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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Happy Halloween, everybody. I wish today would disguise itself as part of baseball season. It’s been one month since the Mets played ball. Even their most recent version of it looks mighty good from the precipice of November.
So the Mets didn’t dress up as playoff participants. So they’ve provided no tricks and few treats since they closed up shop for 2007. So all their news has been knees, bunions and paperwork. At least we’ll still have them next year if we so choose despite their having turned into a pumpkin when the clock struck midnight on the afternoon of September 30.
If you need a little Mets to get you through this particular festive occasion, consider those who first got the ball rolling for us 45 going on 46 years ago. So what if the ball rolled by them as often as not?
The 1962 Mets certainly understood the spirit of Halloween — they dressed up as a major league entity for an entire season. They might not have tricked anybody, but at least 922,530 New Yorkers who passed through the turnstiles of the Polo Grounds considered their existence a treat (as, one supposes, did nine other National League franchises). When you read about those Mets, whether through history or contemporary account, you get the sense they were a ghost story, that this ghoulish collection of 40-120 goblins stuck in one long rundown couldn’t have been real.
But they were. I can swear they were. I’ve heard the creaking and the thunder and all the spooky sound effects.
Earlier this year, my considerate friend and New Breed veteran Joe Dubin (or Joe D. as you might know him from commenting here) sent me a recording of Game One of the Cubs @ Mets doubleheader of June 17, 1962, a broadcast he tracked down because it included the notorious Marvelous Marv tripling but being called out for missing first (and, legend has it, second) play. While Lindsey Nelson’s call doesn’t mention the occasionally added kicker of Ol’ Case running out of the dugout to point at all the bases when Charlie Neal directly follows Marv’s miscue with a homer (what good is a legend if it’s absolutely true?), the broadcast features an announcer saying something I can’t imagine has been said since 1962.
It’s the bottom of the seventh, Marv Throneberry is batting, and Bob Murphy has a request:
Marv Throneberry and several other members of the New York Mets, now that school is out, would like very much to move their families to New York for the summer if they can find a furnished house to rent someplace. If you know of one, don’t call but write Housing, The Polo Grounds, New York, 39.
When they tell you 1962 was a more innocent time, believe them.
I think my favorite part is “don’t call but write,” as if no hurry, the Throneberrys can sleep out on 155th Street a few more nights, the weather has been beautiful of late and those puffy cumulus clouds are like a soft blanket to Mrs. Throneberry and Marv’s delightful children Mary Beth and Marvin Junior.
In Janet Paskin’s Tales From the 1962 New York Mets, it was explained why you were supposed to write, not call. The first appeal for Met housing was made in April after Jay Hook asked Murph, Lindsey and Ralph Kiner to spread the word that New York’s newest heartthrobs were hard up for housing (it was less New York’s treacherous real estate market than the front office forgetting to take care of this rather common detail that led to such dire straits; outfielder John DeMerit said most teams helped players in a new town find a place to live, but the Mets said, “Here’s the newspaper”). The announcers did as they were asked and, Paskin writes, the New Breed put out the welcome mat:
Soon enough, the switchboard at the Mets offices lit up with calls from people who had rooms, apartments and houses for rent. Nobody warned the Mets operators. They answered the phone, told would-be landlords that they had no idea what they were calling about, and refused to take their messages.
Two months later, the broadcast of June 17, 1962 reveals there were still, figuratively speaking, Mets knocking on doors like kids on Halloween. Except they didn’t want candy. They wanted to move in.
But the Mets on the radio their first year weren’t just an excuse for classifieds of the airwaves — a Roger Craig’s List, if you will. Lots of other gold nuggets revealed on this baby Joe D. sent me, including:
• continual entreaties to stop up, plenty of baseball left today, plenty of good seats available (yes, they actually said it and really meant it);
• the Rheingold theme played in Spanish (and you thought Los Mets were a recent phenomenon);
• the soon to be visiting Houston club referred to as “the amazing Colt .45s,” presumably for not being as horrible as the only other National League expansion club of the 20th century;
• much promotional excitement that just-retired Clem Labine has joined the cast of next month’s Old Timers Day;
• a reference to an on-deck batter hoping “to get a stick” in this inning;
• Cubs “head coach” Charlie Metro making moves (the infamous rotating college of coaches was in full effect for the innovative Cubbies in those Mad Men days);
• a reference to Ron Santo having been voted best “second man” in the National League by the writers last year (I think “second year” is what Lindsey meant, though I don’t think there’s a sophomore of the year award anymore);
• hearing the national anthem loud and clear and being told Flag Day ceremonies would take place between games;
• all those we think of dinosaurs actually roaming the earth as ballplayers, including Cliff Cook, Ken Mackenzie and newly acquired Gene Woodling;
• young Lou Brock reaching the right-center bleachers (first time ever at the Polo Grounds and it took Met pitching to make it happen);
• Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks, being booed in the first inning;
• and Marvelous (albeit haplessly homeless) Marv Throneberry striking out with the winning run — pitcher Hook, pinch-running for Big Donkey Frank Thomas — on first and being pretty badly booed for it.
So much for the fans embracing the lovable losers. I can just hear the calls to the switchboard rescinding their rooms for rent.
Quite a game to go with quite a broadcast. The Cubs scored four in the top of the first. The Mets, despite Marv’s misadventures around first (and possibly second), tied it. Before Neal’s bases-empty homer, Throneberry’s non-triple did drive in two runs, though the Baseball-Reference notation has to be one of a kind:
M Throneberry Flyball: 1B; Woodling Scores; Thomas Scores
Al Jackson gave up eight runs (four earned) on eight hits and five walks…yet Casey left him in until there was one out in the ninth, presumably a reflection of the confidence he had in his bullpen. Little Al took the 8-7 loss, dropping his record to 3-8. One of the Bob Millers started the nightcap and left in the sixth leading 3-2. But Craig Anderson surrendered a homer to Billy Williams in the seventh and Vinegar Bend Mizell gave up a long ball to second man Santo in the ninth, making him a 4-3 loser…though how a man who went by the name Vinegar Bend could ever be described as a loser is beyond me.
Marvelous Marv went 1-for-3 in the second game, drove home a run on a sac fly and was charged with a fielding (as opposed to running) error at first base. He committed one of those in the opener as well, when, in the aforementioned four-run first, the Cubs’ Don Landrum was technically caught stealing second but was ruled safe on first baseman’s interference when he got himself into a rundown and ran right into Marv, who neglected to be holding the ball at the time. In As Jimmy Breslin observed in Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?, “Rundowns are not Throneberry’s strong point.”
The tenth-place Mets’ record dropped to 16-44 that Fathers Day. The ninth-place Cubs, despite the presence of future Hall of Famers Brock, Banks and Williams, improved to all of 24-42. Then again, we had Casey Stengel and they had a head coach. Paid attendance was 13,128, as many available good seats apparently went wanting.
