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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 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!
by Greg Prince on 1 February 2008 11:45 pm 
It took four months and three slightly agonizing days, but the Met Fairy has finally delivered the offseason goods in the form of a done deal that makes Johan Santana a pitcher for the New York Mets. Way to go, you crazy, blessed seraph!
(Thanks, too, for Ross Chapman’s inspired character and mom Sharon’s impressive illustration. Thanks to Omar as well. Plenty of gratitude to go around tonight.)
by Greg Prince on 1 February 2008 11:38 pm WFAN is reporting Johan Santana is actually a Met. Six years, $22 mil per, $150 mil when everything (including '08) is added up. He still needs to pass a physical*, but with that kind of scratch, scratch, scratch on the table, you can be damn sure he'll be healthy as a horse and awesome as an ox.
Metsopotamia exhales.
*Saturday: He passed — and we feel great!
by Greg Prince on 1 February 2008 8:43 pm It's beginning to feel like 1776 in here…
It's a megadeal, I say
They will cheer every clause
Every number
I wish I felt that way
That we won't still have
Phil Humber
But then again
The Mets are Mets
And wrought with implication
If they blow
This trade of trades
They'll need another nation
An agent, a GM and an ace
With lightning for an arm
It's a simple fact
To think that now we act
As midwives to a pact
We're waiting for the scratch, scratch, scratch
To be paid Johan Santana
Waiting for this trade to hatch
On this soggy Friday afternoon a
Fortnight before spring training
God knows the contract is high enough
To choke a giraffe
But will it draft Johan?
We're waiting for the swap, swap, swap
To soon be deemed official
Waiting until five o'clock
For the Wilpons to start doling out that
Citi Field naming money
God knows the pile is high enough
To solve the debt
But will it yield a Met?
Johan's gonna make big bucks
So he oughta make 'em at Shea
Brother, it would suck, suck, suck
If twenty million stood between us
And penciling in Santana
I'm gonna click on MetsBlog again
And hope that Omar has grabbed a pen
To make sure Johan
Belongs to us!
by Greg Prince on 1 February 2008 1:51 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.
9/26/07 W Washington 3-6 Humber 1 194-160 L 9-6
It started, in a sense, where it all started long before. It started in Long Beach, at the library. This whole Mets thing of mine took on perhaps its most vital dimension when, as a child, I commenced to taking out books that caught me up real fast on everything I’d missed, those years before I had the good sense to be baseball-sentient, those critical spring and summer months when the miracle I’d celebrate in my first baseball fall marinated. There weren’t many of those years and months between me and the Mets — we were born the same year, you know — but I was on surer footing when I understood where we came from, why, beyond the obvious serendipity of falling into a world championship when they were 7 and I was 6, the Mets were considered so very Amazin’. Men named Koppett and Durso and Vecsey and Zimmerman and Schaap schooled me, told me what the deal was, who the Mets were before I could step right up and meet them for myself. That’s where it began, this ability to process baseball anecdotes and statistics and build on them and, eventually, tell the stories myself. It started in Long Beach, at the library.
It started with books called The Year The Mets Lost Last Place and Joy In Mudville and The New York Mets: The Whole Story and, naturally enough, Amazin’. It started at the library in Long Beach when I was a kid and the only thing I wanted to do as much as watch the Mets was read the Mets. And the final Wednesday of the 2007 season…it started there, too.
Silly me. I didn’t put the two together until many weeks had gone by, not until the final Wednesday of the 2007 season was — along the lines of those tales of Throneberry and Chacon and Fisher and Bosch — a dark chunk of franchise folklore. I didn’t realize just what I was doing the afternoon before that 7:10 start. I do now. I was tagging up at home, going back to where it all started, just in time for the beginning of the end. Within five days, everything about 2007 would be ruined. Within five days, I would be to Shea Stadium five times, absorbing four losses and bearing witness to a three-game swing in the standings that will eternally mark the difference between two teams, scarring one for god knows how long.
I watched.
I yelled.
I groaned.
I flinched.
I hoped.
They collapsed.
But first I went to the library.
It was grandly refurbished from my youth, but it was still the library to me. It still stood on the exact spot off the corner of National and Park as it did in those years when I was I carrying Koppett and Durso and Vecsey and Zimmerman and Schaap to the checkout desk. It was still a mere eight blocks up and three blocks over from the house where I brought those guys home to learn who and what the Mets were before they made themselves apparent to me.
It’s worth mentioning here that I went to the library hours before first pitch that Wednesday to meet an author who had written — what the hell else? — a book about the Mets. Not just meet him, but to go to an actual Mets game with him. When I was a kid, I hardly ever got to go to a Mets game, so I went to the library to read about Mets games instead. Now, without realizing it, I was melding the two cathedrals of my youth: the accessible Long Beach Public Library and the once unattainable Shea Stadium. I wasn’t going to the library because I couldn’t go to the game. I was going to the library in order to go the game.
From where I live now, it was an indirect route to Shea. In the great scheme of Mets things, however, it was absolutely on the way.
The author of the Mets book on this Wednesday was Dana Brand. He published Mets Fan last summer and because he became a blogger to support it, we had dropped each other a few lines. Since he makes his living on Long Island, not too far from where I do, I suggested we hook up and go to a game, maybe in September. Sure, he said. His book tour was taking him to local libraries, usually at night, but it so happened he’s doing a reading in Long Beach the afternoon before the Mets play a night game against Washington. Long Beach — do I know where that is? Yes, I said. Yes, I do. Yes, I’ll meet you there.
