Here's a piece of paper. It says the Mets have taken eight of twelve from the St. Louis Cardinals. That's absolutely true on paper. Now crumple up the paper and discard it at once. It's best not to think about it.
Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez pitched and hit his way to victory. He sure looked calf-ready and unarthritic, the kind of pitcher you would have wanted in an enormous series at a different time of year. It's best not to think about it.
Did we mention El Duque hit his way to victory? With the bases loaded and two out in the sixth, he poked one down the third base line just when it looked as if a golden sixth-inning scoring opportunity would evaporate on sight. That's clutch hitting. It's good to think about it in terms of this particular game. Otherwise, it's best not to think about it.
Aargh…as in we aargh in a brand new season but as long as we're playing hmmm over there, it's impossible to watch any of this without thinking of any of that. And if you don't know what “that” is, well, congratulations on having become a Mets fan 51 hours ago — or recovering so nicely from that lobotomy you got for Christmas.
I didn't see any rings handed out, but then again I didn't need any motivation. Molina…Edmonds…that fucker with the landing strip on his chin…about the only thing that didn't call up October 2006 was the repeated reminder to myself that this is April 2007 and in April 2007, despite having played nobody at all except for the St. Louis Cardinals in any competition of consequence since October 12, we are two and oh. They are oh and two. We are sharp. They are ragged. We are winning. They are losing.
They have rings, very specific rings, that we don't. It's best not to think about it.
 
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. |
Let’s Go Mets is the Quintessential Mets Thing, having prevailed in the 2007 March Metness tournament by edging The Happy Recap in a spirited Metropolitan Championship game Monday night. Having outlasted 63 worthy opponents in the March Metness Field of 64, there’s nothing left to say except…Let’s Go Mets! One of a great city’s functions is to serve as a repository of memory. We need to be a place that preserves not just happy times and grand buildings, but those memories that affect us on the deepest level. Monday’s night’s March Metness championship game was an affair to remember, from the bows taken by the distinguished Mets alumni — Don Aase, Rick Sweet, Larry Elliot, Tom Filer, Ken Sanders, Sammy Taylor and Sammy Drake — who loaned their good names to the festivities all the way to the presentation of awards at tournament’s end. And in between? The Metropolitan Championship Game Surprisingly, we see the action unfold with a display of drawbacks by each entrant. Flaws? These two? Hard to fathom, but they are on record. Bob Murphy: Unbridled optimism in the face of a stretch of 64-98 seasons could get to you a little…in later years he blew fly balls, had them being caught when going out and going out when being caught…he blew smoke in his partner’s face, not a good thing for either of them…once referred to Al Leiter as Larry Dierker…hosted Bowling For Dollars, though that could be taken as a plus in some quarters. Let’s Go Mets: Bastardized by other, unworthy teams in other sports and other leagues…occasionally corrupted via four-syllable mispronunciation by younger generation that has taken its cues from bad “Let’s Go” examples set elsewhere…too often foisted on Shea crowd by electronic means when it’s best left to arise organically from Shea crowd itself…co-opted for use in “Let’s Go Mets!” song and video — a.k.a. “Let’s Go Mets Go!” — though that could be taken as a plus in some quarters. Yet those foibles did not stop either LGM or THR from being seeded in the No. 1 slots in their respective regions and it certainly didn’t slow them down as they raced through five matchups apiece to arrive at the Metropolitan Championship game. When you get right down to it, there is no way any true blue and orange Mets fan can find any real fault with either of them. There is only good to be had. The Happy Recap is, to be precise, what Bob Murphy promised following a Mets win. He didn’t make a big thing of it. He never teased it through the broadcast, didn’t say “wow, the Mets are up seven to one, so you know there will be a Happy Recap when this game is over.” Can you imagine Murph being that self-serving? The fans and the game were his constituency. If the Mets lost, there was no mention of a Happy Recap. If they won, there would be a quick word that we (“we,” not “I”) would be back with The Happy Recap after this message. When Murph returned