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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 20 May 2023 6:23 am In the spirit of the Baseball Writers Association of America members with whom I rubbed or at least grazed elbows Friday night, I humbly submit my ballot for Most Valuable Angle from the 10-9 ten-inning Mets win over the Guardians.
1) MY PRESENCE IN THE CITI FIELD PRESS BOX
This first-place vote may seem like the height of self-absorption, but a) blogging is foremost a first-person medium; and b) the Mets are 7-0 when I cover a ballgame from the Citi Field press box (high-rolling craps players have gotten less for their money from gorgeous good-luck charms they pay to blow on dice). More pertinently, the Mets win some of their craziest bleeping games when I’m wearing a credential around my neck rather than my heart on my sleeve. Rule No. 1 of the press box is there is no cheering, not even by a member of the media whose medium is all about advocating for the cause of the home team. I’m a seasoned pro when it comes to tamping down my rah-rah impulses, having taken those aforementioned crazy bleeping games in remarkable stride, at least until the credential came off my neck and the shouts emerged from my larynx.
2) INTERLEAGUE IS DEAD
I was Working Press for a night because I had an idea or two I wished to pursue, among them the notion that what was once conceived as a novel avenue toward boosting fan interest in the course of a long season is now so commonplace that it doesn’t matter. Seven National League clubs played seven American League clubs on Friday. Same as Wednesday. It’s not “Interleague Week,” the way it was introduced to us in 1997. Every week has a bunch of matchups between NL and AL, creating a wallpaper effect. Maybe the intracity showdowns are still big news. Maybe the chance to see Shohei Ohtani in, I don’t know, Cincinnati, is a godsend to Reds fans. Otherwise, we’re in NFL/NBA/NHL territory wherein team from this conference plays team from that conference and it’s business as usual. Thus, I wanted to get credentialed for the opener of this Mets-Guardians series so I could ask Buck Showalter, a manager whose dugout experience predates Interleague play, if the onslaught of 29 different opponents across the schedule presents new challenges to his preparation (and we all understand how critical preparation is to Buck). I asked, and he gave me a really good, really detailed answer around 4:30 Friday afternoon that doesn’t seem all that relevant given the events transpiring around 10 o’clock Friday night, but he confirmed my suspicion. Buck admitted, “I don’t even think about it anymore” whether it’s an NL team or an AL team next on the Mets slate, and credited “the advance people” for being on top of such a plethora of potentially unknown quantities. Despite it fading into the background as Friday’s festivities went along, this angle gets my second-place vote because it tickled my curiosity enough to get me to the ballpark and on assignment.
3) SILENT NO MORE
The other angle that lured me to Citi Field Friday night was the appearance of the leading light of the Silent Generation Mets. Those were the 2020 Mets who weren’t Mets before or after the short but depressing pandemic year, meaning they never knew what it was like to play as Mets in front of fleshed-out Mets fans. All the likes of Billy Hamilton, Jake Marisnick, Guillermo Heredia, Hunter Strickland and Erasmo Ramirez knew from were cardboard cutouts. I mention those Mets of recent, quiet vintage, because they have at least come back to Citi Field as former Mets. None made much of an impact in 2020, so none really drew a rousing ovation in ’21 or ’22. Ah, but Andrés Giménez was a veritable force as a 2020 Met, the youngest kid on the roster making a name for himself and his future. Andrés played in 26 of 30 home games as a heady infielder on the rise, even rating a smidge of Rookie of the Year support in the succeeding offseason’s BBWAA balloting. Then he was traded before a single fan who might have applauded for him while watching him on television could do it in person. I thought it would be instructive to see and feel Giménez immersed in an authentic Flushing din. Let’s say he now knows what Citi Field really sounds like.
4) YESTERDAY’S FUTURE
Giménez was traded in a package that included the Met shortstop he was in the process of making superfluous, Amed Rosario. Rosario was the breakout star of our dreams way back in 2017. That long? Or is it only that long? We know how we are about demanding a hot prospect be granted his immediate promotion; we didn’t just invent that impulse this year. Rosario’s installation on the active roster was a happening. The Mets followed up with Rosario-themed giveaways. As he progressed, you couldn’t picture our future without Amed. Then one day he was deleted from our present. It warms my heart to report Rosario, like Giménez, received tangible applause when the starting lineups were announced Friday night. More a trickle than a flood, but neither of them was treated like an American League stranger (no video, though). After Rosario’s first-inning hit, a sing-song chant of “Jose! Jose! Jose!” went up. Could it be the crowd remembered Rosario as protégé to Reyes and was making a meta-comment on the circle of Met life? No, it was just some Cleveland supporters excited to see Jose Ramirez come bat next. Guardians groupies would find a lot to get vocal about in the minutes ahead.
 Always a giant matchup. 5) ECHOES OF 1954
The “Cleveland” wasn’t the Indians, the “New York” wasn’t the Giants, and the Polo Grounds is a housing project in 2023, but geographically if not in precise name, we had a World Series rematch on our hands: CLE (AL) at NY (NL). One last glint of sepia-toned romanticism to frame the Mets-Guardians matchup in the glow of memories forged when Willie Mays made The Catch, Dusty Rhodes delivered The Pinch-Hits and the National League champions upset the supposedly unbeatable junior circuit behemoth in four straight. Random Interleague matchup? We had a tradition to uphold! Or, perhaps, just a third consecutive game to win in the midst of what had been, until very recently, a morbid May. “Still,” Arnold Hano wrote in A Day in the Bleachers, the book that made the 1954 Fall Classic a true classic, “I’m not an American League fan. All I know about the Indians is what I have read about them in the papers.” During my night in the press box, I noticed the official scoresheet listed the Mets’ foes for the evening as the “Cleveladn” Guardians. I feared word would get down to the visitors’ dugout and Terry Francona would use the typo as motivation.
6) HE DIDN’T GET HIS MEN
Carlos Carrasco, off the injured list, replicated Sal Maglie in one respect. Both the Giants’ starter from Game One of the 1954 World Series and the Mets starter in the first of three games set for this weekend (weather permitting) gave up first-inning runs. In that respect, Maglie would have fit in nicely with the 2023 Met rotation. Maglie — “the Barber” — got nicked for two runs out of the gate, then shut down Cleveland through seven. Carrasco — Cookie — didn’t compensate for his early crumbles so effectively. Carlos had the Mets trailing, 4-0, after two and 5-0 after he completed his night’s work after five. We could only hope our bullpen had enough Don Liddle and Marv Grissom to it should the Mets’ bats mount any kind of comeback.
7) BABIES COME BACK
Five fine innings from Cal Quantrill (even better than what Bob Lemon posted to open Game One in ’54), combined with the five runs Carrasco gave up, were too much for the Mets to handle…or would have been, before the Mets commenced to reinvent themselves as full of spit and vinegar — and adamant about never saying die. These Mets aren’t your grandfather’s Mets. Or your father’s. Or your older brother’s. Or yours from Monday or Tuesday. These are the Mets who got it together on Wednesday, kept it together on Thursday and gave no indication they didn’t plan to keep it rolling on Friday. How? With an infusion of blood so young it could get a base hit for two different teams in two different cities off two Hall of Fame pitchers on the same day. Francisco Alvarez, 21, went high and deep in the bottom of the fifth. Nobody was on base, but the run Alvarez drove in didn’t stay lonely for long, as former kid who still plays like one Jeff McNeil drove in another run. It was 5-2 heading to sixth — and 5-3 heading out of it, thanks to Brett Baty, 23, homering to lead off the home half of the inning. Climbing out of holes is suddenly a Met skill set. Toddlers love to climb, right?
8) NOTHING POLARIZING ABOUT IT
Having generated such a thoughtful response from Buck pregame, I wondered if I could ask him a followup in the seventh: “What’s this debilitating fascination you have with Dominic Leone?” Leone, who hasn’t inspired an iota of confidence during his Met tenure to date, got bailed out by his defense in the sixth. He responded to his good fortune by loading the bases in the seventh. Stephen Nogosek was the next safety net. It almost worked, too. Rosario lined to center, but Nimmo (who’d performed a little Maysian magic on a Wertzian drive from Giménez) caught it and fired home. Baserunner Will Brennan found himself trapped in a rundown. Alvarez threw to Baty, who chased Brennan toward the plate before tagging him out. In the books, that’s an 8-2-5 double play. That’s the stuff of Dykstra to Gibbons to Hojo, speaking of New York (NL) teams to have won it all. Alas, Nogosek wouldn’t eradicate what was left of Leone’s mess, and the Guardians took a 7-3 lead to the bottom of the seventh. Pete Alonso then took that lead and turned it to dust. Grand slam!!!! Four runs!!!! Tie game!!!! (Exclamation points abound here because in the press box, remember, no cheering.)
