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Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans. Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here. Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here. 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. |
Things seemed to go well with our first order of Faith and Fear in Flushing “numbers” shirts from PrintMojo, so we put in a second, bigger order. So if you want one, click here. (As before, if anything's amiss, email us and we'll see what we can do.) If you're unfamiliar with the numbers shirt, big ol' photo here. Sorry I'm ugly. Not to get the new year off on a needlessly negative foot, but I'm not a fan of January. Mind you, I don't like December all that much given that I spend so much of it waiting for the old, inevitably disappointing year to end (while quietly resenting that millions throng Times Square to count down to the moment my birthday is over), but January's too full of consequence-laden unknowables to make me welcome it with any sense of ease. I'm not big on the near future in the generic sense. Never have been, likely never will be. Don't trust it, really. Give me some year in the past that can't hurt me anymore except maybe by way of repressed memory — and let's face it, I don't repress much. Plus it's cold and it could snow and who needs the flu? But anyway, I said I don't want be a downer right out of the box, so here's a reason to embrace January: The Mets sometimes do something. Good even. It doesn't seem like they will right now, not after a month when their big acquisition was no particular Brewer, their big photo-op showcased some random fan named Schneider displaying the personalized jersey he presumably won in a contest and their big goodwill gesture the decision to hike ticket prices just because they could. And it wasn't like they were covering themselves in brilliance in the preceding months. So let us, as I do when confronted with the uncertainty that lies ahead, take a bit of comfort in what has transpired in the relatively to authentically distant past. Duaner Sanchez, John Maine and Carlos Beltran were all January babies where the Mets were concerned. Recent January babies, in fact. All they took, respectively, were Jae Seo, Kris Benson and a Brinks Truck of money…three great moves by the same GM who has brought you Matt Wise and little else of late. Bernard Gilkey's one good Met year started in a January 1996 deal. Tim Teufel, half a World Series platoon, came in a swap for Billy Beane in January 1986, one accomplished without Billy Beane ripping off the Mets. Rafael Santana, whose autographed bat I treasure, showed up as a free agent right around the time Tom Seaver was lost, in January 1984. Not much in the way of compensation for compensation, but Ralphie did start at short for a world champion, occasionally alongside Teuf. And I do have that bat (though I received it during a December). OK, the January haul doesn't add up to much historically. But it does present proof that the hot stove doesn't absolutely freeze prior to pitchers & catchers, that there's still hope that something positive might get done in the course of the next four weeks and that there is no longer a free agent compensation pool to which we could cleverly expose Maine. If all else fails, there's always February. I can't say for sure how much of it was the work of actual Mets fans like you who came here on purpose, how much of it was the misfortune of music-minded Googlers typing in the phrase “Top 500 Songs” and finding my Convoy-driven list instead of that from a more familiar source or how much of it had to do with those endlessly sticky phantom trackbacks from offshore casinos and easy-mortgage refinanciers that never seem to go away, but Faith and Fear in Flushing's total page views for 2007 added up to 2,162,094. 2,162,094…it's even got 162 in the middle…a full season. More than some teams managed to play all-out in 2007. Statistically, that's almost 50% more than the page views we garnered in 2006 when we had a surefire division title in our pocket from the start of the year and several weeks worth of hopeful playoff talk to maintain your autumnal interest rather than loads of lamentation with which to fill up October, November and December. Numerically, it looks like a lot, whatever it means. From our hearts, it rates a simple wow from Jason and me. That and a brimming bowl of gratitude to everybody who makes Faith and Fear a regular stop on their baseball rounds. We'll do what we can in 2008 to keep you coming back. Thank you. Today was the day when, in Met terms, I joined the numerical ranks of Tug McGraw and Pedro Martinez and latter-day John Franco when he was at his most lovable. Today, after a lifetime of being no older than 44, I wear a 45 on my back. I seem to recall a conversation between Lou Grant and Mary Richards in which Lou, bemoaning his suddenly landing in his late 40s, lamented that if he were in politics, they’d call him the kid. I’d rather not think about what 45 the age actually signifies. I’d