from commercial, it was all about what Cleon Jones or Jerry Koosman or Del Unser or Craig Swan or Steve Henderson or The Man They Call Nails Lenny Dykstra or David Arthur Kingman or Ronnie Darling or John Olerud or you name him did. It was about the players and the Mets and the final score here at Shea Stadium, the New York Mets seven, the San Diego Padres one; our next broadcast will be… That was it. That was The Happy Recap. A short summation, the runs, the hits, the errors and a signoff. Yet that little tail applied to the end of an afternoon or evening became a signature like nobody else’s in Mets broadcast history. Nobody ever played up The Happy Recap per se. We all just knew about it. We tapped it out like Murph Code. For forty-two years those were our words to root by, our goal to strive for. And when Bob Murphy stopped announcing for good in 2003, they stayed with us. That’s the power of the local announcer, the local radio announcer. Murph did TV, too, from 1962 through 1981, rotating back and forth between booths with Ralph Kiner, Lindsey Nelson, Steve Albert and, briefly, Art Shamsky, but it was Frank Cashen’s genius to assign him to permanent wireless duty in 1982. It was seen as a demotion of sorts in those days. From the invention of television, television was the glamour medium of our time. Stars were on TV. Home run-hitting, Cadillac-driving Ralph Kiner was on TV. But somebody forgot to tell baseball. Baseball never stopped being at its best on the radio. We were realizing that all over again in the 1980s as a generation that had grown up smuggling a million transistors under a million blankets told its stories. Television could show us much. Radio could tell it all. That was Bob Murphy’s genius. He painted the word picture, the best picture you could have for a baseball game. The man didn’t conduct a talk show from behind a WHN or WFAN microphone. He told you what was going on on the field. He told you who was warming up in the bullpen. He told you who the manager had left on his bench. He did it in a way that kept you engaged when the game was dragging and in a manner that kept you riveted when the game was bursting at the seams. He never discounted the possibility of a Mets comeback, which was darn thoughtful of him. Bob Murphy clicked with a mass of New Yorkers despite — no, because — he was most un-New Yorkish. Forty-two years on the job and he never picked up a vocal inflection to indicate this was home for more than half his life. Blessedly he never betrayed an ounce of the native cynicism either. Whatever negative thoughts Murph may have brought to the ballpark he put aside when the light went on. Bob Murphy knew he wasn’t granted hour after hour of airtime to air his grievances. He was there to bring us Mets baseball. To bring us hope. And weren’t we a most receptive audience for his signal? It is perhaps some cosmic coincidence that hope and Mets each contain four letters. You usually hear “four-letter word” and you think the worst. Not with hope and, 24 of 45 losing campaigns notwithstanding, not with Mets. The 46th year of New York Mets baseball has commenced and here we are once more, hopeful as ever, maybe more hopeful than we’ve ever been. We slip out of winter and into the season — the only season that counts — and we assume our identity all over again. We nurtured it as best we could without a game in front of us but that was theory. Baseball season in all its in-progress actuality is what reaffirms why we exist in the realm we choose to exist. Why? To be in such a state that we are compelled to type or print or think or mumble or, most appropriately, scream from the top of our lungs and the bottom of our hearts, three words. On May 30, 1962, Roger Angell took in the Mets-Dodgers Memorial Day doubleheader at the Polo Grounds, Los Angeles having pulled ahead to a 10-0 lead after three-and-a-half. Mets first baseman Gil Hodges led off the bottom of the fourth inning with a home run, cutting the home team’s deficit to 10-1. Reaction? Gil’s homer pulled the cork, and now there arose from all over the park a full furious, happy shout of “Let’s go, Mets! Let’s go, Mets!” Imagine if it had been 10-2. Let’s Go Mets has been with us forever, just about as long as there have been Mets to go. Chronicling the early days, Leonard Koppett noted that “when President Kennedy landed at Frankfurt, West Germany, and in the crowd at the airport someone held up a “’Let’s Go Mets’ sign, it was effective indeed.” Ich bin ein Mets fan? And hopeful amid a hundred and then some losses that were already piling up like dirty dishes? Koppett called it “part exhortation and part self-derision”. Perhaps