I broke away from the computer midday and drove to my hometown. It’s about six miles from where I’ve settled, but it feels a little further every time I make the trek. It feels years away. Long Beach, The City By The Sea, is one of those places you don’t pass through on the way to anywhere. When I finally crossed the bridge and moved to another Nassau County locale, I appreciated the extra 10, 15, 20 minutes I wasn’t spending in my car getting somewhere else from Long Beach.
Parking on National Boulevard and walking to the library, the plan was to sit in on what was left of Dana’s session and then he’d drive us to the game — he lives in Connecticut, so it was more convenient that way. I’d take the train back to Long Beach (the station is a block from the library) and drive home from there. Usually when I meet a fellow blogger for the first time, it’s at Gate E, maybe Gate D if I’m feeling frisky. On the final Wednesday of 2007, it was at the library. It made perfect sense.
The afternoon was an unqualified success. From the moment his group broke up and we shook hands, Dana and I were lifelong comrades in arms. We were Mets fans. I suggested Gino’s across the street for pizza and baseball chat. He was up for it. He seemed to enjoy being an audience for somebody else’s Mets stories for a change. Me, I don’t need much prompting, either for Gino’s or to talk about myself and the Mets.
It went like that the rest of the afternoon, finishing our slices, getting in his car, finding the Southern State and the Cross Island and making it to Shea around 5:30. It was way earlier than I was used to, but it was fine. The company was good and we had a pregame agenda. We wanted to partake in the Citi Field Preview Center, the virtual tour of Shea’s successor the scoreboard had been relentlessly hyping. Arriving early to beat the lines worked. We got our peek into the future, at least at what the luxury boxes of tomorrow would look like. We were wary of Citi Field when we entered. We were close to appalled when we were done. The emphasis of the “tour” was on what high rollers could expect for their megabucks. That wasn’t going to apply to either of us or anybody we knew. We probably also weren’t too happy that our respective pasts, enmeshed as they were with the past of the Mets, were slated to be plowed under for parking in just over a year.
The last words Dana read to his group at the library were from the chapter of his book titled “For Shea”:
I will endure its passing, but I would have loved to have been an old man in these seats, under these lights.
Until I had read that in Mets Fan, it had not really occurred to me that if all goes to plan, kids who grow up taking books out of the library to become better Mets fans become old men. It never occurred to me Shea wouldn’t be where it had always been. Shoot, the Long Beach Public Library was right where I’d left it almost 17 years earlier. Come 2009, it would be where it had always been. Shea wouldn’t.
No, the future wasn’t our ally that Wednesday night — especially the immediate future.
We had mezzanine seats that Wednesday night. And in those seats, under those lights, Dana and I aged gradually, then rapidly. The Mets, losers of eight of their previous twelve, sprinted ahead of the Nationals. Beltran and Alou homered in succession in the first. Beltran homered again in the third. Somewhere in between, Castillo drove in two. The Mets led 5-0, giving aid and comfort to their neophyte starter Philip Humber. Humber, 24, represented the future and present simultaneously. Neither was looking good from the vantage point of his dusty right arm.
Humber shouldn’t have been starting, not under the circumstances that brought him to the mound for his very first career start on the final Wednesday of the 2007 season. The former No. 1 pick had joined the big club early in September and was promptly put and kept under wraps. You were as likely to see Philip Humber head to the mound as you were the old bullpen buggy. Now, with a division title in the balance, he was handed a ball and told to keep a staggering team afloat the way you might tell a 20-year veteran to do the same. It was repeatedly proving difficult for the staggering team’s 20-year veteran in residence to accomplish such a task. It would prove impossible for its first-time starter.
To be fair, in the wake of El Duque’s ailing right foot and Brian Lawrence being rightfully left out, Willie Randolph’s choice was narrowed to pitching Humber on a young lifetime’s rest or offering Austin Kearns a hitting tee and relying on his honor to not take undue advantage. By the fifth, you would have liked to have seen what kind of stuff the tee had.
Dana and I, 75 seasons of Mets fandom to our combined ledger, were seeing the beginning of an end the likes of which neither of us had ever seen…and between us we’ve seen or read everything that’s happened to the Mets. We’d earlier shared stories of rooting and pizza from Gino’s and apprehension over Citi Field. Now we were sharing something unfortunately unforgettable: a mezzanine view of the acceleration of what was about to be known as The Greatest Collapse in Baseball History. As the Phillies were beating the Braves, the Nats knocked out Humber, then toyed with the similarly callow Joe Smith. They spotted the Mets a 5-0 lead yet won quite methodically, 9-6. Worse than the numbers was the lack of honest surprise that it went down the way it did, even if the Mets were still in first, even if the Nats were still next to last. It was nine of thirteen now. The starter was brand new to his job. How surprised could you be? The Mets did everything but open a Collapse Preview Center and give virtual tours.
We departed the ramps dazed when it was over. Dana muttered correctly what a horrible, horrible game this had been. I didn’t disagree one iota, but mentioned, for the record, that I’d really enjoyed hanging out and going to this game before it became as horrible it did. Yes, he said, it had been fun…except for the cruel business of blowing the game and quite possibly the season. Can’t wait to do it again next year, I said…without the losing of course, heh-heh. It was an exchange the essence of which I would repeat with other people I also really liked on Thursday night and Friday night and Sunday afternoon, though I guess if I really liked them, I would never, ever again threaten to expose them to the New York Mets.
