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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 30 June 2023 11:40 am Three series remain in advance of the All-Star break, a break that can’t come soon enough — or last long enough. I picture various Mets repairing to their country estates or wherever they live, clearing their heads at their pools or in front of their sizable video game consoles and then, properly relaxed, forgetting that they’re eventually due back at a ballpark near us. “We did plan to bring you Mets baseball tonight,” Gary Cohen will explain in the cold open from a vacant Citi Field on the appointed Friday night, “but it seems the players have opted to continue their vacations.”
Would any among us truly object?
In the Mets’ 81st game, marking the mathematical midpoint of their lost season, the 2023 Mets played one of their signature games. More like a scrawl. They executed certain elements of their craft adequately, they raised hope modestly, they dropped a couple of balls, they offered not quite enough resistance when challenged, they let a couple of chances wither, and they fell short by one run. These are not limited-edition outcomes handed to merely the first 15,000. Everybody gets to see the Mets do something like this most every night.
The 3-2 defeat at the hands of the Brewers left the Mets’ record at 36-45, an easily multipliable mark if you’re still interested in their 162-game pace. Take 36-45, “times” it by two, as too many teachers said in elementary school (“times is not a verb,” I’d mutter in my head), and you’ve got the 72-90 Mets. For those who’ve already made the connection anecdotally, 72-90 was the final record of the 1992 Mets, known far and wide, thanks to the diligent work of Bob Klapisch and John Harper, as The Worst Team Money Could Buy. Except at the midpoint of 1992, the lavishly budgeted Mets were two games better than the 2023 Mets and within conceivable range of first place (the only playoff spot available in those two-division days).
If you want a numerical match for the 36-45 Mets of 2023, you can go back almost as far, to a season nobody wrote tell-all book about, because there wasn’t enough to tell. The 1994 Mets were 36-45 after 81 games, which wasn’t that season’s midpoint, because that season soon did what we wish this season would do: it went away. The owners and players reached an impasse, a strike was called, and the 1994 Mets lasted only 113 games. It was only two years removed from TWTMCB, but a Mets fan wasn’t actually aching for the 1994 Mets to take their leave. They were already an improvement over the Worst Team sequel — the 1993 Mets were 25-56 after 81 games — and they would play quite competently in what little second half there was, going 19-13 before bats and balls were stored for ’94.
Lousy first-half Mets teams have been known to morph into satisfying squads in select second halves. As recently as 2019, we gave up on the 37-44 Mets only to be charmed by their 49-32 turnaround and spirited samba along the periphery of Wild Card contention. Met history is dotted by, if not jammed with, such dramatic changes of direction for the better. A few abysmal half-years gave way to energizing stretch-run drives or at least a sense that the entire schedule wasn’t for naught. Another recent-past example comes from 2018, a season that saw the Mets with both a worse first-half record than 2023 (33-48) and a worse June than the current bunch’s 7-18 (5-21). We unanimously gave up on those Mets in advance of the second half, and we were not wrong in terms of the big seasonal picture, but somewhere along the way the 2018 Mets stopped performing as if weighed down by lead weights. In the second half, they went 44-37. Catch them in the right light, and you’d mistake them for a legitimate ballclub.
If you still dare to bottom-line 2023 through the prism of the Mets actually going somewhere rather than away, you know there’s only one acceptable answer in the historical precedent files. The 1973 Mets were 35-46 at their halfway juncture, separated from first place by five teams and twelve games. The 2023 Mets trail what passes for first place in their lives — the third bonus playoff position in the National League — by three fewer games, though they have just about everybody and their brother ahead of them. It is often noted that the 1973 Mets won their division with a tepid overall record, a reflection of the flaws of the NL East that year, but it is just as worth noting that in their second half (only 80 games due to a rainout that didn’t require a makeup), they went 47-33. Do the math and realize that’s a team that didn’t just put on a You Gotta Believable stretch drive. The 1973 Mets were playing at a 94-win clip for a full half-season.
Given that when we invoke the 1973 Mets, it is a highly singular invocation, with nobody asking, wait, which astounding comeback from last place to a pennant are we talking about again?, we know we’re in the land of long odds. All the 2023 Mets have going for them vis-à-vis a potential 50th-anniversary celebration for the ages is reputation. The 1973 Mets had too many good players to continue on as bad as they’d been for a half. Several of them were injured, a few had not yet found their groove, and leadership didn’t seem all it had been cracked up to be. Time healed the hurt, progression rather than regression toward the mean lifted the ailing averages (batting and earned run), and somebody instilled the notion that an incomplete schedule indicated room for improvement.
The 2023 Mets have too many good players to continue on as bad as they’ve been for a half. That’s the most generous/valid comparison to the 1973 Mets I can gin up to keep my chin up. I haven’t believed this edition has been outright bad. To me, it appears they’ve mostly fallen short of good. It’s a nuanced difference, but it gives me, if not a meaningful dose of it ain’t over…, then some sense that it won’t get any worse and might get marginally better, which, if they are going to return to the ballpark after the All-Star break, is the best to reasonably hope for if not excitedly expect. Not much of a rallying cry, I know, but the Mets will probably not go home and leave us alone, and it’s not our nature to wish they would.