prefer to think of what 45 among Mets means. It means Tug and Pedro and some Franco. So overwhelming is the collective imagery of these three iconic pitchers in that number that it’s easy to forget others wore it completely without distinction. Only when I scrunch my eyes closed tight do I see Brent Gaff or Paul Gibson or Jerry DiPoto in 45. And then I cringe. Only with an old link to a great site (soon to be, no doubt, a great book) do I see the fleeting forgettableness of Goose Gozzo or the three pointless weeks of John Candelaria or the frittered-to-Montreal promise of Jeff Reardon, all of whom wore 45 as Mets. And then I cringe some more. I do see Rick Baldwin, 45 directly after the Tugger, without the aid of any Mets By The Numbers ticklers, but that’s just the way I am after 45 years. And then I cringe just a little more. The point is when I think 45, I think three of the great pitchers and personalities in Mets history. I think of things not bad — not Gaff, not Gibson, not Gozzo; just good. So as I look back for a moment on my 45th year, which conveniently coincided with 2007, I also think only good. Or at least not bad. Not bad 2007 was, in a baseball way, Worst C-word in Baseball History notwithstanding. I mean not bad for me as I was living most of it. I had a pretty darn not bad time, what with the sitting in plastic seats of orange, blue, green or red some three-dozen times and enjoying the company of so many of whom I think so highly. It was not bad making true friends from screen names. It was not bad forging ever closer bonds over baseball games. It was not bad writing and reading back and forth from April to September…from the middle of February to the end of October…from the first of the year to last of the year, actually. It was not bad being a Mets fan with you in 2007, even in the period best described as not all that spicy and far too brown. It is not bad at all — win, lose or collapse — sharing this year’s worth of a lifetime of baseball with you. May the next one turn out just a wee bit better for the lot of us. ADDENDUM: In this afternoon’s Sun Bowl in El Paso, it was, despite a feisty first half, Oregon 56 USF 21. The Bulls finish their once-promising 2007 at 9-4. Baseball — accept no substitutes.
We don’t use a lot of mustard around here, so I’m not surprised what we have in the fridge is, like me today, kind of old. I took the mustard out the weekend before last and noticed that the Gulden’s people had warned me that it was BEST BY SEP132007. Funny, I thought. If the season had ended by SEP132007, then the Mets would have won the National League East by seven games. Instead they kept playing for a little while longer. Well, the Phillies did anyway (which allowed them to ketchup). Moral: Always listen to your condiments. Realization #84,024 That You Are a Hopeless Met Geek: At the beginning of “I Am Legend,” the not-at-all-bad Will Smith postapocalyptic thriller Emily and I saw last night, we’re fed exposition about how an anticancer treatment becomes a virus that turns people into Yankee fans retarded, ultraviolent zombies who live in packs. We’re brought up to speed by watching a properly awkward give-and-take between a chirpy morning anchor and the researcher who created the anticancer treatment. During this interview, there’s a news crawl along the bottom, offering tidbits of news from that day in 2009. During that scene, this caught my eye: The Mets had signed young pitching prospect Thomas Baker to a four-year extension through 2013. Whoa! The Mets have a pitching prospect? He apparently hasn’t blown out an elbow? He’s good enough to lock up for four extra years! Never mind the bad stuff the trailer indicated was coming — this is exciting! But then I kept thinking. Hmm. I’ve never heard of him, so I assume Baker (who you know his teammates call “Bakie,” since Chris Berman was like a runaway virus that killed all the good nicknames) was a 2007, 2008 or 2009 draftee. But wait a minute. Why would the Mets extend him, then? Don’t they still control his rights? Was he a Super 2? Why not lock him up longer than 2013? Maybe he’s an El Duque-type refugee or a Japanese posting? WIth a name like Thomas Baker? Well, maybe his parents were expats. Or, I dunno, missionaries. That’s it — he was a missionary’s kid who grew up listening to Armed Forces Radio in the shadow of Mount Fuji and signed with a Japanese League team. That sounds awesome! So while Will Smith was hunting deer in Times Square and looking at the shattered Brooklyn Bridge and getting back to Washington Square Park by dark, I was paying fitful attention because I was still wondering about Thomas Baker. Then, later, when Smith explained that of those who contracted the virus, 90% died and 10% turned into zombies, and 1% of the population was immune but they pretty much all got eaten, I decided that was probably it for Thomas Baker, and I should stop worrying about him. (And David Wright and Jose Reyes, for that matter. Something tells me Michael Kay survived as a cannibal zombie, if he isn’t one already.) Shit, our