Returning to Long Beach became a bigger pain than I imagined. There are fewer LIRR trains headed there after a game than there are for where I live now — just missed one at Woodside that would have sped up the process; plus, as with driving, you’re looking at an additional 10, 15, 20 minutes to get where you’re going if you’re going to Long Beach. My train didn’t pull into the station until almost one in the morning. It briefly crossed my mind that this was the same depot from which I traveled to my first game on my own, when at 14 I could begin to routinely reach beyond the shelves of the library to show up at Shea at will. But it was too late to get caught up in that kind of thinking. I walked back down National Boulevard to my car, wiped the City By The Sea’s considerable condensation off my windshields, and drove into what felt like total darkness.
by Greg Prince on 31 January 2008 7:49 pm 
Faith and Fear reader Steve Rogers wasn’t suggesting a yearly compensation package to satisfy the demands of Johan Santana when he visited the Ritz-Carlton in San Juan. He was, of course, showing off the only four (for now) retired numbers in Mets history on his FAFIF t-shirt (click here to get yours), giving it, as Omar Minaya has tentatively bestowed upon us, some sun in January. Reports Steve, “Spotted in the casino, I was asked if I was going to play any of those numbers! Sadly only 14 is available on the roulette wheel, not that I didn’t use 36, 24, 5, 17, 8, 16, 18, 7 and others in heavy rotation, though this past weekend was not my weekend in that casino.”
Can’t wait for 57 to come up a winner at Shea.
by Jason Fry on 30 January 2008 3:13 am Johan Santana has a career record of 93-44. He has a career ERA of 3.22, amassed in a league where they ought to have a keg behind second base. He has struck out 1,381 guys in 1308.2 innings. He has two Cy Young awards on his shelf. He led the American League in strikeouts in 2004, 2005 and 2006. His arsenal consists of an 91-92 MPH fastball, a biting slider and one of the game's best changeups, which makes that fastball look like it's sporting an additional 3 to 4 MPH. He's a lifetime .258 hitter, for Pete's sake. He'll be 29 years old on Opening Day. He's left-handed.
And unless something so awful happens that this blog will immediately be renamed Fire and Famine in Flushing, he's about to be a New York Met.
Despite the press corps biting at his ankles and a traumatized fan base in open rebellion, Omar Minaya locked up a guy who could be the best pitcher in baseball for a stunningly reasonable price: Carlos Gomez, Kevin Mulvey, Deolis Guerra and Philip Humber. Fernando Martinez and Mike Pelfrey remain in our employ. I'd still like an explanation for Lastings Milledge's exile and the firehose of money blasted at Luis Castillo, but these now go in the “oh, by the way” file, to be brought up post-hosannas. Omar's got a lot of credit for being creative and for being persistent, but he pulled off this deal by showing patience that bordered on the superhuman.
We could regret the names of the departed, of course: Gomez held his own in a Shea Stadium trial when he should still have been in the minors, Humber put up not-bad PCL numbers while on the rebound from Tommy John surgery, Mulvey's been talked up as a blue-chipper and Guerra is a 19-year-old with an awesome arm. And, as always, there's the shadow of the past: We root for a team that traded Amos Otis, Jason Bay and Scott Kazmir, after all. On the other hand, we once wondered whether it was worth mortgaging the bright futures of Tim Foli, Floyd Youmans, David West and Alex Escobar for short-term gains. Anybody heard from Geoff Goetz and Ed Yarnall recently?
And we're talking about Johan Santana here, not Victor Zambrano or Kris Benson. Heck, Santana's barely the same species as those two.
What will happen with Santana at the top of the rotation? Can't tell you. How could I? OK, I can predict one bad thing: As you read this, some nitwit in the Met A/V department is excitedly putting Johan highlights to the tune of “Smooth.” (Because the kids today, they go crazy over that Santana.)
But that aside, I can tick off a long list of things that now won't happen:
* I will not stare numbly at Grapefruit League games listening to Rick Peterson telling me that Kyle Lohse has done a great job visualizing success or hearing Omar say that Livan Hernandez “knows how to pitch.” Hearing either of those two beater cars talked up like a vintage, low-mileage Ferrari would have been … well, not devastating, since that's for much greater things in life, such as seasons thrown down the toilet by choking loafers. But it sure would have been disappointing.
* My scenarios for the Mets making it back to the playoffs no longer begin with Pedro Martinez being sturdy, John Maine and Oliver Perez not regressing and El Duque's brittle bones surviving a full season intact. All of those things remain important, but they're no longer the foundation without which all higher aspirations crumble.
* I will not have to read Marty Noble wax eloquent about the inherent nobility and wise perspective of Tom Glavine, as prelude to pointing out (correctly) that the Mets never found a replacement for his innings.
* The inane chatter of pitchers and catchers will be about how Santana has changed the clubhouse dynamic (or whatever), instead of 63 billion questions about the worst collapse in baseball history.
And finally, there it is. For once, the talk-radio gasbags were right: If ever a club desperately needed a page turned, it was the current incarnation of the Mets. By collapsing on the final day of the season, there was no way to turn that page. With no next chapter, there was nothing to do but brood over what had happened. The collapse was destined to dominate February and March, to haunt April, and there was the very real danger of it shaping the narrative of late spring and summer. There was no escape.