On a more cheerful note, National League Town this week is devoted to remembering Mets who were good enough to be All-Stars as Mets yet somehow weren’t chosen, so we decided to retroactively make them All-Stars. If you’ve been a Mets fan for more than a minute, this is the podcast for you.
by Jason Fry on 28 June 2023 11:15 pm Oh, so we’re back to this again.
On Tuesday night your bloggers were reunited at Citi Field and had a wonderful time, which we would have had anyway but was definitely enhanced by the Mets hitting homers by the bushel and David Peterson being unexpectedly competent. Speaking for myself, I left the park with a certain smallish but real spring in my step and a willingness to entertain the probably ridiculous but still pleasant notion that the glass was better described as 1/20th full.
Wednesday night took care of that rather thoroughly.
Actually we should have seen it coming Wednesday afternoon, when Steve Cohen held a press conference that left you trying to hold two not entirely complementary ideas in your head at once:
- It’s good that Cohen isn’t going red wedding on his employees just because he’s mad — that would have been cathartic for a couple of hours and then revealed as corrosive and counterproductive.
- Was it really necessary to hold a 23-minute press conference to articulate that you’re frustrated but hey, sometimes life is frustrating?
It was a little off-kilter, which set up the night’s game rather well. There was Kodai Senga pulling a Verlander, which is to say that the bottom-line results were not bad but the execution was annoyingly inefficient and nothing you saw was even remotely inspiring. There were Mets not named Tommy Pham not disturbing baseballs while holding apparently ornamental bats in their hands. There was a rally of sorts that tied the game but still managed to be disheartening, as the Mets converted a pair of bases loaded/nobody out situations into a single run that scored via a base on balls.
And there was the thoroughly emblematic top of the eighth, the frame in which the Mets lost the game. Adam Ottavino entered the game with no one on and one out, secured the second out without undue fuss, but then gave up a double and a walk and hit Joey Wiemer in the hand with a pitch. Lost in the moment was the fact that Wiemer clearly swung and should have been called out by multiple umpires whose entire reason for being present is to ensure things aren’t lost in the moment. Rather than being down 0-2 against Ottavino, Wiemer went to first; three pitches later Christian Yelich slapped a ball slightly wide of second, not the kind of play you expect to be automatically made but one you can reasonably hope will be made. Jeff McNeil didn’t make it, the Brewers led by three, Ottavino let his disgust be apparent, Buck Showalter was ejected, and the only silver lining left was that T.J. McFarland made his Mets debut, which actually doesn’t matter at all except Greg and I had tried to will it into being Tuesday night and so still got a mild kick out of it a night later when nothing else good was happening.
I mean, seriously, look at that top of the eighth and tell me it isn’t this star-crossed season in miniature: a couple of guys who were really good last year continuing to not be good this year, some horseshit umpiring (seriously, Carlos Torres is terrible at his job), a sprinkle of bad luck, and another day ripped off the calendar, balled up and hurled in the direction of the trash.
Crap, missed the can. Guess I better go pick that up. It’s been that kind of year, hasn’t it?
by Greg Prince on 28 June 2023 2:48 am She said she’d meet me in the bar
At the Plaza Hotel
Wear a jacket and a tie
‘What’s the occasion?’
She just smiled and she wouldn’t say why
—Long Island’s Own Billy Joel
“6:30 at apple?” landed like a fresh breeze in my inbox Monday evening, a few hours before the person who sent it appeared to all but permanently swear off Mets baseball for the rest of his time on the planet or at least this season. Except I know him well enough to recognize his most seething contempt as an embrace of sorts, thus no matter how much he would profess to (quite understandably) hate the current iteration of Mets baseball when Monday evening was through, my answer to “6:30 at apple?” was of course going to be “LIRR willing,” rather than “only if they win tonight.”
The Long Island Rail Road was pokey, but as willing as I needed it to be. I made it to said apple a little before 6:30. He met me there a little after. Soon enough we were inside the ballpark the apple fronts, our first game together in 2023, our first game together since 2019, our even I don’t know how many games together since June 17, 1995, the day Bill Pulsipher debuted as the 532nd Met overall. Pulse is the touchstone for our ballpark relationship, given that his first start enmeshed with our first start, but I date us back to somewhere in the vicinity of Roger Mason and Rick Parker, the 507th and 508th Mets overall, each here and each gone shortly after their respective May 1994 launches into orange & blue society. Mason and Parker were Mets before we’d meet in person, but while we were getting to know one another electronically; Jim Lindeman (No. 509) and Shawn Hare (No. 510), too. As the future would prove, electronic communication could be authentic, to say nothing of enduring. Outlasting a string of 1994 Mets was just the beginning.
It had been all electronic for us since 2019, save for a random stop & chat just over two years ago right near that apple, the night of Tylor Megill’s bow as the 1,139th Met overall. The paucity of planned in-person Mettery over these past four years accounted for the fresh breeze quality of that email on Monday. We’d wholeheartedly if halfassedly tried to make a go of going to Monday’s game. Too much life was in the way, however. Plus it looked like rain. Nah, Monday wasn’t gonna work. What about Tuesday — 6:30 at apple?
