo line of the check? Creative would imply the Mets will have to create some more money for this revised payroll of theirs.
Would it be gauche to sell the naming rights to the naming rights? Banco Popular Presents Citi Field, Brought To You By Drake's Cakes?
Is the contract for too much and for too long? Yes and yes, of course. That's my rational answer, but we've all been fans long enough to know that rational answers are useless in paying for sports talent. And this is sports talent at its most capable and accomplished. We're going to be paying out every orifice for seats at Shea Stadium in 2008 and Citi Field, if we can get 'em, in 2009 and beyond. There is nothing on the back of the tickets that links price of admission to quality of ballclub. Who wants to pay top dollar for bargain basement baseball? Once upon a time, M. Donald Grant swore on a stack of reserve clauses that he had to eschew free agents in order to keep ticket prices down. Ticket prices were indeed stable in the '70s. And the Mets grew stagnant. There was also a defining juncture when the Mets spent, got burnt and opted to put away their wallet for a half-decade. Thankfully, the Mets aren't acting like this is 1993 anymore than they are pretending it's 1977.
Look at this way: We're not paying Gl@v!ne his absurd ransom anymore. After '08, Delgado will probably be off the books. Those are big savings right there. Plus, nobody will need to be paid to keep clean 13,000 upper deck seats that won't exist next year (that saves ten bucks a year right there). Push to shove, we'll scrape together our Santana money and pass it over gladly if not as often as we'd like. We'd have bought war bonds if it meant the difference between having or not having the best pitcher in baseball. It's getting gouged for the Lohses and Livans that pisses us off.
It's too much money in a rational world, about as reasonable as it gets in baseball. It's too many years for a pitcher, few of whom are unrelentingly awesome from ages 29 through 35, but it's the market. You hesitate like hell when Barry Zito's agent asks for seven years because almost no pitcher should be signed for seven years. You swallow for only an instant before succumbing to Santana's parameters because “almost” excludes this guy. The economics of this game are obscene regardless of where Johan pitches. Somebody was eventually gonna pay the best pitcher in baseball his weight in gold and Google. Might as well be us.
Besides, the market was our friend, just like it was the Yankees' when A-Rod's people discovered teams weren't lining up for his bat and personality (bat, mostly). As with Rodriguez, the market for Santana was so prohibitive that nobody went there. It's an assessment not as colorful as Yogi Berra's description of a crowded restaurant, but it's accurate. The Twins had only three teams willing to afford Santana and two of them weren't as interested as was generally thought.
Did it really all come down to Phil Hughes? Did the Yankees not lunge at sending Phil Hughes to Minnesota for Johan Santana? I find that hard to swallow, but maybe that's because it's been so long since the Mets have raised a pitching prospect who pitched very well for them. I was the guy who didn't flinch at sending Kazmir to Tampa Bay for Victor Zambrano because I just assumed “Met pitching prospect” equaled inevitable disappointment. Could it be this Phil Hughes, who sure showed flashes in '07, is so good that he's worth the patience? In the generic sense (that is, factor out the team he pitches for), it would be a healthy sight to see. Consider all those players drafted and developed by all those teams. Once in a while, one of them should be more than trade bait. If that's Hughes' destiny, we'll grit our teeth given his uniform, but so be it. We got Johan. We needed Johan.
Would have a willingness to include Hughes in a deal for Santana doomed us? That's the line we were fed last week, as if Brian Cashman was pulling the levers for the Mets. I don't know, but wasn't the same thing said of Carlos Beltran, that the Yankees could have thrown their own ton of money at him and he would have come running? Maybe the Yankees — who have tons of money and have never been shy about shoveling it out — didn't think the best pitcher in baseball was worth getting creative over. Maybe they didn't think the free agent catch of three winters ago, who would have filled a huge void of theirs very nicely, wasn't worth their vast resources either. Let others spin. Santana, like Beltran, is a Met by free will as much as by big bucks.
It took a lot of money and it took four players. The money was the bigger obstacle. I'm sorry to be reminded of how disposable our minor leaguers have become. I'm sorry there is nobody, not even Fernando Martinez, whom I would let get in the way of Johan Santana. I remember Reyes and Wright coming through the system and sooner prostrating myself across the 7 tracks at rush hour before permitting them to be traded. One winter ago, we were allegedly sowing our future on the farm, tending to crops named Humber and Gomez — and Milledge — among others. No skin off the organization's nose that those fellows plus two more thought of pretty highly are gone. Homegrown Mets living up to their Baseball America notices would warm our cockles and so forth, but in the year-to-year reality of the game today, you sometimes simply have to live for the year in front of you…seven years, in this case.
