The blog for Mets fans
who like to read
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.
Got something to say? Leave a comment, or email us at faithandfear@gmail.com. (Sorry, but we have no interest in ads, sponsored content or guest posts.)
Need our RSS feed? It's here.
Visit our Facebook page, or drop by the personal pages for Greg and Jason.
Or follow us on Twitter: Here's Greg, and here's Jason.
|
by Greg Prince on 20 January 2008 10:33 am 
The most versatile t-shirt on earth just got a pretty good workout in Bermuda, the fourth nation in which The Numbers have been photographed (fifth, if we count Texas separately). The occasion was, as the sign in the background suggests, Bermuda International Race Weekend, and our wearer of the hour, Sharon “Inside Pitcher” Chapman, went the extra mile in completing the 10K course and spreading the gospel. “Several people watching the race asked about the numbers,” Sharon reports, “and were supportive when I told them that they were the Mets’ retired numbers.”
One assumes K26 has something to do with the race and is not part of an organized campaign to have a marker commemorate one or all of Dave Kingman’s 672 Met strikeouts.
If you want to show us what you’re doing in your Faith and Fear shirt, by all means, send us a picture and we’ll do our best to post it. And if you want your very own Faith and Fear shirt, just take a jog over here and order one up. Medal not included.
by Greg Prince on 18 January 2008 11:09 am 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.
8/29/93 Su Colorado 2-1 Tanana 4 36-43 L 6-1
Not to go all Top 500 on you for a second consecutive year, but I have to direct your attention to the tune at No. 372, for it is critical to understanding the point this week’s Flashback intends to make.
The song is “I’m Coming Home” as performed by Johnny Mathis. It didn’t mean anything to me upon its release in the fall of 1973 (though anything from the fall of 1973 generally evokes a pleasant baseball memory) but I heard it on a Wednesday night in the fourth week of June 1987 and it meant everything to me, particularly the refrain:
I’m goin’ home
Goin’ home
Tell someone to meet me
I’m comin’ home
It is not incidental that I heard it when I heard it. I was ten days removed from having last seen my brand new girlfriend whom I had met on her Summer in New York term of college. She had taken a train back to Florida. I had taken a trip up to Montreal to delay what I expected to be a long bout of loneliness. It kicked in that Wednesday night, but not in a bad way. Although Stephanie was more than a thousand miles away, I knew once and for all and without a doubt that with her I was home. I felt a state of belonging unlike any other I’ve ever known. More than 20 years later, I still feel it.
And yes, I feel it with the Mets. That’s a given. I feel it here on this blog and I feel it when I listen to Howie Rose and when I read Screwball for the umpteenth time and when I stare at the high-number 1972 Jerry Koosman card a very considerate friend sent me for my most recent birthday so my 1972 Tom Seaver card would have someone to warm up alongside. It’s a given, I would think, that the Mets, like my wife, are my home. With both, I am where I belong.
Having acclimated to the Mets through TV, radio and newspapers, I suppose I technically didn’t need my very own stadium to feel all that, but I am lucky enough to have had one. Of course Shea is a part of this dynamic of comfort, familiarity and belonging. That’s what these Fridays are all about in 2008, that’s the subtext of this upcoming season, that Shea is home.
It’s easy enough for me to have identified Shea Stadium as home for 35 years, dating back to my first game there in 1973. It went like this: I’m a Mets fan; the Mets play at Shea; Shea is home. But if I’m honest with myself, I know the first two decades or so of my relationship to the ballpark had a bit of a wannabe quality to them.
Shea was the home of the Mets, absolutely, but it was just a place I got to visit a few times a season, first because nobody was volunteering to take me, then because I didn’t make it my business to go very often. From ’73 through ’92, I never went to more than seven games in a single season. It’s hard to believe I wasted my teens and twenties doing anything else, but apparently I did. I loved going to Shea then, but it was a place that on some level of my soul I felt I was just passing through.
Then came my thirties and I came home.
The people responsible for directing me where I belonged were the people who wanted as little to do with it as possible when I was younger. My family, agnostic at best to our national pastime, decided it would be a fine thing to round up 15 pairs of tickets and present them to me as a 30th birthday present on New Year’s Eve 1992. Their sense of mathematics was poetic (15 X 2 = 30). Their sense of timing would, however, seem unfortunate (1993 = 59-103).
