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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 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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by Greg Prince on 4 February 2008 8:31 am Eighteen weeks ago yesterday I learned definitvely the dangers of counting chickens and magic numbers before their proper and complete hatching. Yesterday I learned the flip side: never assume something can’t happen just because it doesn’t seem remotely probable that it will.
What a difference eighteen Sundays make.
For the Baseball Mets-Football Giants fans among us — particularly if you list yourself in that order — the breathtaking unlikelihood of January and February triumph does not necessarily compensate for the C-word that defined September and ruined 89% of the succeeding offseason. The direct connection between one too many losses then and four increasingly incredible wins now is nil. Yet, gosh — it’s nice to be reminded that the lessons of You Gotta Believe weren’t lost on somebody we liked.
This has not been a gauzy Super Bowl run for me. It was nothing like the slightly garish but overdue romp from the winter of ’87. Despite comparisons and a couple of functional similarities, it didn’t feel of a piece with January 27, 1991, the non-baseball sports date that will always tower above all others in my life. The Giants meant way more to me back in the day. XXI was what I’d waited for all my sentient autumns. XXV was uniquely intense, emotional, jubilant and profitable.
XLII was nice. It’s getting nicer the more I think about it. But nice is the honest sum total I come away with once I take my thumb off the scale. Yes, the Giants are my football team longer than any other football team. Yes, I stuck with them through the sour ’70s and reveled in the golden age of Parcells and absorbed the sting of cruel Whack-A-Mole losses to the Vikings in ’97 and the 49ers in 2002 and a cringeworthy Super blowout to the Ravens in between. No, I never took up with Dallas or some “national” team, heaven forbid.
Since the mid-’90s, however, the Giants have not really been a going concern of mine. I’ve cared about them when I’ve cared about them and cared less when I didn’t, if that makes any sense. When they did not put forth their best foot attitudinally, or presented personalities I found disagreeable, I chose to tune them out. It’s the Mets I love without question or qualification. Everybody else has to earn it as I grow older and maybe more mature. As much as I could never leave the Giants, there have been times when I couldn’t take them. I’ve pruned all my sporting priorities that way. When I was a kid, a teen and a younger adult, I could soak myself in football and basketball and hockey when their pools filled up with fortune for my teams in those endeavors. For the last dozen or so years, I don’t feel it like that. For the last dozen or so years, it’s been Mets against the world in my mind. Everybody and everything else just kind of gets in the way.
Somehow, though, every time I looked up since the end of December, there were the Giants. Perhaps as a defense mechanism, I found reasons not to be worried about their fate. The day they beat the Bucs, I was coming down with a cold. The day they beat the Cowboys, Stephanie was sick. For two consecutive Giants playoff wins, I had my mind more on Coricidin than football. Then I had a specific selfish reason (no, not a bet; I gave up gambling after losing a 2008 Carvel helmet on the USF-Rutgers fiasco in October) to be unsorry in case the Packers beat the Giants for the NFC title. When that moment of ambivalence dissolved into Tynes’ winning kick, it was like a time-release capsule of joy. Not euphoria, but a jolt of joy. The Giants were going to the Super Bowl; why shouldn’t that be joyous?
The Patriots have never done anything for me, yet a little bit of me disdained the idea — the idea — that such a phenomenal season would go to waste. The Patriots have never done anything for me, yet I thought it would be sort of fun to see one team go 19-0 in my lifetime. I generally go for the underdog, but once in a while, I’ll suddenly decide, respect must be paid particular overcats. It’s the reason I was practically the only guy in my dorm 25 March Madnesses ago disappointed that N.C. State shocked Phi Slamma Jamma…and I wasn’t any kind of college basketball fan. It’s the reason I was slightly excited when the very sated Chicago Bulls won surplus championships…and I never liked them at all.
Again, I reason in the aftermath of a Giants win that could have been a Giants loss, I was employing a defense mechanism worthy of Steve Spagnuolo. If I convinced myself that I was in a no-lose situation if the Giants did lose — I just witnessed 19-for-19, what a treat — then how sorry could I be when they lost? Happily, I’ll never know.
As I give it one more burst of pre-parade, pre-Santana press conference thought, how could anybody sitting on a couch in a grungy Giants sweatshirt watching Eli Manning breaking free and David Tyree soaring in defiant regard to gravity (Endy: The Sequel, a friend suggests) and Steve Smith showing up everywhere and Plaxico Burress cradling what needed to be cradled and Michael Strahan harassing who had to be harassed and Tom Coughlin succeeding after many of us insisted he never could survive in his job (crow equals delicious!)…how could you look at those Giant hearts practically leaping from those Giant chests and pretend you didn’t care? How could you see these guys in those uniforms, realize that because sports works the way it does that they may never get so close again, and not treat this as the milestone it is? How could I deny myself the ancestral thrill of at least brushing a hand against this third Giants Super Bowl trophy as it figuratively passed among the True Blue deserving diehards?
As this Giants championship seemed more plausible, then possible, then probable and, finally, definite, I thought of other Giants fans. I thought of a clutch of our readers who have been far more active Giants fans than I of late. I was particularly happy for them, for their families, for those who passed the Giant gene on to them. Less happy for myself than satisfied that the now extraordinarily grungy sweatshirt can also be certified as pretty darn lucky. When Burress caught the go-ahead pass, I jumped up and hollered by Giant fan instinct, pausing not an instant to analyze why I was so happy.
