Well, it worked on the Red Sox when DiamondVision jumped the gun.
 
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans. Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here. Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here. Got something to say? Leave a comment, or email us at faithandfear@gmail.com. (Sorry, but we have no interest in ads, sponsored content or guest posts.) Need our RSS feed? It's here. Visit our Facebook page, or drop by the personal pages for Greg and Jason. Or follow us on Twitter: Here's Greg, and here's Jason. |
If it’s the final Friday of the month, then it’s the ninth installment of the special Top 10 Songs of All-Time edition of Flashback Friday at Faith and Fear in Flushing. In the late summer of 1974, the foundering Mets decided to give anybody and everybody a try. Their first-time callups that August and September included Randy Sterling, Rich Puig, Nino Espiñosa, Ike Hampton, Bruce Boisclair, Brock Pemberton and Benny Ayala. Though some of those names resonate among Mets fans to this day, most of them came and went quickly. By this measure, never were the New York Mets and the pop chart in tighter sync than they were that year. Except that while the Mets lost 91 games in 1974 and were generally depressing to watch (Ayala homering in his first big league at-bat notwithstanding), music was never better. My proof, the only proof I’ll ever need for this grand assertion, is The Top 500 Songs of All-Time, a survey that covers the years 1972 through 1999. One year among the 28 it encompasses towers above the rest in terms of sheer volume. That would be 1974. Of the 500 songs recognized as the best ever by me, 50 of them — 10 percent — were hits in 1974. From New Year’s Day to New Year’s Eve, the radio was a cornucopia of pop and soul greatness. These were twelve months when music absolutely peaked, the climax of an era that, in fact, established music as a life force for the only person whose taste has ever been of any concern in this corner: Me. Fifty songs from 1974. Forty-one from 1973. Thirty-four from 1972. That’s 125 out of 500 from the first three years when I took music seriously. That’s a quarter of the list right there. Thirty more songs would be added from 1975, meaning that I had pretty much decided what good music was before I was Bar Mitzvahed. I decided it was “The Night Chicago Died” by Paper Lace. It was a lot more than that in 1974, naturally. It was “Rock Me Gently” by Andy Kim and “Hang On In There Baby” by Johnny Bristol and “Tell Me Something Good” by Rufus and “Radar Love” by Golden Earring and “Beach Baby” by First Class and “Free Man In Paris” by Joni Mitchell and “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” by Steely Dan and “Sideshow” by Blue Magic and “Waterloo” by ABBA…and that was all in the span of a couple of months from approximately July to September of 1974. While the post-Believe Mets were definitively receding from contention, the radio, my radio, was rising to the occasion, even if some of those artists didn’t endure in the popular imagination any more than Randy Sterling or Rich Puig did for Mets fans. Right in the middle of this high tide was a group from England whose name seemed rather strange to me singing about a city in America that, to the best of my knowledge, was relatively alive and well. I had only the vaguest idea of what “The Night Chicago Died” was supposed to be about. But what I did know more than made up for it. It was exciting. It was thrilling. It was suspenseful. It had sirens! When I hear “The 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! I would have to say “The Night Chicago Died,” as the No. 1 song of the No. 1 year of All-Time (and remember, I do deal in absolutes in this arena), makes a case for being, well, the No. 1 Song of All-Time. It ranks, however, as No. 2. A very strong No. 2. I would go as far as to call it the people’s champion, the highest-flying song on my survey that isn’t No. 1. No. 1, as we’ll discuss four weeks from today, is set in stone. It can’t be moved, can’t be dislodged. (It’s probably the way Mets fans of a certain vintage view 1986 in relation to 1969, that nothing can top the first time.) With “American Pie” inviolable in my esteem, “The Night Chicago Died” deserves to be categorized as the best of the rest. It really is. I love this song so much. I loved it at 11, I renewed my fealty for it at 22 and today, at 44, I’ve yet to hear anything that’s come along since that I like nearly as much. And according to my heartfelt calculations, I like 498 songs nearly as much. My affection for “The Night Chicago Died” was both instant and delayed. I fell for it immediately and I would fall it for all over again. The first time was explosive. It sounded, as so many songs that captivate me, like nothing else on the radio. It sounded nothing like “Billy Don’t Be A Hero,” which would be neither here nor there except Paper Lace dipped its first toe in the charts with its version of that song, one far better known by its Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods incarnation. The two groups had what is known as a cover battle and Paper Lace got its ass kicked, No. 1 to No. 96. The Lace wasn’t going to stand for it. The songwriting team of Mitch Murray and Peter Callendar penned a quick ditty that nobody else in their right mind would cover (though why there was such a rush on “Billy,” one of the few 1974 hits that I outright disliked, is beyond me). It had Paper Lace written all over it. It must have. It zoomed to No. 1 for a week in the middle of August, practically straddling the line between the Nixon and Ford eras in American