I’ve been kind of chortling for 15 years now that that was some kind of present, a semi-access pass for the worst Met season since 1965, that I should feel fortunate that my father, my sister and my brother-in-law liked me because if they didn’t, I imagine the present would have been 30 pairs of tickets. But I think I’m ready to step off that easy-laugh bandwagon. I think I’m glad I was at Shea as much as I was in 1993, even if it involved watching the 1993 Mets as much as I did.
1993 was the year I came home to Shea. 1993 was the year I stopped feeling like a visitor, like a guest, like a tourist. 1993 was, through repetition and because there was so much elbow room, when I started feeling truly at home at Shea. I could stretch out, put my feet up and not have to ask where the bathroom was or if anyone minded if I used it. The lay of the land would become so familiar as to become second-nature across five months of dismal baseball. Whatever residual self-consciousness I carry with me in public places that tend to intimidate me wore away. I’d always called Shea home. 1993 was when I began to mean it.
I’d say it took the entire season, at least my portion of it, to gain the experience necessary to clinch my sense of 100% belonging. I wound up going to 16 games in 1993 (my record of 6-10 an eerily accurate reduction-facsimile of the overall 59-103 mark, so it wasn’t like they were singling me out for punishment), the last of them at the end of August. That was the day I would pinpoint as my finally being all moved in. I would have to deem it a banner day.
Or, better yet, Banner Day.
No bedsheets were harmed in the course of this milestone in self-discovery. Banner Day was one of those dates that had intoxicated me from afar, the way oodles of fans would materialize from behind the centerfield fence between games of a doubleheader, how wave after wave would march upon the sacred track, how the faith never waned, how when I was 16 and the Mets were crap, there was a banner that insisted “AIN’T NO STOPPIN’ US NOW” even though, clearly, our forward progress had long been kicked into reverse. But Banner Day was no time for a reality check. I had to see one of those Days one of these days.
My Banner Day, thanks to my foresightful brother-in-law (he selected the 15 pairs and took great care to find me all the best promotions) was August 29. For the third time in 1993, I secured the company of my wife for a Mets game. I’m pretty sure I had promised back on New Year’s Eve that she would not be my default companion every time out, especially on the chilly nights, but this occasion required no persuasion. It was Banner Day. Banner Day had been featured in “An Amazin’ Era,” set to the tune of Petula Clark’s “Sign Of The Times”. Stephanie liked Petula Clark. Stephanie liked nonviolent tribal rites. Stephanie liked art. Stephanie even liked the Mets if I didn’t assault her with too much strategy or trivia. How could she not like Banner Day?
The scheduled doubleheader was dead as the dodo by ’93 (just as well for my purposes, as I’m trying to imagine a world in which my wife consents to attend two events of any kind in a single day), so the parade would precede the 3:10 start. So we wouldn’t miss a single word of laundry-markered encouragement, we arrived nice and early and made our way to our Row A seats in loge, roughly parallel to first base.
Alas, they were ruined. It had rained some the night before and those blue seats had turned to white. The mezzanine found a way to leak heavily on them and, though it was now bright and sunny, continued to do so. Our seats were unsittable.
You know how useless your Shea ushers are? Not when they sniff opportunity, they’re not. Standing in front of our seats, we were approached. Look, I said to the man in orange trim. These are not banner seats. What can be done?
Usherdom kicked into action. The man ushered us to another man in uniform and, for a convenience fee of a dollar, we were handed off. Our new man was a higher-up armed with a walkie-talkie, and he ushered us to undamaged seating: Loge Section 1, Row G, Seats 7 and 8. Another cash consideration was consummated to complete the transaction.
These were the best seats I’d ever had at Shea. Not the closest I ever was, but for scope and breadth of the field, they were quite unMetlike in that they couldn’t be beat. Plus, my literally fair lady heartily endorsed the shade we’d be in. Far back enough to avoid the foul balls she forever feared, close enough so that Ryan Thompson wouldn’t be a rumor (as opposed to his talent, which was never proven).
Down went our butts. Out came the banners. Sanguinity was in abundance. There were hundreds of placards passing before us. I expected maybe a dozen in these, the dog days of a dog season, but no. You tell Mets fans they can walk the Shea track, they will at the very least feign optimism. Maybe they’ll even mean it. Me, my banner would have probably proclaimed…
1993: I KENT TAKE THIS ANYMORE!
…but like I said, I didn’t participate. I was just happy to be there.