whole team died or turned into zombies or got eaten, I thought. And if any Met’s left huddled in a bunker somewhere, it’s probably Schoeneweis. We never get a break. Yes, I am completely insane. I’m flipping around the dial a little after 8:30 this morning and what do I come upon? SNY is showing the Mets and Cubs, in Japan, from March 30, 2000. It was the top of the eleventh. Zeile is on first. Ordoñez is working out a walk. Mora comes up and walks as well. I know what’s coming next. And I’m getting quite sleepy thinking about it. Just as on March 30, 2000, I excitedly stifle a yawn as Benny Agbayani wallops a grand slam to dead center. It’s 5-1 Mets. I’m thrilled! I’m drowsy! It was déjà snooze all over again. How odd (and perhaps par for the Snigh course) that the first time this game is shown since early spring 2000, the Mets’ network of record shows it at approximately the same hour it was shown in New York originally. We had to get up before 5 in the blessed ayem for two mornings straight to catch our team open its season on the other side of the world almost eight years ago. We lost the first game on March 29 (Hampton’s shaky Met debut, burn the tape) but battled the Cubs well past daybreak on the 30th. Can’t tell you all the details of the second game because I nodded off in the middle innings on 3/30/00. Can’t tell you anything that happened before the eleventh on 12/30/07 because I had no idea this game had been on since six o’clock…when I was asleep. Of course I love being visited by my 2000 National League Champion buddies anytime, even early on a Sunday morning in late December (especially early on a Sunday morning in late December, in a way), but what’s with the stealth SNY debut? They’re finally cracking open the vault and they do it while most of their audience saws wood or, as a departed friend of the family once put it, cuts logs? Is showing your regularly scheduled installment of Beach Tennis so vital? Lest you think this was an aberration or even poetic Tokyo throwback scheduling, Monday morning you will want to rise and shine or at least record SNY from 6:00 AM to 8:30 AM when the Mets-Brewers game of May 23, 1998 is rebroadcast. I don’t have to tell you, savvy reader, what that date signifies, but for the record, that was Mike Piazza’s first game as a Met, when the ex-Marlin appeared out of the tunnel dazed and confused yet lashed the ball to right in his third at-bat to give birth to a much beloved era. Of course you want to show that with little advance warning at six in the morning. To be fair, SNY is rebroadcasting two other favorites later in day, the Ten-Run Inning of 2000 (1:00 PM) and, for all you New Year’s Eve revelers, the Subway Series game from 2006 in which David Wright drives home the winning run (7:00 PM). Of course the Ten-Run Inning was shown a couple of weeks ago and that Friday night Subway Series game is the only Met-Yankee affair whose images have been preserved, judging by how often SNY has aired it. I’m not sure why the stuff that’s been seen and seen again gets better timeslots, but as long as Street Games gets as many eyeballs as possible, I suppose we can all rest easy. Incidentally, 4:20 P.M. on December 31 marks the Baseball Equinox, the moment when we are as close to next season as last season. If indeed SportsNet New York is pouring on these Mets Classics and UltiMET Classics in its honor, then way to go, Channel 60 on my cable system. But when you go the trouble of dusting off games that have been lurking in darkness for nearly a decade, do you have to insist on having them compete with Sunrise Semester? Sesame Street came along a little too late to be of any use to me. It debuted while I was in first grade, when I already knew how to count, so my reaction to it was quit talking down to me, damn it (I also already knew how to curse). But because it was billed as this great educational breakthrough, our teachers in the West School on Maryland Avenue were directed to lead their classes down the hall to the one room with the one television in the building to make us watch Bert and Ernie and the rest of them on Channel 13 every now and again. It beat sitting at my desk and trying to explain for the umpteenth time to yet another suspicious classmate that I get to drink Grape Hi-C because I’m allergic to milk, but on the whole, after being shown repeatedly and redundantly the number 2… 2 hens… 2 spoons… 2 this… 2 that… …I’d rather have been watching Bugs Bunny. My wife, on the other hand, is a few years younger than I am and was at least a little indoctrinated into polite society by the Muppet machine. When the Children’s Television Workshop decided last year to release a collection of early episodes on DVD under the guise of Sesame Street: Old School, she wanted to check them out, partly to satisfy her video-historian impulse (though Stephanie, too, prefers Bugs Bunny), partly for good old nostalgia’s sake. She watched them and enjoyed them. I looked in on one or two eps and have to admit I got a larger kick out of them in my 40s than I did when I