9) PITCHING AND DEFENSE
So Leone and Nogosek weren’t the Liddle and Grissom of their day. Liddle threw the pitch that Vic Wertz blasted to most distant center only to have Mays track it down; Grissom was the pitcher Leo Durocher brought in after him, with legend having it that Liddle told Grissom as he vacated the mound, “Well, I got my man.” Most importantly, the two Giant relievers from 69 years ago didn’t allow Cleveland to add on to their two runs. That’s the kind of performance the Mets needed ASAP. It’s what they got just as quickly from Adam Ottavino in the eighth — no baserunners, which was great, because an Ottavino baserunner is an automatic Ottavino basestealer — and David Robertson in the ninth. Robertson in particular was assisted by fancy fielding, with McNeil robbing Steven Kwan, and Alonso squelching a base hit bid by Ramirez. The two pitchers doing their best to add up to one Edwin Diaz were half of the reason the game was heading to extras. The other half? The Mets didn’t score in the eighth or ninth, either.
 Lindor in the middle of everything, including me (in windbreaker over the shortstop’s left shoulder). 10) THE DRAMATIC RATHER THAN TRAUMATIC CONCLUSION
Drew Smith took a step outside the bullpen circle of trust, giving up a two-run homer to Gabriel Arias (after Rob Manfred put a Guardian on second) in the top of the tenth to almost certainly make the night an exercise in highs and lows that would land with a thud on a low. Unless you were nutty enough to foresee a nutty conclusion to what had been a fairly nutty game through nine-and-a-half. I was sitting in the same press box I was sitting in when Alonso tore off Michael Conforto’s shirt after Conforto and Todd Frazier tore the roof off the Citi sucker in 2019; when Joey Votto hit a ball off the top of the outfield wall rather than over it on the night 1973 Met stalwart Jon Matlack was inducted into the team Hall of Fame in 2021; and when the Marlins threw all the goodwill they could at the Mets and away from each other on Keith Herrnandez’s number retirement day in 2022. Those were all highlights of unfathomable walkoff wins. How on earth could you expect the Mets to match those kinds of heroics?
• First, you call Rob Manfred and ask for a runner on second, and magically appears Brett Baty.
• Then, you cope with the presence of Emmanuel Clase, the American League’s answer to Edwin Diaz in 2022.
• Then, you send up your Most Valuable Met from 2022, Starling Marte, but it’s a new year, and Marte flies out to right. At least it’s enough to move Baty to third.
• Then, you make with the spit and vinegar again, via the third of the Citi Kids, as I’d taken to calling them in my head. Mark Vientos, 23 and DH’ing (we’ll overlook what a miserable role that is to inflict on a veritable child), singles Baty home. It is 9-8. By never saying die, death is averted.
• Eduardo Escobar comes into pinch-run, no slight detail. The Mets have not had their pinch-running specialist Tim Locastro for weeks and won’t have him for more weeks (thumb problems while on rehab). Escobar, the displaced veteran, carves out a niche as the base thief of record. He steals second, setting up a marvelous opportunity for pinch-hitter Daniel Vogelbach.
• Yeah, right. Vogelbach strikes out.
• But here comes Alvarez! Except Alvarez, after two pitches, is in an oh-two hole at the plate, and up in the press box, Mr. They Never Lose With Me Here unplugs his tablet from the handy outlet of which he’s been availing himself all night because this reporter knows it’s a lost cause and maybe he can get a jump on the commute home if he starts to pack up before the inevitable becomes a reality.
• And, I swear, as soon as the charger’s prongs were detached from the electrical socket, Alvarez socked the next pitch he saw into left, scoring Escobar with the tying run. The detached observer up in the press box plugged his tablet back in.
• Nimmo grounds near but not to Rosario. Amed doesn’t have enough time to nab the ball and Brandon, meaning it’s first and third.
• After Buck’s presser and before settling into my press box seat, I took a trip out onto the field. You can do that when you have the right credential around your neck. Between the reporters and the photographers and the various guests the Mets welcome and the perk-enjoying season ticket “members,” there may be more spectators surrounding the field during batting practice in Flushing than there are in the stands during games in Oakland. Even this ad hoc crowd was bigger than any Giménez saw when he was a Met. One fellow amid all this activity stood out. He’s got the hair for it, the bandana for it, and the charisma for it. Francisco Lindor attracted attention, whether he strove for it or not. He stopped to give an interview for Cleveland’s pregame show. He stopped to greet families who couldn’t believe the Mets’ shortstop was not only talking to them but smiling at them. He invited two children to come see “my office,” meaning the clubhouse, and whisked them on a whirlwind tour. Lindor was already doing it all and first pitch was still two hours away. As focused as I was on Rosario and Giménez coming home, it was a much bigger deal for the Guardians and their fans/press corps that they’d be facing the players they sent to New York: Carrasco and, especially, Lindor.
• Lindor was a big deal in Cleveland for a reason and is a big deal in New York for a comparable reason. The man comes through. Even after interrupting his pregame preparation to accommodate everybody. Even while having to wear an olive drab cap that doesn’t go with his dyed curls (or anybody’s natural ones), let alone black jersey. Even when the Mets appeared in various states of dead and desperate.
• The erstwhile Clevelander turned on the nightlife in Queens, singling home Alvarez — who Francisco labeled one of the “Baby Mets” with the winning run. I like Citi Kids as a moniker (I’m already seeing the poster in my head), but the important thing is we’re test-driving adorable names because we’re so excited about these adorable young players and their adorable elders. Together, the generations made it Mets 10 Guardians 9 in ten. Two nights after Mets 9 Rays 8 in ten. Sandwiching Mets 3 Rays 2 in nine. All one-run wins are not created equal, but each of these one-run wins has been huge in its own right, and this version takes its place in the pantheon of press box EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT! special editions, the kicker coming from both out on the field, where “L.A. Woman” blared like it was 1999 (followed by “Takin’ Care of Business” evoking 2006) and back in the Excelsior concourse where, whenever somebody opened a rear door, you could hear LET’S GO METS!!! rumble down the steps from Promenade.
So yeah. A good night to cover a ballgame.
by Greg Prince on 19 May 2023 12:08 pm I followed Thursday afternoon’s game from Citi Field as much as I possibly could, and it followed me almost but not fully everywhere I had to go. Thursday afternoons can be uncooperative that way. I had TV at the beginning and end, radio on and off in the middle, and pitches missed here and there. My attention was focused no more than three-quarters Metwise at any given moment. That’s an estimate; Statcast doesn’t measure fan focus, but give them time. Despite gaps, I was able to discern that the Mets and the Rays clung close to one another all day. Had my attention pierced the 90% mark, I might call the game tense, but I was partly distracted; fairly content that the sun was out; and, mostly, not convinced the Mets would eventually lose. That state of affairs on its own merits depleted for me some of the tension from a matchup whose margin never exceeded one run. As a Mets fan, I was simply happy not being unhappy.
If that’s not a sea change, it’s a least a tidal shift. For several weeks until the late innings Wednesday night, Mets games proceeded mostly on a doom course. They’d lost 16 of 22. Few of the sixteen losses as they unfolded seemed surprising. Almost all of the six wins came off as aberrations. Even going back to the smugger beginnings of the season, including the spurt when we collected 11 Ws in 14 attempts, I was increasingly overcome by something being no less than slightly off about this team. A virtual pie to the face to the first person who haughtily sees fit to remind me that all wins are good wins. You didn’t have to graduate first grade to comprehend all wins are preferable to all losses, yet there were wins in whose fabric flaws are noticeable and nagging. I keep going back to the Saturday (3-2) and Sunday (4-3) of the sweep in Oakland and the conviction I developed that weekend that if we’d been playing anybody better than the consensus pick for worst team in baseball, we could have been had. Soon, we’d be playing a string of teams considered barely a notch above the A’s, and the whole assortment of presumed also-rans tangled us in knots.