That was the key to the day: I was happy — immersed in a pool of happiness deeper than a 1993 Mets fan could possibly anticipate. I had the great seats and of course the greatest of seatmates. We watched the banners flutter by and then we watched Frank Tanana’s pitches do the same. Of course the Mets lost, 6-1 to the expansion yet somehow superior Rockies. Of course they bowed without a fight, taking barely more than two hours to sink 40 games under .500. Of course I didn’t care. I was numb to the losing by the end of August. I had gotten used to it in that sad whaddayagonnado? fashion any sane fan adopts when a 1993 rolls around.
Yet the game wasn’t the point of this sunny afternoon in loge. Even the bucket list accomplishment of taking in one Banner Day before management unceremoniously abandoned this proudest of Mets traditions wasn’t. It was that feeling that I was where I was supposed to be, joined for the afternoon with whom I was supposed to be joined, doing what I was supposed to be doing. I was watching the Mets with Stephanie at Shea Stadium like it was no big deal.
Believe me, though. It was.
And not incidentally, Happy Birthday come Sunday to the woman who has brought me a passel of banner days since May 11, 1987.
by Jason Fry on 16 January 2008 5:15 am Don Cardwell, one of the Miracle Mets’ elder statesmen, died Monday at 72.
It’s been that kind of offseason: Most of the headlines the Mets make are because there are fewer of them, and not because three or four are headed to Minnesota for Johan Santana. Jim Beauchamp died shortly before New Year’s; now Cardwell. What news do we have otherwise? Well, Angel Pagan has come back to the fold in what Bill Veeck used to call a dog-and-cat trade — I’ll trade my utility guy for your utility guy so the papers will have something to write about and the fans will have something to chew on in the barbershops for a few days.
(Actually I was pathetically excited to hear Pagan was returning — he was the phenom on the inaugural edition of the Brooklyn Cyclones, the one the girls would yell loudest for, with that goofy-in-English name that sounded like something a bunch of suburban punk kids would call their crappy band. I’d been warned, as a newcomer to this short-season A-ball thing, that at most two or three guys might make the big leagues in any capacity. Pagan had some pop and some speed and a certain way of gliding around the bases that made me imagine it would be him. Now, I suppose, it shall be.)
I never saw the ’69 Mets play (OK, I did but I was five months old when they won), so as a geeky Met fan on Long Island I did the only thing I could: I learned them by rote, assembling them from little snippets of biography I read in quickie books borrowed from the library or found in used bookstores. I was a kid, so the portraits I assembled were odd bordering on random: They mixed obvious baseball descriptions with personal stories, and often prominently featured words and concepts I was just learning. For example: Tom Seaver was the phenom, who’d bulked up in Fresno moving boxes (some of which contained big spiders) and in the Marines, played in Alaska, wound up in a lottery, and married Nancy, who was beautiful and blonde and wore something called a tam o’shanter in the stands, where she was not afraid of Orioles fans.
See what I mean? And Tom Seaver was easy, because he was Tom Seaver — still around while I was falling in love with the Mets and devouring every bit of their history that I’d missed. Most of the others were gone, and thus not so simple to fix in memory. Grote was hard-nosed, muttered at umpires and thought the writer who said the Mets had as much chance of winning as men did of landing on the moon had insulted the team. Swoboda had once got a batting helmet stuck on his feet but despite that was smart, had beaten Steve Carlton with two home runs, had a Chinese grandfather and you pronounced his name “Suh-boda” even though that was wrong. Nolan Ryan soaked his fingers in pickle brine and was now very good. Ed Charles wrote poetry and was nicknamed the Glider. Tug McGraw was a flake, which was a baseball term, gave his teammates haircuts, and his brother Hank had been a Met minor-leaguer. Tommie Agee and Cleon Jones were from Mobile. Rod Gaspar’s name had eventually been twisted into “Ron Stupid” by Frank Robinson and the rest of the Orioles, which might have been one reason they got what they deserved. Jack DiLauro was the guy you’d forget the first time around.
Don Cardwell, hmm. He was older, had been a Phillie and a Cub and a Pirate. Swingman. Helpful to the younger pitchers. Bigger than Cal Koonce, with whom I otherwise got him confused. Not a lengthy or terribly flashy biography, but then that’s the life of a swingman as put together after the fact by a child.
And yet, unfairly, Cardwell also became the name I connected with an important and thoroughly unwelcome loss of baseball innocence: These guys wearing the same uniform didn’t always get along.