history…which is funny in retrospect since it attempted to reflect another era in American history and mangled several essential details. My daddy was a cop OK. He’s your daddy. Can’t argue with that. On the east side of Chicago First problem. There is no east side of Chicago nor any streets of the old east side, according to Chicagoans. There is a north side (Wrigley), south side (Comiskey) and west side (where the Bulls roam). To the east of those sides there is a lake. A great lake. But no east side where one could be a cop. Back in the USA Historical, dramatic and creative license is taken with the narrative throughout. I guess if you want the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre told accurately, go read a book. If you want an imaginary version of Al Capone trying to make that town his very own, you’ve got a 3:30 45 from the UK. Murray-Callendar (not to be confused with Murray Hewitt, manager of Flight of the Conchords) weren’t exactly Illinoisans. Neither were Paper Lace, which was composed of vocalist/drummer Phil Wright, bassist Cliff Fish and guitarists Michael Vaughn, Chris Morris and Carlo Santanna. They were Nottingham-based. Nottingham is the Lace City, which was good to learn eventually since I thought Paper Lace was a rather tepid name for such an AWESOME band. Anyway, the night in question…whoa, what a mess Chicago was. Al Capone was pretty demanding and next thing you knew “about a hundred cops were dead.” You know, being 11 years old in 1974 made you pretty desensitized — Watergate, The Towering Inferno — but that’s a lotta lawmen biting the dust in one night. Did Murray and Callendar have any sense of proportion? Apparently not. Just as well. If you’re going to create a musical cartoon, may as well go for it. And it’s not like there were no repercussions: ‘Til the last of the hoodlum gang See? It’s not like the bad guys were winning. And by the way, “surrendered up” is so much more action-packed than merely surrendering. Listen, it’s a stupid song, but it’s effective. The second half of the chorus could have been written by an 11-year-old: Brother what a night it really was You did not require a sixth-grade education to come up with that, or to have the wits to alternate “it really was” with “the people saw,” or to trade off “glory be” with “yes indeed”. Yes indeed, I never realized just how stupid this song is. But I don’t care. I love it even more now that I’ve gone about dissecting it. I can’t believe that I once read a critique of the so-called worst songs ever and “The Night Chicago Died” was included among the offenders. In fact, most every song on the list I’m thinking of that ran in 1988 (in the Daily News, compiled by two of their hopelessly elitist music critics, David Hinckley and David Browne) was from my beloved 1970s. A lot of critics never got over the fact that a) the ’60s ended and b) time marched on. It was that attitude, already pervasive as I became old enough to have enough to look back on, that bugged me. I saw nostalgia rise up in the ’70s for the ’50s. I saw it form in the ’80s for the ’60s. Why were the ’70s getting such a bad rap when they were barely yet the old days? Why did they have to be reflexively dismissed as the bad old days? This topic was top of mind on a night in early 1985. I had been invited to join my roommate and his friend to see KISS (makeup-free edition, cost-free tickets) at the Bayfront Center in St. Petersburg. I wasn’t really a KISS fan nor was I, at 22, within the target demo of the band judging by the rest of the crowd, so I wasn’t all that into most of the concert. That was until the final encore, “Rock And Roll All Nite,” which was a hit when I was in seventh grade…early 1976. For that I was up on a folding chair singing along. So were my roommate and his friend. A lot of the kids in the audience just stared blankly. MTV’s KISS oeuvre apparently didn’t reach back before “Lick It Up”. So the three of us are in the car heading back toward campus and reflecting on the dissonance of our loving KISS’s ’70s songs and other records we grew up knowing by heart and the institutional amnesia they had otherwise inspired. My roommate said yeah, you know what was a great song? “Run Joey Run” by David Geddes. It wasn’t, really, but I said yeah! And you know what else was great, I said…”The Night Chicago Died” by Paper Lace. Yeah, they said, whether they meant it or not. And whether we knew it or not, we were on the slippery slope to middle age. This was the first time I’d given serious thought to “The Night Chicago Died” since fifth grade became sixth in the fall of ’74. Paper Lace had followed me from Camp Treasure Island where we sang it on the bus to a family trip out west where I sang along to a transistor and back. It was a big for a long time that summer, but like most pop smashes by groups who didn’t follow up well (“The Black-Eyed Boys” peaked at No. 41), “The Night” and the band would fade from consciousness. That January night in Florida, I made it my mission to bring them back. 1985 became the year I became determined to revive the music of the 1970s. For several years, until Rhino Records picked up my cause, the sound of the battle rang as I wouldn’t shut up about it when given the opportunity to convince anybody — particularly my self-hating generational peers — that our music shouldn’t be written off. We need to appreciate this stuff. We loved it then. There’s nothing wrong with it now. Bought my first copy of “The Night Chicago Died” in the oldies section of a Sam Goody in the summer of ’85. Tuned into WCBS-FM every Saturday when they did their “This Week In…” Top 20 countdowns in the hope they’d