That’s Housing, the Polo Grounds, New York, 39. Don’t let the Throneberrys sleep in the subway, darlin’.
The weird part about the way the 2007 World Series ended, specifically after the World Series of the past half-dozen years, was seeing no monkeys flung from anyone’s back, no albatross peeled from around anyone’s neck, no donuts, no bagels, no bupkis filled up or filled in, no getting off the schneid.
This wasn’t some eternally deprived expansion team sipping at last from the chalice of ultimate success, nor a long-suffering tribe (whether deserving or despicable) reaching the promised land for the first time in eons. This was simply the inevitable becoming reality, the best team earning its just reward after trumping its overmatched opponent in a one-run game that wasn’t terribly close.
Terrific if you’re a Red Sox fan, not all that electrifying otherwise. World Series sweeps are bad for the losers as well as the unaffiliated observers who just want more baseball. But they can’t be over fast enough for the winners who don’t need to wait a moment more than necessary for a second World Series sweep in four years.
Red Sox fans are no longer deprived and no longer suffering. Yet I doubt winning is getting old for them.
Their team flat out deserved to win. Not only did the Red Sox lead their division from April 18 on, but they, unlike at least one other Northeastern team I can think of, didn’t blow a longstanding and formidable divisional lead in September. They faced down their bout with adversity (behind 3-1 to the Indians in the ALCS) and they supplanted the Rockies as the hottest team in baseball. Colorado started the postseason 7-0. Boston ended it that way.
Swell buncha fellas on television, from the monsters in the middle to the percussion in the bullpen to the rooks to the not one, but two cancer survivors to that pitcher who evokes comparisons to Christy Mathewson, Bob Gibson and, perhaps, Catfish Hunter. The Red Sox blended a roster of experience and youth and power and speed and arms and bats and gloves…it’s as if they, among all the other things they did right, gave their versions of Lastings Milledge and Ruben Gotay legitimate shots and their kids did not disappoint.
How nice for the Red Sox, how nice for their Nation. Every Mets fan I know who lives in New England finds his Red Sox neighbors insufferable and overbearing, but I don’t live in New England, so I’m happy for them. The village elders didn’t have to hang on for one more breath for so they could die happy and no parents needed to wake their babies so they could grow up to say they witnessed a once-in-a-lifetime event. It’s twice-in-a-lifetime now. When the Red Sox broke their cold spell in 2004, the Daily News snottily suggested this would be it until 2090. Turns out there wasn’t an 86-year wait this time around. Turns out the team of this century, to date, hails from Boston. Turns out that Mike Lowell was the best third base pickup anybody in the A.L. East has made since the winter of ’04.
Turns out Alex Rodriguez is still looking for a team whose coattails are long enough to drag him to a pennant. But that’s somebody else’s problem.
If the Rockies, who stormed into the World Series before being stormed right out of it, had stayed hot, they would have written the more exciting final chapter to 2007. I rooted for them and I’m disappointed for them, but the Red Sox winning is a good story any year…‘cept one, as we all know. You New England-based Mets fans may not be able to stand being surrounded by RSN for the next few days (or years), and you have my sympathies, but at least at the heart of their narcissism there is our shared bond. Hank Steinbrenner may have been full of it last week when he dismissed Red Sox Nation as no more than a component of “Yankee universe,” but I don’t completely begrudge him his point that “if it wasn’t for the rivalry with us, they’d be just another team.” Maybe not for true Red Sox fans, but for me and most Mets fans, probably.
At one point or another, I’d venture that just about every Mets fan’s favorite American League team has been the Red Sox precisely because they have been the archrival to our least favorite American League team. With the Blue Jays, the Devil Rays and the Orioles all having gone on hiatus over the past decade, the Red Sox have been all we could invest our residual hope in from April through September. They’ve been all we’ve had to combat our sidebar hatred. It took them a while, but they’ve gotten the job done on our behalf and the behalves of good people everywhere. The Red Sox embarrassed their rivals directly in 2004 and have completely upstaged them in every tangible fashion in 2007. The Yankees are left to hold meetings and interviews and conference calls in late October. The Red Sox hold parades.
It’s nice to see. It doesn’t actually help the Mets, but it’s nice to see. And when it occurs to one of their celebrity fans, like the surprisingly surprised Ben Affleck, that there are New Yorkers who are empathetic to his cause, it’s nice to read this:
I get a lot of supportive things about the Red Sox, which at first kind of confused me. We don’t understand this in Boston, but half of New York likes the Red Sox because they hate the Yankees and they love the Mets. And I love the Mets. So go Mets!
And go Dave Magadan, revered hitting coach of the World Champion Red Sox, the only Met alumnus I noticed in the Boston dugout this October. Magadan (or Mags) hasn’t been a Met since 1992, but as with Bob Apodaca (or Dack), I still see him as a Met when I see him at all. I like that he got noticed for the Red Sox taking lots of pitches (and keeping lots of games going lots of hours). I’m always amazed that it’s news that if hitters take pitches, it might wear out the pitcher, that the hitter might eventually see the pitch he wants, that the hitter might walk. I seem to recall Mags collecting lots of bases on balls in his Met prime. Indeed, in 1990, his one really good year, he finished one point behind ex-Met Lenny Dykstra for the league lead in on-base percentage and was eighth in walks.
It’s probably a poor excuse for irony, but Dave Magadan was the smart-money choice to take over third base from the departed Ray Knight in 1987, but Howard Johnson won the job out of Spring Training when Mags was sidelined by an infected lymph node in his right armpit. HoJo never relinquished third after that and it took until ’90, when Mike Marshall washed out as Keith Hernandez’s replacement, that Dave became a regular, at first base. The irony? Twenty years later, Magadan and Johnson are both Major League hitting coaches…and Magadan’s students have been doing much better.
Maybe the Rockies were overwhelmed by their eight-day layoff, but now we all have an eight-day layoff. Actually, we all have approximately nineteen eight-day layoffs before there’s another new baseball game to remotely obsess over. Via the good graces of XM Radio, I listened to the top of the ninth on KOA, the Rockies’ station. I switched to WRKO’s Red Sox feed for the happier broadcast in the bottom of the ninth. In flipping, I felt a bit like the sheepish Shea assistant clubhouse manager in Jeff Pearlman’s The Bad Guys Won who, with Game Six in Metly peril, threw on a Red Sox warmup jacket so he could “be a part of the celebration, any celebration,” but I’d decided one sad ending in 2007 was enough for me. Moments after Joe Castiglione announced the Red Sox had become the first team in the 2000s with two world championships to its credit, he threw it to a reporter in the victorious clubhouse. On KOA, they couldn’t go to commercial fast enough — visit your Denver-area Dick’s Sporting Goods for Rockies merchandise and “show your support throughout the Series!” On Fox, Mike Lowell was named MVP and asked about his free agent plans.