The root of that is a tiny incident, one the principals invariably laughed off in the retelling: On an airplane in the summer of ’69 (when Bryan Adams was freaking nine, by the way, that Canadian faker), Swoboda — my favorite Met whom I never saw play — and Cardwell got into a dispute over Swoboda’s general Swobodaness and his wearing love beads. (I didn’t know what love beads were when I first read that; truth be told, I’m not sure I do now.) Cardwell objected to the love beads or tore them off, and eventually wound up taking a swing at his teammate.
No harm was done, but for a baseball-obsessed kid it was an eye-opener. How was this possible? Baseball players wore the same uniform, they had road roomies, they went to battle together, they slapped hands and hugged after home runs and once in a very great while they got to cover each other and anyone else in range with champagne, which looked like it would be incredibly fun to do. And now you’re telling me there are guys who do this and don’t get along, who even once in a while try to punch each other over love beads, whatever those are? I was shocked.
To reiterate: Cardwell, by all accounts, was an awfully nice guy. (And he got traded to the Cubs and threw a no-hitter in his first start, which is insanely cool.) It’s ridiculous to have the kind of little disagreement that probably happens all the time on planes and buses during a long season surgically attached to him. But it got wired that way when I was a kid, and I’m powerless to change it: Ever since I read that ages ago in some forgotten book, Don Cardwell has been the face of intramural dust-ups. Whether it’s Rey Ordonez and Rey Sanchez fighting on the bus or Darryl hitting the cutoff man on Picture Day or everybody abusing Gregg Jefferies, when I hear about stuff like that, the first thing that pops into my head, always, is “love beads.”
by Greg Prince on 14 January 2008 8:57 pm Last week when I was very sick, my friend Joe Dubin, a charter member of the New Breed, cheered me up as he is wont to do by sending me a copy of an old Mets radio broadcast of a game I recently wrote about but missed the first time around. I returned the favor by transmitting my cold to him via e-mail. To make it up to him, I'd like to share with you something he shared with me last year, a lovely stream of recollections regarding the new ballpark in Queens…the first time such an edifice was constructed.
Feel better, Joe D. — and thanks for your memories.
Drove by Shea yesterday and was able to get a quick glimpse of Citi Field's construction site while heading to and from the Grand Central Parkway. There it was, the old making way for the new. It made me think of the first time I saw Shea 43 years ago.
Remember your reaction the first time you saw it? I'm not thinking as much when entering the park but rather that experience when first approaching it close up, either from the expressway or pulling into the Willets Point station.
My experience might be a little bit different than yours since I first saw Shea when it was the newest ballpark in America and light years away from the old Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium and anything east of Dodger Stadium (except maybe D.C. Stadium).
Games started at 8:05 P.M. so it must have been around 7:15 P.M. when I got my first glimpse sitting in the car as Dad drove onto the Whitestone Expressway. It was overcast and the sky was dark, allowing the stadium lighting to be seen in its full brilliance. The upper deck lights were much brighter when looking straight at them than they are today. Most of the exterior was open (unlike now, when it's partially covered by blue painted masonry with bulbs arranged to look like ballplayers), so the entire perimeter was a silhouette of neon lights coming from both the outside and the ramps and pedestrian walkways peaking through from within.
I'm glad my first trek to Shea was at night because the effect would not have been as dramatic or beautiful without that gorgeous lighting. My first two words were “holy s–t”. I couldn't believe the ultra-modern stadium I was seeing! It was like being in Disney's Tomorrowland.
We parked, purchased our general admission tickets, took the escalators to the upper deck and sat behind third. All I had ever seen on TV was a Shea drenched in shades of black and white. This park had tiers of yellow, orange, blue and green seats with a rainbow of lights protruding onto the white shell covering the scoreboard. We saw color slides of each player from the square screen on the top.
About the game? Well, it was a Wednesday evening in late July against the L.A. Dodgers, the middle of a three-day on-field celebration of Casey Stengel's 74th birthday. The Mets scored three in the bottom of the first off Joe Moeller but the flood gates opened in the top of the second and my first experience was a washout!
Dad was unprepared for inclement weather and purchased from the concession stands a clear, gray-tinted plastic poncho (with no Met logo or hood) stored in a small travel case to protect him from the rain. Harry M. Stevens came well prepared back then; at that time there was no such thing as a Met Shop behind home plate selling all types of apparel.