throw me a bone (’twas sensational hearing it in my Toyota since I never got to drive to Paper Lace when they were hot ’cause I didn’t have my license when I was 11). And kvelled, absolutely kvelled, when the Mets swept four from the Cubs at Shea in June of ’85. When the fourth game was complete, guess — just guess! — what song was played over the stadium loudspeaker while Steve Zabriskie offered his wrapup. It may have been an afternoon affair, but it was “The Night Chicago Died.” (I tried to send those vibes to the Jets by playing my 45 over and over again when they took on the Bears in December, but there was no stopping the Bears Shufflin’ Crew.) There was hope for my ’70s yet. Rhino honored Paper Lace and a hundred acts like them with the Have A Nice Day series so I no longer had to rely on my poorly dubbed K-Tel tapes for sustenance. Meanwhile, the greater consciousness was receiving one ’70s earworm after another. I needn’t have worried that my music would be forgotten. Others remembered. It’s not like those of us who made those songs such big hits surrendered up or died. Hip-hop excepted, you don’t get story songs like that anymore. You don’t get that kind of violence glorified either. Do you get sirens anymore? The ’70s were the golden age of siren songs. “Indiana Wants Me” by R. Dean Taylor. “Armed And Extremely Dangerous” by First Choice. “The Night Chicago Died” by Paper Lace. Sirens and st…st…stuttering were very big in those days. Did any other song have a clock? I loved that, too. And there was no sound at all It came with a tick-tock. And they did it without computers. Maybe they used a real clock. I’d like to think Murray and Callendar were on a ladder under a cuckoo with a microphone capturing a clock ticking for posterity. I’d also like to think the door burst open wide and they complained bitterly that they’d have to wait another hour to get the tick-tock just right. That’s highly unlikely since nobody surrounding this second-greatest song of All-Time seemed terribly concerned with getting anything besides the hooks right. After telling the world that Chicago had an east side and lost a hundred peace officers to unfathomable gunfire, the boys’ management requested that Mayor Richard Daley ante up a key to the city or something proper when Paper Lace visited Chicago to promote its record. Go figure, but Daley’s office was not receptive. An aide is said to have told the band and the writers that they should “jump in the Chicago River, placing your heads under water three times and surfacing twice. Pray tell us, are you nuts?” Can you imagine someone not wanting to honor “The Night Chicago Died”? Now that’s nuts! *** On August 31, the last Flashback Friday devoted to music, I was in a store in Milwaukee where the radio was tuned to a station that was airing its own weekly feature known as — yup — Flashback Friday. I’d love to pretend they stole the concept from here, but of course I borrowed the gimmick from who-knows-how-many FM stations that have used one hour at the end of the week to look backward. Still, on the day we celebrated Del Amitri in this space, it was quite odd to hear a DJ in another city spinning Murray Head (No. 81 on the Top 500) in the same spirit that we today celebrate the likes of Paper Lace. No matter the decade, no matter the artist, it’s the universal language. The No. 3 Song of All-Time was heard at the end of August. The No. 1 record will be played at the end of October.
Next Friday: Crying in baseball. I can't tell you with any great conviction that there's any good reason to invest your faith in our team this weekend. Of course I can't. I was at the same game Thursday night that you were or watched. There was nothing about the Mets' performance to suggest they ever held a seven-game lead in their division or, for that matter, that they were about to be tied for first. The Cardinals — Albert Pujols, David Eckstein and a flock of random Redbirds — played like contenders, not the washed-out world champions they are. Journeyman Joel Piñeiro may as well have been the lost Dean brother, so effective was this Cardinal pitcher against these Mets bats. The only reason we were technically in the game for nearly two hours was that we had Hall of Famer and all-time legend Pedro Martinez giving again his all to this nearly lost cause. Pedro's made five September starts and has been exactly what the Mets needed five times. One unearned run in the first and two earned in the third, but unquantifiable guts and smarts otherwise. The best move Willie Randolph has made as Mets manager came in the seventh when he visited the mound after Pedro walked Rick Ankiel on four pitches to make it first and second with two out and Pujols looming. I may be crazy, but I thought Pedro wanted Albert. Pujols had doubled twice earlier. Pedro wasn't gonna let it happen again. The best move part was the manager leaving his starter in for one more batter. Willie sat down. Two pitches later, so did Albert. Pedro was done at that point, though hopefully not for calendar year 2007. As the ninth approached, I experienced the most horrible kind of déjà vu. It was 3-0 in the fourth-from-final game of the season, with the Mets' position in the playoff race tenuous, with the Mets having begun to lose alarmingly, with the Mets playing a team long out of it, with me sitting in the mezzanine hoping that somehow the Mets could get something going right here, right now. Except it wasn't right here, right now. It was right here, Wednesday, September 23, 1998, the Mets, one inning removed from sliding into a tie for the Wild Card with the Chicago Cubs, down three runs to the Montreal