Let's be clear on something: If Gomez or Guerra or Humber or Mulvey succeed as Twins, this trade isn't a disaster. Steve Renko was a serviceable pitcher for the Expos for several years, but the Donn Clendenon trade was a winner for the Mets. They can't all be Parsons for Grote, Allen/Ownbey for Hernandez, Zinter for Brogna. They can't all be blind robberies. Just because they're not doesn't mean they're not winners for ya. The Twins sent us a two-time Cy Young winner in his prime. They deserve something for their troubles (besides, the Twins have won four times as many division titles as us in this decade; won't cry for thee, Minneapolis).
Unless you are confident you have the moral equivalent of Johan Santana warming up in Binghamton or thereabouts, you trade a prospect or four to get Johan Santana. Gomez can run and field and perhaps hit. Humber gutted it back from Tommy John. I liked the little I saw of them. I won't miss them one bit, not when Santana's pitching for us. Same for the two prospects I never saw. Santana pitches like Santana for enough of his contract, then we won't care how good Guerra or Mulvey become.
If Frank Viola had arrived in New York in August 1989 and pitched the Mets to a pennant or if he hadn't eased up in the second half of '90 and we'd gotten to the World Series or if he and everybody else here hadn't fallen from grace in '91, Rick Aguilera could have saved 300 of Kevin Tapani's wins in Minnesota and their absence wouldn't have mattered. If Joe Foy or Jim Fregosi or Steve Reed had contributed to the greater good instead of dismal transaction folklore, we could have sucked up, to some extent, the blossoming elsewhere of Amos Otis or Nolan Ryan or Jason Bay (all right, maybe not Ryan). It will be tempting, because it's what we do, to groan that Humber is pitching really well or that Gomez is leading the A.L. in stolen bases. Don't do it. It's not fair in light of the way we are oohing and aahing at the adorable southpaw deposited on our doorstep in February 2008.
In other Februarys, tortured Met past compels me to add, George Foster and Robbie Alomar were steals that cost only money and callowness, too. This isn't those. Foster was up there in years. Alomar was, too. He was also a little too available all the time considering his Hall of Fame résumé. Santana was on the block because he was packing up. I will not wallow in unpromising precedent. This is a better deal, a new deal, a fair deal. This is change we can believe in.
Will the Mets win behind a rotation of Santana, Martinez, Maine, Perez and one more guy? Sure could. I didn't buy into the notion that we were doomed if it was Martinez, Maine, Perez and two more guys. Pedro will always have my confidence as long as he has his well-being. If Maine and Perez were somebody else's 26-year-olds coming off 15-win seasons, we'd have been drooling over them. El Duque is his usual bag of aches and tricks and Pelfrey continues to be young and throw hard; some people were writing off Eli Manning at 24, too. With Johan out front, however, they all just got better. (Good article breaking down the particulars from Mets Geek.)
The obvious historical allegory is Viola from the Twins, who didn't work out so well, but Santana to the Mets reminds me of Pedro to the Red Sox — big-time pitcher turns enormous on the bigger stage — or even Schilling to that same franchise. Schilling in the winter between '03 and '04 was exactly the tonic that a team that had collapsed, albeit in a matter of innings, needed to pick itself up and dust itself off. For all his self-obsessed tics, Schilling (joining, as it happened, Pedro Martinez) provided talent along with a megadose of confidence to a clubhouse with a complex. Four years later, you'd have to acknowledge Curt Schilling has worked out nicely in Boston.
It's also worth pointing out that another outstanding pitcher with multiple Cy Youngs in his cabinet was once sent away on account of money and brought in return four young players considered pretty good with okey-doke upsides. That pitcher, Tom Seaver, was just sent the wrong way is all.
Are there other areas in the here and now the Mets must address on the staff and elsewhere on the team? Sure. I suppose. But we got Johan Santana, so I have to say whatever. It won't be a good answer come the first one-run loss, but it works for me this February.
Not sure if this is the new era overheated and amnesiac columnists have been hyping. The Mets have made good trades and bold moves before. They've been legit contenders, sometimes even division winners, in the past couple of years. Again, this ain't the Jim Duquette Dollar Tree Special we were fixing up. I don't want to give an ounce of credit to the 2007 Mets but that wasn't some 66-95 deep-seated mining disaster we watched fold. September was a failure and August wasn't so hot either, et al, but the Mets were not in dire need of reconstruction. That's not the change we can believe in because the change went into effect in the winter of '04-'05. We got that change when Omar replaced the Duke and the Wilpons remembered they're not the Royals.