But it turns out there was a way out. Omar found it, and he didn't even pay the king's ransom we would have forgiven as the price for the key. Here's to Omar. Here's to a clean getaway. Here's to 2008. Here's to Johan Santana.
by Greg Prince on 29 January 2008 9:54 pm The Mets and Twins have agreed on a trade for Johan Santana. This is not a drill. The Mets and Twins have agreed on a trade for Johan Santana. Repeat, this is not a drill.
According to USA Today (link provided immediately by brkpsu), the deal is three promising pitching prospects — Kevin Mulvey, Phil Humber, Deolis Guerra — and one talented outfielder, Carlos Gomez, for the two-time Cy Young winner, the dominant lefty in the American League, the ace in his prime the Mets haven't had since the world and Doc Gooden were young.
The trade's been agreed to, but it's not final. The Mets have to negotiate a deal with Santana, which will encompass loads of money and a ton of years and there has to be one of those pesky physicals. We'll probably know by the end of the week whether this is a cruel Never Met hoax (bar the windows and lock the medicine cabinets if so) or St. Lucie just became a much sunnier springtime destination. Until then, we'll hold the euphoria, the inevitable Frank Viola comparisons and our breath.
This is not a drill.
by Greg Prince on 29 January 2008 3:07 pm These two, they’re stuck together whether they want to be or not. Make no mistake: they do not. They were sworn enemies in the last life yet nowadays share psychic space that has become all too real to them. In one sense, they are no longer with us. In another, more significant sense, they have never left.
Their names? Let’s call one of them Eb and the other Po. Unusual names (short for something else in both cases) but they were and are singular sorts. That the fates have thrown them together for eternity presents us with a more delightful twist than they will ever appreciate.
Eb and Po don’t have much to do these days. They just kind of exist in their shared space, reliving their glory days, embellishing their well-worn tales and unleashing more than one lifetime’s worth of venom on the other. Though they have all the time in the world, they are oblivious to clocks and calendars. It takes something momentous to snap them out of their tedious bickering and focus their attention on what we might call the fierce urgency of now. Maybe today will be the day they have reason to get their heads out of their clouds.
If it helps you to understand them better, envision them as the quintessential grumpy old men, roommates even, characters from the pen of Neil Simon — somewhere beyond The Odd Couple, more like eternal Sunshine Boys, despite their currently craggy dispositions.
Picture a spacious prewar apartment, rent-controlled. Maybe somewhere between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Maybe somewhere else altogether.
“So,” Eb says to Po, “any plans to cheat today?”
“Oh, not this again,” an exasperated Po answers. “When are you going to give that up?”
“Give up? Give up what? You’re the one who should give it up. Give up the pennant already! You stole it!”
“I stole nothing and I will not have my good name sullied through your ample supply of mud just because you never learned to lose gracefully…not that you didn’t have plenty of opportunity to learn.”
“What? What was that crack supposed to mean?”
“Oh, nothing. Say, Eb, your third base is looking a little worn today. I guess that’s what happens when you have three men standing on it at the same time.”
“Once! It happened once!”
“Like your one world championship?”
“Listen big shot, if I were you, I wouldn’t start trading credentials.”
“Why not? I’ve got plenty of them. I had the world champions in 1904…”
“1904…you wouldn’t even play the other league.”
“…1905, 1908…”
“1908? You didn’t win nothin’ in 1908!”
“We were robbed. And note my proper use of English in expressing that thought.”
“You wuzn’t robbed of nothin’! Next time tell your players to touch the base in front of them.”
“…1921…”
“Boy, you sure do like your ancient history.”
“…1922…”
“Oh, and then what? You let those lousy interlopers win in ’23.”
“Not until we had the good sense to evict them.”
“Yeah, and they took that real hard. How many times they beat your brains in after that?”
“…1933 and 1954. World championships all.”
“Geez, Po, it gets a little lonely there at the end, don’t it? Some pretty long gaps between titles. But when you don’t know how to measure nothin’…”
“What are you implying?”
“Uh, gee, I dunno. 257 feet to left, 483 feet to center. Your ma drop you on your head when you were a baby or somethin’?”
“The word is idiosyncratic. If you ever spent a day in your life outside of that charming neighborhood of yours…Pigtown, you might understand what an idiosyncrasy is.”
“Use all the big words ya want, big fella, it don’t mean ya make any sense. And as for charm, I got it by the boatload. Who else had the genius to put up an ad that said ‘Hit Sign, Win Suit’?”
“How very, very droll. Please, be sure to mention that again tomorrow, just as you have every single day for as long we’ve been here.”
“Ah, you’re just jealous.”
“Jealous? Don’t make me guffaw.”
“We had fun in my day. We had the Sym-phony!”
“The cacophony, you mean.”
“You can’t pronounce nothin’ right. We had Hilda Chester and her cowbell, too!”
“What a boon to culture. What a shame we had to settle for actual talent among our fans.”
“Like who?”
“Such as Tallulah Bankhead.”
“Tallulah, tashmullah. Now if it’s Dan Bankhead ya want…”
“Pass. The glitterati came to see me. The show people adored me.”
“Too bad no people actually showed to see ya.”
“Pardon?”
“I don’t think I will. All your highfalutin, hoity-toity fans — where’d they go? Where’d any of your fans go? The only time you sold out after a while wuz when my boys had to schlep all the way up to your godforsaken neck of the woods.”
“You mean New York City? The capital of the world?”
“Don’t be givin’ me that bunk. I’m from America’s Fourth Largest City!”
“I think that claim lost its essential veracity around 1898.”
