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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 5 February 2007 12:02 pm Major professional sports championships won in full or part at what is presently known as Dolphin Stadium:
San Francisco 49ers: 2
Denver Broncos: 1
Indianapolis Colts: 1
Florida Marlins: 2
Miami Dolphins: 0
HA! The Dolphins haven’t won a thing since moving into the building where they dominate everything but the bottom line of the competitive ledger, have they? Their badly run baseball tenant is positively bathed in glory compared to the emptiness in Don Shula’s trophy case since the joint opened in 1987. Since January 1974, actually. That doesn’t stop Shula’s jaw from jutting in front of cameras long past its day in the sun, but it should.
The Marlins? They’re an odd fish in the Dolphin tank. The next time we glance inside the Super Bowl facility we have, for own nefarious purposes, referred to as The Sack, Soilmaster Stadium, Tru Playa Park, Your Name Here Stadium and even, surprisingly respectfully, Joe Robbie Stadium, will be in third week of April, a Wednesday night. There will almost assuredly be approximately 500 people for every point the Bears scored yesterday. Unless it’s drizzling. Then there will be fewer.
Thanks to the unbalanced schedule, we know about the Marlins. We see them 19 times a year every year whether we want to or not. Though the home/away ratio is always 10:9 or 9:10, it seems like we play just about every game against them in Florida. You can’t think of the Marlins without thinking of their distressing home situation and you can’t think of that and not want it and them to go away.
While we’ve been wintering and wondering if there’s possibly a pitcher out there for the pinching, our gilled counterparts — however many of them there are — have been tossed a life preserver of sorts. Talk about constructing and funding a new Miami ballpark has gotten reasonably serious. The Marlins may actually escape the shadow of the Dolphins, the 6 o’clock showers, the sweltering indifference of their exit off the Florida Turnpike and a setup that leaves their groundskeeping supplies in full public view.
I hope they do. I don’t like the Marlins. I don’t like any National League team that isn’t us. But they’re here, they’re teal, I’ve gotten used to them. Besides, we gotta play somebody somewhere. It might as well be them in an upgraded setting. It’s absurd to believe that South Florida can’t properly support an MLB franchise if the MLB franchise were to be run and housed like a fairly normal business. The Marlins have never had anything going for them in the way of human ownership and yet there they are, the only N.L. team in the past 24 seasons to own two Commissioner’s Trophies.
That’s gotta be worth something. All those folks crammed into those three counties that make up the Marlins’ ADI (even accounting for the legendary snowbirds) have gotta be worth something. A generation of children of expatriates of baseball-savvy metropolitan areas growing up with a potentially decent place to take in a game has gotta be worth something. A retractable roof playing velvet rope to the objectionable elements that have been killing attendance at JRS since 1993 has gotta be worth something. Whatever intelligence exists in Marlin scouting and development that allowed them to be competitive under insane circumstances in 2006 has gotta be worth a ton.
Maybe if the Marlins had been brutally unsuccessful in their 14 seasons in the bigs I wouldn’t be rooting for their rescue. But the way they managed to win two World Series, even if the first one involved Bobby Bonilla in a featured role, is a part of baseball history, and not the Bonds-McGwire-Sosa kind. Huizenga is Roy Boe on steroids for ripping apart a champion before the ticker tape was picked up, but then another personally detestable owner came in and they won (versus the Yankees at Soilmaster North, technically). There must be something going on down there that’s worth preserving.
What if the Marlins don’t get their ballpark? You figure they move to some inconvenient non-EDT outpost that will play havoc with the Mets’ travel. Bet they keep them in the division anyway. Who needs another weird road trip? Maybe the relocated Marlins move out of our jurisdiction and we get Pittsburgh back. I’m second to no fan in my admiration for PNC Park, but I don’t wanna play there any more than we have to. We occasionally win games at The Sack. Nothing good ever comes out of PNC except the view.
Fantasize all you want about making an opponent disappear. You’re still required to play somebody to fill up those 162 boxes on the schedule. We learned that when the Expos morphed into the Nationals.