The baseball season was completely over everywhere I turned.
A clip of this World Series might appear in a Chevy commercial down the line, otherwise it’s likely being forgotten by all but the participants and their most ardent admirers. Red Sox fans will have their t-shirts and their DVDs and their final assurance, in case any was necessary, that there was never any such thing as a curse. Rockies fans will have their mixed emotions. It took them however long they lived before 1993 to join the league of extraordinarily fortunate markets and have a baseball team to call their own. It took them 15 years to win a league championship. It took them 36 innings to fall back down the mountain. All those empty seats at Coors Field became fans again in late September. I probably won’t care in May when the Mets are the visitors and the Rockies just another team we have to beat, but I hope those who were disappointed these last four games remain in love with their team. Wrote Robert Wells of Milwaukee Braves fans after the novelty of winning the 1957 World Series wore off:
When a player popped up with the bases loaded, he was no longer a figure of heroic tragedy but a bum. With triumph as well as aspiration behind them, the team’s followers began to be like baseball fans elsewhere. The plump ladies with cowbells and baseball caps started missing games. When it looked like rain, people who had considered going to the stadium decided to stay home.
Whatever Rockies fans decide to do next year, I realize I’ve just blogged my last baseball game of this year. According to the Weather Channel right now, it’s 42 degrees in the vicinity of Shea Stadium. But it feels like 37.
You don't have to be a graduate of one of Colorado's prestigious school systems to know the Rockies are in trouble. They've lost a blowout, a squeaker and a moderately competitive slugfest. Even education-conscious Mike Hampton could have calculated his former team's current odds of survival as prohibitive long before his celebrated cameos at Denver County's highly regarded parent-teacher conferences.
Yet I envy the Rockies. They've made it this far. They'll probably be dismissed as hopeless lightweights when (when, not if) they lose this World Series, but I hope their fans have enjoyed the unanticipated ride. No, they're likely not enjoying much right now, as evidenced by Fox's continual closeups of thousands of them between pitches — the home team's behind, the faces will be mopey, just shoot the action — yet the luckiest among them got to sit and shiver at Coors Field Saturday night. They were at the first game in the National League park. This marked seven consecutive years for certain that we could only imagine that the first game in the National League park was taking place at Shea Stadium.
I caught the slightest and most accidental snippet of the last World Series game played at Shea as I flipped by a regional sports network that shall remain nameless. It aired Friday, October 26, which happened to be the seventh anniversary of the Mets' most recent Fall Classic appearance (and, it dawned on me, their crosstown rivals' most recent Fall Classic triumph). Putting 26 + 1 together, even though I'm no Mike Hampton, I realized Saturday would be October 27, or the anniversary of the last Mets World Series title won.
So I popped Game Seven, the only Game Seven truly worth identifying as such, into the DVD player. Didn't watch all of it, just the good stuff: El Sid turning the tide in long relief; Mazz starting the rally in the sixth; Teuf drawing the walk that loaded the bases; Keith securing his postcareer broadcasting sinecure by driving in the first two runs; Keith furious at the lousily lazy call by Dale Ford that cost him second base when Dwight Evans couldn't handle Kid's right field fly which tied it; Knight's MVP laser of a homer in the seventh, the run that gave us the lead we never relinquished; shaky McDowell giving way to steady Orosco; Darryl's moon shot and subsequent trot around the solar system; Jesse swinging away to drive home the eighth and final run; then Romero, then Boggs, then Barrett going out, out and out; and then Jesse and Gary and everybody else dogpiling on the mound.
It happened. It really happened. The Mets won a World Series. The Mets have won two World Series, but this was the one that happened least long ago. That it's been 21 years (soon to be referred to as 22 years) and counting…well, that's too long, but at least it happened. I have evidence. I have hard digital evidence that the Mets did what the Rockies won't, which is beat the Red Sox in the final baseball games on the calendar.
October 2007 has been a month for anger and healing for most of us. Our emotions weren't at their prettiest on September 30 for obvious reasons and they've needed time to mend. Of course I envy the Rockies, even down 0-3. Of course I wish we had held on for one more day and then some. Of course losing twelve of the final seventeen was lethal when losing merely ten of the final seventeen would have satisfied all constituencies — the Mets still would have sucked as they were so determined to do, but at least we would have been sucked into the playoffs along with them. And from there, who knows?
I'd be way happier if we were in, let alone succeeding at the 2007 World Series, just as I would have been way happier last October had we engaged in baseball beyond our last Game Seven. Unlike Tom Glavine, I was devastated when he and we came up short on September 30. But it neither made nor broke my allegiance to my team.
I've given a lot of thought to Dan Shanoff's post on fandom by way of Jason's piece from the other day. I suppose I'm one of the undiscerning masses from whom Dan distances himself. My route to becoming and remaining a Mets fan was neither clever nor circuitous nor unorthodox. I imagine it's a pretty typical tale for Mets fans of my vintage. With atypical brevity, here is the essence of my story:
After winning that first world championship, the Mets went a long time thereafter without winning a second. They paused to attain the aforementioned belt from '86, but have continued their unabated nonwinning ways otherwise.
With me rooting like hell for them regardless.
Probably the most telling characteristic you could infer about me and my Mets fandom is I'm stubbornly loyal and possibly loyally stubborn. I chose my favorite team when I was 6, I chose my political party when I was 7, I chose my favorite song when I was 9. I've remained faithful to “American Pie,” the Democrats and the Mets without hesitation, even if none of them has spent much time at the top of its respective chart since 1972, 1970 or 1969.
But in the long Met run, the paucity of Commissioner's Trophies on display in the Diamond Club lobby doesn't quite matter. I caught that smidgen of Game Five from 2000 and I was bummed. I treated myself to those highlights of Game Seven from 1986 and I was conflicted — Yay! for winning, Damn! for winning almost half my lifetime ago and not following up for more than two decades. Yet so what? I didn't stop being a Mets fan because we didn't qualify for more World Series and lost the one World Series in which we did participate. I'm apparently deriving some benefit from being a Mets fan, even if success by association isn't it.
Let me let you in on a little secret: I didn't hate being a Mets fan in September 2007.
Don't misunderstand me. I didn't enjoy the squadrons of Phillies, Nationals, Marlins and Cardinals clomping repeatedly on the home plate of my heart for half a month. I didn't enjoy the Mets' myriad pop-ups, errors, blown holds and seven-run tops of firsts surrendered. I didn't enjoy earning our way into infamy. All of that and so much more created utterly hateful circumstances in September 2007.
But I enjoyed that I was doing what I do. I was being a Mets fan. It wasn't working as desired, but I was watching Mets games and listening to Mets games and attending Mets games and talking about Mets games and writing about Mets games and reading about Mets games and thinking about Mets games. I was doing that while hoping there would be Mets games to attend at Shea Stadium in 2007 as late as October 27 and 28 and 29 — if necessary — but I would have been doing it had that hope not existed at all. The level of frequency and activity has varied from year to year, but there hasn't been a season since before I was 6 when I wasn't watching, listening, talking, writing, reading and thinking Mets. (I'd include attending, but I had to wait 'til I was 10 for my first on-site visit to Shea.)