What it says when the Mets, after stumbling successively at the hands of the Tigers, the Rockies, the Reds and the Nats, were thrown into competition versus the consensus best team in baseball and, eventually, got the best of the best I’m not as sure. The Rays made the Mets look as bad Tuesday night as the Nationals made the Mets look Monday afternoon. A lot of bad had been going around and it didn’t ask to see anybody’s record as it descended on the House of Not So Amazin’. The Mets, behind Kodai Senga on the mound and the Rays on the scoreboard, didn’t look bad Wednesday night so much as destined to be outlasted. Senga pitched great, yet the Rays kept finding ways to edge ahead. Then here came the latest iteration of the Youth of America, clutch Mark Vientos and even clutcher Francisco Alvarez, and suddenly we were in fugazi extra innings, and a Rays run scored easy-peasy, and the best team in baseball was positioned to inflict upon us one of the least appealing consolation prizes a professional sports team of whom much was expected can receive: a moral victory. No, we didn’t beat the mighty Rays, you could hear it reasoned, but the kids came up big and it took ten before we went down for the count.
As one imagines Pete Alonso would put it with characteristic eloquence, fuck moral victories. With a synthetic runner (Brandon Nimmo) on third and a real one (Jeff McNeil, by way of a single to right rather than a baseball-hating commissioner’s bright idea) on first, Alonso sent a Pete Fairbanks pitch to somewhere near Anchorage, and, as you know, we won, 8-7. Without Pete’s explicit power, maybe we lose, 7-5. Or maybe they lose, 7-5. Pronouns can be tricky when you don’t necessarily wish to identify with a particular result.
What Wednesday night’s triumph accomplished, beyond one win, was to make Thursday the kind of game when, no matter what percentage of attention you directed toward it in amid the contours of an afternoon, mentally tenable. It helped that the slight hole the Mets dug for themselves in the top of the first (they sure love to dig first-inning holes) wasn’t deep and it was instantly excavated in the bottom of the first. The two teams traded a run apiece. The two starters, Tylor Megill for our side, Taj Bradley for theirs, settled in. I knew nothing about Taj Bradley going in. I knew Megill as well as one could from three seasons of intermittent pitching as a guy we use mainly because somebody else isn’t available. I know that he can, from time to time, provide an island of stability for a staff in disarray. Tylor was all that on April 12, when he went five solid innings and gave up but two runs to the Padres in a hypercompetent 5-2 win at Citi Field.
That game was the thirteenth the Mets played in 2023. The season’s ensuing episodes have since, like Terence Mann’s evocation of America in Field of Dreams, rolled by like an army of steamrollers. As of April 12, the Mets had yet to make that ten-game trip to the West Coast, Max Scherzer had yet to be suspended for sweat and rosin, Justin Verlander had yet to make a single start and the ballclub had yet to utterly lose its way. As of April 12, the Mets were 7-6, clearing their throats en route to announcing they were a week and change from catapulting to 14-7. It was the day I figured the Mets were now the Mets and everything was gonna be fine. It was the last time I allowed myself to feel the slightest bit smug about our projected powerhouse of a surefire contender. It was the last time I thought Tylor Megill was an unalloyed asset to the rotation.
Until Thursday. Megill going six against the Rays and giving up two runs was the main reason for feeling good about Megill. The Mets withstanding the Rays on all fronts seeded the environment for greater satisfaction. Because of how they played Wednesday — because of how they finished Wednesday (not just in the tenth, but within the thunderbolt swings of the seventh and the ninth) — I had the sense I was watching/listening to a different team from the one that had sapped the enthusiasm out of the season for most of the past month. Maybe we won’t win, I thought, but it won’t because we so readily allow the worst in us to come out at the slightest tap. Better yet, maybe we won’t lose, regardless that these are the Rays, and for all of Tuesday and most of Wednesday we were made to understood what that meant.
The Rays of Thursday were pretty good, too, but so were our Mets. Their first-inning run was met by our first-inning run. Their next run, in the sixth, served only to match the one Pete put up all by his lonesome in fourth. The Rays’ response, via Josh Lowe’s solo homer, tied the game at two, but it didn’t severely damage our chances in the interim. Megill hung tough enough, and the Mets, à la the Fabulous Thunderbirds, still maintained a chance to wrap it up.
In the bottom of the sixth, as in the bottom of the first, the Mets scratched out a run, this one to put them/us ahead, 3-2. It’s the Alonso blasts to the heavens and the Vientos and Alvarez breakthroughs that you remember, but it’s the simple little rally tally that can make all the difference. Alonso’s non-homer batting average is .152. Be glad that Pete leads the world in home runs with 16. Be thrilled that once in a while his teammates, young and less young, go deep. (The thrill of a non-Pete Met homer being so rare helps explain why track-record slugger/tin glove catcher Gary Sanchez is coming up, presumably at the expense of Michael Perez, who merely instigated the final defensive out of the top of the sixth with a heady pickoff throw to first.) But danged, as Pete likely wouldn’t say, if three singles stitched together by McNeil, Baty and Pham — none of them calling for the kind of Statcast tape-measuring Alonso’s hits require — don’t also sometime get the job done.
Same for three innings of unglamorous but mostly effective relief pitching, this time around from Brooks Raley, Jeff Brigham and David Robertson. Tampa Bay put a runner on first in the eighth and another runner on second in the ninth. I was prepared for the dang dam to burst at any given moment, with Rays runs swimming everywhere, but I was just as prepared to stay dry. Each arm did what it was asked to do. No Ray scored after the sixth. The Mets had just won two in a row.
The standings tell us almost nothing definitive other than they contain only 45 games played for the Mets to this point. The “race’ for the final NL Wild Card involves literally everybody who isn’t already clutching a playoff spot in the mythical if the season ended today… derby. Miami, in what amounts to first place for Berth No. 6, is five games ahead of eleventh-place Washington. Washington’s probably not going to get hotter than ten other clubs and become the third Wild Card in the league, but you can’t tell the Nationals to go home and get their shine box on May 19. Nobody’s out of it yet. That, blessedly, includes us. We’re 22-23. It would be nice if we could keep adjusting the first column upward and limit the rise of the second. Nice for now is a return to actually believing such a Met-friendly trajectory is more than possible.
This is where, if the season was in further progress and straits had just grown slightly less dire from two encouraging victories, we might declare, YOU GOTTA BELIEVE! Too early for that in 2023, but not too early to pay tribute to the 50th anniversary of the season when both our lexicon and our flagpole was enhanced forever. Revisit the pennant-winning campaign of 1973 as part of the It Happens in Threes series on the newest episode of National League Town.
by Jason Fry on 18 May 2023 12:28 am For most of Wednesday night, my only thought was that feeling pain because of the Mets was actually progress: better writhing in agony than sitting dour and numb watching another night of bad baseball, as we have for the last three and a half weeks.
Kodai Senga was the best he’s looked as a Met, with command of every pitch in his arsenal and an apparent bit of extra intensity. (Maybe it was all the family members in the stands — given Joey Lucchesi‘s first scintillating start in San Francisco, perhaps every Met starter needs a retinue of relatives in attendance.) But the Rays pierced Senga for a lone run in the fourth and that looked like it would be enough to beat him, because the Mets couldn’t do anything with Josh Fleming or Kevin Kelly. The sixth was particularly frustrating — Jeff McNeil pinch-hit and walloped a drive to left-center that annoying showboat Jose Siri ran down, Francisco Lindor singled, but Pete Alonso grounded out and Daniel Vogelbach looked utterly helpless in a lefty-on-lefty matchup with Jake Diekman. When Siri smacked a homer off Jeff Brigham an inning later, the crowd at Citi Field seemed too depressed to boo.
The ball hit to center by freshly anointed savior hasty import newly arrived Mark Vientos off Ryan “No Not That One, He’s Like 75 Years Old by Now” Thompson looked destined to wind up in Siri’s glove, undoubtedly to be followed by Siri turning several cartwheels and blowing kisses to his teammates. But somehow it kept carrying until it was safely over the fence: Implausibly and wonderfully, the kid had done what we’d been clamoring for him to do here instead of in Syracuse and the Mets had tied it.