“6:30 at apple?” felt very comforting to read. It felt like the plan to meet at Gate D 28 Junes, or 672 Mets ago overall, when I said I’d wear a New York Giants baseball cap and he said he’d wear one from the Capital City Bombers, and we figured we’d recognize one another somehow, even if he later admitted he wasn’t sure what a New York Giants baseball cap looked like and I was clueless regarding the logo of the Capital City Bombers. When we were beginning to get to know one another in the days of Roger Mason and Rick Parker, we never bothered to forward photography of each other to each other. Could you even do that in May of 1994?
 To date, there have been 1,204 Mets overall. Here in June of 2023, the most recent Met to debut was Danny Mendick last Saturday, the 1,204th Met overall. If the opportunity presented itself, maybe the 1,205th Met overall would present himself on Tuesday in the form of T.J. McFarland, called up on Monday, when it didn’t rain too hard but it sure did suck. McFarland, a veteran lefty reliever whose only real interest to us was the chance to account for his overall Metness, didn’t pitch Monday. Maybe he was waiting for us to drop by on Tuesday.
It appeared the Mets’ ability to win a baseball game had also hesitated to reintroduce itself publicly until we could be there to greet it. Had it been only Saturday and the debut of Danny Mendick when last the Mets produced a desirable result? Seemed longer. Seemed at least a few hundred Mets ago. We were in the midst of the world’s longest two-game losing streak. But did that stop us from meeting at apple at 6:30 Tuesday, the apple that used to be inside the ballpark that used to stand in the parking lot, when the ballpark that now stands was that ballpark’s parking lot? That apple, when it sat in a hat in its natural environs on June 17, 1995, didn’t have the opportunity to rise in salute to a home team home run. Craig Biggio did go deep for the Astros off Pulsipher, but the apple remained unmoved. Biggio was on his way to the Hall of Fame. Pulse was on his way to the showers.
Apples to apples. The one that sits inside the new ballpark was frisky Tuesday night. It doesn’t come out of a hat, but it will elevate from a bucket-like receptacle on command. Brandon Nimmo commanded it to elevate twice, Francisco Lindor and Daniel Vogelbach once apiece, all at the expense of former thorn Julio Teheran. What a show this apple touches off when it goes up. Fireworks shoot from its platform. Smoke wafts in the air. An apple-shaped counter clicks upward. A fresh breeze blows along the massive scoreboard. One line is Met runs, plenty of them. The other is exclusively Brewer zeroes, inflicted on Milwaukee by David Peterson, the 1,100th Met overall, and therefore a minor celebrity in our world, no matter that until Tuesday he had reverted to being a minor leaguer. But then Megill, ol’ No. 1,139, had repeated run-ins with roving bands of major league hitters and he was back to Triple-A, furnishing a roster spot for Peterson to fill and make the most of.
With the Mets scoring seven runs and the visiting Brewers scoring none entering the eighth inning, the stage should have been set for T.J. McFarland. “Pulsipher to McFarland,” it was said. Too good a throughline to interject, “Don’t forget Roger Mason and Rick Parker,” from when there’d been barely more than 500 Mets overall. All that was needed was the enormous lead to remain immense, and there’d be no reason to not bring in from the bullpen for the ninth inning the southpaw who would forever be the 1,205th Met overall and inch us closer to 700 Mets we could say we’ve shared across 29 years and counting of counting.
 We were both in the mood for a victory, Mets had us feelin’ alright. Except Jeff Brigham gave up a couple of runs, and Buck Showalter, too nervous to screw around too much these days, turned to Dominic Leone to finish up, and we had to settle for the Mets breezing to a 7-2 win and staying stuck on 1,204 Mets overall. Still, a delightful evening like so many we’ve enjoyed in neighboring seats in so many seasons in a couple of different apple-laden ballparks. We got everything but T.J. McFarland for our Tuesday night troubles. We even got “Piano Man” winning the singalong poll. One of us loves to sing along to “Piano Man”. The other loves to detest that “Piano Man” is being sung at all, but the seething contempt is an embrace of sorts all its own, and even that I looked forward to as I anticipated 6:30 at apple.
by Jason Fry on 26 June 2023 10:39 pm Another night, another loss.
At this point the bad losses — like the two HBP gag job in Philly — are hills breaking the flat endless plain of the more mundane losses, the ones where you have to furrow your brow and remember the details of what exactly sucked more than the background sucking that’s present all the time.
Like oh yeah, that was the one where Justin Verlander once again looked like the $43 million fourth starter he’s inexplicably become, only he somehow emerged from an off-kilter, inefficient outing unscored upon. (I suppose you could say Verlander battled or found a way or some horseshit, but does anyone really believe that?) It was the one where Pete Alonso and Tommy Pham kept hitting bullets right at guys and Jeff McNeil — let me check, yeah he really was a batting champ last year — once again didn’t hit a damn thing, which you could be angry at McNeil about except he’s already so much angrier about it than you are that what, exactly, would be the point?