Here, I think, is the deal, historic chokes aside: they're pretty good at being my team; I'm awesome at being their fan. This has been going on all my life. It will be going on all the rest of my life if I have my way. It will include several to many Mets World Series appearances if I have more of my way, but that part of my way is way out of my control. I can also declare, four weeks removed from The Worst Collapse Ever, that it's surprisingly irrelevant. My stubborn loyalty and loyal stubbornness is not win-dependent. The joy my Mets fandom has brought me for going on 40 seasons has little to do with winning and everything to do with being. I love being a Mets fan.
Not that I would reject out of hand a few more Mets games to watch, listen to, attend, talk about, write about, read about and think about tacked on to the end of every year, this one included.
On October 25, our friend and blolleague Dana Brand noted babies born the night of the Mookie-Buckner play for the ages were turning 21, old enough to order themselves a drink. In that beer, wine or spirit, Saturday the 27th marked the 21st birthday of the 1986 world championship. I would have thought its parents would have given it a younger sibling in one of the years that followed, but I guess 1986 remains an only — or should we say exceptional — child of the ’80s.
Here’s to you, October 27, 1986. A better last Monday in October we will never know.
10.There isn’t a Spinners’ radio hit from their halcyon and gorgeous period between 1972 and 1976 that doesn’t flat out make me happy. None makes me happier thanOne Of A Kind (Love Affair).
9.As I approach Merrick Road, make the next songBaby Babyby Amy Grant. Nothing ever sounded better in my life than that song did at that moment on that spring morning 15 years ago.
8.Rosannawas my soundtrack. It was the music bed for the chase scene, the one where I put hundreds of ragged, uncertain miles behind me. Come to think of it, “Rosanna” wasn’t driving music. It was flying music. Because I swear my Toyota had wings for those five or so minutes Toto played.
7.Others can dismissIce Ice Babyfor any reason they like. For me not to acknowledge how much I love that record, how much it got under my skin and never left, how much I still hum it about once a week…it’s like the man said: anything less than the best is a felony. For me circa September and October 1990, “Ice Ice Baby” was practically the best song I ever heard. So sue me for questionable taste.
6.Stephanie microwaved popcorn and I poured Barq’s Diet French Vanilla Creme and we spunArielover and over and over again on June 19, 1990. Those were the first times I had heard it since 1977. If I close my eyes I can smell the popcorn and taste the soda and feel the grief dissipating just a little. About a week later, I’d adopt “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips, as my on-the-nose, get-through-this anthem of the summer of ’90, but really the emotional perseverance really began to take hold way on the other side of the Hudson. If I listen to “Ariel,” there’s no way I won’t hold on for one more day.
5.I’ve yet to come into contact with a sole fellow aficionado ofGet Used To It. Voudouris was not only the embodiment of that most misunderstood pop music creature, the one-hit wonder, his hit wasn’t terribly pervasive.
4.A big part of the 90% or so ofCome On EileenI literally didn’t understand was Rowland confessing to Eileen that his thoughts “verge on dirty”. You know when I figured that out? When I Googled the lyrics last week to write about how much I loved “Come On Eileen”.
3.My feel for the pop scene, or at least the pop charts, was fraying by the time I was 32, but it was the right time forRoll To Me, a song that doesn’t require me to lean even a little on period context to enjoy it.
2.When I hearThe Night Chicago Died, it turns me back into an eleven-year-old…not from a reminds-me-what-I-was-doing-that-summer standpoint, but by appealing to my preteen values of what’s exciting and thrilling and suspenseful. Namely a song with sirens and stage whispers and martial drums and gruesome body counts and sound effects intended to replicate a clock and a round of indefatigable na-na-na’s and rhymes so obvious that you couldn’t believe every song on the radio hadn’t seen the genius in pairing night with fight, all with wall, said with dead. Seriously, I’m 11 when I hear this. This is, like, the coolest song…EVER!
1.By the timeAmerican Piewas finished, I had begun. I had begun to love pop music. I had begun to understand what pop music was. I had begun to identify with pop music. I had begun to follow pop music. I had begun a lifetime love affair with pop music.
If it’s the final Friday of the month, then it’s the tenth installment of the special Top 10 Songs of All-Time edition of Flashback Friday at Faith and Fear in Flushing.
There would be baseball games on that radio, but not just yet. Not on this particular Friday, not with the players on strike. It was the end of a very turbulent week if you were a baseball fan, especially if you were a Mets fan. Gil Hodges died of a heart attack. Yogi Berra was named to succeed him. Rusty Staub was acquired from the Expos for Singleton, Foli and Jorgensen. What was supposed to have been Opening Night, the night before in Pittsburgh, was cancelled due to work stoppage.
Friday morning, however, would herald something even more momentous than the 1972 baseball season. On Friday morning, April 7, 1972, on a Panasonic AM-FM portable radio that my mother gave my father for their 21st wedding anniversary — a radio I would inherit in a few years after he upgraded — I first heard “American Pie” by Don McLean.
It was Opening Day, all right. The world of popular music opened up all around me. That season is still in full swing.
It was, for all intents and purposes, the day the music was born.
I don’t remember a lot of sitting around the weekday breakfast table as a family when I was a kid. In fact, I remember it almost never happening. I would say “never,” except it seems to have taken place that Friday, April 7. My parents’ anniversary was the reason. They were, for the first time, leaving me, 9, and my responsible sister, 15, alone for a couple of days as they decided to celebrate their wedded bliss at the Host Farm Resort in the Pennsylvania Dutch Country. They would be driving out early, so we needed to acknowledge their anniversary that morning. That’s why the radio was presented before school. That may be why I remember what it was playing.
My sister had tuned it to WNBC, home of the “Imus in the Morning” program which was a big sensation in the spring of 1972. Mr. Imus had just come to New York from Cleveland the previous December and got lots of laughs with his Reverend Billy Sol Hargis character and his proclamation that “Rambling with Gambling days are over/It’s raining, it’s pouring/It’s Imus in the Morning!” Yes, Don Imus was once fresh and was once funny. And he was once required to play records on 660 AM. Sometime on Friday morning, April 7, 1972, he played one that began:
A long, long time ago I can still remember how that music Used to make me smile
He wouldn’t be done playing it for a long, long time. For more than eight minutes, I would eventually learn. By the time “American Pie” was finished, I had begun. I had begun to love pop music. I had begun to understand what pop music was. I had begun to identify with pop music. I had begun to follow pop music. I had begun a lifetime love affair with pop music.
That was quite a radio. And this is quite a song.