Well, for about five minutes. Adam Ottavino didn’t have it, walking Randy Arozarena and looking perturbed as Arozarena swiped second, one of seven Rays to steal off Mets’ pitchers — phrased that way because Francisco Alvarez was at fault for exactly none of them. When Brandon Lowe — I forget if he’s the Lowe pronounced like OW or the Lowe pronounced like the oh in OH NO — homered off a slider that slid its way into trouble, Citi Field felt like a funeral home, with the faithful stunned into silence.
I was on my couch, but I knew I looked like all the fans SNY’s cameras lingered on: a dull stare above the rigor mortis of surrender. I rarely stalk away from even terrible games, but I won’t claim that’s the product of superior moral fiber; mostly it’s because I’m old and a certain long-haul fatalism has crept in. But OK, it’s also because there’s still a better me somewhere inside this gloomy old hulk, and that better me always has to be blowing frantically on some sad little ember of hope and chirping annoyingly that it’s not over yet and anything is possible and wouldn’t you feel like a chump if one of those 1,000-to-1 bets placed out of stubborn belief paid off and you missed it?
Because sometimes — OK, once in a very great while — those bets actually do.
Even when you’re playing the best team in baseball, the one with the relentless hitters and the pitiless base swipers and a million relievers throwing from two million weird angles, and you let that team tack on a ninth-inning run to leave you three in arrears, with the three feeling more like 30.
In the bottom of the ninth Jason Adam was tasked with facing Vogelbach, Starling Marte and Mark Canha, not exactly a trio to spark fear this year. But he walked Vogelbach and hit Marte before striking out Brett Baty, sent up to pinch-hit for Canha. Vientos flied to center and the Mets had used 26 of their precious outs, with only one left. All that stood between the Mets and another defeat was Alvarez, whose rapid improvement has yet to include not trying to do too much in big spots.
Alvarez spat on a sweeper just outside for ball one, which was mildly encouraging; Adam tried that pitch again, left it middle-middle, and Alvarez demolished it, smashing it off the facing of the second deck to tie the game. He unleashed an epic bat flip and floated around the bases, levitated by the swagger that’s made me laugh since I first glimpsed him as a Brooklyn Cyclone not so long ago.
A wonderful moment, except it lasted about as long as the afterglow of the previous game-tying homer from a rookie. Against David Robertson, ghost runner Taylor Walls swiped third leading off the 10th, came in on a Harold Ramirez single, and then Ramirez came home on a single by the other irritating Lowe. Robertson had been all but untouchable all year, but that one looked like a dagger. Sure, there’d be hopeful things to say about Vientos and Alvarez and Senga would earn well-deserved praise, but the Mets seemed fated to lose another one.
McNeil led off the 10th against Pete Fairbanks with a single, pushing ectoplasmic Brandon Nimmo to third, but Lindor looked hapless striking out on a pitch in the dirt and up came Alonso — who was “sick as a dog,” we’d learn later from Buck Showalter.
Fairbanks’ first pitch was a slider that caught a lot of plate, except Pete was looking fastball and it zipped in untouched.
“That might be the best pitch he sees,” I grumbled.
A wonderful thing about baseball is sometimes you’re completely and utterly wrong and it makes you happy. Fairbanks’ next pitch was the fastball, he threw it to the exact same spot as the slider, and the second Alonso made contact you knew the game was over — impossibly and unbelievably and blissfully over. This is baseball’s greatest magic trick: a slow, grim forced march to a seemingly inevitable unhappy ending somehow transformed in an instant and become stammering, staggering joy.
The Polar Bear stomped around the bases and vanished into a forest of helmet pounds and high-fives, with one SNY shot catching Baty, Vientos and Alvarez in the same frame, romping out of the dugout beaming and impossibly young. Pete offered up his postgame LFGM for Steve Gelbs’s mic, except this time he said the words and not the letters, including the word that I assume will draw a fine from the FCC* and tut-tutting from the ranks of the self-appointed tut-tutters.
Another reason it’s good to have a billionaire owner? I’m pretty sure Steve Cohen will pay the fine without so much as a blink. I’m tempted to chip in myself — maybe even enough for the triple play pancake breakfast. And I know there will be a next however many games when all looks dark and dreary but I stay at my post, obeying that little voice, the one that simultaneously annoys me and that I hope I never stop hearing, the one insisting that anything is possible and wouldn’t you feel like a chump if you missed it?
* the FCC’s fining/grousing is limited to broadcast, smarter people tell me. Carry on, Polar Swear!
by Jason Fry on 16 May 2023 11:44 pm The Mets said all the right things after getting beaten by the Rays 8-5 on Tuesday night in a game that was not nearly as close as the final score suggests. Justin Verlander talked about understanding the fans’ frustration and about how the players were frustrated too and about needing to work hard. Buck Showalter talked about worms turning but didn’t sugarcoat all the things that seem to be going wrong all at once. It all sounded good, but if you zoomed out from trees to forest, the vibe was essentially that the beatings will continue until morale improves. And when exactly will that be? The starting pitchers are dropping their teammates in holes early, the hitters have stopped hitting and so are unable to slug their way out of those holes, and this dreary blueprint is followed pretty much daily, leaving the games sour and unwatchable.
Predictably, a Mets team that had just been steamrolled by the not very good Nationals found the Rays a tough matchup. Right now the Rays are pretty much a perfect baseball team: They ground down Verlander, a surefire Hall of Famer even if he won’t wear our uniform on his plaque, until he was forced to make hitters’ pitches, which the Rays didn’t miss. Meanwhile the Mets hit three home runs, which is three more than they hit in Washington, but that was all they did, and this moderate uprising never really felt like a serious threat — frankly, it was a lot of lipstick to waste on one pig. The Mets got screwed on a replay challenge at first, they got booed repeatedly by the faithful, and in the last few innings SNY treated us to about 200 shots of Mets fans looking outraged, astonished, morose or catatonic.
If that’s the scale, I think right now I’m somewhere between the last stages of astonished and early-onset morose — the Rays are a fantastic baseball team, the Mets are a tire fire, and it’s a little like the unstoppable force and the unmovable object if you switched the polarity of one of those entities so that both were pushing in the same direction, which is to say away from the Mets conceivably winning anything. I mean, Starling Marte looks done, Mark Canha remains a shell of his 2022 self, Daniel Vogelbach‘s best moment was cheering a teammate, Francisco Alvarez‘s swing is getting worrisomely long again, Drew Smith had a fit in the dugout … it’s bad, y’all.
Congratulations to Josh Walker, I guess, for becoming the 1,200th Met all time. Now that Walker is a made man, though, he’s strongly advised to run like hell away from this Baseball Chernobyl. Maybe see if Tampa Bay could use another arm — those guys look like they’re going places.
by Jason Fry on 16 May 2023 7:46 am A confounding Mets season took another confounding turn Monday afternoon, when the team followed up Sunday’s burst of offensive competence (counterpoint, maybe the Nationals decided to experiment and do Whip-Its between innings) by once again looking like an outfit with zero resemblance to a professional baseball team. Going into Monday, you might have said, “Well, at least we know David Peterson isn’t really a pitcher with a 7.68 ERA.” And you’d be correct — when the Nats were done strafing Peterson, leaving him lying in a daze on the mound surrounded by the components of his uniform, a la Charlie Brown, he was a pitcher with an 8.08 ERA.
8.08! I’m no statistical wizard, but that seems bad!
Peterson will soon be out of a job, replaced by Carlos Carrasco. I take no satisfaction in pointing out at this juncture that Carrasco’s 2023 ERA is … 8.56.
And yet Carrasco now somehow feels at least sort of savior-adjacent. That’s because Peterson has been a metronome of suck, so chronically and reliably horrible that when I hear his name I now reflexively assume the posture of a (much smaller, not even faintly intimidating) bouncer outside of the kind of downtown hot spot I don’t go to. Right now I never want to see him again, a stance that is neither personal nor permanent, but heartfelt for all that.
But it’s not all Peterson’s fault, not by a long shot. He’s one guy having a bad season, a label that could be liberally applied to the Mets roster. We could point to the starters who haven’t started, the starters who have started and fizzled, the home-run hitters who have done nothing to earn that distinction, the 2022 offensive stalwarts who have gone flabby this year, or just to the general rancid crumminess produced by the collective. Since the last two days of their at-the-time-heartening California trip the Mets have been terrible at all aspects of baseball, putting up a 6-15 record against the Giants, Braves, Nats, Tigers, Rockies and Reds.