All that sucked, but it was background sucking. No, the way to remember this mundane loss before it’s displaced in memory by tomorrow night’s mundane loss is it was the one where we got Drew Smith back and Smith kept leaving pitches too high in the strike zone and the Brewers somehow didn’t hit them until oops one of them did — a two-run homer by Joey Wiemer, whoever the fuck that is, was enough to beat Smith and the Mets. Two runs. Ballgame. A 2-1 loss sounds close except the 1 that went on the Mets’ side of the ledger was a gift and 2-1 in the ninth with the heart of our order felt like 20-1.
The Mets look not just bad but also meek and beaten. They have thousand-yard stares affixed to their faces before the horrors ensue, said horrors take place, the Mets slink away looking purse-mouthed and grim, and the next day it all starts again. How many games can slip by simultaneously horribly and in utter anonymity?
What’s the point of recapping this? Of watching it? Of being connected with it in any way? It isn’t fun or edifying, and even the flashes of hope for the future are hard to discern amid the dull smear of defeat after defeat after defeat.
I hate this team. I hate their chronic grinding failure, as inevitable as watching a glass that’s slipped out of your hand shatter on a tile floor. I hate their inability to get out of the way of each night’s slow-moving but inevitable disaster. And most of all I hate the way they make me feel about something I’m supposed to love.
by Greg Prince on 26 June 2023 12:23 pm The Mets won Sunday’s game by three if you’re counting high-leverage relievers rested.
Brooks Raley? Rested.
Adam Ottavino? Rested.
David Robertson? Rested.
Yup, that’s three. Each pitcher pitched some on Saturday, and one of them (Raley) pitched on Friday, and you know what they say about relievers’ arms falling off should you try to use them a second or third day in a row in a game you lead and it would behoove you to hold onto. I mean, I suppose somebody guarantees those arms will fall off if you push them a little further than you’d prefer. What do you think the Mets’ hierarchy talks about in their councils of state — Turk Wendell? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their bullpen usage/rest, just like everybody else does.
Thus, it’s not about trying to win the game in front of you on Sunday. It’s about resting 38-year-old David Robertson and 37-year-old Adam Ottavino and soon-to-turn 35-year-old Brooks Raley so they’ll be available for the Milwaukee series that starts Monday night, weather permitting. Those are your workhorses, your high-leverage assets. A game against Philadelphia hanging in the balance with a chance to take a series, something the Mets haven’t done in weeks, pales by comparison. Raley, Ottavino and Robertson each answered the bell on Saturday after the Mets got pretty much the best they could expect from mega-co-ace Max Scherzer. Max went six.
On Sunday, Carlos Carrasco went four. Seventy-eight pitches. They weren’t the most effective pitches, but they got as much of job done as Carrasco’s manager and pitching coach and anybody else consulting believed viable. Carrasco left with a 3-2 lead. The Mets’ bats were taking it to Old Friend™ Zack Wheeler. Pete Alonso blooped a well-placed single with the bases loaded to score two. Brandon Nimmo poked a ball to right to bring in one. Then, post-Carrasco, All-Star finalist Francisco Lindor hit a long fly ball that just kept going to put the Mets ahead, 4-2. Eventually, after the Phillies’ starter departed, the Mets held a 6-3 lead, the sixth Met run coming on Pete’s solo home run off Jose Alvarado, a high-leverage reliever who wasn’t infallible, because no reliever is every time out.
After Carrasco left, the Mets used Dominic Leone for an inning that can be described as Could Have Been Worse (one run built on Trea Turner walking to first, then pretty much strolling home via two steals and a bad throw) and Grant Hartwig for two innings, one of them defense-aided (sweet throw from Tommy Pham to nail Alec Bohm at second on what looked like it was gonna be sure double), both of them scoreless. We get to the bottom of the eighth with a three-run lead and the manager of the Mets calls on one of his less tested relievers, Josh Walker. The manager has been in similar if not wholly alike situations before. In June of 2022, there was a game that stands as the shiningest example of how everything the manager did that year showed how resourceful he could be or maybe that sometimes your least-desired option can surprise you. Against the mighty Dodgers, in Los Angeles, having already used his highest-leverage relievers that very day (Ottavino, Edwin Diaz, Seth Lugo), the manager turned to Adonis Medina in the tenth inning, which meant a runner was on second to stress the rookie righty even more than he was already stressed. The batters Medina was tasked with facing were Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, Trea Turner and Will Smith. That’s stress incarnate. The pitcher, nowhere on anybody’s depth chart on Opening Day, got the job done in June, and the Mets beat the Dodgers in the game that guaranteed those Mets were every inch a championship contender. “For this team to have that trust in me at that moment, it’s a big deal,” Medina said afterward. It was the kind of year, one when leverage, smeverage, sometimes it helped to be a lucky Buck.
This year is the kind of year when everything the manager touches turns to Showalter.