Probably because the event was so impressionable I remember so many of the details, including the game being stopped by rain in the top of the second. Or, maybe it's because the Mets scored three runs in the bottom of the first and actually were ahead of the Dodgers 3-0 when the rains came (how often did the Mets lead L.A. by that margin back then?).
Well, the game was a washout but not the memory of my first visit to Shea. That's how I'll always remember Shea — no DiamondVision, no Budweiser advertisement filling two-thirds of the old scoreboard, Jane Jarvis, the green outfield wall.
When it opens, Citi Field will be gorgeous to see but somehow I doubt I will experience anything like the awe I had when I first saw Shea, for I'm obviously much older. I will see the construction as it progresses and despite all the new conveniences, the park itself won't be as unique compared to its contemporaries as Shea was in 1964.
I'm sorry you were too young to have experienced Shea when it first opened and the exciting, unbelievable first glance as seen through the eyes of a 13-year-old at a time when most ballparks were ancient and the world was not surrounded by the Internet, cable, computer video and other forms of communication that today take away the thrills experienced by the 13-year-old in each of us.
by Greg Prince on 14 January 2008 2:36 am John Strubel of MetsNet, a terrific and comprehensive site devoted to all things orange and blue, was kind enough to invite me on MetsNet Radio Saturday for a little chat regarding various aspects of Mets nostalgia and a touch of potential trade talk. The most interesting thing about the session to me is that I don't sound nearly as bad after a week of marathon sneezing, coughing and noseblowing as I thought I would. Pull me out of a sickbed in the middle of winter to discuss the 1973 yearbook cover, and I apparently get well in a hurry.
You can listen to the show here. I come on at about the 42:00 mark and go for about 15 minutes (good guests precede me as well).
by Greg Prince on 11 January 2008 3:29 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.
7/25/07 W Pittsburgh 14-12 Gl@v!ne 15 189-153 W 6-3
No doubt that by Opening Day the Mets and the MTA will team to install a sturdy pole and a good strong rope to serve as a replacement for the subway platform extension they have torn down to make way for progress. So it’s not like something will be replaced by absolutely nothing. But something’s definitely missing with the removal of that extension, its staircases, even what we can rightly term the original rotunda in Flushing, Jackie Robinson’s emerging handiwork notwithstanding.
It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t airy. It wasn’t efficient. But it was round and it was where everybody sooner or later gathered, either for a fleeting moment en route to baseball or for too long trying to cram your way past your fellow travelers in order to beat them home. The most time you ever spent purposefully in its unfriendly confines was to buy a MetroCard, hopefully before the game (good luck after). As token clerk postings go, the Shea Stadium cage would certainly have to be rated one of the more unique: placed literally in the middle of the action, lonely for several hours and then mad rushed at the end of the shift.
Yet there was a sense of place in that structure, genuine Shea Stadium iconography — older than the Home Run Apple and a touch more reliable. In reality, it didn’t work very well. In memory, all it has to be is there.
When you think of the platform extension, you’re likely to think of upstairs before you think of downstairs. Even if you never once took a 7 train to Shea Stadium, you knew about upstairs from watching TV, from those inevitable “the crowds are still coming in” shots. Maybe all that foot traffic was why the orange seats seemed so unoccupied as tonight’s starter took his warmups.
The platform was also your ticket to free baseball, or at least a healthy glimpse for the price of a subway fare. My happiest moment as a press-junketing attendee of the U.S. Open was listening to the early innings of a Mets-Padres game during the one match I consented to sit through and then bolting back toward the subway to do what always seemed so exotic: watching the Mets from behind the scoreboard. “Just one pitch,” I told Stephanie. “I want to see one pitch from up here.” On that pitch, Lance Johnson doubled. Had an unobstructed view of him pulling into second, courtesy of that platform. With that, I turned away toward the train, partially absolved for what I considered the sin of going to the tennis stadium while the Mets were in action.
If I was running late for a game, I’d usually ditch the platform and come out on the other side of Roosevelt Avenue. I don’t know if it was any faster, but it seemed slightly more direct. The rest of the time, I grew to enjoy the ritual of the platform extension. Though one friend sniffed that it was best left for “tourists,” I’d say welcome aboard to anybody touring Queens. The platform presented one of the most picturesque vistas in New York. I wonder how many photographs through the years have been explained away with “…and this is Shea Stadium where we got off the train — you can kind of see it behind that big guy in the Mets cap carrying the bag.”