They now have to face the Rays, who could fall out of a boat and discover that 26 guys can walk on water. In baseball youneverknow, to quote the late Joaquin Andujar, but you can often guess, and let’s just say I’m not filled with optimism. As things have cratered, I’ve been thinking about another old baseball saw: the idea that you spend the first two months figuring out what you have, the next two getting what you need and the last two seeing what you can do.
The end of May will more or less mark the end of the Figuring Out What You Have part of the schedule. A turnaround from this same group of players is possible, and would be no weirder than other things that have happened in this strange Girl With a Curl campaign. (Recall that these same Mets were 14-7 before whatever the hell happened halfway through San Francisco.) But barring a strange and heartening turn, you’d expect the Mets’ braintrust to conclude that what they have is not what they need, and so start making changes. Maybe that means Mark Vientos and/or Ronny Mauricio join Brett Baty and Francisco Alvarez for a ’23 youth movement, which seems risky but once again, it’s not exactly going well; maybe it means pink slips for some veterans; maybe it means some big move empowered by Cohen cash flow; maybe it means some combination of those things; maybe it means something else entirely.
The end of May might feel a long way off while Rays are pell-melling around the bases and the Citi Field faithful are booing anyone down on the field unwise enough to be caught wearing blue and orange. But it really isn’t a distant prospect — it’s 14 games away, which measured by new fast-forward Manfredball standards is about 36 hours.
Thirty-six baseball hours from now, one suspects, the 2023 Mets will start looking different.
Maybe better, maybe worse, but different. And why not? As I believe I and more importantly they have demonstrated, it’s not going well.
by Greg Prince on 15 May 2023 12:39 pm On May 9, 1972, it rained in New York, which, then as now, is an unfortunate occurrence when a baseball game is scheduled in the Metropolitan Area. The Mets were to play the Dodgers at Shea Stadium that Tuesday night, meaning that baseball game would have to be made up. The good news was the Dodgers would be sticking around Queens for a couple of days. They had games scheduled Wednesday night and Thursday night. With no significant travel on their itinerary — their next stop was scheduled to be Philadelphia — it wouldn’t put anybody out if a twi-night doubleheader was scheduled. Instead of opening the gates for an 8:05 PM start, the norm in 1972, the Mets could invite fans to be in their seats by 5:35 PM for the first pitch of the first game, and then continue to maintain those seats as theirs through the final pitch of the second game. Such adjustment to circumstances by the management of the home team was traditionally one of the unexpected bonuses of a given baseball season. You didn’t expect there to be two games for the price of one on that date when you saw the schedule at season’s beginning, but sometimes you’d get a chance to partake. What a bargain!
Author Charlie Bevis, a baseball historian of all things night-game related, breaks down the utility of the twi-nighter on his incredibly informative website, explaining its application peaked between 1942 and 1972, when the NL and AL were shifting from almost exclusively day games to mostly night games. “The twi-night doubleheader originally developed to facilitate the makeup of postponed games,” Bevis writes. “The potential problem with night baseball was the postponement of a night game, since teams couldn’t just add on another night game as they easily could to an afternoon game, since spectators would not tolerate the second game starting very late at night.”
A ready-made answer hence existed for the Mets. Ah, but M. Donald Grant, running the show, had or at least signed off on a different idea. Perhaps because a players’ strike had lopped a few dates off the front end of the season, or perhaps because the Dodgers were too enticing a draw to make him tolerate losing the receipts they usually generated (a reluctantly hosted makeup doubleheader versus L.A. from the previous August might have remained fresh in the chairman’s mind), Grant approved a Shea Stadium first: a split doubleheader on Thursday, May 11. Mets and Dodgers at 1:30 PM, with all fans clearing out when that game was over. The second game would be at 8:05 PM, as scheduled. Each would require its own ticket. No freebies in Flushing this Thursday. No bargain.
 Two for the price of two the first Met time. Coverage of baseball might not have been as consumer-friendly or at least as consumer-conscious as it is today. Reporters in the press box didn’t have instant access to what fans were thinking nor were they necessarily compelled to find out. Thus, when one plumbs various archives, one comes up empty in search of explanations for why, in the Mets’ eleventh season, they are suddenly deciding to charge two admissions for two games in one day after, for ten seasons, hewing to the beauty of two for the price of one, sometimes on purpose (Sunday doubleheaders were fairly standard), sometimes out of rainy necessity. In Boston, the Red Sox regularly held day-night doubleheaders when compelled by the weather, but that was understandable. Fenway Park was comparatively tiny in the emerged age of multipurpose stadia. With about 32,000 seats and decent demand, you maybe wanted to make sure every possible fan in New England could be accommodated amid a ticket squeeze. Shea held 55,000 or so seats. People weren’t likely to be left altogether out in the cold if a date went by the wayside somewhere between April and October. Rainchecks could do wonders in an enormous outdoor facility. Joe Trimble in the Daily News provided the most service journalism in this realm by detailing Thursday morning a little what would be different at Shea Thursday afternoon and evening.
“Incidentally, the matinee begins at 1:30 p.m., 35 minutes earlier than usual for a day game. The reason is obvious. The cleaning crew has to have time to sweep up the house. Season ticketholders must use coupon E-1 today. No tickets were printed for today’s game as it wasn’t on the original schedule.”
While the Mets beat writers didn’t explicitly address what the heck Grant was doing here, a reader more than a half-century later can discern more than one raised eyebrow. After covering a 14-inning affair on Wednesday night that lasted until close to midnight Thursday (“by the slender margin of 10 minutes, the Mets lost a chance at a unique tripleheader sweep”), Joe Gergen in Newsday alluded to the upcoming day-night doubleheader, attributing its scheduling to “Tuesday night’s rainout and a new management policy.” What the policy was may have been edited for space or never chronicled in the first place, but a person gets a sense that “new management policy” is code for Grant grubbing money. The Times didn’t seem to think much of what the policy wrought, with its non-bylined story devoting its fourth paragraph of ten to noting, “The two games — two for the price of two — were watched by a total of 28,732 persons, not many for a rivalry with ancestral overtones. Only 8,299 paid to watch the afternoon half of the program, a makeup for Tuesday’s rained-out game, and 20,433 turned out at night.” Indeed, during the last series in which Mets hosted weeknight games against the Los Angeles Dodgers of no longer Brooklyn, in June of ’71, paid attendance topped 35,000 twice.
Once the two-for-two occurred, there didn’t appear to be much followup on the subject of Shea’s experiment with day-night doubleheaders in the local media. To be fair, there was a lot going on in Metsopotamia that week.
• There was that 14-inning game on Wednesday, won by the Mets on Teddy Martinez beating out an infield single following Buddy Harrelson stealing second and taking third on a wild pitch, all after Tug McGraw pitched five innings of shutout relief. “It was a long night,” Harrelson observed in the home clubhouse as the calendar pushed forward. “It was almost a long tomorrow.” There was, too, the quick turnaround for that day half of the split-admission extravaganza ahead. (Gergen: “McGraw still was in his underwear at 12:30 and he was due back at 11:45 AM.”)
• There was the Mets’ win in the day portion Thursday which featured Tom Seaver’s 100th career victory, achieved despite what had become chronically aching legs; imagine how terrific Tom would be feeling totally healthy.
• And, oh, there was the little matter of a trade the Mets were working on with the team that was coming into the Shea once the Dodgers left town after the nightcap (which L.A. salvaged to not make their stay in New York a total washout). The Mets and Giants were talking through a deal that would send one of San Francisco’s high-priced veterans back east so he could finish his career in the city where he started it. The Giants weren’t having a great season and weren’t drawing well. The Mets could afford him and, though he wasn’t the player he was in his prime, the 41-year-old’s appeal was undeniable. You might have heard of him. His name was and is Willie Mays, the Say Hey Kid who recently turned 92. Although the Giants were playing in Montreal, Mays had his club’s permission to fly ahead to New York to get involved in the talks himself. Everybody had to be satisfied by the brewing transaction that was filling newspaper column inches Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday, May 12, Willie, in a suit and tie, was on the back page of the four-star edition of the News, pictured sitting in the press box taking in the Thursday afternoon action in the company of the sparse crowd; Grant presumably didn’t charge him to count among the 8,299 who went through the turnstiles. Willie appeared to be watching intently. He should have been. Those were his new teammates down on the field. The Mets had swung the deal for Mays on May 11, 1972 — exchanging pitcher Charlie Williams and a reported $100,000 in cash — the day that doesn’t primarily go down in franchise history as the day Tom Seaver notched his hundredth win nor as the day the Mets experimented with day-night doubleheaders.