Turning to rookie lefty Josh Walker to get outs with a three-run lead didn’t work out. At all. A walk. A single. A walk. An exit. The Mets still lead by three. The manager brings in Jeff Brigham, a veteran righty who was surprisingly consistent in earlier innings in earlier weeks of this season, a little less so has time has gone on. Still, Brigham bounces the first batter he faces, Bohm, to third base. That could very well be a double play ball. All the third baseman, Brett Baty has to do is field the ball cleanly and throw it quickly and accurately. But he doesn’t. He double clutches, he throws low to second, everybody is safe, every base is occupied and a run has scored.
Brigham has been undermined by his defense but is still protecting a lead. He must face three batters in all. The second of them, Brandon Marsh, walks with the bases loaded. OK, not good, but the Mets still lead. Then Kody Clemens strikes out, which is much better. Hitting Kyle Schwarber…no, not very good at all. The game is tied. Then, upon Brigham’s fifth batter, Turner…another HBP. It is now Phillies 7 Mets 6. At last, Brigham is removed.
In favor of Vinny Nittoli, who like Medina in L.A. the year before, outpitches his reputation and gets two dangerous hitters, Nick Castellanos and Bryce Harper.
From the fifth through the eighth, the Mets have used five relievers: Leone, Hartwig, Walker, Brigham and Nittoli. Two of those relievers gave up no runs. None of those relievers was a Met on Opening Day let alone in 2022. Being a part of last year’s team isn’t a guarantee of success on this year’s team, we continue to learn, but it does seem telling that the quality that qualifies them most for a Met roster spot is options. The general manager engineered his bullpen depth based the ability to call up and send down relievers without fear of losing them on waivers. A couple of relievers previously counted on have, in fact, been lost to roster machinations. Stephen Nogosek and Tommy Hunter were designated for assignment, decided they were tired of Triple-A shuttling, and opted for free agency. The nerve of them not wanting to be yo-yo’d up and down. Nogosek and Hunter often got outs. They occasionally didn’t, just as the most platinum of closers sometimes implode. The state of reliever infallibility hasn’t changed since it was first invoked several paragraphs ago.
A reliever is in a game, he should be able to get an out or more. It’s not guaranteed. An eighth-inning three-run margin with the bases clean seems a plump enough cushion to show some trust in some kid who hasn’t been asked to ferry too many (if any) leads to the ninth inning. It didn’t work for Walker. Whatever was left for Brigham to brush aside didn’t work out either, no thanks to Baty, but also no thanks to his own control problems. From the distance of the television, a fan has no idea who really has that certain something that makes him the most solid bet on any given day, whatever the inning. Maybe we, or the organization, doesn’t really know whether Vinny Nittoli had a gut-check eighth inside him. But we can probably guess that Nittoli, like most of these guys, was in a Mets uniform because he had options.
“So I say, ‘Why don’t you call home and have somebody wire you the money? Or call your company and tell them the problem? Or, better yet, why don’t you take a personal check out of your checkbook, roll it up real tight, and then cram it!’”
“She gave me several options.”
—Customer service representative (played by Roseanne Barr) and customer (played by Phil Hartman), in an SNL credit card commercial parody that comes to mind every time I hear how important is to have relief pitchers with options
As for Raley, Ottavino and Robertson, in a Mets uniform specifically to maintain late-inning leads and extricate the club from late-inning jams (as would be Drew Smith if he weren’t serving out his sweat & rosin suspension), the manager wouldn’t think of using them. That, he indicated in his postloss comments, was a given. You might as well question an NBA coach who is sitting his superstars in the middle of January in the name of load management. Even if David Robertson isn’t exactly the baseball equivalent of Kevin Durant, a manager can make a straight-face case that you can’t always use relievers who’ve been used the day before, no matter that two of the relievers — Robertson and Ottavino — swore they were ready and willing to pitch, probably because they’re pitchers and they know they are in a Mets uniform to do so when needed most, which doesn’t necessarily include a bottom of the ninth that may never come if the bottom of the eighth isn’t navigated sans four runs scoring. Keeping them out of the game in the eighth almost makes sense on the surface, if one presumes there’s an epidemic of arms falling off over North America, and preventing another such incident is your goal as a major league manager. It makes less sense when a close, more or less must-win baseball game is in progress.
Say, wasn’t that Craig Kimbrel on the mound to nail down the Phillies’ 7-6 victory in the ninth? Joke’s on Rob Thompson. Sure the Philadelphia manager got to congratulate Kimbrel and the rest of the Phillies once his closer set down the Mets 1-2-3, but that’s one more inning of mileage on Kimbrel’s 35-year-old right arm, one that has saved 405 major league games, including 11 this year. Had Thompson gone with a lower-leverage, optionable reliever, Kimbrel might be fresher in September or October when the Phillies might be competing in a very big game.
Think how rested all the Mets, not just their highest-leverage relievers, will be by then.
by Jason Fry on 24 June 2023 9:47 pm “I swear I could tear your throat out right now!”
That was said by a parking-lot attendant at Citizens Bank Park after our friend Jerome pulled an admittedly unconventional U-turn in an effort to escape a tediously slow line of vehicles waiting for spaces.
Welcome to Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love! And yes, sometimes the jokes do write themselves.