I didn’t realize that “American Pie,” by Top 40 standards, had already been on the air and on the charts a long, long time. To the rest of the world, it was old news. “American Pie” had debuted at No. 69 in Billboard‘s Hot 100 for the week ending November 27, 1971. It reached No. 1 on January 15, 1972 and remained at the top of the chart for four consecutive weeks. By the time I discovered it, “American Pie” was falling off the national chart. It had left WABC’s local list in the middle of March.
But to me, it was brand new. It entered my life at No. 1 on April 7, 1972 and it has remained lodged there ever since. It is my favorite song ever. It always will be. And April 7, 1972 will always be the date from which all pop music flows. Everything that was released after that Friday has been, at some point, authentically new to me, authentically potentially part of the soundtrack to my personal narrative. Everything before it is forever an oldie. Every song from before the spring of 1972 is like every Mets game from before late in the 1969 season. I know it existed — I just can’t swear to it for sure.
That’s how powerful “American Pie” was when I first heard it. That’s how meaningful April 7, 1972 is to me. I’d heard other songs in my first nine years, three months and one week on the planet, but once I heard “American Pie” by Don McLean, I was determined to hear more songs. I listened and I heard.
In the wake of April 7, 1972, I heard “Horse With No Name” by America; and “Heart Of Gold” by Neil Young; and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by Robert John; and “Mother and Child Reunion” by Paul Simon; and “Without You” by Nilsson. Some of it I liked. Some of it I loved. All of it I heard in a way I’d never heard it before, in a way that allowed me to link it to a time: a month, a week, a day, a moment. I heard music that connected itself to me by its very existence. I heard music in a context that made sense to me. And I could hear more of it if I just stay tuned.
I’ve stayed tuned for 35 years. I’m not as tuned in as I used to be, but I still keep an ear open, knowing that something else will come along. I still listen to the radio, if not quite as much as I once did. The stations have changed. The singers have changed. The sounds have changed over and over again. But what became a part of me on April 7, 1972 has stayed a part of me: the wonder, the excitement, the anticipation, the deeply personal nature of music.
To no song do those feelings apply the way they do to Don McLean’s “American Pie”.
“Like no other song of its era,” declares Eric Lefcowitz in The Rhino History of Rock ‘n’ Roll: The ’70s, “‘American Pie’ managed to capture the mood and tone of that fascinating and slightly odd transitional period between the 1960s and the 1970s when people were attempting to recapture their lost innocence and, at the same time, move forward.”
I may recall in intense detail having “American Pie” revealed unto me, when it happened and what I was doing, but I don’t know that I recall what was revealed to me about rock ‘n’ roll or my mortal soul. “American Pie” carried an intense air of mystery to it, yet I’ve never been much of a stickler for trying to penetrate it.
For that, there are loads of theses circulating out there. Opinions on exactly what Don McLean was trying to tell us every step of the way are as common as rear entries: everybody has one. But McLean himself blessedly skirted the subject in 2000 by confessing, “I’ve never analyzed the lyrics to the song. They’re beyond analysis. They’re poetry.”
Works for me; he wrote it, he would know.
It is established that “the day the music died” equals Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper going down over Clear Lake, Iowa on February 3, 1959 and that Don was painting on a pretty breathtaking canvas — “my attempt at an epic song about America” — from there. Everything else is conjecture and interpretation.
When I was 9, I didn’t know from Buddy Holly or epic. It was the poetry I dug. The awesome wordplay. I assumed my new favorite song was about something deep, something off the beaten path, something you didn’t come across every day, probably a little hippieish.
It was the most dramatic thing I’d ever heard. It started slow, it sped up, it became manic, it wound down to a point where “the music wouldn’t play”. It painted pictures I could barely literally comprehend. I was content to listen to them and imagine them — the pink carnation and the pickup truck; the dancin’ in the gym and the kickin’ off of shoes; the quartet that practiced in the park and the dirges that were sung in the dark — as I wished without having them explained to me.
At 9, you think I had any idea what “Helter Skelter in a summer swelter” meant?
Or what a levee was?
That rye was a drink, not just a bread baked by Levy’s (as opposed to levee’s)?
That “the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost” wasn’t something Don McLean made up on the spot to go with “caught the last train for the coast”?
That I could differentiate between “the birds” and the Byrds in the reference to “Eight Miles High”?
Or nod “oh yeah, Mick Jagger” when I heard “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack Flash sat on a candlestick”?
Or be almost certain that “the sergeants” who “played a marching tune” were the Beatles?
The fully woven tapestry of what McLean probably means is massively impressive in retrospect. It truly is. But I’m with Lester Bangs, who called the lyrics “just a bunch of words that could have as much meaning as you wanted.” When I was 9, I was too old for nursery rhymes. But when I was 9, “American Pie” was like the greatest nursery rhyme ever written.
It caught on in my demo, which makes sense now that I’ve read “it is around the age of ten or eleven that most children take on music as a real interest” in Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain On Music. Indeed, I can remember other kids in third grade humming it and referring to it as “Miss American Pie” (thus raising my fact-checking ire regarding the accurate citation of song titles and such for the first time). By sixth grade, we were singing it at graduation as part of our Bicentennial-themed ceremony (“Philadelphia Freedom,” too). Every now and again I’d come across an article confirming that “American Pie” hadn’t just been a No. 1 hit, but that it was Important, that maybe it was the most Important record made after the Beatles broke up.
I felt good that I’d landed on something so significant without knowing it. But it also didn’t matter. I couldn’t like it any more than I did when I didn’t know anything about it.
By the time I was in college, I learned many of my peers held it in the same kind of esteem I did. I distinctly recall some friend of a friend tacking the sheet music to her wall. “It’s my favorite song,” she said. The mutual friend in this case said he didn’t like “American Pie”.
“How can you not like ‘American Pie’?” I asked.
“Because,” he said with defiance, “everybody always says it’s their favorite song.”
Maybe not everybody (I have an amusing book called The Worst Rock ‘n’ Roll Records of All Time that ranks it No. 9 in dubiousness), but yes, it’s nice to know that for once I’m in eternal harmony with a large group of listeners. After telling you of my unabashed fondness for the cheesy and the obscure since the end of last December, I take some satisfaction in reporting that my No. 1 Song of All-Time is practically my generation’s No. 1. It’s the only one of my leading favorites that shows up regularly in actual sanctioned commercial countdowns, not just my heartfelt, homemade Top 500.
But that kind of widespread popularity shouldn’t surprise me. It transcended age range in my family. My father, who rues the turning of the musical calendar from 1950, liked “American Pie”; my sister, with little musical interest at all, liked “American Pie”; even my mother, whose only comment to me about the music of my youth was that Bonnie Tyler and Rod Stewart sure sounded alike and rather ridiculous at that, liked “American Pie”.
My god, I really am related to those people.