“I don’t know what kind of city that is, but we had it all. We wuz the borough of churches, too.”
“And I was America’s first sporting cathedral.”
“Always with the past tense. They’re still calling me The Greatest Ballpark Ever. Ever.”
“No accounting for taste. Besides, I’m known as The Echoing Green. How poetic.”
“Ya mean pathetic. Echoing with the sign-stealing.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you when you’re not making any sense.”
“Cheater!”
“Low-life!”
“Big joik!”
“Insecure runt!”
“Ya lost to the Yankees!”
“You did nothing but lose to the Yankees!”
“We had Zack Wheat!”
“We had Christy Mathewson!”
“We had Pete Reiser!”
“We had Mel Ott!”
“Robinson!”
“Mays!”
“Durocher!”
“Durocher — when he won!”
“We won last!”
“You won once!”
“You had 20,000 empty seats for the biggest game ever played!”
“WHICH WE WON!”
“BECAUSE YOU CHEATED!”
“BECAUSE YOU BROUGHT IN ERSKINE INSTEAD OF BRANCA!”
“OISK BOUNCED THE COIVE IN THE PEN!”
“BRANCA GAVE UP A HOMER TO THOMSON IN THE FIRST GAME! WHAT KIND OF IDIOT BRINGS THE SAME PITCHER IN TO FACE THE SAME BATTER HE COULDN’T GET OUT TWO GAMES BEFORE? WITH THE PENNANT ON THE LINE! WHICH WE WON!”
“DRESSEN!”
“EXACTLY!”
Eb and Po paused to regain their bearings and then resumed their dialogue.
“CHEATER!”
“LOW-LIFE!”
It pretty much went on like this all the time, Eb and Po in their ebb and flow, selectively reminding one another of failures and slights and shortcomings. Nothing ever got solved. They would stew and then they would growl and then they would rest before starting all over again. This went on for as long as either of them could remember. Today, however, their carefully hewn routine was interrupted by the sound of shuffling papers.”
“What’s that sound?” Po asked Eb.
“Somethin’ under the door, I think. I’ll go take a look. It’ll give me somethin’ to do to get away from you for a few seconds.”
“Do be sure not to stop on third if there are already two other men there.”
“You’re a riot, Po. A regular riot.”
Eb headed to the door and found a piece of stray mail had been slipped under by a considerate neighbor.
“That putz Shibe musta got our mail again,” Eb reported.
“Anything good?”
“Ya mean like another book about how everybody loves me and nobody remembers you?”
“Sorry, I wasn’t listening to a word you babbled. I was just re-reading Underworld. Oh look, I’m an entire novella!”
“Probably some junk mail. The postmark says Flushing.”
“Flushing? Never heard of it.”
“You dope. That’s in Queens. You know, where they were going to move…”
“Oh, right. Guess I’d put all that out of my mind.”
“You’re tellin’ me. What wuz that bit O’Malley came up with? ‘If they move to Queens, they won’t be the Brooklyn Dodgers.’ Guess he had the last laugh.”
“At least they offered your team a new spot relatively nearby. Mine was headed to Minneapolis in all likelihood.”
It didn’t happen often, but once in a while Eb and Po would curb their snapping and reflect on the actions that brought them to this current state of theirs. They didn’t like to think about it, didn’t like to contemplate the concept of progress that made them, like their neighbors Shibe and Forbes and Crosley, obsolete. None of them wanted to be where they wound up, holding forth only in the mind’s eye. They wanted to be back where they used to be, back where people remembered them, doing what made them famous. It was tough to talk about, especially for Eb and Po, the best of enemies, so they masked their pain by going at it, hammer and tong, day and night, over and over.
“So,” Po asked, “what is it anyway, the mail from Flushing?”
“Looks like a brochure. Tickets.”
“Tickets? Baseball tickets?”
“Are there any other kind? You were dropped on your head!”
“Lemme see that, you knothole.”
Po grabbed the brochure and stared at its cover. He was dumbfounded.
“Eb! Did you see this?”
“Not before you grabbed it out of my hands I didn’t.”
“Go ahead! Read it!”
“‘Shea Stadium…’ Shea…that’s the new kid, ain’t it?”
“Was the new kid.”
“‘Shea Stadium, 1964-2008…’ Hey, what year is this?”
“Who notices up here?”
“‘Shea Stadium, 1964-2008, Final Season.'”
Eb was speechless. So was Po. It took them what felt like an eternity to compose themselves and look at the brochure again.
“What’s this all about?” Eb asked.
“I guess the kid is done for,” Po reasoned.
“Aw come on! No frigging way! They just put that up like…how long ago?”
“Here, lemme see that postmark. I’ll be damned. It’s 2008 right now.”
“And when did Shea go up?”
“You saw, 1964.”
“So that’s…”
“Forty-five seasons, counting this one.”
“Geez! I thought it had only been a coupla years. Shea’s the same age I wuz, for crissake.”
“Almost the same age I was, too. Well, except for those last couple of years.”
“That’s right. You had them for a while, didn’tcha?
“When they were born!”
“What were their names again?”
“Amazin’ something…Amazin’…Amazin’…Amazin’ Mets, that’s it. It’s in the brochure. Funny, I’d kind of forgotten that.”
“They wuzn’t much good, wuz they?”
“For once, Eb, you’re dealing in understatement. Those Amazin’ Mets were terrible. Dreadful. The worst.”
“The woist?”
“Like I said, the worst. But they were fun to have around. A ball, actually.”