However, I’m obliged to report that a) this rather gruesome threat was somehow expressed in a thoroughly amiable voice; and b) the parking-lot attendant’s reason for threatening violence had nothing to do with me, Emily and Joshua in the backseat clad in Mets garb. (In fact, our friends Jerome and Val are Phillies fans.) The attendant’s objection was that there were no spots in the section to which we were headed; told that we could see several available spots, he shrugged and cheerfully let us continue on our way, throats intact.
Not long before that, it didn’t seem like this was a game we were going to get to attend. It had rained Saturday morning on Long Beach Island, culminating a beach week that was half washed out; Philadelphia’s hourly forecast was just a copy-pasted SCATTERED THUNDERSTORMS 45% CHANCE OF RAIN, the meteorological equivalent of a shrug.
Not to worry — it was sunny the entire time. That only left the question of what would happen to the Mets, who based on recent evidence might not be capable of beating a squad of parking-lot attendants, homicidal or otherwise.
We were a section over from the 7 Line, first heard from when Starling Marte crashed a monstrous home run into the left-field seats and vocal for the rest of the game — to the occasional annoyance but mostly placid acceptance of the Phillies fans around us.
The Mets took a 2-0 lead and Max Scherzer looked sharp, with his off-speed stuff particularly deadly. More than that I can’t tell you, as we were in the upper deck — I could tell what was a fastball and what wasn’t, but details beyond that were fuzzy bordering on theoretical. But there was enough to see — or hear, as happened when I was getting a beer and Nick Castellanos slammed a Scherzer offering into the weird little shrubbery beyond the center-field fence, followed shortly thereafter by Trea Turner tying the game with a single.
Scherzer fanned Bryce Harper on a cutter and the Mets quickly built a new two-run lead, which the Mets protected with a pair of nifty double plays. Our vantage point high above the game was perfect for those — from up there, the geometry of the fielders tells its own story, whether its outfielders trying to close on a ball up the gap or infielders lurking where hitters would prefer they wouldn’t.
The DP David Robertson coaxed from his old teammates to end the eighth was a thing of particular beauty, with Luis Guillorme‘s catch and flip to Francisco Lindor looking like it had been doctored with a little CGI before Lindor fired the ball on to Pete Alonso. Robertson got in trouble again with one out in the ninth, surrendering a single to Brandon Marsh, whose soaked mane makes him look like Swamp Thing. That brought the tying run to the plate in the person of Josh Harrison, but it also left Guillorme and Lindor primed for action.
Harrison slapped Robertson’s second pitch on a beeline to Guillorme, with Lindor already in motion to his right. “C’MON C’MON C’MON C’MON!” I was shouting from the upper deck, and Guillorme and Lindor came on, securing both outs and the game.
It hadn’t rained. Parking-lot threats had been cheerfully empty. And most improbably, the Mets had won. Brotherly love carried the day after all.
by Greg Prince on 24 June 2023 11:04 am Twenty-six years ago this month, Dave Mlicki ensured he would be remembered forever fondly by Mets fans, and I doubt the reason requires specific explanation here. But on the off chance anybody is just tuning into Mets baseball, Dave started the very first regular-season intracity game for New York’s National League team (which was shaking off the slumber that had enveloped them for most of the decade in progress) and he pitched a shutout against New York’s American League team (which also happened to carry the overbearing title of defending world champions). In the self-esteem standings, no Mets victory could have been bigger. It was the beginning of what was branded the Subway Series, an homage to Fall Classics past, except this was played on the cusp of summer as intrinsic to a heretofore sacrosanct schedule in which NL and AL would never meet until October. In retrospect, it should have been a Subway Solo. There never needed to be another Mets-Yankees game. We’d experienced the moral equivalent of perfection, and we had the heretofore ordinary righthanded starter to thank for it. For what he did in the Bronx that June night in 1997, Dave Mlicki immediately elevated himself into the upper echelon of “never has to buy himself another drink” appreciation in the borough of Queens.
Twenty five years ago this month, Dave Mlicki was traded by the Mets to the Dodgers for Hideo Nomo, and my reaction was, “We got Hideo Nomo?” In those early-ish Internet days when a Met of any tenure departed the premises, it was my instinct to log onto AOL, click on enough icons to reach the well-hidden Metcave message board where Jason and I first crossed paths, and attempt to craft a brief but heartfelt tribute for anybody who might be reading. I’d been doing those in my head for Mets who became ex-Mets in my head all my life, anyway. Somebody ought to fondly remember every Met who did something for us. Nobody could have done more for us in the late 1990s than grant us 24 hours as undisputed rulers of New York baseball.