Expos. I sat and watched in disbelief as Jay Payton, Jorge Fabregas and Todd Pratt lined, popped and struck out against Uggie Urbina. It was the second consecutive loss for those Mets who had been one up over the Cubs when the week began. They would go to Atlanta, lose three more and be one behind them and the Giants when the week and the season ended. I tried to shake off the feeling that I was enduring 1998 again. We were sending up three legitimate hitters: Jose Reyes, Luis Castillo and David Wright. Unprompted by Kevin James or any other unwelcome recorded intrusions, about a third of the house drummed up a Let's Go Mets! It was sincere if short-lived. Reyes grounded out. Castillo grounded out. Wright flied out. It was another 3-0 loss, nine years removed from the same 3-0 loss. We were beaten for the fourth consecutive game while the Phillies were topping the Braves, yet it wasn't a booing night in Flushing. Maybe because of Pedro. Maybe because this was a makeup date and you had to go a little out of your way to find it. Maybe some of the more sympathetic souls at Shea took “makeup date” literally and felt conciliatory toward their team on this, the last evening they would spend alone in first place. By night's end, we had a roommate. Then there's the very real possibility that there wasn't a ton of derision because there wasn't a ton of concern or its sibling emotion, a ton of belief. You can't believe what you've seen since September 12: the Mets 4-10, the Phillies 11-3. After 140 quick minutes, we filed out like middle-schoolers from a mandatory assembly. It was cool to get out of class for a couple of periods, but that was pretty lame, wasn't it? Yes, it was lame. Yes, the Mets are lame. Yes, the Mets are choking on their own vomit in historic fashion. At first it was disturbing to watch. Then it was sad. Now it's barely anything. Except for this: There's a tie for first place in the National League East with three games to go. The Mets are one of the two teams in the tie. They didn't get here the way you'd want them to get here, the way the Phillies did. You'd rather rise than fall this or any time of year. But I've checked the rulebook and it turns out the Mets are still eligible to compete in and win the games they have remaining and the division as a whole. And that's what I hope they do. I mean I really hope they do. You know how they've disappointed us by their actions? You know how it looks as if they're going through the motions instead of to the postseason? You know how most of us who are lifelong fans have said we can't stand them? I don't care about that anymore. It may be as true as the drop has been precipitous, but I don't care about that anymore at all. I have rooted for this team since I was six years old. I'm forty-four. I've been at this nonstop for 39 seasons. I have lived — lived — to have my team be in a position to go to the playoffs every single one of those 39 seasons. It is all I ever wanted when it was unavailable to me. It has been unavailable to me almost every one of those 39 seasons by the time those seasons reached this juncture. There have been ten exceptions to the rule. There were the seven seasons when they made it; there was 1985, when they took it to the second-to-last day; there was 1998, when they took it to the last day; and there is 2007, when they are alive on the third-to-last day. I can't do a blessed thing about 1985 or 1998 anymore. But I can do whatever a lifelong fan can do right here, right now. As my Thursday night companion AlbertsonMets put it in a very perceptive comment on this blog yesterday, I am going to root like hell. I am going to be at Shea tonight, and I am going to root like hell. I am going to be watching on SNY Saturday, and I am going to root like hell. I am going to be back at Shea on Sunday, and whether there is still something on the line or not — and there may very well not — I am going to root like hell. I am going to root like hell for the Mets. Not because these particular players who have whizzed away a formidable lead like nobody before them necessarily deserve my unqualified support, but because I deserve to give it. I don't wander through the winters thinking how great it will be for the baseball season to come along so I can ignore my team or dismiss my team or decide my team is pointless, hopeless or worthless. I haven't been at this for 39 seasons so that when I am presented with a two-way tie for first place with three games to play I will act like I am too good for it. When the Mets clinched the 2006 National League East title, I told you this: We look at the script Mets on those uniforms and that's our name. That's us. However it happened, we became Mets a forever ago. We don't get paid. Doesn't even occur to us how much being Mets costs us in dollar terms let alone man and woman hours devoted to this cause we've made our own across each and every one of our lifetimes. We bleed, we sweat, we cry because, c'mon — what else are we gonna do? We can do everything for this team except hit, hit with power, run, throw, catch and pitch. So we do what we can. We wear them and we hope them and we yell them and we live them and we write them. We do it with only limited promise and no guarantee of success most years. We do it on the slightest chance that every now and then we can call ourselves the champion of something. It's not a dealbreaker when we can't, but it surely serves as a contract extension into perpetuity for us when we do. Hey, fellow Mets — there is only limited promise and no guarantee of success this year, but the slightest chance still exists. Don't pass it up. Root like hell for us.