I continue to carry the tiniest of torches for the departed Montreal Expos. Finished a book not long ago in which I learned they were known as Nos Amors in Quebec. Our loves. That’s sad. So was Olympic Stadium and the deterioration of everything Expo, making Washington a logical landing spot. But it’s still sad that it didn’t work out. The Expos were interesting. They were different. In this corner, they remain missed.
The Marlins don’t quite rile up my emotions that way. They’re mostly annoying. But as one who has gotten used to them, one who claimed a Broward address back in the day, one who got a surprisingly big kick out of their 2003 title run, one who rooted for them in October of 1997 against his better judgment and one who will always link the best night of the 2006 regular season to their presence at Shea Stadium, I would like to see them stay afloat in Florida as long as they can.
If for no other reason than they make the Dolphins’ 33-season title drought look laughable by comparison.
by Greg Prince on 4 February 2007 11:52 am Let me see if I’ve got this straight. If Rex Grossman sees his shadow, we get eight more weeks of winter. If Peyton Manning earns a trip to a theme park, we get eight more weeks of winter.
Yeah, that’s about the size of it. One football team will beat another tonight and 56 nights hence the Mets play the Cardinals in St. Louis. Now that will be a super Sunday and a super matchup, one surely worthy of carrying on in the name of double-alum Super Joe McEwing. May the victor walk a mile in his shoes.
Until then, let the other national pastime do its thing. Why not? I like chips. I don’t mind hype. I love NFL Films. I get a kick of counting to XLI. Not to be uncool about this, but I dig the drop everything & gather ’round nature of the Super Bowl, even one featuring two teams whose respective fortunes concern me not a whit.
They know what they’re doing in rigidly timed football. One big Tarantino adrenaline shot to the chest, we all burst out of our winter comas for a potentially thrilling moment and then it’s back to normal. One and done. It works for the Super Bowl.
It wouldn’t work for baseball. We like math. Best of five. Best of seven. The World Series is a microcosm of that long march of a season of ours. Oh, the games start too late unless you live in California (which I hear nobody does) and Fox debases it year in and year out (I really wish C-Span would telecast baseball in October) and it’s unwatchable if the Mets lose the seventh game of the NLCS, but otherwise baseball’s championship is perfect for baseball.
You don’t invite people over to watch it with you. You don’t fill in boxes to make it more interesting. You don’t wait for the third out so you can see the next Bud Light commercial. It’s best taken as a solemn vigil. It was exactly that when you were sneaking your transistor into school and it is exactly that when you’re prying your eyelids open to the 14th inning at Minute Maid Park at two in the blessed A.M. when you don’t know when or if or how it’s gonna end. If the Colts win tonight, we’ll get Peyton Manning out the wazoo. When the Giants and Mets and White Sox won, we got pleasantly surprising dabs of Dusty Rhodes and Al Weis and Geoff Blum. I bet they’d make pretty decent company at Disneyland.
Nevertheless, I’m willing to let football carry the ball today. It will be interesting to see what Marlins Stadium looks like with people.
The forecast in Miami calls for rain. Prepare the Soilmaster.
Elsewhere amid all things super:
• Super kudos to XM Radio for again replaying Game Four of a certain 1999 National League Division Series in the just-completed wee, small hours of Saturday night. Murph and Cohen still sound immortal and Todd Pratt still should have kept running.
• The super, one of a kind talent of tenor Billy Henderson has left us, another one of the Spinners gone too soon. Thankfully the music he left behind means that whenever we need to hear from him, he’ll be around.
• The most super superlative of all this morning is for the FAFIF readers and Mets fans everywhere who helped the Baby Miranda tribute at the Starlight Starbrite Childrens Foundation surpass and shatter its fundraising goal. Our deepest thanks for pitching in and brightening some otherwise dark days. PS: It’s not too late to lend a hand to the kids and families who can truly use your help.
by Greg Prince on 3 February 2007 1:06 am 
In 1967, the Mets were determined to rise from the depths of their tenth- and ninth-place beginnings. They didn’t just yet, but Willard Mullin’s illustration of the effort is just one reason the ’67 yearbook stands as a gem from another time.
by Greg Prince on 3 February 2007 12:54 am If the clock is running inexorably counterclockwise, then it must be Flashback Friday at Faith and Fear in Flushing.