But in June of 1998, I found myself largely unmoved by the departure of Dave Mlicki and I don’t recall writing a word of bon voyage, not even in my head, for the man who’d beaten the Yankees in June of 1997. The Mets had stepped up a notch in their aspirations over the previous year. Beating the Yankees had been great — the greatest — but now the object of being a Mets fan was to see the Mets beat all comers. In May of 1998, the Mets had acquired Mike Piazza. The nice, little team that at most received patronizing pats on the head from outside observers for its surprising 1997 run past respectability to the edge of legitimate contention now had to be taken seriously by everybody, not just us. With Piazza surgically inserted into the heart of their order, the Mets began to roll, winning nine in a row from the moment the trade for Mike was announced. Their streak ended only when Dave Mlicki threw another frustrating start. Almost all Dave Mlicki starts in 1998 were frustrating. His ERA after ten turns through he rotation was 5.68.
Thus, when it came time for the encomium I expected to flow from my fingers, I demurred.
Mlicki’s gone?
We got Nomo!
He was really good not that long ago, and not for just one night!
Maybe he’ll help us make the playoffs!
(He didn’t.)
This example of how the most loyal threads of lifetime fandom can get tangled up in contemporary concerns came to mind Friday night when Howie Rose and Keith Raad reported they had some breaking news to pass along while the Mets were playing and, of course, losing in Philadelphia. The club had made a trade. A couple of Angels minor league pitchers were mentioned as the Met gets for…
“Did we trade Vogelbach?” was my interjecting, fingers-crossed thought, but, no, going west to get them was Eduardo Escobar.
“Those guys we got any good?” I wondered next.
Missing from my thought process, at least at first, was anything resembling “Good old Eduardo! Eduardo with the smile! Eduardo with the cycle! Eduardo the National League Player of the Month last September! Eduardo who rescued us from the clutches of the Marlins right before we went to Atlanta with first place on the line! Eduardo who hit the Mets’ first postseason homer since 2015!”
All that came eventually, but not with any overwhelming force of sentimentality for a guy I liked fine— more than fine — but also a guy who wasn’t playing very much for a team that has revealed itself in 2023 to be nothing like the team it was when Escobar was playing most days in 2022…although it would be disingenuous to suggest the Mets’ general success or lack thereof over the past season-and-a-half has ever been Escobar-dependent. Eduardo’s moments and demeanor were enough to make a Mets fan mostly look past his daily struggles in 2022, because 2022 was 2022, and it was enough that Eduardo occasionally chipped in to what we can call its 2022ness. His productive interludes and his upbeat attitude felt like an essential element of all that made last year so special for so long. You want a guy like that around.
But, y’know, that was last year. It’s a recurring theme this year that by now ought to be pounded into our heads. Similar personnel, different results. Very different. After 75 games in 2022, the Mets of Eduardo Escobar et al. stood tall at 47-28. Their successors with largely the same cast currently wobble at 34-41. A little further inside the numbers, we find that over the past 54 games — a third of a 162-game season — the Mets have gone 20-34, a significant sample size that followed on the heels of the Mets’ best span of 2023, when they won 11 of 14. An 11-3 spurt is just that: a spurt, not even 10% of a regulation campaign. A 20-34 record times three equals an easily calculable and pretty telling 60-102 over a full year of Amazin’ futility. There isn’t a playoff format alive that accepts that caliber of applicant. Except for the reputations of the individuals who have executed it, there is little about the 20-34 stretch that doesn’t feel as if it accurately reflects what the 2023 Mets have become.
The other day, after the getaway day debacle in Houston, Daniel Vogelbach, who’d been hitting well enough to serve as team spokesman for the spate of inevitable postgame “what’s wrong?” questions, said, “We’re going to get out of it. We’re going to go on a winning streak. I don’t know when that is. I wish I could tell you when. But I truly believe it’s going to happen and we’re going to get right back to where everyone believes we should be.”
I bought into this type of thinking as the Mets tumbled away from the top tier of their division and down through the Wild Card rankings for as long as I could. Yeah, they’re not that bad. Just wait, everybody goes on some kind of tear and our turn will come. Finally, it has sunk in that a) they are this bad; and b) they already got hot. That 11-3 joyride in April, the one that brought them to 14-7 and “where everyone believes we should be” is as functionally distant from the Met present as Dave Mlicki or Hideo Nomo. These Mets have been mostly lousy for about four times as long as they looked splendid. Gotta go with the larger sample size after having subjected myself to it night after night these past two months.
With all the respect and affection I can muster for a Met who was part of a playoff team, and the sort of person who made rooting for the Mets a pleasure whether he hit for the cycle or went 0-for-4, I have to admit I’m largely unmoved by the trade of Eduardo Escobar. And, honestly, I don’t really care who they got for him. I’m mostly glad they did something and got rid of somebody. The way they’ve been playing, they can get rid of everybody. The names of the pitchers received for Escobar are Coleman Crow and Landon Marceaux. At this juncture of their affiliation with the Mets, they are slightly less familiar to me than Vinny Nittoli, the journeyman reliever who made his Met debut in the 5-1 loss at Citizens Bank Park Friday. Nittoli pitched a scoreless inning once it became apparent that, in the scheme of the game he entered, it didn’t really matter what he did. In the scheme of the season in which the Mets’ 75th game was played, it has become apparent that no individual game really matters, either.