We have nothing to Fear but the Mets and the Phillies themselves. Since both teams now have a magic number, that also means we have nothing to count down. Have Faith anyway this weekend. As a very smart man recently said: If I’m wrong, we all have six months to not root for them. Let’s Go Mets. [Illustration by Jim Haines…who else?] “This is the train to…LONG BEACH. The next stop is…LONG BEACH.” Ever since the Long Island Rail Road began employing automated voice systems, I'd never heard that kind of redundancy on an eastbound train. I'd never ridden to the final stop. But there I was last night, on the 11:54 to Long Beach, my old hometown. Well, I thought as we pulled out of Island Park and I heard that computerized announcement, this figures. We're coming to the end of the line. And so it goes in these waning days of a baseball season and these desperate hours of this unwanted pennant race. The end of the line is nigh. Four games left. Almost no lead remaining. Now don't it feel like you're a rider on a downbound train? My car was parked in LB because I had made a southern excursion in the afternoon to meet Dana Brand, author of Mets Fan, a book for which I reiterate my previous recommendation. He was giving a little talk at the Long Beach Public Library and from there, he and I were going to Gino's for the world's best pizza and Shea for the world's worst baseball. The company and the pizza were outstanding. The Mets were not. This was the first of my four planned trips to the future home of the Citi Field parking lot this week. I wasn't banking on being there for the clinching. I thought the clinching would be taken care of already. Mostly I'd looked forward to the socializing. The social aspect of my Mets season has far outdistanced my Mets. I thought the last week of the year would be cause for the world's largest outdoor Diet Pepsi party. We'd drink, we'd nosh, we'd chat…Oh look! The Mets are tuning up for the playoffs! Ta-ta to that notion. Dana, like so many of those with whom I've shared a soft drink this season, was a better reason to go to a Mets game than the featured attraction. Shea itself is a better reason to go to Shea than the featured attraction. Even Future Shock Park Propaganda Plaza was pleasant in comparison to the Mets. Curiosity drove us to the Citi Field Preview Center (which shouldn't be open this week, dammit) early enough to beat the crowds for the virtual tour of the luxury suites we'll likely never really sit in. It hardly matters when your season is crumpling up and blowing away, but boy was that thing scary. I used to work for a corporation that introduced initiatives in town hall meetings the way the Mets are previewing Citi Field. “You'll like it a lot. You don't have any questions. Now get back to your desks.” Seriously, I thought I'd have to file paperwork with the Mets to take the night off so I could go to the game. • We voluntarily stood in a line reminiscent of the way happy earthlings voluntarily stood in a line for the spaceship that would take them to the home planet of their veritable saviors, the Kanamits, a race that had eliminated war and famine among humans. As every Twilight Zone aficionado knows, the Citi Field literature that is titled “To Serve Mets Fans” is actually a cookbook. • We saw a meeting in progress in the conference room where a PowerPoint was up that trumpeted the improvement in the Mets' “on-field product” across 2006 and 2007. Must have been an old slide. I imagine a new deck will be in use by tonight, one that exclaims that the Mets scored 12 runs in the 5 innings that spanned the end of Tuesday and the beginning of Wednesday. • We visited a replica of the Excelsior Club, which I think is where all the upstanding civic leaders in Stepford convened to plan their next move. • We sat in all the different seats Citi Field has to offer. Some were more luxurious than others. It was no coincidence. The more you pay, the more padded the seat you will get. The least you pay, you get no padding. Every fan decidedly not a king. • We were told that no inquiries about the “relocation process” for current season ticket holders could be answered at this time. I can think of a few European countries in the last century that trafficked in that kind of euphemism. I suppose it couldn't be addressed since the Mets are expending all their energy against the relocation process that is shifting them from the penthouse to the outhouse. • We were not shown the time machine that would make it possible for us to adjust our career choices in order to earn what it will take to afford a seat at the Excelsior Club conference table. I wouldn't make any presumptions about those Mets fans who joined us on the virtual tour, but I didn't sense a lot of Fortune 500 types were along for the ride. I have to wonder why the Mets sales department didn't tweak this dog-and-pony show for the common folk…something to whet our appetites beyond “your seat will not be padded.” One thing that will be a vast upgrade over Shea Stadium when Citi Field opens in 2009 is it will not include the 2007 New York Mets. My wife works with a woman whose first question and comment to her yesterday was, “How is your husband doing? He must be so upset with the way the Mets are playing.” Great — it's back: the autumnal rite of sending along Greg must be taking this very hard precautionary condolences; I received them with leaf-peeping regularity in my mid-to-late thirties. Thanks for asking, but I'm with Jason as regards the current Zeitgeist. Go ahead, dare me to be upset in the 1998 sense that this club has six-sevenths of its erstwhile margin stuck in its windpipe. 