a little of each, indeed, but perhaps a little more of the first than Koppett recognized from the press box. Anybody who has sat in the depleted remnants of an already sparse crowd on the wrong end of a wide score in the closing minutes of an agonizing Flushing night will recognize this scenario, as recalled by Stanley Cohen in his 1969 tribute “A Magic Summer”. During one game in 1963 (the team’s last season at the old Polo Grounds), with the Mets trailing by thirteen runs in the bottom of the ninth, two out and no one on base, the New Breed sent up a chant of “Let’s go, Mets.” With each new strike on the batter, the cry grew louder and more insistent. It was a battle cry that needed no battle; it betrayed neither a glimmer of hope nor the sneer of derision. It was a simple and joyous act of defiance, the declaration of a will that would not surrender to the inevitable. The New Breed — Mets Fans 1.0, if you will — was analyzed by Robert Lipsyte in The New York Times in 1963 as a classic underdog, one who understood the brilliance of taking down the overcat in those rare instances it occurred. Alas, “the pure Metophile is likely to disappear in a few years,” Lipsyte concluded. “Even now, more and more ordinary people go to the Polo Grounds to watch a baseball game. As the Mets progress from incompetency to mediocrity, their psychological pull will be gone.” Lipsyte didn’t see the future that clearly. Maybe the Mets who pursued garden-variety ineptitude as the team shifted to Shea didn’t inspire anthropological dissection any longer (the Times famously posted correspondents to Africa, yet operated no bureau in Queens), but Mets fans were Mets fans, and as Cohen explained in 1988, a fan base’s memory is collective and enduring. A team’s followers always outlast its players and even its owners. They do not get sold or traded, they do not retire or become free agents, they do not sell out to conglomerates, and they rarely switch allegiance. They represent a team’s truest continuity; they are the repository of its history. And Met fans, who for years had thrived on failed hopes and comic relief, were of a very special type. The type that may have shed some of its Upper Manhattan excesses for its trip across the Triborough, but still the type to shout and twist its abdominal muscles into knots. The type that found its voice early and its motivation often. The type that never lost its sense of irony but, when given the slightest impetus, gained a true and awesome grip on hope. That’s what Let’s Go Mets grew into. 1969. 1986. 2006. A few other almost as great years. A whole string of not-so-great years. A mess of the mediocre kind, too. Let’s Go Mets has always been there. Let’s Go Mets is our mantra, our haftorah, our throatiest admonishment, our most sincere and personal thought. The Happy Recap is something we all want. Let’s Go Mets is something we will keep crying no matter what kind of recap the fates bestow on us. Let’s Go Mets is for good times, Let’s Go Mets is for times less than optimal but never not good, because any time we can shout it to the skies, it means we are being Mets fans, which is all we want to be anyway. Let’s Go Mets is the eternal expression of hopefulness that fuels each and every Mets fan, none of whom would ever let the lack of a silly commodity like the likelihood of a win get in the way of who he or she is. Let’s Go Mets is the Quintessential Mets Thing, the winner of the Metropolitan Championship and the recipient of the Joan Payson Cup, the Mayor’s Trophy and a gleaming new 1970 Dodge Challenger. Bob Murphy himself would call a victory that celebrates Mets fandom itself worthy of nothing less than a happy recap. So if you’ll excuse the gaucheness of electronic cheerleading, I want you to get up now. I want you to get out of your chairs and go to the window. Right now. I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell… Years ago I was in Los Angeles for work, and because of some cellphone-related mishap wound up using my room's phone for a long-distance call. For this, I was presented with a shockingly large bill upon checkout. When I expressed my surprise and indignation, the scruffy front-desk clerk smiled broadly and said, “Yeah, they get you every time, don't they?” To which I responded, now more indignant, “Who, exactly, are they? And how are you not them?” …with the smile of a man whose team is in first place. My worries of yesterday afternoon aside, I was not, in fact, bitter on Opening Night. And it wasn’t just the happy absence of Wainwright/Beltran footage, or the way the Mets played crisp, clean baseball while the World Champions did not. Though both those