 Willie Mays watches history at Shea just before making his own. The experiment lasted a combined 18 innings. The Mets went back to making up rainouts the old-fashioned way, with single-admission doubleheaders, or as we old-timers call them, doubleheaders. On August 1, the Mets and Phillies played a twi-nighter to compensate for a rainout from the end of May. As if karma was trying to get a message to Grant, the first game of this twinbill lasted 18 innings and nearly four-and-a-half hours on its own, and the teams couldn’t play the nightcap until between-games festivities were completed. It was Banner Night, with 2,176 bedsheets and placards marched through the center field gate. Game Two (a 1:45 Koosman-Carlton special executed sans pitch clock) didn’t end until 12:45 AM. Thankfully for the players, August 2’s lone Mets-Phillies game was scheduled for 8:05 PM.
Shea Stadium wouldn’t host both segments of another day-night doubleheader until 2007, when pretty much every team resorted to split-admission twinbills if the weather was uncooperative. The Mets could reasonably tell their customers that with attendance riding high in the ballpark’s final two seasons of existence, they sure wouldn’t want to shut out raincheck holders who might not be able to turn in their vouchers for a comparable seat so easily. In 2009, the Mets would move into a smaller ballpark, where the same argument could be made with an approximately straight face. Fans, particularly those who didn’t grow up in the age of single-admission doubleheaders as essentially the only kind of doubleheaders, didn’t think anything was particularly unusual about this kind of double-dipping into their pockets.
Yet nobody could instantly remember anybody doing to its ticketholders what the Washington Nationals did on the weekend of May 13-14, 2023. The Nats, who provided the opposition when the post-Grant Mets revived the split-doubleheader experiment at Shea on July 28, 2007, sanctioned the starting of their game versus the 2023 Mets this past Saturday at 4:05 PM despite ongoing rain. Maybe it would pass. It didn’t. The tarp went on the field within 40 minutes of first pitch, in the top of the third inning. It came off more than two hours later. The grounds crew came out and worked to make the field playable. It was no longer raining, but nobody was playing. People sitting on hold amid a loop of “your call is important to us…” had more of a clue as to what was going on in their endeavors than did anybody curious as to whatever became of Saturday’s contest. Ultimately, just short of four hours since play was stopped, the game was suspended. It was still the third inning, the Nationals ahead, 1-0. The Mets had runners on second and third. Daniel Vogelbach on third base and Michael Perez on second had the good sense to come in from the rain. But they and their colleagues would return to the field the next afternoon, the environs sunny and dry. It hadn’t made for an ideal scenario — not starting in the first place and preemptively rescheduling didn’t require much hindsight to anybody staring at the sky or a weather app — but these things happen.
The unusual if not wholly unprecedented part: the Nationals, who kept progress reports so quiet that not a single fan in attendance at Nationals Park, let alone anybody following along via any channel of popular communication, had any idea when another pitch might be thrown, decided Sunday would be a split doubleheader. That’s two for the price of two. Except this was a suspended game, not an outright postponement from a rainout. Baseball doesn’t let partially played games get washed away any longer. You’ll recall in 2021 the Mets and Marlins barely got a rainy game underway on April 11, halted it, and picked it up right where they left it at Citi Field on August 31 (with five Mets playing in the “April 11” game despite not joining the team until well after that date). They concluded that game eventfully in the afternoon — the Mets scored a passel of runs in the bottom of the ninth to win it, making fans forget that several players had been thumbs-downing in their general direction a couple of days before — and then cleared the ballpark for the regularly scheduled night game (which, during the Abundance of Caution era, was declared in advance a seven-inning game despite a doubleheader technically not taking place). It was basically two games for two admissions, plus the Marlins weren’t in town between April 11 and August 31, so if you squinted generously, you could almost see the semblance of sense in the solution.
 Missing: any word indicating apology for inconvenience. This, in Washington, was different…or “shameful” as Gary Cohen dubbed it over SNY. This was the Mets at the ballpark the very next day when a 1:35 first pitch was on tap. Also, it was Mother’s Day Sunday, with MLB pinking up the joint. A holidaylike atmosphere in theory. Here’s what the Nationals could have done: pick up the game, right were it was left the night before, finish that game, and then have the game people paid for and call it one happy gate for those who were in the house, with rainchecks for whoever got soaked the night before.
Nah, the Nationals didn’t do that. They made it first furtive, not as much as tweeting an update once the tarp went on the field Saturday until an hour after the suspension went into effect, then, without so much as a “we apologize for the inconvenience/thank you for your support,” they made it difficult. Show up 12:35 Sunday for the suspended game, if you had a ticket Saturday. Watch that one wind down, box score and agate type curiosities included at no extra charge. It became a 3-2 Mets loss despite recalled catcher Perez rapping out four hits from the nine-hole in his first game back from Triple-A, only the second time the Mets have ever lost a game with that kind of bottom-of-the-order production, and surely the first time they’d been held to a mere two runs with their last batter proving himself entirely unretirable. It also contained the rarity of a starting pitcher, Joey Lucchesi, being optioned to the minors while the game he started more or less had stepped outside for a smoke. “Lucchesi, you’re going to the showers. Then you’re going to the airport. Then you’re going to Syracuse. Yeah, we know you gave up only one run in suboptimal conditions, but them’s the breaks, Churvy.”
Then, with the curly Ws unjustly rewarded with a competitive W despite their bad-karma creativity in consumer relations, they took the “split” in split admission seriously, more or less imploring the crowd already in the ballpark to “split!” so they could commence ushering in the originally conceived Sunday afternoon gathering at 4:35 PM for what was now a late Mother’s Day outing. The Mets won the Lerner-rigged nightcap, 8-2, with Max Scherzer returning to form (5 IP, 1 ER) and the Mets cramming all their offense into a single inning (the fifth). I’m sorry the Mets didn’t win both games, not just because I prefer the Mets win every game, but because Nationals management doesn’t deserve to benefit in any fashion from the way they presented baseball to their fans or, for that matter, visiting fans.
Somewhere down there — and I don’t mean the District of Columbia — M. Donald Grant was monitoring the Nationals’ decisionmaking process Saturday and Sunday and asking himself, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
by Jason Fry on 13 May 2023 10:38 am The important thing: The Mets actually won.
The less important thing: The Mets barely won a thoroughly strange, confounding game against the Nationals, one that left you without much confidence that any kind of worm has turned in any direction one would want a worm to turn. (If you’ve ever wondered, that strange turn [ahem] of phrase turns out [ahem again] to be a modern version of a medieval expression popularized by Shakespeare.)
The first half of Friday night’s game looked a lot like the kind of dismal games the Mets have played too many of recently: Tylor Megill gave up a run in the first and was maddening to watch, throwing not enough strikes, unable to put hitters away and trudging around on the mound with the body language usually seen with guys standing in highway medians in August wearing sandwich boards touting party-supply stories. (See also: Megill’s little friend David Peterson.)
But Megill never broke, giving up just two runs and hanging around through five; meanwhile, the Mets were grinding out at-bats against MacKenzie Gore in a fashion that reminded you of their 2022 offensive approach. That was a welcome change; what was distressingly familiar was their inability to turn those ABs into anything. Starling Marte flied out with the bases loaded to end the first; Francisco Lindor fouled out with two on to end the second; and Mark Canha flied out with two on to end the third. Gore departed after four with an ungodly pitch count but also with a 2-0 lead, and that certainly felt like it would be enough to beat the Mets.
Hell, these days an enemy runner on first with two outs in the first feels like enough to beat the Mets. Even beyond that, though, it was a sloggy, frustrating game, the kind that felt more like waiting in line at a DMV than like anything a person would voluntarily choose to do with precious hours of their life.
And then, somehow, the thoroughly unexpected happened.