1998's five-loss choke job was brutal because we hadn't been to the playoffs in a decade. It hurt because we were being deprived of what we could only imagine. Amid 2007's disquieting gaggery, the saving grace is the relatively recent 2006 memory that lingers lovelier as this year's days grow short. Never mind that it's a lot of the same guys. Never mind that '06 ended as it did. You never believed for half a second that those Mets were “complacent”. If their immediate successors are satisfied that winning a division once and a division series once confirms their talent and permits their complacence, then maybe it's fine for us, the fans, to dismiss this 2007 edition as a fraud and rest on laurels constructed of 2006 National League East Champions pennants and t-shirts. (If there are any left over, we can weave our own Citi seat padding.) We're not entitled to a postseason per se, but I don't think we deserve to party like it's the year before 1999. We're not trotting Brian McRae and Tony Phillips out there. But how can you look at this relentlessly helpless outfit and see anything but a choke in progress? Philip Humber justified my conditional faith by appearing to know what he was doing for a couple of innings, as if he'd been pitching all his life. Then it became apparent he wasn't ready or he was too rusty or the Beltway Behemoths were just too massive a challenge at this tender stage of his development. I hope to see him again some day. The same I cannot say for Joe Smith, at least not until he spends some quality time at Binghamton or somewhere. Imagine that your defending N.L. East champs' potential to repeat came down on the final Wednesday of 2007 to Philip Humber and Joe Smith, an untested rookie and a failed rookie. All that payroll, all that padding and no experience to rely on. When we're paying whatever we're paying for whatever seating's available at Citi Field (suddenly the Mets don't loom as such a long-term hot ticket), I will be endorsing a new philosophy for management: Don't skimp on pitching. When Chad Bradford got the three-year deal from Baltimore, I thought of course you should let him go. How do you give a non-closer three years? They're all interchangeable and you can't commit that long to such an uncertain quantity. Forget that. Give the next Bradford three years. Give the next Darren Oliver two years. It's chump change when you consider the stakes. If it doesn't work, then eat it. It's better than hoping a Joe Smith will be up to the task of retiring Major League batters (after everybody's taken his measure) at crucial junctures in his second professional season. This is not a license to re-sign Guillermo Mota or give Scott Schoeneweis (who has improved enough of late to rate his own PowerPoint page) three years. But I'm done worrying about the Mets' budget. I've seen the future. I've seen the Excelsior Club. They can pay worthy* relievers any premium they demand. While Dana and I chatted the early innings away, pausing just long enough to standing-ovate for Beltran and Alou, it was all good. This had sure-thinginess written all over it…Sodaman! Diet Pepsi all around! Then I happened to notice it was 6-2 and there were Nationals on base. Then 6-4 and more runners on base. Hey, we could lose this game. It was the strangest realization. Even after this endless, shapeless, nightmarish stretch of endless, shapeless, nightmarish ball when you're praying the hinges on the bullpen gate aren't oiled — it's real “The Lady, or the Tiger?” stuff behind that door right now — I thought a 5-0 lead was safe for a team that has so much talent that it sometimes gets bored with the work involved in preserving its leads. Then I thought a 6-2 lead was reasonably golden. Then I thought this is pretty much the worst I've ever seen my team perform when you factor in context. Tipping point, set and match. Phillies cruised. Nationals crushed. Mets crumbled. The pen eventually resembled competent, just in time for the offense to take a batnap (until Wagner). And the lead is suffering from the kind of shrinkage normally associated with a frightened turtle. Are the Mets “blowing” this or are they merely losing a lot of games while their closest opponent is winning many? If you don't have enough wins at the end of the year, did you “blow” it or did it just not add up for you? I don't want to dissect that line of thinking just yet. I don't want to come to the end of the line just yet. I don't want to have confront real life without baseball just yet. *word added upon further consideration of subject matter
The magic number is still 4. That’s also how many games are left in this season. So do we really still have have a magic number? Or have the Mets, in the best tradition of Doug Henning, made it disappear? …if you want perspective, can-do, rah-rah, exhortations to stay the course, solidarity with our boys, or any of that shit. Because you're not going to get it. You're not going to get one little scrap of it. This team sucks. And they don't suck in a wet-behind-the-ears way that makes you want to see what they'll turn into next year. They suck in a way that makes you want them to just go away. Which it certainly looks like they'll be doing at the end of the week. And really, honestly, how can you care about this pathetic baseball team? Horrifying mental mistakes, stupefyingly dumb tantrums at umpires, ludicrous mismanagement of the bullpen and roster, listless play and innings and innings and innings of bad baseball — which part of this rancid stew makes you want to remember your boyhood heroes, or daydream about green fields and summer nights? And should the Mets somehow pull out of their death spiral, which part of it makes you want to fork over $75 a night to watch them sleepwalk through the first week of October against the Cubs or Padres? This New York Observer article is full of dreadful admissions from Carlos Delgado, Pedro Martinez and Tom Glavine, all of whom said that yeah, the Mets play complacent ball. If you didn't read it already, go do so. You're back? Good. One of those articles that makes you want to look away for fear that your fandom is about to crumble, isn't it? Because how on earth can those players — potentially three Hall of Famers — let such a thing happen in their clubhouse? If it's not their job to stop it, whose is it? Willie Randolph? Dream on — apparently he's been a winner all his life, and winners don't dirty themselves by asking millionaires they're paid to oversee not to get bored with little details like making the postseason. What's so infuriating is that the article makes clear something I'd suspected, but shied from confronting. Namely, that blowing a five-run lead to the Washington Nationals — the fucking Washington Nationals — is a symptom, not the disease. “I think at times we can get a little careless. We’ve got so much talent I think sometimes we get bored.” “We have so much talent that sometimes we relax a little bit and then we get