Sometimes I’d stop and window shop at the kiosk that used to be a newsstand and peruse the pins and the pennants. I don’t think I bought more than a couple of items there all these years, but I liked the idea that there was commerce up there. The only other thing you could get your hands on was a Jews For Jesus pamphlet. I preferred the pins.
Once down the staircase and out the turnstile (which, despite its physical removal in ’07, I never once didn’t brace to push upon completion of my descent), it was out of the dark and into the light of approaching Shea, melting into the army of those similarly avoiding the aggressive entreaties of MasterCard, Newsday and Kozy Shack. That was generally that until the ride home, when the less you saw of the rotunda and the staircase and the platform extension, the better.
Except for a little arrangement I had worked out with my friend Mike Steffanos, a.k.a. Mike of Mike’s Mets. When he and I decided to make our maiden mutual voyage to Shea Stadium in 2006, Mike had been out of practice at gamegoing. He lives in distant Connecticut and, I believe, has a life, thus he wasn’t instantly familiar with the nooks and crannies I favored as specific meeting spots outside Shea. How about, he asked, if we meet by the subway entrance? He knew for sure where that was.
I thought about it for a moment. You can do that? You can meet somebody there? I guessed you could, if you got there early enough not to be trampled.
It worked! I don’t know why I would have thought it wouldn’t have. Just seemed too simple, I guess. Yet at six o’clock for a 7:10 start, there aren’t that many people around. You can surely pick out your friends.
Late last July, our second game together, I arrived a little before him and used the opportunity to traipse across the truncated right field parking lot and case as much of the new joint as I could. Citi Field was finally taking shape. It was the first time I saw two ballparks where I had always seen only one plus a construction site, where I will always see two, no matter how many there actually are. Curiosity satisfied for the time being, I hustled back to the subway entrance — the rotunda — and found Mike loping down the last of his steps. A local had masqueraded as an express, he apologized, otherwise he would have been here sooner.
No problem, I said. After seeing the Future Home of the New York Mets, I was quite comforted to find a familiar face in this very familiar space. Of all the things I thought of in December after learning of the demise of the platform extension, the one that stuck with me the most was Mike and I have to find a new place to meet.
by Greg Prince on 8 January 2008 9:20 am I got another asinine question the other day about the Hall of Fame. You think that I played my career because I'm worried about the damn Hall of Fame? I could give a rat's ass about that, also.
—Roger Clemens
Dave Parker: He was a Yes for me last year, but I just wasn't feeling him this year.
—Ken Davidoff
I don't know if Dave Parker is close to getting into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but I hope someone tells him if he misses by one vote, it's because at least one cavalier baseball columnist entrusted with evaluating the length and breadth of his career “isn't feeling him” for 2008 the way he was for 2007. Nice way to have your stature determined for the ages.
Yup, I'm with Roger Clemens on this one. I don't give a rat's ass about the Hall of Fame either.
I used to. I used to live a little for this day in January when we heard who was deemed immortal and who would have to wait his turn. I got excited on behalf of those I rooted for and found myself gratified for those I admired.
Now I don't much care. I might again someday, but today's announcement will leave me cold one way or the other. After watching year after year the varied machinations evolve so they could effectively conspire to bar Buck O'Neil and continue to keep out Gil Hodges yet welcome Walter O'Malley, I am so over the Hall of Fame.
Except that it's given me an excuse to think about the only former Met on today's ballot, Shawon Dunston. Regarding his Hall of Fame qualifications, I've got them right here.
With his and our team three outs from the saddest of eliminations, Shawon Dunston led off the bottom of the fifteenth inning of the fifth game of the 1999 National League Championship Series, worked Kevin McGlinchy for eleven unsatisfying pitches and, on the dozenth he saw, singled. Then he stole second. He made it to third on an Edgardo Alfonzo sacrifice and scored when Todd Pratt walked with the bases loaded.
That made the score of the fifth game of that NLCS 3-3. Shawon crossed home plate and the Mets weren't losing anymore. The Mets were no longer dead in the water that poured over Shea Stadium on the night of October 17, 1999. With a little help from his friends Fonzie and Tank (and Matt Franco and John Olerud, each of whom walked somewhere in there), Shawon rescued the Mets. Moments before our notion that a grand slam and a single could never be mistaken for a unified entity went the way of “you got your chocolate in my peanut butter,” Shawon Dunston was our miracle in the rain.
