Mr. Met has skewered himself a Cardinal. Dig in everybody!
Roasting of Redbird courtesy of Zed Duck Studios…so much for birds of a feather.
 
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. |
My hair may be in need of a trim, but I can think of some birds whose wings have definitely been clipped. Goodbye 2006 World Champion Cardinals. Goodbye Busch Stadium and your lights that blind only the home team's outfielders. Goodbye Stan The Man and Scott Spiezio's dad and the chick with the earmuffs. Goodbye to rings and banners and orgies of self-congratulation. Goodbye to overly acrobatic Jim Edmonds and recast Braden Looper and .100-hitting Albert Pujols and earthbound Yadier Molina and Shades LaRussa. Goodbye to all that. Hello 2007 Mets. Hello you big, beautiful defending National League East champions. Hello home run power, surehanded fielding and starting pitching that's never in doubt. Goodbye 0-3 Cardinals. See you in St. Louie, screwy. Hello Carlos Beltran who may take a strike three now and then but won't be caught lookin' no more. Hello Jose Reyes whose homer was nice but I was kind of, almost rooting for a triple. Hello Paul Lo Duca, batting .385 after tonight. Hello suspect Shawn Green, posting a .333 after three games. Hello nearly flawless John Maine, even better than barely touched El Duque who was even better than highly competent Tom Glavine. Hello Moises and Ambiorix and Aaron the other. Hello all you new Mets. Hello all you old Mets. Hello Julio Franco who knows where to send a fly ball — right at Preston Wilson. Hello everybody. Hello this year. Hello first place, a half-game lead over Atlanta, one ahead of Florida, 2-1/2 over the Rollinses. Is it too early to keep track? Not if these games count. And they do. The world is three games old. This wasn't revenge. This was this year…is this year. It couldn't have commenced any better. Quick question for anyone who frequents barbershops: Does anybody actually talk baseball where you get your hair cut? I’ve been hearing all my life about guys sitting around barbershops mulling the state of the world, particularly baseball. It’s never happened to me. Never. I went to the same barber, Mario, for 21 years, from 1974 to 1995. Never once did Mario engage me in baseball talk. It’s not like I didn’t give him clues, like wearing a Mets jacket and — because my hair was so unruly by the time I rolled in to see him — a Mets cap. But nothin’. Our entire two-decade relationship was amiable but rather limited. Howyoudoonmyfrien’? Fine. How are you? I’m fine. Howyoufamily? They’re good. [A specific inquiry regarding one of my parents or my sister’s marriage]? He’s/she’s/it’s good. The haircut would proceed without comment. Other guys in other chairs chatted. Mario did a little crosschat with those barbers and those customers. Me and he, despite our longstanding relationship, never had more than two dozen words for each other. We always smiled, but then went shtum. It was never weirder than when we showed up at the same wedding — my friend married his partner’s daughter for a couple of months — and we greeted each other warmly before lapsing into absolutely nothing to say. Other than there being no scissors, no comb and no tall bottle of blue-green liquid on a counter, it was pretty much like all our transactions. When the silent haircuts were finished, he’d joke about how much better I looked now (the joke part was what I looked like when I came in), I thanked and paid him, he’d urge me to send my regards home, perhaps ask whenyoudaddycominin? and that was that. Satisfying enough from a folliclesque standpoint. But not one “how about those Mets?” To which you might say, so? Maybe he wasn’t a Mets fan. He probably wasn’t. Except I remember distinctly before Game One of the 1988 NLCS going into get a haircut because I had gone in to get a haircut before Game One of the 1986 NLCS. And in ’88 there was a kid, probably in his teens, getting a haircut from Mario before me and he was a Mets fan and was getting all kind of Mets inquiries from my barber. Mind you I was in the same jacket and cap as I had been two years earlier when I received not a nibble of baseball acknowledgement. Then it was par for the course. Now I was vexed. This is it, I thought. This is my chance. Mario’s into it. The Mets fan teen is done. My turn. Mario and I exchange pleasantries, we have the haircut, we finish up, he wishes me well and then I hit him with “you know, I came in here before the playoffs started two years ago and the Mets won the World Series, so I figure this will be good luck.” He smiled and nodded and said goodbye. NOTHING! DAMN! This barber shop was run by Italian men who were big soccer fans. Every four years during the World Cup they had TVs blazing. The rest of the time, it wasn’t all that sports-crazed. Except my friend Fred also went to this shop, had a different barber, Dom, and swears Dom consistently engaged him in baseball talk. About the Mets even. Fred was barely cognizant of the Mets. Me? I got nothing but a haircut. I hate getting haircuts. I’ve hated getting them since what I’m told was my second haircut when I was two. The first one I sat through calmly. The second one I went nuts, running around George’s Madison Avenue Barber Shop which was on Park Avenue (or Park Street…they never could keep that straight) in Long Beach. I don’t remember the first one. I do remember the second one. Perhaps I’m subconsciously expecting a replay of the second one every time I put off a badly needed haircut as I seem to be doing now. I think I reacted violently in 1965 because I was subject to George trimming my sideburns with that electric contraption they use and a pinch on my right cheek when he was done. “No machine, no pinch on cheek” was my insistence to my parents. They thought it cute. George thought it cute. I was serious. No machine. No pinch on cheek. Got that? George gave way to Leo, a nice German man. Leo cut my hair from the time I was, I’ll say, three until I was about ten. Then my mother got it in her head that I needed to have my hair styled at Andre’s. The place stank of hairspray and low-fat frozen yogurt. The haircuts weren’t particularly stylish either. A year later I wound up with Mario. He, like George, like Leo, like the stylist — some machine, no pinch on cheek, no baseball. Since my 21-year barber retired to Florida, I’ve drifted from chair to chair, settling in for a year or two here or there sometimes but never wanting to get attached like I was to Mario. When Mario left town, it was tough going. Now I leave them before they leave me. But I’m still waiting for that baseball talk that might win me over for the long haul, that baseball talk I’m always hearing about. Bill Gallo from the Daily News insists it goes on full-force where he gets his hair cut (then again, Bill Gallo insists it’s 1942). The last haircut I got, up the street from where I live, there was some lively chatter…into cellphones. One guy was lying to his wife about where he was. Swore he was picking up his car at the garage and would be home soon. Somebody else was getting the number of the shop wrong. It was right there in neon in the window. Look at it in the mirror, I was thinking, you’ll see it plainly. But he kept giving it out wrong and wondered why somebody couldn’t reach him. He needed the number because his cell was on the fritz. I’ll bet he didn’t know how to turn it on. One barber where I used to live had a series of those neat Bill Goff prints on the wall, the ones of ballparks and ballplayers. But we never talked baseball. Once he told me he was having a tooth problem. I recommended a dentist. He said he wasn’t interested in helping make some Jewish lady — the dentist’s wife, in his mind — rich. If he didn’t give such good haircuts I would have been more offended and stopped going sooner. Eight springs ago my hair was as out of control as it is now. I was in the city on a Saturday and had no chance of getting back to my neighborhood barber with the vaguely anti-Semitic leanings that hadn’t yet revealed themselves before he closed, so I stopped in at a midtown hotel barbershop. It was an expensive haircut by my suburban standards, $25, but it was there and it got done. As I was paying, I noticed an obituary from the Times taped to the wall above the register. It was M. Donald Grant’s. “Did he get his hair cut here?” I asked, pointing to the obit. “Oh yes,” the barber said with some reverence. “He was such a nice man.” Maybe I’m better off not talking baseball in barbershops after all. 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.
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.) |
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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