ourselves in trouble.” “Sometimes when you’re a team as talented as we are—I don’t know if I’d use the word ‘bored,’ but I guess you can get complacent sometimes. You don’t pay attention to details every now and then because you do have a ton of talent and think you can on most days do everything you wanna do.” These are not things said by pissed-off bloggers fuming in their basements. These are things said in very recent history by decorated New York Met veterans, players universally known as leaders and good clubhouse guys. They are horrifying self-indictments that are about to turn into epitaphs. And if they somehow don't? If the Mets somehow cheat the hangman, what then? Don't tell me about the 2005 Chicago White Sox and the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals, because I don't want to hear it. I want to hear why on earth I should give a fuck about the 2007 New York Mets. Because there's far too much evidence that the 2007 New York Mets themselves do not. There’s something magical about the first Major League start by a highly touted pitcher, particularly a highly touted Mets pitcher. He could be our next Seaver…our next Gooden…our next ace. News that a hot young arm is going to start a game for the first time in his big league career is undeniably exciting news. I sure hope this is the right time of this season for that kind of news. I’m not going to reflexively argue against using Philip Humber in the fifth-to-last game of the season even if the season is still very much up for grabs. Humber is highly touted because he is highly talented. Better yet, he’s highly healthy, which is more than can be said for Orlando Hernandez. Not incidentally, Humber’s highly here. The only other potential candidate for this otherwise orphaned turn in the rotation (on a staff that numbers 18 active pitchers) was Dave Williams, who posted a few impressive starts in 2006 before the herniated disc in his neck got the best of him. Judging by his two 2007 cameos, he’s not fully recovered. So Humber it is. At 24 and with four Met mopup appearances over two callups to his credit, he’s making his first start and he’s doing it when nothing less than solid will be an acceptable result. Nobody likes to grade first starts on anything less than a steep curve, but September 26 with a two-game lead collapses the curve. Humber has to not just worry about getting over his curve (it’s considered a very sharp one), but he must pitch like the first-round draft pick he was out of Rice, the Triple-A ace he became after Tommy John surgery, the top prospect we’ve been told he is right now. He has to do it right away, not against the Baylor Bears, not against the Nashville Sounds, but against the Washington Nationals. He has to not let Ryan Zimmerman or Austin Kearns or Ronnie Belliard or any of them beat him. It’s something Mike Pelfrey, who’s made 16 big league starts, didn’t do Monday. It’s something John Maine, who’s made 55 big league starts, didn’t do last Tuesday. It’s something Brian Lawrence, who’s made 152 big league starts, didn’t do the night before that. It’s something Tom Glavine, who’s made 668 big league starts, didn’t do last night. Experience is apparently no prerequisite for pitching well against the Nationals, because it didn’t help any of those guys. Still…first start…final week…high stakes…I’m thinking this, like so much else about this team this month, is not an ideal situation, particularly for a starter’s debut — regardless of touting. If he comes through and helps us gather in the monster pot that’s been lingering on the National League East table a little too long, then we will have reason to believe we have a keeper on our hands. If he doesn’t, Philip Humber’s long-term future will be pretty low on my worry list. I can’t shake visions of other first starts at non-optimal junctures. The first one that pops to mind is Julio Valera, chosen by Buddy Harrelson to supplant Ron Darling at the beginning of September 1990. Valera was a Tidewater stud and Darling was maddeningly inconsistent. Valera would look OK his first turn (6 IP, 3 ER) and win. Five days later, he would get the call over Darling for a crucial showdown against the Pirates and be dreadful (2 IP, 4 ER on 8 H). It was one more shaky start and out for Valera from there. Julio didn’t cost the 1990 Mets the division, but he sure as hell didn’t help. The other first start by a noted rookie in a pennant race I can remember is Craig Swan’s, against the Phillies in September of ’73. He was called on by Yogi Berra to pitch the nightcap of a Labor Day doubleheader (go ask your grandparents what one of those was). Swan did not pitch well: 4.1 IP, 4 ER, 9 H. The Mets didn’t win his debut. Said M. Donald Grant in the wake of his loss, “Send the fat kid back to Tidewater.” Unlike Valera, Swannie had a more-than-representative Mets tenure, albeit without any more real pennant race opportunities for the rest of his career. Valera was 21. Swan was 22. Humber is 24. Plus Philip was around the team last September and, unlike his predecessors in pressurized situations, isn’t making his first ML appearance. But he’s also starting his first game far later in the schedule than Valera (9/1/90) and Swan (9/3/73) did. Whatever they did, there was still plenty of time left on the Mets’ side. After Philip Humber starts, there will be all of four games remaining in this regular season. Nothing necessarily bodes anything about anything, but it sure feels awfully late for somebody who’s so early. As we can say about any scenario in baseball but as is most apropos when it comes to a pitcher making his first start, we’ll see what happens. The subject of first starts by highly touted pitchers inevitably leads me back to the patron saints of Mets pitching prospects, Generation K. I was recently reminded of them even before Humber crossed the radar, a few Sundays ago, when their leading edge, Bill Pulsipher, reappeared with the Long Island Ducks and Jeff Gold of Newsday caught up with him. Geez, I thought, Pulsipher’s a Duck again? Hasn’t he been a Duck already? Hasn’t he been everything already? Pulse is still pitching? Bill Pulsipher’s first Major League start, on June 17, 1995, is iconic in these parts. It was the occasion that provided the impetus for the two bloggers you know as Greg and Jason