I remember Chevrolet using the “drove my Chevy” line in a commercial, but I don’t remember if it was Chevrolet or another advertiser that portrayed a guy not wanting to get out of his car until “American Pie” was over. That’s been me for 35 years. Every new stereo we buy, I insist on christening the turntable with eight minutes and thirty-two seconds of Don McLean, from the same LP I bought at TSS in 1973 (just before I realized I could buy singles).
Long song. So long that its 45 was sold as Parts I and II on sides A and B. So long that American Top 40 generally didn’t play the entire version. But that’s like exhibiting only half of Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night. “The song was too powerful to be abbreviated, and a majority of radio stations played only the complete version,” according to Fred Bronson in The Billboard Book of Number One Hits. The Clearasil ads would just have to wait. At 8:32, you could be happy for a while and then some.
Don McLean wrote something much longer than the norm in his field and the length was embraced because the work was great enough to merit such a reception. The lesson wasn’t lost on me.
If you were to ask me to name my favorite recording artists, I’d tick off probably dozens of groups, duos and solo acts before remembering to mention Don McLean. It’s not that I don’t celebrate the guy’s entire catalogue, it’s just that I’ve demonstrated very little curiosity about everything that isn’t “American Pie”.
For the record, Don McLean is a local boy, from New Rochelle. Went to Iona. Had a pretty big hit right after “American Pie” called “Vincent” (so hauntingly beautiful in its own right that it might have been written about the Van Gogh of first basemen) and a lesser hit the following winter with “Dreidel,” which is No. 72 on my list (it came out not long after Chanukah). Don disappeared from the charts for most of the rest of the ’70s, re-emerging in 1981 with a touching Roy Orbison cover (“Crying”) and then a re-release of the sincere if badly dated “Castles in the Air”. If he’s received any kind of contemporary/non-oldies airplay in the last quarter-century, I’ve missed it. If he’s come out with an album of new material, I’ve gone unaware. I’ve never seen him play live. I’ve only caught him on television by accident.
He gave me “American Pie”. What else could I ask from him?
As the song of songs, it is best left alone. Use it in another commercial? I wouldn’t begrudge Don the royalties, but I’d hope it doesn’t get mixed up with some shady pie company. Cover it? Madonna did that in 2000 on the soundtrack for The Next Best Thing. Turned out the next best thing to Don McLean’s original is never hearing Madonna cover it (though it somehow reached No. 29 in Billboard). Illustrate it? There was a syndicated show in 1986 with the clever title Deja View. Its aim was to produce music videos for classic songs that predated MTV. They did one for “American Pie”. It looked exactly like something that somebody who had 15 years too long to think about it would have created.
“American Pie” doesn’t need latter-day ubiquity, doesn’t need updating, doesn’t need a literal visual treatment, certainly doesn’t need another wacky teen sex romp named after it (though I thought the first one was pretty good) or another Weird Al Yankovic Star Wars parody of it (he’s done better). It doesn’t need anything except to be heard in its entirety on the radio or television or Internet every once in a while, maybe even by some 9-year-old who’s never heard it before.
Otherwise, leave it be. It’s been perfect since April 7, 1972.
***
Credit where credit’s due: To underscore the absurdity of segregation in 1962 Baltimore, John Waters made the last Thursday of every month on The Corny Collins Show Negro Day in Hairspray, thus providing the twisted inspiration for making the final Friday of each month here Music Day. Here’s to you, Mr. Waters. (And here’s to you, gentle reader, if you picked up on the homage.)
***
The No. 2 Song of All-Time was heard at the end of September. Join us in this space on January 4, 2008 for the debut of Flashback Friday: Tales From The Log. In the meantime, if you want to relive all of this year’s reliving all over again, go right ahead to go right back.
There's an interesting discussion today over at Dan Shanoff's site about fandom.
Dan is a pal of mine — he was on the same bill as Greg and me at Varsity Letters last winter — and besides being salt of the earth, he's one of the most knowledgeable, enthusiastic sports fans you'll meet. That said, there's one very odd thing about him, which I've never known another sports fan to let go unremarked: He never had a boyhood team. No hometown team. No team to which he gave his undying, unconditional love, come hell or high water or heaven. Dan's only allegiance is to the Florida Gators — but he didn't go to Florida. His wife grew up in Gainesville; the Gators are her team, and he adopted them.
I know, I know. To born-and-bred crazies like us that sounds contrived at best and faintly sinister at worst. But Dan's completely genuine, and unapologetic about the oddity of both his rooting interest and the way it developed. Which he addresses here. It's an interesting tale, told well and told honestly, and it's generated a lot of reaction — most of it very thoughtful, some of it pretty visceral. (For example: “huge hypocrite” and “BS bandwagon fairweather fandom,” and those aren't even some of the nastiest ones.)
Here's the part that set Dan's critics off. It also happens to be the crux of the argument:
…I argue that making an active choice about my fandom — even pushing 30, in what some would describe as a “mid-fan-life-crisis” — wasn't just acceptable, but arguably superior to the more traditional, passive roots of sports allegiance:
Biology: Let me guess -– you root for your favorite team because it's the team your father rooted for, and he “passed it on” to you. While I agree that's a nice way for parent and child to bond, it smacks of inheritance rather than fandom earned through independent, thoughtful decision.
Geography: Another accident of circumstance. Your fandom is less about the team itself and more about having a sense of civic pride.
Besides a question of tone (“arguably superior” waves a red flag at a lot of bulls), I think the disconnect is that Dan is trying to be rational about what for most fans is a product of irrationality — and in my experience people will do most anything to avoid having to admit to themselves or to others that they behave irrationally.
I'm not one of them. I can tell you why I'm a Met fan: One of my earliest memories is being about four and seeing my mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. When you're a toddler and your mother is behaving bizarrely in response to something, you focus on that something and desperately need to classify it and understand why it's important, usually either by being frightened of it or by embracing it wholeheartedly so you're not left outside of it. I chose the latter. (Big surprise: Rusty Staub was my first favorite player.)
I won't say that story is 100% accurate (what family tale passed down from the time you're four is?), but in every way that matters it's true. And I'm aware it's utterly ridiculous. I've spent the better part of 34 years agonizing over a ever-changing cast of young men playing a game in goofy outfits because I was taken aback by something I saw my mom doing in 1973? Well, yeah. More or less.
Instead of that story, I could rattle on for about the millionth time in these pages about pitching and defense and miracles and taking your best shot even if it's at your own feet and believing and the difference between believing and expecting — about Faith and Fear, in other words. And all that stuff is true — but it's also the pearl that's formed around the bit of sand that got caught in the works.
Did I choose to be a Met fan? No — just as I suspect most Met fans (or Dolphin fans or Jazz fans or whatever) didn't. And I think it's this having not chosen that makes “traditional” fans so suspicious of — and often hostile to — any fan who does seem to have made a choice. It doesn't really matter if it's a “good” choice (got swept up in a team after moving to a new city, fell in love with a girl) or a “bad” choice (Team X is in first place, Team X is the Yankees). Either is at least slightly suspect to those of us who never chose.