“Musta been nice. There wuz already a housing project where I’d been by then.”
“Yeah, I suppose so. That was ’62, ’63. Just before my housing project.”
A little more silence passed between the two old enemies who’d kind of forgotten they hated each other.
“So what gives already? What’s goin’ on with the Amazin’ Mets? They beatin’ it outta town, too?”
“I don’t think so, Eb. If I’m reading this thing correctly — and I’m from Manhattan, so I probably am…”
“Condescending joik.”
“Anyway, it seems the Amazin’ Mets will still be in New York next year.”
“They will? Moses give them that plot of land O’Malley wanted?”
“It doesn’t say, but it appears they’ll be staying in Queens.”
“That’s a relief. I’d hate to see the National League fans go through what our fans went through. That must be, what, fifty years ago by now?”
“Exactly, Eb. Exactly fifty years ago. Yes, that was rough. That was way worse than losing any ballgame.”
“You said it, brother. But what I don’t get is what wuz wrong with Shea. Wuzn’t it supposed to be all new and shiny and everything they said we’d never be?”
“That was a long time ago, my friend. A long time ago. They said the same things about us a century ago, give or take. We were the latest in ballpark technology and so on and so forth. And what did we last?”
“Not fifty years.”
“Not fifty years.”
Eb took the brochure from Po and noticed something that struck him strange.
“This thing they sent in the mail, Po.”
“What about it?”
“Well, most of it’s boring. I don’t even know what ‘state of the art’ means, but in the pictures, it looks like they’ve got tons of people in the stands at Shea.”
“You’re right, Eb. Says something about record attendance in 2007, which would be last year. ‘Get your tickets early’ and all that.”
“But if they’re breakin’ attendance records, what gives? What’s wrong with Shea? Why they gonna pull him down?”
“Like I said. progress. Whoever owns the Amazin’ Mets must want to make more money.”
“Just like O’Malley and Stoneham.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far. It’s not like they’re leaving for California. It says here the Amazin’ Mets are gonna have a new park in 2009 right next door. That doesn’t sound so bad, all things considered.”
“No, I guess not. Beats the team leaving.”
“On that we can agree.”
“Plus it’ll be nice to have some company, don’tcha think? Shea’ll probably be comin’ here, right?”
“Why, I guess he would be. Gives us something to look forward to, Eb. Maybe we can stop arguing all the time.”
“That’ll be the day.”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
Nevertheless, the roomies sat for a moment, feeling not nearly as hostile as they were used to. Maybe the impending visit of their spiritual offspring from Flushing at the end of 2008 would be good for both of them. Maybe they could, after nearly one hundred years of antagonism, finally get along.
Eb thought of a question for Po:
“Say, anything in that brochure about what the Amazin’ Mets are building to take Shea’s place? Gosh, Po, you had them when they were infants, maybe it’s gonna look like you. Even I’d have to admit that would make a little bit of sense.”
Po turned the pages and found a drawing of the ballpark that was going to take Shea Stadium’s place. Quite suddenly, his face echoed a very dark green. He hadn’t smoked in decades, but out of instinct, he quickly lit a match under the brochure.
“Oh gosh, Eb,” Po said. “I was just lighting up a Chesterfield and I burned the damn thing to a crisp. Sorry ’bout that. Don’t worry, though. I’m sure the new ballpark doesn’t look like anything special. Probably one of those crazy domes. They’re all the rage, I hear.”
“Yeah. They’ll never build a real ballpark like one of us again, Po.”
“Not really, Eb. Not really.”
by Greg Prince on 25 January 2008 8:10 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.
8/12/93 Th Atlanta 2-4 Gooden 11 35-42 L 8-4
It would be easy to say the sole purpose of football is to fill a few hours a week between baseball seasons. In theory, I believe that. When it comes to sports, just as it comes to life, there’s baseball and there’s everything else.
But let me give football a little credit as a practical matter. There are aspects of it I truly enjoy.
1) I honestly don’t have to know that much about it to watch it. What does a tackle do as opposed to a guard? I’ve never bothered to find out, but I’ve picked up enough Pidgin Football English to convince myself I’m as conversant in the game as Andy Robustelli. Quarterbacks shouldn’t throw into coverage. Smart coaches make adjustments at halftime. An explosive first step is very helpful. The rest is common sense: Don’t run a draw play on third-and-eighteen (a Joe Walton specialty); don’t score the go-ahead points with too much time left on the clock (because 48 seconds and two timeouts is an eternity); don’t grab a facemask or anything you wouldn’t want grabbed yourself.
2) I don’t have to follow a particular team to think I know something about them. Who’s on the Vikings these days? Damned if I know, but they used to be the Purple People Eaters. They had Gary Cuozzo and Norm Snead before they got Tarkenton back. It sure was cold at their games then. Dallas was the Doomsday Defense and Tom Landry and irritated everybody with that America’s Team crap. Pittsburgh had a Steel Curtain and a Three Rivers Stadium full of Terrible Towels. The Falcons and Lions almost always sucked. Still do, if I’m not mistaken.
3) NFL Films is awesome. When I was up nursing a horrible cold a few weeks ago, I kept searching ESPN for Super Bowl highlights, anything from NFL Films, just one lousy Joe Montana pass spiraling through the air, landing softly in Jerry Rice’s sure hands. I could watch their productions in the middle of an anthrax attack and forget anything was wrong. NFL Films could make a box of Kleenex riveting.