was in my Sesame-scornful single-digits. “These early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child,” according to a warning label attached to the box. I didn’t know counting had changed all that much in 35-plus years or that showing kids moldy television could do anything worse that bore them. Shoot, I wouldn’t have learned what war bonds and victory gardens were had not 1940s-era Bugs alluded to them regularly every afternoon on Channel 5. But whatever. We’re grown-ups, technically, so it was safe for us to see Volume 1 and the more recently released Volume 2. In the latter collection is the first test episode, shot in the summer of 1969. It was apparently aired on a handful of stations prior to Sesame Street‘s national premiere in November of that year. It’s a little ragged in comparison to what would become the CTW standard in the early ’70s, but it contains an unexpected element that in terms of learning to count is as timeless today as it was then. Zero. Zero no-hitters. In prehistoric Sesame Street Episode 1 is a segment in which a magician (in the service of promoting the letter ‘D’ somehow) tears up a newspaper — a copy of the Daily News — and conjures it back together. As I always do when I spy such a detail, I squinted to read the back page. Maybe there was a Met headline there. For example, in watching the DVD of Network last year, I was blown away when I noticed this back page of the Daily News from September 25, 1975: CUBS NIP METS IN 11TH, 1-0 Come to think of it, if Sesame Street was being created in the summer of 1969 when I was on my way to first grade, there could be an amazingly intriguing headline on the back page. I asked Stephanie to pause, pause some more and freeze the picture on the screen until I could get the best look I could. And there it was, from July 10, 1969: SEAVER PERFECT TILL 9TH This was too good or perhaps too horrible to be true. On the very first episode of the most revered educational television program in the history of the medium, one of the very first lessons anybody learned was that no matter how well a Met pitcher pitched, no matter how great the Met pitcher was, he could never, ever throw a no-hitter. Zero. Zero no-hitters. While the finer points of counting hens and spoons didn’t elude me in the summer of 1969, I was just young enough, 6-1/2 (when did we start dropping the fractions from our ages?) to have missed the Jimmy Qualls Game. Nevertheless after decades of reading about it — continually since I was 8-1/2 — I almost feel as if I saw it. I almost feel I was watching on the night of July 9 when, as Tom Seaver told it to Dick Schaap in The Perfect Game: With two outs to go for a perfect game, I picked my first pitch to Qualls carefully. Almost all my pitches had been working well, the rising and sinking fast balls, the fast and slow curves, even the slider. I decided to throw Qualls a sinker, but the ball didn’t sink. It came in fast, too high, almost waist-high, over the heart of the plate. Qualls swung and hit the ball to left-center field. Cleon Jones broke over from left field, Tommie Agee raced over from center, two of the fastest men on our club, and neither of them could reach the ball. It fell in, a clean single. “My perfect game,” Tom said, “was finished.” One. One hit. So began in earnest the Metropolitan Baseball Club of New York’s quest for its holiest grail. The gag that summer was man will land on the moon before the Mets win a World Series. Eleven days after that almost waist-high sinker, Neil Armstrong made that prediction come true. But 88 days after that (when my parents had the foresight to schedule for me an eye doctor appointment in the morning that conveniently kept me out of school the entire day), the Mets were officially no longer absurd and never would be again in quite the way they had been before Seaver flirted with perfection. That grail of a world championship, as unimaginable as it had to have been to those who were learning their M-E-T-S while I was still stuck on my A-B-C’s, was taken care of. Seven years after expansion, the Mets had won a Series. But 46 years deep into the franchise’s operation, there is still no no-hitter. Two world championships. Zero no-hitters. The dream has been torn to shreds by batters often no more magical than Jimmy Qualls dozens of times. Unlike that magician on that little-seen first installment of Sesame Street, there’s been nobody to weave the dream back together, not yet anyway. You learn to live with it. You learn to have that internal dialogue like the one Tom Seaver had with Nancy Seaver six minutes (according to The Year The Mets Lost Last Place) after perfection proved unattainable. TOM: What are you crying for? We won 4-0. NANCY: I guess a one-hit shutout is better than nothing. You constantly remind yourself that a W is a W, that the H column is incidental. You remind yourself of that, it seems, at least once a year when you begin to believe the zero will take care of itself at last. You rationalize away every single disappointment as long as a win is involved. To