I embrace (or perhaps have thoroughly internalized) the irrationality of fandom — the world is comparatively rational, and it's also frequently dull or depressing (though also frequently beautiful and wonderful), and constantly demands you engage and strategize and figure out how to get between arbitrary points A and B. Which is fine — I deal with the world perfectly well, thanks — but sometimes a respite is welcome. In fandom I'm swept up in a cause whose outcome I can't possibly control, and part of something larger — a community of people also living and dying on the outcome of something they can't affect any more than I can. Fandom is a form of surrender no rational person would find wise — what idiot gives his or her heart to a bunch of rich kids to do with as they will? But in that surrender, in those three hours a night, I'm free. (And if that talk of surrender and being part of something bigger sounds a bit like religion — let go and let Gotay — well, that's no accident. This is my religion. I don't begrudge anyone theirs and I don't apologize for mine.)
I wonder if Dan feels transported by sports the way Greg and Emily and Charlie and Laurie and all the rest of us do. Can he, without the wellsprings of childhood and place and memory, without having been washed in grief and hope and wonder before his emotions were fully formed? Without irrationality, in other words? I can't know and he can't know — which, again, is not unlike religion. In the end we are all of us — not just childhood fans and newly minted ones — mysteries to each other.
(Whoa. So heavy. Let the record also show that baseball is beautiful, rewards intensive scrutiny and casual attention alike, and an excellent excuse for drinking beer, eating hot dogs and sitting in the sunshine.)
Somebody wake the Rockies. The World Series has started.
Well, that wasn’t pretty, National League fans. It didn’t feel like a World Series. It felt like a Super Bowl blowout from the era of Cowboys-Bills and 49ers-Chargers. In football, it’s just one game. In baseball, you have to keep reminding yourself it’s just one game. (Hey, somebody call George Carlin!)
Just one game, but what a bad game for Colorado, a franchise which seemed more and more hypothetical as the innings snowed it under. We know who the Red Sox are, but from whence did these Rockies come? With their Mercury Mets homage uniforms and their stubbornly clinging anonymity, this could have been a goodwill exhibition between the excellent American team and a band of strangers who just took up the sport; a Canadian starter, a Japanese second baseman, a Dominican centerfielder, a Venezuelan catcher — maybe they were World Baseball Classic refugees. Are we sure the Colorado Rockies are licensed and bonded by MLB? That they weren’t fashioned for the sake of a historical novel? Dan Jenkins could have invented a name like Troy Tulowitzki. The whole bunch of them wasn’t even semi-tough against Josh Beckett.
But again, just one game. The Rockies are very real. The Rockies are 21-2 since September 16. The Rockies got hot so long ago that the Mets were clear favorites to win the N.L. East when they were just warming up. The Rockies maybe need to play games on consecutive nights to remember how good they are.
The Red Sox just needed to show up, and that they did. Beckett made me glad the Marlins dealt him out of our division (until I remembered Florida received Hanley Ramirez in return). Their lineup broke or matched offensive records dating to the 1920s, from when Fenway Park — does any park look better on TV as long as we’re not being swept in it? — wasn’t all that venerable. Game One was a perfect expression of baseball’s timelessness. Fenway has been around almost as long as the Red Sox, and the Red Sox batted for almost a century in the fifth.
Man, was that not pretty. That was Rick Ankiel circa 2000 minus the wild pitches and nervous breakdowns. If you had Francisco Morales and a World Series ERA under 94.50…you lose! Ryan Speier’s three consecutive bases-loaded walks to score three inherited runners (his World Series earned run average is 0.00) brought to mind an eight-run eighth inning five Rockies pitchers, including future Mets Steve Reed and Mike DeJean, combined to surrender at Shea on May 18, 1997.
• Baerga singled
• Olerud walked
• Hundley walked
• Ordoñez walked
• Alexander walked
• Everett walked
• Alfonzo singled
• Gilkey singled
• Huskey singled
• Baerga doubled
And in the Mets’ dugout, presumably enjoying it because it was happening to somebody else, was pitching coach Bob Apodaca. The scene ten years later in Boston was a lot different for our old pal Dack, who has worked miracles — humidor or no humidor — in turning a Colorado pitching staff into an actual asset. It pained me to watch a guy whose alleged firing offense in 1999 was incommunicativeness (or perhaps perceived closeness to Bobby Valentine) and a guy whose own pitching career was cut short by ligament injury at age 28 make all those helpless trips to the mound where nothing he could say to Morales or Speier or Jeff Francis before them was going to be of any practical use.
I’d forgotten that Bob Apodaca spent a staggering 29 consecutive seasons affiliated with the Mets as a major and minor leaguer, as a pitcher and pitching coach, as a Mets lifer. Did you know Bob Apodaca trails only Jeff Innis in games pitched as a Met among retired pitchers whose entire career was spent with only the Mets? Though he threw just 11 starts and 173 relief appearances (walking two Pirates on eight pitches in his September 18, 1973 ninth-inning debut, a critical pennant race game rescued by Buzz Capra), Dack is one of those Mets who will never not look like a Met to me, regardless of his present laundry.
But it could have been worse for him. If Apodaca continued to coach Mets pitchers, he might have had to have relied on Tom Glavine in a big game.
Here’s something to cheer us up ever so slightly: The Mets have never suffered a postseason loss anywhere near as lopsided as 13-1. If you think about it, we’re a very tough postseason opponent when we’re not too complacent to qualify. In 74 LDS, LCS and World Series games, we’re 43-31, and in only six of our 31 losses have we been beaten by more than three runs. Our worst defeats, four of them, were by a civilized six runs — and three of those were in series we eventually won.
Also, in the five postseason series we’ve lost, three times we took the eventual victors to the seven-game limit, while in the two other sets, none of our eight defeats came by more than two runs.
In other words, we’ve been much better losers than the Rockies.
One night short of the World Series, I was so desperate for baseball programming that I zeroed in on Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel on HBO for Bob Costas' interview with ex-Mets manager Joe Torre.
They didn't discuss why Torre wanted to give the third base job to Joel Youngblood in 1981 when a) Youngblood obviously couldn't play third; b) Youngblood didn't want to play third; c) Hubie Brooks, who batted .309 the previous September, was standing by with the same third baseman's glove that he used more than adequately in his 1980 callup. Now that was a story I would have liked to have heard explored.
But no. Costas and Torre talked about Torre's last, not first managerial assignment for some reason. Though it's a topic that hasn't lacked for coverage in recent days, I derived a few interesting nuggets from their chat.