4) Though we have never institutionalized it, Chuck and I have a Sunday ritual in which he calls from Florida to discuss the score: the Bucs game…the Giants game…the Jets game…whatever game. Neither one of us gambles or is in a fantasy league, it’s just what we do. We spend about three seconds on the score and a half-hour reliving something John Madden said about Sean Landeta more than twenty years ago. Two Sundays back, when I was trying to sleep off the aforementioned cold, I was dozing when he called. I glanced at the clock and knew the Colts-Chargers game was underway. First and only question out of my mouth before rasping that I’d have to call him back later was “what’s the score?” He said that moment of putting football above all else did more than any other in recent memory to convince him that I am a Real Man.
Yes, football has its charms and has its purposes. It’s also got one thing that baseball simply doesn’t.
It’s got my father’s interest. It provides us with common ground, a shared language, something to mull like it matters. If Chuck and I indulge in a few laughs over football every Sunday, it is the course of the week where this sport definitively proves its worth to me. Somewhere between Monday and Friday, I will speak with my Dad. And we will have something to talk about.
Football. You bet.
He’s not a huge fan. He won’t watch the CFL at three in the morning or anything like that, but he does get into it. With his radio tuned faithfully to WNEW-AM every Sunday afternoon when there was an NFL blackout in effect, he’s the reason I chose the Giants over the Jets when I was a kid. And his later enchantment by everything green and ultimately futile is the reason I’ve followed the Jets at least as closely as the Giants (to the limited extent that I follow either), especially in the last ten or so years. He shifted, so I shifted. I’ve never asked why he shifted. I don’t ask him very much, actually. I just accept.
I have three favorite end-to-end football games from the past quarter-century: Miami’s upset of Nebraska in the 1984 Orange Bowl, the Jets’ insane 51-45 shootout win over the Dolphins in 1986 and, topping the list, Super Bowl XXV, January 27, 1991. It is no coincidence that I watched each of those games with my dad. I would have liked them fine by myself, but I loved that we cheered for victory in unison.
There was nothing festive about how we watched Super Bowl XXV. It was seven months after my mother died and he was getting ready to put the house up for sale. Plus he was taking his doctor’s direction to lose weight seriously. So when Stephanie and I came over to watch the Giants and Bills, all we ate were these terrible, Styrofoam chips from a cellophane bag. Didn’t make any difference. Our Super Bowl party consisted of sitting around the kitchen table glued to the suspenseful conclusion to the Giants’ unlikely march to this, their second championship. Now that’s what I call a Super Bowl party. There was the promise of a trophy for our ancestral team, sure, but there was also the not insignificant matter of some Super Bowl boxes I had bought into — I had Giants 0 and Bills 9 and it was 20-19 with seconds remaining. If Scott Norwood made a long kick, it would have been 22-20…and Stephanie had Giants 0 and Bills 2. In that sense (unless it was bizarrely blocked and run back), it was a no-lose proposition. But who wanted to win that way? The Giants who weren’t lining up against the field goal attempt were on the sidelines holding hands in prayer. We may as well have been doing the same.
My father doesn’t raise his voice often and almost never jumps up and down. My wife (then fiancée) is literally incapable of yelling and gives new meaning to the word reserved. But there they were, like me, on their feet, gasping and shouting and doing everything a crazy sports fan does. When the Giants held on, the three of us exploded like a first step. There were hugs and high-pitched screams and tremors that shook the chandelier over that kitchen table. We won the Super Bowl! We won the pool! I was thrilled. Stephanie was thrilled. Dad was thrilled. We all showed it. It was such a moment.
Then I had to go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like “wow, I guess this is the last Super Bowl we’ll ever watch in this house.” You would have thought Norwood had kicked his 47-yarder straight through the uprights. I had been moved to reflection and retrospection. My father wanted no part of it. He never has and I’ve never asked why. When I went to the trouble of implying that 29 years of family history in our house were about to come to an end, that we would never again have a moment like the one we just reveled in when Norwood had to kick from too far and our Giants emerged champions, he didn’t say “shut up” or anything like that. He just gave me this “yeah, all right, drive safe, talk to ya later” look.
OK, so we don’t go deep. We’ve never completed any kind of substantive father-son conversation. But we get along, y’know? We’re cordial. We chat amiably. I like him every bit as much as I love him. But he tells his problems to my sister, my sister tells them to me and I kind of, sort of ask him what’s going on and maybe he’ll clue me in, but mostly he’ll steer the subject back to something less onerous, like didja hear what Parcells said this week? I used to be put off by this triangulation. I used to clear my throat and try to elicit information directly from him. He doesn’t go for that. He doesn’t want to tell me directly what he doesn’t want to tell me. He doesn’t want to be reminded of what he doesn’t want to be reminded. It’s the last Super Bowl we’ll ever watch in this house? Why would I go and mention that?
So I won’t. I won’t do metacommentary with my dad. I’ll just enjoy what I can. I know I listed my favorite football games before, but you know what my absolute favorite football memory is? It’s a Saturday from 1985, the year I returned home after college. My mother goes out to do some shopping or whatever and it’s just me and Dad. The Giants are going to play the Steelers with a playoff spot on the line: win and get in. We’re going to watch the game, no big deal there. But his eyes light up, as if we’re putting one over on the watch-your-weight police and asks, “wanna get a pizza?” At first I thought he was joking, like we were in a beer commercial or something. We never did stuff like that, just me and him ordering a pizza and watching a football game. But he meant it. Let’s call the Capri and get a pie delivered.