To borrow from the late, great Molly Ivins, the 1967 Mets yearbook is more fun than a church-singin’-with-supper-on-the-grounds.
Yearbooks get more expensive every year and are progressively less fun. The 2006 version was ten bucks, 244 pages long and distressingly short on zazz. There was a nice takeout by the esteemed Dennis D’Agostino on the twentieth anniversary of ’86 but everything else about it fairly whispers annual report. Proxy statements are more whimsical.
The cover, various Mets in various boxes, is as exciting as a ticket brochure. The player facts are minimal (Yusaku Iriki enjoys playing golf in his spare time). The recap of the previous year is Orwellian in its deletion of those who had since moved on (Marlon Anderson never pinch-hit that inside-the-park homer and Mike Piazza never waved goodbye). There’s an ad for a perfume with a big picture of Paris Hilton; kids shouldn’t have to see that. The modern-day yearbook is heavy on heft, long on price, light on charm.
Ah, but the 1967 Mets yearbook…the Mets yearbook was something then. You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days.
I didn’t see the 1967 yearbook in those days. I was 4 and a couple yearbooks away from entry into Metsdom. I probably couldn’t have rounded up the 50 cents necessary to buy one at Shea to say nothing of getting a ride to and from. I have a copy thanks to my co-blogger’s relentless pursuit of all things Schmelz. He had it on a tip a couple of slow winters ago that the elusive Al, who was seemingly never properly photographed as a Met (the Schmelzes believe a photograph steals something precious from the soul — or am I thinking of I Dream of Jeannie?), showed up in a team picture. Sadly, this SECOND Revised Edition of the OFFICIAL Year Book (were there bootlegs?) came a cropper and Dr. Fryenstein’s mad experimentation would have to wait another day.
I, on the other hand, made out like a bandit when Jace tossed the thing my way. What a treasure. Start with the cover, drawn by Willard Mullin of New York World Telegram & Sun fame, the premier sports cartoonist ever. The only sports cartoonist we modern folk have with which to compare him is Bill Gallo which is no comparison at all. Maybe you’ve seen some of Mullin’s most classic work, the moony Jint and the perpetually scruffed-up Bum who personified New York National League baseball in the ’50s. Their successor was the kid Met who by 1967 was taking toddler steps up the stairs of heretofore awful records. Note the detail, specifically the cracked step of 1965 when the kid Mets stumbled and managed a worse record than 1964’s extraordinarily poor result.
But that’s ancient history in 1967. Mullin’s boy, our boy, is in ascendance. He’s leaving behind those hundred-loss seasons — imagine acknowledging all your miserable failures of the past half-decade on the cover of your primary propaganda tool — and, having launched himself to the heady stratosphere of 66 wins, he’s on the climb. Watch out National League!
Gosh, what optimism. Unfounded in the short term, of course. The next step would be cracked, too, as the ’67 team stumbled to five fewer victories than in ’66. But we know that Mullin’s golden staircase reaches its apogee way ahead of schedule, just two years after, so no complaints on the prognostication front.
They don’t draw covers like that anymore. And they don’t print yearbooks like this either. Turn the page and the first picture you countenance is a solemn “changing of the guard,” two men in suits who may as well be shaking hands in the Kremlin. It’s grip ‘n’ grim time for a stoic George Weiss “turning over presidency of the Mets” to a wary Bing Devine in November of ’66. Khrushchev and Brezhnev couldn’t have looked any less comfortable. And who, come to think of it, were the marketing wizards who decided the first image to hit fans with was two men in suits?