things helped, of course. It was the way baseball settled itself into my life (and Emily’s) like an old friend, making itself and us comfortable. From Ball 1 delivered by Chris Carpenter to Jose Reyes, spring training and its frustrations were gone. This was baseball under the bright lights, with a seriousness of purpose that let you know immediately that you weren’t in Florida anymore. Even the annoyances were familiar: The 2007 season was exactly four pitches old when Joe Morgan was invited to make fun of stats. But whatever: In June such utterances will drive me to beat my fists on the couch, but on Opening Night they were comfortingly familiar. Extrapolating the season from one game is, of course, ridiculous: Paul Lo Duca’s flirtation with 500 RBIs will lead us to a 162-0 campaign! But Glavine looked like Glavine (his location wasn’t great, but he knows how to work around that by now); I admired Joe Smith’s first-night guts if not his first-night results (he threw strikes, the rest will come); Beltran made a whale of a throw to erase David Eckstein; and Jose Valentin’s fist pump after he and Reyes bailed out Heilman, Smith and Pedro Feliciano had to be the picture of the evening. Granted, it’s easier to look good when your opponent looks lousy: So Taguchi made two more bad plays than I’ve ever seen him make, including that pratfall on Delgado’s double that made him look like the Anti-Endy; Carpenter got the bunt down on a suicide-squeeze attempt but still managed to get Kennedy erased on the play (not so easy to do); and on the mound Carpenter was lousy and clearly knew it, squinting at YFM with the look of a man approaching a roundabout at the end of a four-hour drive with the tank on E and the kids screaming and hitting each other in the back. You knew it really wasn’t St. Louis’s night when Moises Alou, nicely described by the Sun’s Tim Marchand as having “the range of a box turtle,” made a tumbling grab. Still, I was horrified to see Alou out there in the ninth. Maybe for each batter we could rotate Endy and whatever bad corner outfielder is still in the game, the way Davey Johnson yo-yo’ed Orosco and McDowell between the mound and the outfield all those years ago in Cincinnati? My one stab at bitterness came when Beltran came to the plate for the first time: After the first pitch from Carpenter, I yelled “that’s the second straight called strike he’s taken!” Emily told me to shut up, but I wasn’t remotely serious. I was already having too good a time. Game Seven is dead. Long live Game One. Ohmigod, it’s so good to have one of these to pore over again. Three new Mets (lifetime count: 802). Four not yet overworked relievers (to paraphrase Madeline Albright, what’s the point of having this superb bullpen that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?). Four double plays (Valentin’s middle name must be Flynn). Three RBI for the once and again No. 2 hitter (Lo Duca doesn’t look a ballplayer but he sure does play like one). Two ribeyes for Cleanup Daddy Delgado (who needs Spring Training?). And 291 for the Met we call Glavo (without a second thought). One and oh. One and oh and it’s all good. A fabulous throw from Beltran (or Bel-TRAH!n as Jon Miller reinvented him). A sliding catch from allegedly ancient Alou (I’ve got to turn the sound down on ESPN next time). Even two hits from the allegedly decrepit Shawn Green. So far, so crepit. Listening to Mets Extra beforehand, I heard nothing but roars and cheers which led to nothing but bile and disgust. But then 8:10 or thereabouts rolled around and I didn’t care about the 2006 Cardinals anymore. The 2007 Cardinals I will care about for two more games and not again ’til June. The 2007 Mets have my attention. They don’t suck. Not yet anyway. The long night of winter is over. Nothing sucks. I love Opening Day. Time begins on it, dontcha know? We get to start reading the latest chapter of our favorite story, thrilled we'll have reading material until October (and hopefully through it) and eager to know how it'll all come out. Our lives go on during the winter, but today they once again are lived to the fullest, with our biological clocks resetting to 1:10 and 7:10 and other times that mean everything now and are significant only in their tragic lack of significance in the winter. (That thought swiped from Greg's marvelous “Happy New Year,” which you should go read right now. Only the details have changed.) I think we just won the pennant last year. What else is there to glean from the story that the Cardinals have been caught Redhanded having indulged in a variety of banned substances prior to last year’s National League Championship Series? I would