1) Everybody is eventually nobody. Torre described his experience in Tampa last week as thus: He walked into a room full of Steinbrenners and other such life forms; he made his case that he'd been very successful over a dozen years, meriting a better deal than that which he was offered; he was stared at silently. At that moment, Joe Torre wasn't a revered leader of men, packing four World Series titles in his back pocket. He was a disgruntled employee going up against human resources. And human resources stares at you silently if that's what human resources intended to do in the first place. Torre could have slipped his Torreography into the nearest laptop and it wouldn't have done him any good. Management — whether represented by apparatchiks in windowless offices adhering to guidelines carefully designed to avoid lawsuits, or megalomaniac shipping heirs in the blithering, blathering flesh — is very good at staring silently.
2) Only win if they make it worth your while. Torre's strongest point to Costas as regards the infamous “insult” he took at the deal he was offered was, in so many words, why would you think I need an “incentive” clause to try and win a World Series? He was a professional baseball player for nearly two decades. He's been a manager for four different teams in 26 different seasons. Virtually all of Joe Torre's life has been devoted to trying to win something. That's what athletes and coaches do. It's what dedicated people do in whatever context their careers provide. Of course it's nice to be offered a performance bonus, but in baseball, it's all about performance. Joe Torre didn't know that? As he told Costas, it wasn't like telling him a million bucks awaited him for making the playoffs again was going to change this or that in-game decision. It's another example of whoever's running Torre's former team demonstrating a slippery grip on the reality of their business.
3) The best team is the team that plays best. Torre lost me by repeating the conventional wisdom canard that a best-of-five playoff series is by definition a crapshoot. It was a way to take himself off the hook for his team losing its last three division series. Hey, whaddaya want from me? Anything can happen in five games! Nowhere in the discussion between him and Costas did he say his team was lucky in the years when it won its LDS. It was implied that his team was always better but sometimes unlucky, never simply losers like half the teams in a League Division Series are going to be. How about acknowledging that everybody who makes it through 162 games to reach the playoffs is probably on a par with each other and there are no legitimately unfathomable upsets by October? The LDS round pits a division winner against a division winner, or a division winner against a team that probably came pretty close, a team that, if geography had been reinterpreted, might have won a division itself. If it's wrong of Steinbrenner to demand All Or Nothing results, then it's off base for Torre to act as if piloting a few division series losers was somehow a freak of nature. P.S. Between 1969 and 1984, pennants were decided in best-of-five series and I don't remember the crapshoot argument being invoked. If you lost, it was because somebody beat you, not because life wasn't fair.
4) PR isn't a stat, but perhaps it should be. Maybe Joe Torre was just being efficient in holding a big-ass press conference last week since he was presumably besieged for interviews. Maybe he was just being considerate of every reporter who covered him. Maybe he was doing Costas a favor by giving him his first one-on-one since leaving his post. Or maybe Joe Torre gives lie to the ol' “I never read the papers [or Internet]” dictum so many sports people insist we believe. It's pretty obvious Joe Torre cares what is said about him. He doesn't have to. He can probably do whatever he wants or, as that jingle for the Nevele put it, he doesn't have to do a thing (people do that, too). Yet Torre has a storyline and he has talking points: he wasn't treated with respect; he deserved a longer contract; he was plenty motivated. If he didn't say a word, most observers would come to those conclusions independently. Discount the outlying cranks who like to come off as iconoclasts, and everybody who's covered Torre regularly has generally burnished his image for him for years. Maybe now that he doesn't have batting orders and pitching rotations to worry about, maybe he's right to worry about perceptions. Maybe, to paraphrase the line about rich folks who are careful with their nickels, that's how people who enjoy positive perceptions continue to be perceived positively.
5) Drama must linger. Why are intelligent people pretending it matters that Torre won't say if he will eventually go to his former place of business and throw out a first ball or tip his cap? Of course he doesn't want to right now. Who the hell wants to go back to the company he or she just left acrimoniously? He just finished a dozen years doing what he considers a great job and was met with stony silence when tried to express that view. No, he wouldn't be anxious to return. Nor might his former employers be anxious to have him back. But eventually they will. For someone who obviously appreciated the enhancement his image received from his success in that job, Torre will someday, sooner than later, want to own that part of his history. Everybody eventually goes back for at least ceremonial purposes. Casey Stengel took another job after being fired in 1960 but went back in 1970 for the retirement of his uniform number. Yogi Berra famously huffed he would never go back after being fired in 1985, but he returned in 1999 because he decided life is too long to hold an endless grudge. Billy Martin…he always returned. He'd return right now if he could. Of course Joe Torre will return there to wave if not manage. He'll look good doing so and his former employers won't lose anything in the process. But don't expect it to be tomorrow. Put aside the $5 million and put yourself in Joe's shoes: you wouldn't return tomorrow either.
6) Bob Costas can come off as an elitist twit. After watching Joe Torre sport an insignia I reflexively froth at for a dozen years, you'd think he'd be the person in this HBO interview I'd be most annoyed by when it was over. But no, it was Costas. And it wasn't anything he said or did in the interview that annoyed me, it was the afterchat with Bryant Gumbel when the host asked the interviewer what the chances were of Torre managing again. Fifty-fifty, Costas guessed, an informed way of saying “I don't know.” Costas ventured that Joe would require an ideal situation, that Torre obviously isn't going to manage the Cincinnati Reds (FYI, they just hired Dusty Baker) or the Milwaukee Brewers. OK, maybe I'm being too literal-minded here, but the way he gave off this vibe of condescension when he dismissed the Brewers in particular peeved me no end. Why couldn't Joe Torre manage the Milwaukee Brewers? What's so dadburned extraordinary about a specific baseball manager that he's incapable of managing a specific baseball team? If Costas' point was the Brewers probably couldn't pay him all he would want, I'll buy that. But that didn't seem to be his implication. It was more the Brewers aren't good enough for Torre. That's absurd. The Brewers nearly won the National League Central last season. They have an outstanding young nucleus, not altogether different from what Torre walked into in 1996. Maybe a more patient, more experienced manager than Ned Yost (whom we last saw tussling with Johnny Estrada in the runway to the home dugout at Miller Park) is just what they need to become a champion. They have relatively new ownership that isn't afraid to spend a few bucks, they have a very nice facility with healthy attendance and Milwaukee — where Torre began his major league career in 1960, not incidentally — appears to be a wonderfully livable town. A couple of pennants and, before you know it, snobs like Costas would be falling all over themselves calling Milwaukee an adorable baseball hotbed, the Brewers a summertime version of the Packers and their fans — not the Cardinals' — the best in the game, tailgating inheritors of the sacred and homey traditions established for the Braves of '57 and the Brew Crew of '82. Why not? A year ago, maybe two months ago, Costas (like a lot of us) could have similarly patronized the Colorado Rockies and seemed urbane and knowing in the process. Today, there's no success story quite like Clint Hurdle and the heretofore obscure, small-market, instantly dismissable Rockies. Today, in his heart of competitive hearts, I'd bet Joe Torre would happily trade his last twelve years for Clint Hurdle's next four to seven games.
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.