That’s the beauty of baseball back then, I’ve Bing-divined. It wasn’t marketed, not really. There was something clubby about the whole thing. Oh, it was insidious. It needed Marvin Miller and the NFL and society to shake it up. It needed to move into the second half of the twentieth century by 1967. But the quaintness I found when I leafed through the 1967 yearbook is from another time.
Which is what surprises me. The Mets are supposed to be thoroughly modern. They’re the expansion team born amid the hopes of the New Frontier. They’re the embodiment of the Swinging Sixties.
More relevant to my self-centered view of things, they’ve taken place almost entirely in my lifetime.To have experienced the Mets and nothing but the Mets as your forever baseball team, to have not even a wisp of experience of living without them or before them, arithmetic says you can’t be much over 50. It would take a man or woman born no later than the mid-1950s having a child by the mid-1970s and that child having a child by the mid-1990s to assume there’s a family with three generations of pure, lifelong, well-versed Mets fans — not your grandpa who converted from the Dodgers or Giants or apathy or worse and raised your pop/you right, mind you, but someone whose childhood team was the Mets. Demographically speaking, that third generation is only approaching the staircase as we speak.
Tradition in the sepia sense has always been for the Tigers and the Cubs and the Red Sox and other franchises with roots dating back a century or more. They’re the ones that have grandfather clauses. They’re the ones caked in must and dust. They’re the ones with the antiquated team publications that read so anachronistic in relation to the now. The Mets’ 1967 yearbook, from suddenly 40 years ago, proves to me that we might be, too.
Enough sociological, anthropological noodling. Let’s turn more pages.
There’s Vaughan Devine, President. Oh wait, that’s the same guy from the page before where he was Bing. The Mets took their “Officials” headshots very seriously (and, by their looks, took them before World War II). No Mr. Devine, you can’t use your nickname here. This is our page of record.
There’s Vaughan again. Naturally. Baseball fans love executives. President Bing is a little looser in this two-page spread (whereas Weiss, “Man of Dynasty and Destiny,” gets a double-truck of his own later and couldn’t be a whole lot tighter). We have shots of Devine playing basketball with Solly Hemus in 1954, donating his vital fluids to a blood drive in Rochester and being delighted by “gag gifts” at a 50th-birthday surprise party in St. Pete. Bing, who passed away last month, seems reasonably delighted by the all-stag affair.
Baseball was a very manly business in 1967. A group photo of the Met beat writers (you don’t see those anymore) features 13 men, including a few (Vic Ziegel, Steve Jacobson, Maury Allen) who are still active and one (Dick Young) who most of us believe hung on too long. Not pictured: a single woman.
Pictured: a married woman. That would be Josephine Westrum. She’s pouring coffee for her husband the manager, Wes Westrum. According to the caption, by doing so she “proves worth as a manager at the breakfast table.” I’m assuming that was considered complimentary by the editors in 1967, fellows, one senses, whose values system was set in stone by 1937. The first yearbook I ever had as a kid was the ’72 and while there were arcane references to Met player wives as “better halves,” I don’t remember nearly as much patronizing prose. A lot could change in five years. A lot did.
But in 1967, “Mets are Model Wives.” Look out Twiggy, here comes Mrs. Jack Fisher sporting the latest from Carnaby Street or wherever ’60s fashions were sold. Yes, it’s Austin Powers come to life on pages 54 and 55, a fashion shoot to benefit the Doctors’ Wives Auxiliary of Flushing Hospital when “Shea Stadium served as the ‘salon’.” Some salon — they used a ramp between loge and mezzanine. That’s where we find the “purty Mrs. Dennis Ribant” (let’s keep her first name out of the public eye) pretending to sell copies of the Daily News. How this helped Flushing Hospital I couldn’t tell you, but there’s no denying it: Mrs. Dennis Ribant sure was purty.