Kodai Senga pitched not terribly, but not great for five-and-two-thirds innings. He was undermined by his defense twice, each time on marginally tricky pop flys that fell in on misplays by two Mets who also used to be known for their smiles, Brandon Nimmo in the first and Francisco Lindor in the sixth. The Mets produced more hits than pivotal defensive flubs, but barely: three in all. One was a home run by Nimmo, off Old Friend™ Taijuan Walker. If good old Eduardo isn’t traded again, we can greet Escobar as an Old Friend™ when the Angels visit Flushing in late August. Perhaps the mammoth video board that seems to have electronically sapped the Mets of all their competence will beam a video revisiting Eduardo’s cycle from last June, which might as well be from 1997. I don’t know how much historical staying power that enormous night in San Diego will have in the collective Mets fan memory. I do know that when Dave Mlicki was interviewed at Citi Field shortly before the Subway Series this year, Steve Gelbs didn’t ask him about all those awful starts from 1998, and trading for Hideo Nomo surely wasn’t what I thought of when I heard the name Dave Mlicki.
by Greg Prince on 22 June 2023 6:11 am DATE: June 21, 2023
FROM: United States Patent Office
TO: New York Mets
RE: Patent Application Status Report
We are in receipt of your patent application for your invention, “A New Way to Lose,” and are considering its originality and efficacy. It appears your blending of many previously invented ways to lose into one enormous way to lose, culminating in a gobsmacking 10-8 loss at Houston, is, in fact, unique. So much bad fielding, bad pitching, badly timed lack of hitting, bad thinking and even a bit of bad luck all being distilled into one baseball game does appear to be unprecedented, although our experts continue to discuss whether this is a method of losing that can or even should be patented. For the good of the sport and your fans as well as the nation at large, our office’s provisional sentiment is none of which you illustrated in your submission of June 21 should be disseminated to anyone who enjoys what many still opt to consider “the National Pastime,” lest it destroy whatever goodwill remains for baseball. A final decision will be issued shortly. In the interim, we wish you just stop with this sort of play. Thank you.
National League Town seconds that emotion.
by Jason Fry on 20 June 2023 10:36 pm Framber Valdez pitched awfully well. The Astros got some superlative defense from Jeremy Pena, Kyle Tucker and Corey Julks. None of those things were particularly the fault of the Mets.
The rest? Eh. Justin Verlander pitched OK, if his goal was to be the best-paid No. 4 starter in baseball history. I dunno, somehow I thought $43 million a year bought more than that.
[insert bullshit postgame Verlander quote here]
The Mets didn’t hit, again. They couldn’t figure out an answer for Corey Julks, whoever the hell that is. Whatever had to go wrong did, in the right proportions to doom the Mets again … as it generally has done this year.
[insert bullshit postgame quotes from … I dunno, take your pick. Buck Showalter? Francisco Lindor? Pete Alonso?]
Honestly, I’m more tired than mad at this point. Tomorrow is the first day of summer, and I wish this season had fewer games left in it than it does. That’s a lousy place to be, as a Met fan, a baseball fan, and a person.
by Jason Fry on 20 June 2023 8:34 am Last time we saw Max Scherzer he was decidedly min against the Yankees, chiefly because his slider was batting-practice quality, hanging obligingly in the strike zone and waiting to be clobbered by any Yankee who fancied a go.
Scherzer vowed stonily that he would fix the problem, which sounded good but also sounded like the kind of thing a parade of underachieving Mets have said during the serial low points of this baffling, exasperating season.
But it was clear from the beginning of the Mets’ Monday night tilt with the Houston Astros that Scherzer had, in fact, done what he’d said he would. The slider was sharp, an ideal complement for Scherzer’s fastball, and the combination was bad news for the Astros, shorn of slugger Yordan Alvarez and squeezed into their dopey City Connect alts. (“Space City” is a fine moniker, but why do the sleeves have a grid pattern? Why why why why why why?)
Bad news for the Astros, but excellent news for the Mets. Scherzer put together his longest outing as a Met, completing eight innings and only passing on a complete game because the scoreboard suggested there was no need to expend unnecessary bullets. (Grant Hartwig, the newest Met and the first newcomer since the Gary Sanchez Experiment, finished up.)
Scherzer had company in making good on postgame vows, too. Daniel Vogelbach continued his adventures in launch-angle home runs; Francisco Lindor had five RBIs and invited a whole team of Astros to join Kalina and Amapola in calling him Daddy; and Tommy Pham continued to slash hits and looked solid in the field. Every starter save for Brandon Nimmo had hits and the Mets scored 11 runs — a formula that I’ll crawl out on an analytical limb and posit will work.
Like families in doorstop Russian novels, happy baseball teams are all alike. Given the multitude of things that have gone wrong for the 2023 Mets, there’s a long list of items that still require tinkering: Next up is Justin Verlander, another serial provider of postgame brave talk who will be returning to the scene of previous triumphs.
A good start from Verlander, the offense continuing to click … that would go a long way to suggesting the Mets might still have a story worth telling in 2023. Wouldn’t it be nice to see them standing around the kind of happy clubhouse we’ve seen before, saying interchangeable dopey things about teamwork and chemistry and passing the baton because there’s nothing to fix?
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