do otherwise, you tell your Met self, would be greedy. And you can’t do anything about it anyway. You do it for Bobby Jones when he’s tagged by Jeff Kent because a one-hit complete game shutout that clinches a playoff series is way better than nothing. Hey, we won the NLDS today! Would have been nice to have had the no-hitter, but that’s not the important thing. You do it for John Maine when Paul Hoover — who wouldn’t even be playing in the eighth if Miguel Olivo hadn’t been such a hothead in the fifth — ruins an otherwise brilliant day, because a combined one-hit shutout while you attempt to maintain life on the edge of impending disaster is immensely better than nothing. Hey, we’re back in first place! Would have been nice to have had the no-hitter, but that’s not the important thing. You do it for the Mets you barely know, the Mets you wish weren’t Mets, the Mets you’re thrilled to have, for any Met pitcher who will ever come as close as carrying the 0 under the H to the end of 9 as Tom Seaver did the night before the Sesame Street props department secured a Daily News for its magician sketch. It would have been great had it been Jones against the Giants in 2000 or Maine against the Marlins in 2007. It would have been just as splendid if it had been Gooden (Keith Moreland, 1984) or Reed (Wade Boggs, 1998) or Cone (Benny Distefano, 1992) or Darling (Vince Coleman, 1987) or Fernandez (Davey Concepcion, 1985) or Estes (Eric Young, 2002) or Trachsel (Chin-hui Tsao, 2003) or Heilman (Luis Castillo, 2005) or Martinez (Chris Burke, 2005) or Dotel (Phil Nevin, 1999) or even T#m Gl@v!ne against the Rockies when he took it to the eighth inning and I magnanimously allowed the Manchurian Brave the honor of the first no-hitter in Mets history before he allowed a hit to Kit Pellow. I sat in The Broadway Theatre, straining hard through the static to hear the last Met I ever wanted to throw the first Met no-hitter over the overture of a Sunday matinee performance of Bombay Dreams on May 23, 2004 and rooting hard to hear the last Met I ever wanted to throw the first Met no-hitter throw the first Met no-hitter. A couple of numbers into the show, I tapped Stephanie on the knee and shook my head. (So much for Bombay Dreams.) I imagine I would have rooted for all of those guys whose flirtations stand out in my mind had Tom Seaver’s sinker sunk a little lower on July 9, 1969, if the most marginal Major Leaguer in the Cub lineup had lived down to the obscurity he so richly deserved. Even if Seaver had made Jimmy Qualls his 26th consecutive out of the evening and then retired pinch-hitter Willie Smith to make it perfect, I would have wanted another. I’m sure I would have wanted Seaver to have duplicated the feat when the Phillies of Mike Compton or the Pirates of Vic Davalillo or the Padres of Leron Lee or the Cubs of Steve Ontiveros slipped away with the moral victory of having pinned another one-hit win on the Mets or, especially, when Jungle Joe Wallis did in Seaver in September of ’75 with two out in the ninth and the score inconveniently knotted at nothin’ and nine one-hit innings went completely for naught as CUBS NIP METS IN 11TH. But if none of those had worked out, if the 0 under the H always became a 1 just as has happened from July 10, 1969 onward, I know I wouldn’t have taken it as hard as I have every time it’s occurred. ME: Why aren’t you crying? We just missed out on a no-hitter. ME AGAIN: Tom Seaver threw a perfect game on July 9, 1969. Anything else would be anti-climactic. ME: It doesn’t bother you that you don’t remember it personally even though you remember the moon landing from just eleven days later? ME ONCE MORE: No. It’s not my fault I wasn’t born eleven days sooner. We would have that no-hitter filed away forever. It would be on the wall in the Diamond Club and would be packed up in bubble wrap and moved to swankier digs at Citi Field. I might not have the scratch to get a look at it, but I would know it’s there and that would be good enough for me. There would be no Jimmy Qualls Game. There would be Tom Seaver’s Perfect Game, the first no-hitter in Met history, perhaps the only no-hitter in Met history, perhaps not. But we would have 1, and 1 is as high as I absolutely need to count when it comes to no-hitters.  14 comments - (Comments closed) | |  Print This Post |  1969 Mets, Jimmy Qualls, Mets Pop Culture, No-Hitters, Sesame Street, Tom Seaver
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Piazza: Catcher, Slugger, Icon, Star by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers. 
Amazin' Again: How the 2015 New York Mets Brought the Magic Back to Queens by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers. 
Volume I of The Happiest Recap: 50+ Years of the New York Mets As Told in 500+ Amazin' Wins by Greg Prince is available in print and for Kindle on Amazon. 
Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History by Greg Prince (foreword by Jason Fry), is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers. |
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