Then Robin Ventura completed God's Work and that was marvelously that, at least for a couple more days. But Ventura — and this takes zero away from his own mighty swing — was creating on a fresh canvas of Mets 3 Braves 3. He could have (shudder) grounded into a double play and the Mets would have been alive, if only for the sixteenth, but alive nonetheless. Robin did not have to raise Lazarus. Dunston did the heaviest lifting.
Shawon Dunston's career began long before October 17, 1999 and would go on a few years thereafter. He wasn't a Met for much of it. He was a Met that Sunday, which is all my Hall of Fame needs to know. Shawon between the raindrops, refusing to walk, refusing to strike out, insisting on a hit, demanding another base, snatching for the precious time being from the Atlanta Braves a pennant they were sure was theirs…that's immortal to me. That and the eternally enduring eulogy he delivered for a championship season died young two nights later at Turner Field. The cumulative effect of Shawon Dunston at the climax of Game Five and immediately following Game Six puts him in the Hall of Fame of my mind.
Cooperstown can be somebody else's cause today. The Baseball Writers Association of America surely did not give Shawon Dunston 75% of its support. I'd be surprised if he gets the 5% that would keep him lingering on the ballot another year. And I find myself completely unable to pony up a rat's ass that he will be so lightly dismissed. I saw Shawon Dunston lead off the fifteenth inning. It's been eight years, two months and three weeks. I'm still feeling him.
For every Mets fan who properly cherishes the final glorious throes of 1999, your next move is to click through to The Ballclub's epic nine-part series that recalls that October in gorgeous and expansive detail.
by Greg Prince on 8 January 2008 9:13 am 
To be historically accurate, this poorly scanned picture of a very happy Shawon Dunston wasn’t from Game Five of the 1999 NLCS. But the feeling is very much in sync with how all of us were feeling when he crossed home plate in the bottom of the fifteenth inning to knot the score at 3 and bring the home team back to life. Shawon won’t make the Hall of Fame today, but for any Mets fan who lived through the late afternoon and night of October 17, 1999, that’s surely a technicality as regards his immortality.
by Greg Prince on 5 January 2008 12:13 am 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.
8/15/81 Sa Philadelphia 2-1 Leach 1 5-13 W 3-1
It was probably just a coincidence that the Mets never seemed to win when I went to see them. But at the age of 18, I didn’t think so, not after what felt like a lifetime of watching them lose in person.
It wasn’t a lifetime. But it did feel like it. My Sheagoing started with a loss in 1973, when I was 10, followed by three wins across ’74 and ’75, the cumulative effect of which imbued me with a false sense of confidence that the Mets and I were winners.
Then puberty struck.
1976: 0-1.
1977: 0-1.
1978: 0-1.
1979: Two losses, a win and then another loss for a 1-3 personal mark that fit all too snugly with the 63-99 Zeitgeist.
1980: 0-3.
This is where I began to get suspicious. It was me, wasn’t it? This was The Magic Is Back year, but Magic took a hike when I was in Flushing. The Mets lost every time I showed up, even during the deceptively uplifting portion of 1980.
They were never going to win when I went, were they?
1981 began: A loss…another loss…then a long and boring strike that coincided with the end of my senior year of high school, thus costing me the trivia question of what the Mets were doing on the day I graduated (answer: nothing, absolutely nothing). There would no official baseball at Shea Stadium until the middle of August. I raced out there the first night it was available.
A loss.
God damn it! The Mets never win when I go! What is this now? It’s seven losses in a row, twelve of thirteen. I’m 1-12 since starting 3-1, for crissake, a lifetime mark of 4-13. I might as well be Pete Falcone.
But there’s a reason you don’t stop banging your head against a wall: the promise that one time you’ll bang it and it won’t feel quite as bad as the approximately dozen times prior.
That time, for me, was August 15, 1981. We won. The Mets won. I was there for a Mets win for the first time in eight tries, for the first time in more than two years, eligible to start my first winning streak since I was 12.