Somebody worked overtime on assigning nicknames to the major Met players themselves. Newly acquired Tommy Davis was THE TOMMY GUN: Mr. Two-Time Batting King. He’s captured in candid conversation with Mickey Mantle, presumably reminding him “they call me MISTER Two-Time Batting King”. Titular ace Jack Fisher is simply HI-JACK, perhaps in honor of his absconding with 24 losses two years earlier. Ken Boyer is 7-TIME ALL-STAR (not much of a nickname, but truthful advertising), Bob Shaw is THE CITY SLICKER: Mound Magician of Mets (coming off a 12-14, 4.30 campaign — some magician) and 21-year-old William Francis Denehy is “Literally Billy the Kid,” presumably in deference to his callowness and not because the Mets planned to use him in a trade to rob the Washington Senators blind of manager Gil Hodges.
Having been on the Mets scene myself since ’69, I’ve seen most everybody who’s played for us. But I never saw the guys mentioned above, certainly not in their New York phase. Mets who were Mets in 1967 but not later may as well be Cleveland Spiders from 1899. I know they were there. I’ve read about them plenty. Yet it feels somehow impossible there were Mets without me, even more unlikely that these historical figures cavorted with many of the same gents — THE JONES BOY (Cleon), THE PONY EXPRESS (Buddy), “THE DEAN” AT AGE 22 (Kranepool already a legend), Seaver The Saver: Picked out of a hat (Tom not yet Terrific nor worth upper-casing) — who introduced me to baseball. It was only two years from ’67 to ’69 but from the time I was 4 to the time I was 6, it was an eternity.
What links the eras as I read through this, what connects what I perceive to be the time before time began and the time when time started, is a bit of the advertising. The Mets may have presented themselves through out-of-date thinking (unless reincarnating Ron Swoboda as THE PEEPUL’S CHERCE was “with it”) but a couple of their sponsors were clearly endeavoring to be a part of the late ’60s as they happened. Opposite the Flushing Gothic of Weiss and Devine is a perky, today kind of couple selling cherry-red Plymouth Furys. On the back we have a Rheingold ad that’s almost cutting-edge in its meta-commentary on the medium: an Archie Bunker type (before we knew that’s what he was called) clutching a beer, smoking a cigarette and demonstrating “In N.Y., the city of tough customers, only Rheingold’s made it to the top.” It’s an ad that’s sort of about the ad…if you look at it hard enough. Or tough enough.
It’s 2007. The Fury is off the lot. Rheingold shuttered its brewery. Don Bosch never developed into MIDDLE MAN: Center of Attention. Vaughan Devine beat it out of town after a year. Judging by his own downcast demeanor before his September dismissal, Wes Westrum never asked the dutiful Josephine for that second cup. The 1967 Mets lost 101 games. But this 1967 yearbook? It’s a winner in any baseball library.
Next Friday: It seemed like such a good idea.
by Jason Fry on 31 January 2007 11:11 pm So the other day ESPN.com invited readers to rank the major-league teams from #1 to #30, using one of their whizzy mechanisms where you drag numbers onto pictures. (Which is very cool until you work from worst to first, get to about #6 and realize you forgot the Reds.)
So here’s how I ranked them, with voters’ consensus rank in parentheses. (Caveats: I did this quickly, and I don’t know jack about most of the American League. Because, honestly, who gives a shit.)
30. Royals (26)
29. Orioles (27)
28. Devil Rays (29)
27. Pirates (28)
26. Nationals (30)
25. Rockies (25)
24. Reds (23)
23. Rangers (19)
22. Diamondbacks (22)
21. Mariners (24)
20. Astros (16)
19. Giants (18)
18. Marlins (20)
17. Brewers (21)
16. Cubs (9)
15. Braves (17)
14. Padres (15)
13. Blue Jays (13)
12. Indians (14)
11. Cardinals (5)
10. Dodgers (7)
9. Phillies (10)
8. Mets (4)
7. Angels (11)
6. Red Sox (2)
5. Yankees (1)
4. White Sox (6)
3. A’s (12)
2. Twins (8)
1. Tigers (3)
So.