to meet in person and take in their first game. It was a winning debut for both of us, if not Pulsipher himself: seven earned runs in seven manager-mandated innings. Jason Isringhausen would be up about a month later, a righty who was supposed to be even better than his pal the lefty. By the spring of ’96, they’d be joined and presumably topped by the cream of the Mets pitching crop, Paul Wilson, the No. 1 pick in the nation in the summer of ’94. Izzy. Pulse. Paul. The first Internet acronym I ever used regularly was not BTW or ROFL or LMAO. It was IPP. It would be perfectly understandable if you were to LYAO at the notion that IPP were going to set the world on fire or at least anchor the Mets’ rotation for the balance of the 1990s and into the next millennium. For myriad reasons, none developed as Mets. Among them, they started 98 games as Mets. None was with us beyond 2000. The trio wasn’t even technically a trio for a single gameday; Pulsipher was injured during Wilson’s first Spring Training. By the time he pitched for the Mets again, the other two were out. When he briefly returned from exile after that, Isringhausen was gone and Wilson was going. If the Cardinals are holding a lead in the ninth inning on Thursday (heaven forefend), we’ll reacquaint ourselves with Jason Isringhausen. Of the three baby starters of yore, he was the only one who would find lasting big league success, albeit as a closer and not as a Met. Paul Wilson persevered after injuries cost him what should have been his prime development years, grinding out a respectable if mostly losing career with the Devil Rays and Reds through 2005. And Pulse never quits. He started 2007 with Leones de Yucatan in the Mexican League and alighted in Central Islip for his Long Island encore at the end of August. He wound up 2-0 in four starts as the Ducks flew toward the playoffs. Pulse is 33. Paul is 34. Izzy just turned 35. They have yet to lead the Mets to a world championship. They probably won’t. In the final episode of perhaps my favorite television drama ever, Six Feet Under, David Fisher asks his mother, “Why do we so desperately cling to the past?” Ruth Fisher, despondent as all get out, responds, “Because that was when we had hope.” That’s the only reason I can imagine I still dwell, when given the opportunity, on Izzy, Pulse and Paul. Their statistical accomplishments added up to fewer than 100 Mets starts and a lot of broken dreams. Every dispatch from Triple-A in 1995 infused us with hope. That the hope amounted to not even a pitcher’s mound of beans is almost besides the point a dozen years later. Our record, despite the battering its taken recently, is in far better shape at the end of 2007 than it was at the end of 1995. Now is indisputably better than then to be a Mets fan. Yet I was somehow far more hopeful about the Mets then than I am now. Contending is better than dreaming of contending. I understand that. But the way-out-of-it Mets made me smile more at the end of 1995 than the first-place Mets are inspiring me to at the end of 2007. Generation K is recalled as one of the biggest disappointments in Mets history, yet I still feel a warm little tickle thinking about those three arms in their larval phase, constituting the building blocks of the first legitimate shot at a bright Met future in years. Your mindset is so different when all you’re hoping for is hope. I can still see each pitcher wearing his cap pulled almost down to his eyebrows. I can see Pulse and Izzy giggling like schoolboys on Dallas Green’s bench as ’95 begins to turn around a little and they’re two of the key reasons why. I can see them and Wilson — Paul with a beard — staring out at me from the cover of USA Today Baseball Weekly the following Spring Training, hyped and headlined as the Next Big Thing. Sometimes I hear Ace Frehley and I think of them. I directed a video in my mind that was going to be the theme of the 1996 season. With these three pitchers leading the way (and wicked ladies sittin’ by their side sayin’ “where are we?”), there was no doubt the Mets would be back!…back in the New York groove. Just you wait, I told myself. It’s gonna happen. It’s not just a long season, you know. It’s a long life if you’re a fan. Even if you do see something every day that you haven’t seen before, you’ve kind of seen it all after a while. Then you kind of see it over and over again. You get so immersed in arguing for or against the deployment of one pitcher or another that you might not notice the entire rotation, the entire staff, the entire roster has turned over again and again without your realizing it. It seems about twelve minutes ago, not twelve years, that we just had to bring up Pulsipher, that we just had to bring up Isringhausen, that we just had to bring up Wilson. There’s something magical about the first Major League start by a highly touted pitcher. Julio Valera be damned: this is the time for that kind of magic. Gotta love the way spoilers are capable of playing in September. You can see they have no chance themselves, but they keep battling and keep driving the better teams crazy. Tuesday night the seemingly overmatched Mets proved they can play with anybody. Even though you watch them and you know you're looking at a team that's way out of contention, it makes you proud to see them driving so hard this late in the season, so late in a ballgame. Sure, they couldn't pitch and made loads of mistakes and eventually came up short versus the Nationals, but the Nats, no matter how many runs they score off our Metsies, aren't going to take them lightly any time soon. And who knows? If there were enough games left, I'd bet we'd have an excellent shot at clinching fourth place. |
Piazza: Catcher, Slugger, Icon, Star by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers. 
Amazin' Again: How the 2015 New York Mets Brought the Magic Back to Queens by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers. 
Volume I of The Happiest Recap: 50+ Years of the New York Mets As Told in 500+ Amazin' Wins by Greg Prince is available in print and for Kindle on Amazon. 
Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History by Greg Prince (foreword by Jason Fry), is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers. |
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