be happy if it weren’t so sad. This is one of those in-retrospect moments where everything that didn’t make sense then completely adds up now. That was an 83-win team, one that sagged in September and nearly blew a formidable divisional lead in the process. And suddenly they can beat the Padres (maybe) and then the Mets (yeah right)? No, that doesn’t happen without some help. Maybe we (or their fans) thought it was Divine intervention or just a lousy week on the Mets’ part. Turns out sometimes there’s a reason stunning upsets are so stunning. Where to begin? The LaRussa-McGwire connection? Neither of them wants to talk about the past, but they do go back a long way together. There’s now more than the good old days in Oakland to bond (or Bonds) them. And what about our pal Braden Looper? He looms as having been the worst abuser of them all — and I’ll resist the temptation to crack where was the HGH when Joe Randa came to bat two years ago? Those of us who thought there weren’t enough substances in the world to get him through a tough inning, well, we were wrong. Looper the lifetime reliever suddenly a starting pitcher this year? Payback, obviously, for keeping his mouth shut. (Aaron Heilman may wish he’d thought of that.) Of course the junk doesn’t just put a few miles on your fastball. It loosens your lips. Who else thought it strange when Looper led the mocking “Jose! Jose!” bit in the jubilant Cardinal clubhouse? He wasn’t a good closer here but at least he kept his mouth shut (like when he should have fessed up to his 2005 injury, but never mind that right now). Looper, though, is just the tip of the dirty iceberg as the rumblings that leaked out of Roger Dean Stadium reveal. An unproven bullpen became an asset for St. Louis in the NLCS. It wasn’t just talent and Dave Duncan after all. Look at those names (because you may never be able to look at them again on a Major League ballfield once disciplinary action is taken): Randy Flores, Tyler Johnson, Josh Kinney. Looper had a lot of baby Birds under his wing. Uh, you may be wondering, as long as relief pitchers’ names are being named, what about…yup. If Adam Wainwright’s curve broke unnaturally on oh-and-two to Beltran, there was a reason. Wainwright himself wasn’t exactly made from the best stuff on earth. Nor, it shouldn’t surprise you, was his .216-batting catcher, the last man to touch the ball in Game Seven, the last man to drive a run in. Yadier Fucking Molina never could have earned his middle name without Braden’s Little Helper. Him and Taguchi — another unlikely power hitter — were reportedly among the biggest non-pitcher users on the club. Aaron Miles and Chris Duncan less so, but they were apparently involved. It was mostly the scrubs and the rookies who broke the rules. Pujols was clean on this pass. Edmonds, as annoying as he is, was, too. Rolen wasn’t implicated. I’m a little unclear on Spiezio (so much for stereotyping the rock ‘n’ roller). Eckstein is still composed of only piss and vinegar. Also, Carpenter and Weaver were tested and came up negative. Not so Suppan. Like Gary Matthews, Jr., his big free agent contract may ultimately be null and void. But there’s more to this scandal than any given player’s career. The whole integrity of the game, which I have to admit I always thought was a little melodramatic as an issue, is in jeopardy. Bud Selig doesn’t want any part of nationally telecast 2006 world championship flag-raising. That’s not going to happen. Keith (ironic, eh Whitey?) and his ex-mates won’t be part of any ceremony after all. The coming suspensions have to go through an appeals process, but this is not a fight Donald Fehr and Gene Orza want right now. You’ve got the specter of George Mitchell holding press conferences, all those senators who are running for president ready to grandstand at the first hint of opportunity to brandish their moral credentials, the Post-Dispatch at loose ends and — this is almost unthinkable — Anheuser-Busch withdrawing its support of Cardinal baseball. Imagine the Busch Stadium sign down by tonight. (Cry hypocrisy all you want, beer is legal.) I assume there’s still a game scheduled for 8:05. ESPN paid big bucks, the show must go on. Don’t know how the St. Louis fans will respond. Will they throw their giveaway replica rings and banners back on the field this week? Will management hand them out? (Come to think of it, will the real rings even fit those Cardinal fingers that have swollen and deflated so drastically since October?) Meanwhile, are the Tigers awarded the 2006 title by default? They sure as hell didn’t earn it (their hands were slippery from plain old sweat and nerves, which is