What's encouraging is Minaya and ownership recognized it wasn't good enough to stay 88-74 and take their best shot with fifth starters galore. As pleasing an anti-depressant as this trade may have been to ease the wounds that linger from the C-word, that wasn't the point. We need to separate ourselves from that kind of thinking. We don't need sops. We don't need distractions, no matter what disconnected scribes who dare to speak for the interests of “the fan base” typed in the past months. We're not idiots. We don't require moves for moves' own sake. We needed pitching. That's why we're so happy, not because bright and shiny objects mesmerize us so. Trading four maybe-prospects for the one and only Johan Santana and then compensating him powerfully was smart baseball. If it's smart marketing or helpful public relations, all the better. There's no better publicity, however, than participating in baseball games deep into October — and collecting eleven wins if possible.
It's worth noting that we didn't give up Jose Reyes as John Harper insisted we must (twice, comically), just as we never traded Reyes for Tejada or David for Dontrelle, two “the Mets must make this move” ruminations among dozens I recall reading in the undistant past. Maybe the Santana move marks the moment when the Mets won't strike the agenda-setting press as desperate for its conventional wisdom gatekeeping, no longer offer guinea pig fodder to rumormongers who figure the Mets are so mired in futility that they'll trade anybody they have for anybody somebody else has because anybody somebody else has has got to be an improvement over whoever got stuck on those pathetic Mets. Maybe it also means we are no longer focused on keeping up with loathsomes for back pages or worrying about currying the favor of any given community (does anybody really believe we would have gone so hard after our Matsui if another local team hadn't gotten their own Matsui?). This deal was made not to stick it to the Yankees, but to the Phillies. It wasn't made to re-establish our bona fides in Venezuela either. If it extends The Mets Brand, it will be because The Mets Brand stands for winning, not groping.
Can we do that? Can we not only win but begin to think well of ourselves and our team and not be caught up in outdated drama? In the wake of last September, probably not. On the cusp of pitchers and catchers, yes we can.
by Greg Prince on 6 February 2008 7:40 pm 
If the 57 fits, wear it!
by Greg Prince on 6 February 2008 11:46 am This is the fun part. This is the moment when Johan Santana can do no wrong. He will step up to a podium. He will be handed a uniform top and cap that each of us, by some bizarre coincidence, owns some iteration of. He will slip the top over his dress shirt, slap the cap on his noggin and smile the second-widest smile in all of Metdom. The rest of us will be tied for first.
This is the moment when we stare in awe at what it says on the back of his uniform top.
This is the moment when we will gaze upon SANTANA 57 and attempt to fathom the bizarre color scheme (orange? blue? really?) in which it is suddenly available.
This is the moment when I pinch you and you pinch me and neither of us awakes.
This is the moment when we ask ourselves, “Opening Day…Johan or Pedro? Pedro or Johan?”
This is the moment when we don’t see our shadow, because there are no more weeks of winter, just a few days before spring.
This is the moment when we dare glimpse ahead, not behind, to fall.
This is the moment when we don’t look back because we no longer feel the discomfiting presence of something that not only gained on us but completely overtook us.
This is the moment when collapse recedes and promise beckons.
This is the moment when it stops being last year and commences to be now, the age of Pitching for the New York Mets, Number Fifty-Seven, Johan Santana.
What a moment. What a God Almighty moment.
There will be other moments similar in nature; first moments. There will be the first moment the uniform and cap go on and it’s not ceremonial. That moment is only a week and change away. There will be the first moment that garb gets a workout, then the first moment it is test-driven in exhibition play, then, at last, the real thing: the first moment when SANTANA 57, blue trimmed in orange on a field of gray or black, will be found on a mound in a stadium where the score is kept in ink. On March 31, no later than April 1, Johan Santana of the New York Mets will throw a pitch to Hanley Ramirez of the Florida Marlins.
At that moment, there will be bliss. But also at that moment, Johan Santana is on the clock. From there on out, clear to 2014, he has to earn every moment we are dying to share with him. As soon as SANTANA 57 officially enters the ranks of New York (N.L.), as soon as that first pitch is recorded, the moment passes.
