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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 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.
by Greg Prince on 3 January 2008 8:45 pm 
| Our old friend Ross Chapman hits the jackpot (blue and orange M&M’s!) in Las Vegas thanks to the numbers you can find in only two places: above the left field wall in Shea Stadium (and good luck with that a year from now) and on the world-famous, well–traveledFaith and Fear in Flushing t-shirt that pays homage to Casey Stengel, Gil Hodges, Tom Seaver, Jackie Robinson and random acts of Met fandom.To order your own lucky tee for the too-good-to-be-retired price of $17.31, just click here (luck not included, but if you’re a Mets fan, you already knew that). |
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by Jason Fry on 3 January 2008 7:42 pm 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.
by Greg Prince on 2 January 2008 11:24 pm 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.
by Greg Prince on 1 January 2008 9:02 pm 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.
by Greg Prince on 31 December 2007 11:00 pm 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.
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