Um, sure!
And we did. It was no big deal. it was just a pie. It probably had sausage and mushroom on it. The Giants won, clinched their playoff berth. It wasn’t a jump-up-and-down episode or anything. It was just…us doing something together. Watching football. Eating pizza. Nice. I wanted it to keep going. The next game that Saturday was the Redskins and the Cardinals. I was like, “hey let’s watch this one now.” But he lost interest and so did I and the pizza was mostly eaten and my mother came home and life went on.
Football did its job, however. It still does its job. It still gives us a few minutes of conviviality instead of awkward silences. It gives me the chance to say “did you see where USF is nationally ranked?” or “what was Mangini thinking in the fourth quarter?” It does, I hate to tell you, what baseball never has between us.
My dad doesn’t much care for baseball. It’s just not his game. I’ve never really pursued an answer as to why not. He mentioned a few times when I was growing up that his father and uncle dragged him to Yankee Stadium on a steamy Memorial Day, 1945, for a doubleheader against the Tigers (they split) where he drank warm sarsaparilla and he was jammed in among 70,000 and it used up all his patience where baseball was concerned. He was 16 then. The next time he showed any discernible interest in our National Pastime was the mid-1980s, when he and my mother climbed earnestly and enthusiastically aboard the Mets’ bandwagon. It still blows my mind to recall how into it they both were for about five years, how these two parents of mine who had always treated my baseball mania primarily with benign neglect were suddenly superfans. There would be nights when I was doing something else and my dad would call up the stairs: “Hey! Did you see what Mookie just did?”
Mind-blowing, I tell you.
Once Mom died, Dad suddenly recalled he didn’t like baseball. It was warm sarsaparilla all over again. There went one topic of conversation forever. But I wouldn’t let it go without a fight. You know those 15 pairs of tickets I was given for my 30th birthday? For the 1993 season that turned out so well? I had one goal for one-fifteenth of them. I was determined to go to a Mets game with my father because isn’t that what sons and fathers do? We had never done it, just the two of us. I invited him and, perhaps sensing it meant something to me, perhaps because he didn’t have a good excuse not to, he accepted.
It wasn’t that many years removed from those bulletins up the stairs, of my father being all over Mookie and HoJo and Doc and being on the same nickname basis with the Mets that I was and that New York was. Surely, I thought, we could summon up the remnants of that fervor for one more night.
Surely, I was insane.
The evening got off all right. Dad drove to my office in Great Neck and we had dinner at a coffee shop pretty close to the train station (he had his car radio antenna removed in the Shea parking lot on a rare family outing in ’75, so we agreed the LIRR was the way to go). I remember two things about our meal: We managed a steady stream of some of that amiable chat on which our relationship is built so I was relieved it wasn’t one long awkward silence; and dinner was over fast, leading me to think “oh god, what now?” There was plenty of time before our train and I had no idea how we were going to fill it.
I know, I said — why don’t we take a walk? Dad was really into walking and I could always use a little exercise. We could amble down Great Neck Road, turn right and then amble back up via Middle Neck Road for our train. Only problem was I kind of underestimated how long all this ambling would take. From worrying about killing time before the train, I was now worried that I would be killing my father because we were suddenly racing for the train. From leisurely stroll to dead-on dash, me in no great shape, him, you know, 64. We survived the sprint and made the train. I found it partially amusing, partially embarrassing (never wander away from your mode of transportation is a valuable lesson I learned that night). He was all right, but I don’t think he was too pleased with my sense of logistics.
We had some nice first base field level tickets. All my tickets that year were pretty good given that my brother-in-law picked them out in December. It was a Thursday night against the Braves who were beginning to make their move on San Francisco. As luck would have it, Dwight Gooden was pitching for the Mets. Almost everybody else from the glory days was gone, but Doc I knew he knew. I figured this would give us a point of entry through which to talk a little baseball and enjoy ourselves.
No, it didn’t work that way. I could point out Gooden all I wanted, but Dad wasn’t biting. I could even note the presence of Deion Sanders, a football guy, on Atlanta (he went to the same high school as Stephanie, which always seemed worth remarking upon), but that didn’t make much of an impression either. My father wasn’t rude or anything. Once we got our diet colas, we sat. I’d bring up baseball and he’d nod or something. I’d say something snarky about these awful Mets and he wouldn’t react. He’d just sip his soda. I had a co-worker in those days who once described a Baptist wedding at which there was no alcohol served. Once the men attending the ceremony learned that dispiriting fact, he said “they just sat there — and waited” until they could leave. That was my father with me at a Mets game in 1993, the only time we went together as father and son, son and father. He sat down, crossed his legs and waited until he could leave.
The Braves rolled the Mets (surprise, surprise) and two-and-a-half hours after it started, it was mercifully over. He could uncross his legs and toss out his cup and we could get our train back to Great Neck. Few have been the days or nights when I spent an entire game wanting to get the hell out of Shea Stadium. This was one of them. The Mets could have rolled the Braves and I would have felt the same way.
But Super Bowl XXV in the kitchen with nothing but a bag of Styrofoam and the Hurricanes over the Huskers when Tom Osborne went for two and Wesley Walker catching that overtime TD from Ken O’Brien to make it 51-45 and the pizza we had delivered from the Capri and those weekday conversations we’ve filled with tidbits and observations from the previous weekend…how did those Coors Light commercials from a few years ago go again?
Here’s to football.
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