After the events of last September, I might do well to indulge more in yelling and less in thinking.
by Greg Prince on 4 February 2008 3:46 am The Mets completed a trade for the best pitcher in the world 52 hours ago. Eli Manning just led the heretofore mediocre Giants past the heretofore undefeated Patriots for the championship of professional tackle football. And, for all I know, cats are doing math.
Sheesh…these days everything is possible.
by Greg Prince on 4 February 2008 3:40 am 
Given the opportunity, you had to know these Giants wouldn’t Skip the opportunity to win Super Bowl XLII.
Thanks, CharlieH, for sharing the cake.
by Greg Prince on 3 February 2008 10:55 am You’ll hear the word perfect tossed around quite a bit today. Nineteen football wins in nineteen football games, should the nineteenth of them come to pass, is admittedly awesome. Nevertheless, our idea of absolute perfection for a Super Bowl Sunday is transcribing the call of Hall of Fame broadcaster Lindsey Nelson for one half of one inning, specifically the top of the eighth from July 9, 1969.
Tom Seaver on the mound for the New York Mets. Through seven innings he has retired twenty-one consecutive batters, and Ron Santo, who leads the National League in runs batted in with seventy-four, is up to lead off. He has struck out and flied to center.
Rod Gaspar has come in in right field now in place of Ron Swoboda for the New York Mets. Rod Gaspar, that’s a defensive move by manager Gil Hodges.
Wayne Garrett comes in at second base now and Bobby Pfeil moves over to third as Charles comes out of the ballgame.
Here’s the pitch to Ron Santo. Swung on — hit in the air to deep centerfield, Agee going back, he has a bead on it, he’s there, and he makes the catch.
Listen to the crowd, riding on every pitch of the ballgame now, riding on every play as Tom Seaver has retired twenty-two consecutive batters at the start of the ballgame.
Wayne Garrett is playing second base. Bobby Pfeil is playing third.
In the history of the Mets, the longest that any Met pitcher has ever gone without allowing a hit, seven-and-one-third innings, by Al Jackson, in Pittsburgh against the Pirates. Seaver has gone seven-and-one-third here.
The pitch to Ernie Banks is high for a ball.
The crowd is humming.
Here is the one-oh pitch now to Ernie Banks. Swung on and missed, it’s one-and-one. Seaver has struck out nine and he’s walked none in this game tonight.
This will be a one-one delivery, it’s on the way — curveball, swung on and missed, GOOD curveball. One-and-two now to Ernie Banks, as Seaver faces the heart of the batting order of the Chicago Cubs.
Santo opening up with a LONG fly to center, Banks is at the plate and Al Spangler’s on deck.
Here’s a one-two pitch — swung on and fouled back, he’s still alive at one-and-two.
In the first inning, Kessinger struck out, Beckert lined out, Williams struck out. In the second inning, Santo struck out, Banks struck out, Spangler struck out. In the third, Hundley flied out, Qualls flied out, Holtzman struck out. In the fourth, Kessinger struck out, Beckert grounded out, Williams grounded out. In the fifth, Santo flied out, Banks grounded out and Spangler struck out.
There’s a swing and a foul ball back and out of play.
In the sixth, Hundley grounded out, Qualls grounded out and Abernathy struck out. In the seventh, Kessinger lined out, Beckert flied out, Williams grounded out. Here in the eighth, Santo has flied to center.
The count is one-and-two to Ernie Banks and Seaver’s pitch is on the way — curveball misses WAY outside, caught in the webbing of the glove by catcher Jerry Grote, who leaned WAY out. Count goes to two balls and two strikes now.
Here is a two-two delivery to Ernie Banks. Swung on, fouled back, it’s out of play, the count HOLDS at two-two, as 38-year-old Ernie Banks continues to foul that ball off.
The Mets lead by a score of four to nothing. Here’s the two-two pitch — swung on and missed, he struck him out! Listen to the CROWD! Strikeout number TEN for Tom Seaver.
He has retired twenty-three consecutive batters from the start of the ballgame.
Left-hand batter Al Spangler’s coming up. He’s been up twice and he struck out swinging both times. The Cubs are batting in the top half of the eighth inning here at Shea Stadium.
There’s a swing and a miss at strike one!
Seaver again takes the sign from Jerry Grote, two men out and nobody on base. He’s into the motion again and here’s the strike one delivery.
It’s in there for a called strike two!
Oh-and-two the count now, to Al Spangler. Seaver again takes the sign. Here is the two-strike delivery — it’s high and away for a ball, one-and-two.
Nancy Seaver, Tom’s wife, seated in one of the lower field boxes, on the EDGE of her seat, RIDING with every pitch of this ballgame. Here’s a pitch now — swung on and missed, he struck him out!
The side is retired. Seaver has gone through EIGHT innings; he has retired TWENTY-FOUR consecutive batters; he has not allowed a HIT or a BASERUNNER; he’s getting a STANDING OVATION; he’s gone LONGER…without allowing a hit than any MET pitcher in the history of the New York Mets.
That was his ELEVENTH strikeout.
No runs, no hits, no errors and none left. In the middle of the eighth inning, the score IS the Mets FOUR and the Cubs nothing.
Cap tip to Joe Dubin for passing along this greatest of baseball broadcasts. And, though we choose to salute baseball on this particular Sunday as we would any partcular Sunday, we are not completely tone deaf to other pursuits of local sporting interest. Go You Giants!
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