In the sixth the Mets greeted Andres Machado with a Marte single and a poke-job double by Canha to put runners on second and third with nobody out, which in better days would call for the licking of chops but these days was a warning to assume the fetal position. All looked like it would come to naught as Brett Baty slapped a little grounder to third that erased Marte (with Canha failing to take third) and Francisco Alvarez grounded to first. Exit Machado and enter Carl Edwards Jr., who always makes me think of Idiocracy‘s gag involving Carl’s Jr., to secure a third out from Brandon Nimmo. Edwards walked Nimmo and looked hell-bent on walking Lindor, who went into protect mode while I peered at the proceedings from between my fingers.
Lindor didn’t walk and also didn’t make an out — he rifled the ball over the second baseman’s head and into right-center. Here came Canha, then Baty with the tying run and then — whaaa? — Nimmo steaming along right behind him, courtesy of Joey Cora‘s habitually aggressive right arm. It wasn’t even close: The Mets led 3-2 with Lindor taking second on the back end of the play, proud owner of a three-run single.
A three-run single? I wasn’t immediately sure I’d seen one of those, though that’s probably wrong: Edgardo Alfonzo recorded one against the Giants in 1997, which I would almost certainly have seen, though the first one would have eluded me as it was delivered by Tug McGraw back in 1970. (Greg noted Pete Rose recording one off the Mets — and sure enough, it beat Dwight Gooden back in ’86.)
Now, a one-run lead in the sixth isn’t exactly a ticket to the promised land: The question remained of how, exactly, the Mets were going to secure 12 outs before something terrible happened. Jeff Brigham got the first three, Adam Ottavino notched the next three, and then Buck Showalter sent David Robertson out in search of the last six.
Many things have gone wrong this year, but absolutely none of them have been Robertson’s fault — he’s been a godsend, doing his business with the no-fuss efficiency that’s sustained a long, successful career. Robertson cruised through the eighth, but walked the leadoff hitter in the ninth. He secured the next two outs, but the fuel light was blinking red and the car was gasping and starting to seize. A wild pitch, a five-pitch walk to newcomer Jacob Alu, and here came Showalter with the tow truck: Drew Smith, proud owner of zero career saves, was going to get us home safe or be left standing on the mound in shock as Nats frolicked and bumped cherry blossoms. There’d be brave talk about better approaches and fighting back and sticking with the plan and guys doing everything asked of them, but there’d also be grim sets to mouths and faraway eyes and the unavoidable statistical fact that the Mets had now lost 32,948 of their last 32,950, or whatever the exact figure is, though that feels more or less correct.
Except Smith got an 0-2 count on Lane Thomas courtesy of two fouls, threw one up and away that didn’t tempt him but also didn’t escape Alvarez, and then came back to the top of the strike zone for one Thomas could neither resist nor hit. All’s well that ends well, but I felt like spending the next hour throwing up was what was called for.
At least this time it would be throwing up out of relief.
by Greg Prince on 11 May 2023 5:00 pm When the Mets’ 5-0 loss at Cincinnati completed its appointed rounds on SNY Thursday afternoon, the postgame show came on, with Todd Zeile seated as the designated authority on all things disappointing. He was a good choice for the job, seeing as how Zeile was right in the middle of disappointment aplenty as the 2001 Mets steadily ran themselves into the ground. Thirty-eight games into the 2001 season, the Mets were 15-23, which, for reference purposes, is three games worse than where the 2023 Mets sit at the same juncture of what appears to be their voyage to nowhere.
Twenty-two years ago, Zeile wasn’t off to a good start. Twenty-two years ago, no Met was off to a good start. The Mets had been to the World Series the year before. When the season began, you could imagine them making another such run. As the season neared the one-quarter mark, your imagination had been overtaken by the prevailing reality. May 2001 ended with the Mets ten games under .500, thirteen games out of first place and not close to the one Wild Card spot that existed then.
Long season short, the Mets made a run before 2001 ended. Their horrid first quarter, which extended to a horrid first half, then a horrid first three quarters, didn’t preclude them from turning everything around. It wasn’t enough to vault them all the way from nowhere to the playoffs, but it was invigorating, at the very least. Come the final weeks of their unlikely chase of a division title, you weren’t thinking about how bad they looked in May. May, along with everything from early April to late August, still counted toward explaining why they hadn’t climbed higher in the standings, but there were games left and games won, and as long as the Mets looked alive, they represented a suitable object of support for a Mets fan who himself was turning around attitudinally. I was disgusted by the Mets in May of 2001. It didn’t stop me from sincerely applauding every good thing they did come that September.
 What kind of year is this being? Not one that stays crunchy in milk, despite what this attractive cereal box is meant to imply. All of which is to say should the 2023 Mets, 18-20 at the moment following five consecutive series losses — four to teams allegedly unfit to shine their fluorescent shoes — find whatever made them a postseason qualifier in 2022 or simply shed whatever has made them sink in quicksand through the opening weeks of the year after, I will mostly forget how frigging lifeless and incapable they have appeared almost every inning of almost every week thus far. I won’t be a hypocrite when I chant “Let’s Go Mets” as if it’s 1969 or 1999. I will be a fan.
I’m a fan right now. I’m a fan who is having a hard time feeling supportive of a group of players I’d generally describe as guys I like. I don’t like the way they are playing. Fans love teams but can disapprove everything about those teams’ actions and results. There is not a lot to love, let alone like, at present.
Lousy Mets teams in May aren’t necessarily destined to be lousy Mets teams in September. I gave you one example. Others are scattered through franchise history. None among the front office, the coaching staff and the players gives up on improving. Improvement is always possible. I won’t say likely in this case because, despite the ample opportunities SNY provides me to wager, I wouldn’t have bet on an 18-20 start in 2023. Or a 15-23 start in 2001.
We commit unconscionable portions of our lives to staring at rosters and wondering how they’re not producing as we believed they would. “You’re never as good as you look when you’re winning and you’re never as bad as you look when you’re losing” is a phrase that gets thrown around quite a bit when a team projected to win does otherwise. When Tim McCarver repeated it often during rough Met patches, it seemed sensible, even compassionate. Ooh-oo child, Timmy seemed to be trying to tell us, things are gonna get easier/brighter.
These days, “You’re never as…” lands like a cudgel to the part of your brain that processes sucking and tries to come to grips with an evolving reality. It’s the baseball version of a line I heard once that advised the two worst words you can tell somebody you wish to be calmer are “calm down.” “You’re never as…” is rarely invoked when a team is exceeding expectations. You’re winning? You look good? Carry on. At worst, you get a “don’t go crazy” barked at you in a Mad Dog Russo-style voice, the spoilsport wet-blanket types telling fans of the perennially downtrodden to know our place should we dare to be excited at, say, not losing five series in a row. There’s nothing better than ignoring those scoldings, nothing better than exceeding expectations, nothing better than being surprised for the positive.
Conversely, not stepping right up to meet expectations makes a so-so season so much worse than the record indicates. There are fans of teams in this league and the other one that probably think 18-20 looks pretty good right about now. We’ve helped a few of those teams pull to within that charmed circle of a little less mediocre than they were resigned to being in 2023. Our team can’t take series from Cincinnati or Colorado or Detroit. We have a chance to take a series from Washington next, but we already had one chance and didn’t take advantage. To be fair, we didn’t beat Atlanta more than one out of three, either.
It’s an indisputably not great situation. It might get better. It could get worse. It could stay approximately the same, which would stand in for worse just fine.
by Greg Prince on 11 May 2023 12:47 am The New York Mets currently have on their roster five pitchers who were born before their last world championship, which speaks to both the age of the pitchers and the last world championship. One, Max Scherzer, hasn’t been able to make his most recent scheduled start because of neck spasms. One, Tommy Hunter, missed time in the bullpen because of back spasms. The team, not quite treading water to date, has chalked up its successes spasmodically at best. At one point, the Mets won 11 of 14 this very year. You might not remember that, given that they followed up that stretch by immediately losing 12 of 15.
Good thing, then, that they had the pitching Wednesday night in Cincinnati to pull them closer to sea level. All three arms on which they relied were attached to babies born prior to October 27, 1986. The babies grew up to become major league hurlers with uncommon amounts of experience, at least as measured in places other than the 2023 New York Mets clubhouse. On these Mets, you don’t flinch when told the pitchers in action were born in 1983, 1985 and later in 1985.
You’re just glad they’ve been around long enough to know what they’re doing.