perfectly within the letter of the law), but they were the only other team in the World Series last year. And, in the interest of being completely self-serving, is the National League pennant vacant now or is it ours? Can we now say with objective certainty that we truly deserved to win that LCS? Look how close we came against an illegally stacked deck of Cards. Factor out Guillermo Mota if you want. That’s one Met who was taking something he wasn’t supposed to. Maybe half the Cardinals meet that description. You don’t have to be Buster Olney to recognize that Selig’s whole tenure will be defined by how he handles this. Baseball has for too long turned its back on steroids and human growth hormones and everything else that has disrupted the game. Letting the St. Louis Cardinals masquerade as defending world champions, even National League champions, transforms this whole sordid tale, breaking on this Opening Day of all days, into some kind of unfathomable farce. Does any event in sports match the pageantry of Tom Filer Four Weekend? Whether you’re lucky enough to be there in person or just taking it on TV, it’s like being caught in a brilliant kaleidoscope of blue, orange and black. The way they bring back all the March Metness competitors to take a bow is a great nod to sportsmanship and obviously very true to the Metsian ideal of fair play (so is the flinging of whiskey and water bottles at Pete Rose and John Rocker). The free peanuts and Cracker Jack are a nice touch as is the open seating. “Sit anywhere,” the ushers say. “And if you need anything, just give a holler. We’re here to help.” The atmosphere and amenities are awesome, but Tom Filer Four Weekend is, of course, about the competition. The reason everybody queues up and tunes in is to see what will be crowned the Quintessential Mets Thing. Four entrants remain from the original field of 64. Two will remain to play Monday for the Metropolitan Championship. Who will those two be? Saturday answered that question. The Taylor-Comma-Sammy-Final The Drake-Comma-Sammy-Final This clash of the Met icons seems almost predestined, as Bob Murphy’s happiest recap arose from Bill Buckner’s unhappiest mishap. The two, winners in the Believe and the Amazin’ regions, respectively, are reunited here and linked forever through Mookie Wilson’s fair ball that got by Buckner and the aftermath that allowed the Mets to live another day. What aftermath was that? Rounding third Knight! The Mets win! They win! The call lives on every bit as much as the result. Bob Murphy, however, wasn’t just about those incandescent moments of victory any more than the 1986 world championship was constructed solely from one first baseman’s error. Here he was on the radio broadcasting the end of an equally incredible, equally emotional Game Six thirteen years later: The count is three and two. Now the pitch…he walked him! The season is over for the New York Mets. Kenny Rogers walked Andruw Jones forcing in the winning run from third base, Gerald Williams heads into score, and it’s celebration time for the Atlanta Braves. What a horrible loss for the New York Mets. Both Game Six events would have an intense feel to them regardless of who told you about them, but coming from Murph as opposed to Vin Scully or Bob Costas, it was coming from family. He was our great baseball uncle. He was blood. He cared because we cared. He cared because he cared, too. Announcing Mets games may have been a job for Bob Murphy, but did you ever detect the slightest ounce of clock-punching in his delivery? Every game was the biggest game Bob Murphy ever did. Considering that The Happy Recap was never guaranteed and more than half the time impossible, that’s an utterly magnificent feat. As few and far between as Game Sixes are, there is no plural version of Bob Murphy. There is only one. The Happy Recap…yes, it wins the damn thing. The final is set. Monday night brings the showdown of a Met lifetime: Let’s Go Mets versus The Happy Recap for the Metropolitan Championship.
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Piazza: Catcher, Slugger, Icon, Star by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers. 
Amazin' Again: How the 2015 New York Mets Brought the Magic Back to Queens by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers. 
Volume I of The Happiest Recap: 50+ Years of the New York Mets As Told in 500+ Amazin' Wins by Greg Prince is available in print and for Kindle on Amazon. 
Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History by Greg Prince (foreword by Jason Fry), is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers. |
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