We won. The Mets won. They beat the Phillies. I was there. Terry Leach made the first start of his Major League career. This poststrike callup of whom my friend Joel and I in loge knew nothing outpitched Nino Espinosa. Espinosa was the Met starter and loser the day in ’78 my lifetime record dipped below .500, where it would wallow for the next two decades. 1978 was the year before Nino and his surfeit of hair was traded to Philadelphia for the presumably solid Richie Hebner. Hebner gave an emphatic two-armed salute to Joel and me and 6,600 other fans of the reluctant Met third baseman on one of many 1979 afternoons that would prove futile for him, the team, Joel, me and the rest of the scattered faithful (Richie had elicited the disapproval of our small congregation by waving a Brave ground ball through to left field the way a Bluetooth-wearing, clipboard-wielding bouncer at a hot club might signal Paris Hilton that no, of course she doesn’t have to wait outside with the riff-raff). Espinosa for Hebner apparently wasn’t the steal I predicted it would be. On this particular Saturday night in 1981, however, Nino’s surrender of an RBI double to Doug Flynn and a pinch-sac fly to Rusty Staub in the seventh inning to make it Mets 3 Phillies 1 was sufficient compensation for having endured Annus Hebnerilis.
I didn’t know Nino Espinosa was making the final start of his Major League career the same night Terry Leach was making his first. I doubt Nino knew. I just knew I was thrilled that the bushiest afro I had ever seen on a Met now belonged to a pitcher who sported a wavy red P set against powder-blue pajamas, a pitcher who allowed the Mets a go-ahead run and insurance run as I watched from a couple of hundred feet away. Nothing personal against the late Nino Espinosa. I just wanted a visiting pitcher in my midst to be saddled with an L.
Pete Falcone, my go-to example of indifferent Met pitching circa 1981, picked up the W. Me and him, actually. His first W since early May. My first since the late 1970s.
We won. The Mets won. I was there. I had three responses to the event.
1) Following Neil Allen’s two-inning, no-hit save (Bowa, Unser, Rose, Matthews, McBride, Schmidt…this kid could pitch!), I babbled so long and excitedly to Joel out of Shea and into the lot about having finally witnessed a win that I entered the Grand Central without bothering to turn on the headlights in my borrowed family Ford Granada until the motorist behind me was kind enough to let me know of my literal dimness via several gentle reminders.
2) After I dropped off Joel, I headed to Laurel Luncheonette to buy two Dunkin’ Donuts. I guess I was hungry, but mostly I didn’t want to go home right away lest the feeling of the win evaporate too quickly (good thing they invented blogging to serve as a jubilation-pastry substitute).
3) After trawling for highlights on every 11 o’clock newscast to prove I saw what I thought I saw, I went up to my room and pulled out from the bottom drawer of the tackily contact-papered bureau in the corner of my bedroom (my mother fancied herself an interior decorator) a stenographer’s notebook. It was left over from my high school newspaper editing days, pilfered from a metal cabinet where our journalism teacher hid from us everything we might need to produce a high school newspaper. To his never-ending consternation, two of our staffers were expert lock-pickers. I probably took the notebook because I could.
Up until now, everything I knew about the games I saw at Shea Stadium had been drawn from what I was told was legendarily unusual memory: the first loss in ’73 was 7-1 to the Astros; the nosedive that started in ’76 came at the expense of an unsupported Tom Seaver gem; two of the three disgraces in ’80 transpired in July. This, tonight, was my 18th game. I figured I wasn’t going to remember forever the details of each game I had been to, so I ought to write down the essentials: when I went, whom we played, who threw the first pitch for us and, of course, the final score. This was a pleasant task to undertake on August 15, 1981, a 3-1 win against the Phillies behind rookie Terry Leach, even if I was compelled to record the 17 games and 13 losses that preceded it.
By continuing to write down exactly what happened after I came home from Shea Stadium, I would know now and forever how every game I ever attended went just by looking. When I would get curious down the road as to what day of the week those games took place, I could add that information. When I wondered what the Mets’ record was against a particular opponent when I saw them play that team, that, too, would be easy enough to pencil in. Same for deciphering how often I saw one Met starter or another. Finally, should the running tally in my head ever betray me, I could add a notation regarding “my record” at Mets games.
I stayed up until late Saturday night became early Sunday morning and stared at that first page of a spiral bound steno pad that I would spend the next quarter-century and then some filling in dutifully until there would be just enough space left for a final season of Shea Stadium. I studied each line representing a past disappointment and marveled that every once in a while I got to come home unabashedly happy.
by Greg Prince on 5 January 2008 12:11 am 
In this notebook is scrawled the history of every official Major League Baseball game I’ve ever attended. Each Flashback Friday in 2008 will be devoted to culling its numbers and telling its tales, starting with the night in 1981 I began filling in its blanks.
|
|
Comments closed | | 