When Justin Verlander was born, on February 20, 1983, Tom Seaver hadn’t pitched for the Mets since before the Wednesday Night Massacre. Darryl Strawberry had not yet played a single major league game. Keith Hernandez was ensconced as the first baseman of the defending world champion St. Louis Cardinals. Everything we’d come to associate with 1983 and the Mets — Seaver’s triumphant Opening Day return; Strawberry’s hotly anticipated promotion; Hernandez’s sudden arrival by midseason trade — was in the future. Baby Verlander came first, forty-plus years ago.
Then Old Man Verlander waited a while to make his Met debut, not only by spending his first 18 seasons in Detroit and Houston, but then shaking off a teres major strain for a month. We didn’t know from teres when Verlander went on the IL a couple of hours before the first pitch of the new season. We could have guessed missing him would be major. So it was. When you have a righty who’s won not only two World Series and three Cy Youngs and made those totals current within the last twelve months, you want to see what he can do for you.
In his first start, he endured one inning that had us scanning the fine print to see if his megacontract came with a refund clause, then settled down to remind us what a fully developed, reasonably healthy starting pitcher looked like. Had the Mets hit for him at all in Detroit, his two runs over five frames would have looked mighty good. They seemed fairly satisfying even in a loss.
Six days later, Justin faced another opponent he seemed readily capable of steamrolling, but we’ve been just as susceptible of rolling over for alleged bottom-feeders, middle-dwellers that we’ve become. The Reds hit plenty the night before, but that was off David Peterson, a.k.a. pitching depth. Verlander’s the front line, or was going to be had not teres major ordered him to the sidelines. Wednesday night, his entire body was back in form. Another shaky first inning, but maybe that’s his m.o. at the moment. When Seaver would encounter danger, then limit damage in a first inning, you nodded that things would probably be OK. Get to the great ones early or not at all.
The Reds got to Verlander in the first inning, for one run, then not at all. Somewhere along the way at Great American Ball Park, the 40-year-old locked in and made calendar pages irrelevant. On this occasion, Justin went seven innings in a Mets uniform, which is something only Joey Lucchesi had done among starting pitchers in 2023. Of all the new sensations Justin Verlander looked forward to as a New York Met, aspiring to match Joey Lucchesi for length probably didn’t top the list.
Thank goodness he did, though. Verlander gave the Mets the best start they’d had this season, two hits over seven innings, just that one run in the first, hardly a baserunner from the second inning on. Thus inspired, the Mets offense supported him…barely. Pete Alonso, who seems to take to steamboat architecture and the siren song of the mighty Ohio, hit a solo shot to tie the game in the second. The Mets otherwise mostly left runners here and there, but in the fourth, they accidentally strung together a double from Luis Guillorme, a walk to Francisco Alvarez and a single by Brandon Nimmo — all with two out — to take the lead. The Mets would leave eleven runners on base in all. Consider the two that crossed the plate manna from heaven.
Consider Verlander’s successors, the similarly venerable Adam Ottavino (37) and David Robertson (38), sentries worthy to stand watch over the manna. Holding an edge of 2-1 after seven, in the wake of losing 12 of 15, didn’t make one think, “This would be a great game to win!” No, this would have been a terrible game to lose, because to lose it would be to tell Verlander he really shouldn’t have stopped by on his way to Cooperstown, while hinting to the rest of us that we shouldn’t expect much to get better soon.
Fortunately, good old Adam and slightly better, slightly older David were both very much on. Plus the Reds are pretty crummy. Sooner or later we were bound to meet the enemy and it wouldn’t be us. Ottavino’s eighth was clean. Robertson’s ninth was spotless. Having tethered their lines to Verlander’s effective seven, we were treated to a rare three-man two-hit victory. How rare? Dismissing rain-shortened or pandemic-truncated doubleheader versions, Baseball-Reference’s Stathead tool tells us the Mets have now won two-hitters via three pitchers thirteen times in their history. It happened only once prior to 1998, because it used to be (when Verlander, Ottavino and Robertson were kids) that if you had a starting pitcher working on a two-hitter, he kept working on a two-hitter. The only pre-modern iteration of the three-to-give-up-two combo occurred in 1968 when Jim McAndrew went eight-and-a-third before Gil Hodges turned to Bill Short and Cal Koonce to retire one batter each to top the Cubs, 1-0.
Such specific combining wouldn’t happen again for thirty years, when the starter was Masato Yoshii and the relievers, for an inning apiece, were Greg McMichael and John Franco. The Mets beat the Cardinals that night, 4-1, on a two-hitter. What the 1968 game didn’t have; and the 1998 game didn’t have; and what none of the ten three-man two-hit victories that followed between 2001 and 2022 had that Wednesday night’s in Cincinnati featured was this much experience. The Mets had never before won a three-pitcher two-hitter in which each pitcher was a member of the 37 & Up Club. The life experience was implicit. The baseball experience was off the charts. Verlander’s been in the majors since 2005, Robertson since 2008 (he made his big league debut at Shea), Ottavino since 2010. From the vantage point of 2023, that’s a lot of years and a lot of innings, starting in one case, relieving in two others. That, as we’ve already seen this year, tends to place the risk in front on the risk/reward scale. Older pitchers had to do a lot to last as long as they have and still be trusted at this stage of their career. To ask them to defy chronological gravity as a group is trusting them even more. For a night, it absolutely worked.
On this night, it really had to.
Two Mets pitchers who may have been an even bigger deal than Justin Verlander are in the spotlight on the latest episode of National League Town. One retired last week. One made a comeback the week before. One you heard about everywhere. One you had to be watching a particular cable network to know from. Come and listen to the story of two aces too good to be true.
by Jason Fry on 9 May 2023 10:52 pm The Mets have been both bad and unwatchable for the better part of two weeks, so Tuesday night counted as progress: They were watchable.
Watchable, as they fought back after being put in a deep hole by David Peterson, Stephen Nogosek, and (one could argue) the umpiring crew, which missed a ball headed for Francisco Lindor‘s glove hitting Wil Myers in the hand as he slid into second. Intentional? Probably not. Against the rules? Certainly. Enough to make Buck Showalter mad? Oh yeah. Buck was ejected for the first time as a Mets skipper and at least got his money’s worth, indicating via a one-two-three-four pantomime visible across the river in Kentucky that four umpires had been on the field and not one of them had managed to fulfill the basics of the job.
Showalter departed dissatisfied, Nogosek gave up a two-run triple and a sac fly, and somehow it was 7-1 Reds, as the Mets continued their ill-advised run of making the dregs of the major leagues look like world-beaters. Seriously, since the wheels came off in San Francisco the Mets have lost series to the Nationals, Tigers and Rockies, and they’re now off on the wrong foot against the Reds, the sole remaining entity on Earth that hasn’t received the memo that drop shadows are out.
Down by six, the Mets did at least fight back: Posterity will record that they scored five unanswered runs. Unfortunately, mathematics will record that they needed to score one more than that. Francisco Alvarez started the futile comeback with his second homer of the night, with additional runs courtesy of homers from Pete Alonso and Lindor and a run-scoring GIDP by Mark Canha. That GIDP wound up typifying too much of what’s been happening, though: It came with the bases loaded and nobody out in the seventh, short-circuiting the inning, and Canha fell on his face after stumbling across first base.
In other words, it was the last two weeks of Mets baseball distilled into about eight thoroughly shitty seconds.
Elsewhere, well, where do you want to start? Peterson, called upon after Max Scherzer was scratched with neck spasms, looked like he’d been replaced with a heretofore unknown identical twin who had no idea how to pitch. He couldn’t throw strikes and when he somehow did you wished he hadn’t. Peterson’s short career has been marked by false starts and reversals, to be sure, but he looks absolutely lost right now, a young pitcher whose stuff, location and confidence have all deserted him. It was cruel summoning him from Syracuse when that’s pretty clearly where he needs to be, but the Mets had no choice — and, in case you weren’t already depressed, he was filling in for a guy who’s destined for the Hall of Fame but hasn’t exactly looked like himself all year either, which is starting to look like a much bigger problem than Peterson’s growing pains.
As for the Myers play, a basic equation of baseball and life is that when you’re going horseshit they fuck you. The Mets have demonstrated proof of the numerator for two weeks now, so getting smacked in the face by the denominator isn’t injustice but simple cause and effect.
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