Then he’s a pitcher who has to retire Hanley Ramirez and Dan Uggla and Jeremy Hermidia and everybody else attired in teal. There’s nobody else we’d rather have attempt this feat, but we do need to see it done. We need to see Marlins go down and, five days hence, watch Braves encounter the same fate. Five days after that, give or take, we require his considerable assistance in flattening the Brewers. Off in the April distance, there will be Nationals and Cubs who must also be overcome — preferably overwhelmed — by our ace pitcher. We will feel great about Johan Santana’s chances before he takes on these opponents, better than we would about anybody else’s chances in the same role, but the truth is he will be functionally no different from every Mets pitcher who has started a Mets game since Roger Craig. We will judge him not as our beau ideal, but as tonight’s or today’s starting pitcher.
When he’s on, we will embrace him. When he’s off — and on some night or day, he will be — we will squirm.
We will wonder what we are paying for, why we gave up so much, how we wound up committing to someone for so long when we understand clearly that no pitcher should be relied on to age gracefully, healthily and eternally successfully.
We will lapse into that oh no mode our particular breed reaches faster than anyone else in either league.
We will invoke the names of others for whom we had such high expectations, those who came to us with undeniably glittering credentials, those who invariably (we swear) let us down.
We will hear word of progress achieved by one of the youngsters we surrendered to secure our ace pitcher’s services and we will press our default button and mutter on about our endless history of shortsightedness.
We will cringe when helpful commentators and columnists remind us who failed when wearing that same model uniform top and cap our ace pitcher is wearing now and we have been wearing all along.
We will likely conveniently forget that one off night or day is just one off night or day across the length of a very long-term contract.
We will definitely forget that one off night or day is just one off night or day if there happen to be two of them strung together consecutively.
And if we are morons, we will boo.
Johan Santana will, by March 31, April 1 at the latest, descend into the morass of mortals, nestled between Ken Sanders and Rafael Santana on the roster that runs from Aase to Zimmer. He will be a Met and he will be continually judged, not altogether fairly. He may bow in our midst as the highest-paid pitcher in baseball and the most talented pitcher in baseball and the best pitcher in baseball, but in real time, he will be only a pitcher on the Mets who better locate his fastball if he doesn’t want to put Ramirez or Uggla or Hermidia on base and dig us a hole early. He has to pitch the way we imagine him pitching when he ascends that podium this afternoon. He is surely capable of matching, within reason, the lofty dreams, goals and standards we have been setting for him since we heard he became ours, ours, OURS! He’s just not capable of doing so on every single pitch he will ever throw for us.
We will not always remember that, no matter how hard he tries, no matter how hard we try. In a sense that has little to do with pitching and everything to do with perception, it is all inevitably downhill from here…even if this singular southpaw figures to carry with him the gentlest such incline possible.
That’s why today is the fun part, the moment when Johan Santana can do no wrong. This is when SANTANA 57 fits absolutely perfectly on the back of a New York Mets uniform, when a New York Mets cap fits absolutely perfectly on the head of Johan Santana, when that smile we’re smiling fits all of us absolutely perfectly.
by Greg Prince on 5 February 2008 10:26 pm 
| Don’t know how painfully obvious the computerized retrofitting of 2007 Johan Santana into a Mets uniform will appear when Topps issues him as a 2008 Met (an identity beautiful enough on its own to require no further embellishment), but it can’t be as flat out embarrassing as the TRADED card created in 1976 to trumpet the news that Mickey Lolich was reluctantly schlepping his pots and pans to Flushing. I was 12 when the Mets acquired Lolich, 13 when I acquired this card, but I would have had to have been born yesterday to have believed our rusty (if not Rusty) southpaw hurler had just suited up in Amazin’ attire. If he had, why did his pinstripes stop short of his front? Why was his NY surreal enough to have been dreamed by Dali? And how come, in the days when Interleague play was the stuff of Grapefruit League exhibitions, he was standing in a ballpark that I’m pretty sure stood in Detroit?
Once airbrushing came into vogue, the TRADED conceit for cards always struck me as a big, fat fraud (insert here your own punchline about Lolich’s single-season Met career). The Fregosi trade may have been horrendous, but at least the Fregosi TRADED card from 1972 had the decency to capture him in Spring Training, in a Met uniform, in the innocent moment or two before you had proof that exchanging Nolan Ryan and three (three!) other players for him wasn’t such a hot idea. By the time LOLICH CAME TO METS IN 4-MAN SWAP, however, Topps was no longer doling out its cards by the series, thus there was no opportunity to snap him in a Mets uni. That meant you got an artist’s rendering in which he looked less like Mickey the Met than Tony the Tiger — cartoonish if not GGGRRREEEAAATTT!!! |
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