I don’t apologize for thinking the Yankees and Cubs won’t be that good. (The Cubs won a division on paper, so what — ask Steve Phillips, Mo Vaughn and Roberto Alomar how that turns out. Besides, they’re the Cubs.) I don’t think the Cardinals deserve an asterisk or anything, but 5th best in baseball? C’mon. I admit I’m probably too high on the A’s because of a lingering Moneyball crush and it’s just too hard to keep track of a team that uses a DH 3,000 miles away.
But what you’re really wondering is this: Eighth? Really, Jace? The average ESPN voter has more faith in our team than you do?
Um, I guess so.
Look, I still rated us the best team in the National League. But I admit to being nervous, and it’s not just a longtime Met fans’ innate pessimism.
It’s the pitching.
Tom Glavine and Orlando Hernandez are capable, but they’re awfully old. Mike Pelfrey and Philip Humber could become stars, but they’re awfully young. John Maine and Oliver Perez could take a step forward, or a step back. (Given Perez’s career, by now he’s got enough steps for a whole dance routine.) Dave Williams and Jason Vargas and Aaron Sele are the pitching equivalent of spaghetti hurled at a wall. And Pedro? His projected date of return ranges from August to never.
I’m not sure what percentage of that glass is full and what percentage is empty, but it makes me anxious. I wouldn’t be shocked if Glavine got to 300 wins and a few more for lagniappe, El Duque was serviceable, either Pelfrey or Humber had a breakout, star-making year, either Maine or Perez or both took steps forward, the spaghetti starters weren’t needed beyond spot starts, and Pedro arrived like a conquering hero come summer. In that case, print my playoff tickets and hold my October calls, please.
But I also wouldn’t be astonished if Glavine was merely serviceable, El Duque spent a long time on the shelf, Pelfrey and Humber scuffled while learning their craft in New Orleans, Maine and Perez took steps backwards, the spaghetti starters channeled Lima and Gonzalez, and Pedro never arrived at all. In that case, we could lose a lot of 7-6 affairs, and October might be spent listening to Tommy Lasorda tell us to get out of the tree.
Maybe the sight of pitchers running along the warning track and reading the 35th story about Moises Alou just fitting in will make me perk up a little. Maybe. For now, though, it’s freezing and I look at our pitching staff and I think, We could be second or third and we could be 15th, so yep, that averages out to around eighth.
Change my mind, please.
by Greg Prince on 29 January 2007 10:06 pm The swings Darryl Strawberry and David Palmer took at each other last night during a bench-clearing brawl in the first inning were sissy swipes compared to the real punch Gary Carter displayed.
Sissy swipes? Did somebody actually use the phrase “sissy swipes” in a baseball game story at some point in the past quarter-century? Without irony?
Yup. That’s how Jack Lang of the Daily News led his report on the Mets-Braves game of July 11, 1986, one in which Palmer “plunked Strawberry in the butt” after surrendering a three-run homer to Carter. Though “Darryl dropped his bat, threw his helmet and started for the mound,” Lang reassured his readers that “no one got hurt and it was all over in a matter of minutes.”
Kind of describes the game story as we knew it when newspapers were our primary conduit to baseball information.
Jack Lang, you’ve probably heard, passed away last week at 85. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I would have thought Lang was still writing for the News. Or the Long Island Press even.
Without looking it up, I couldn’t remember any particular piece Jack Lang wrote in his more than 25 years on the Mets beat. That’s not a knock on Jack. He had a job to do: sum up the game and, if deadline permitted, gather a few quotes. Rereading his story on the 11-0 drubbing the Mets put on the Braves in their championship season, there are no quotes (Friday night game, late start for NBC, Saturday paper) but I got the flavor of what happened all over again.
By 1986 the reader almost certainly knew the score by the next morning. Lang could sum up the feel of the game in the first paragraph and then get to the meat of the matter in the second and third:
Carter hit a three-run homer and a grand slam his first two trips as the Mets treated Sid Fernandez to a fun festival in walloping the Braves, 11-0.
Carter drove in the Mets’ first seven runs and that was much more than El Sid needed as he rolled to his 12th win — the most by any NL pitcher this season. Fernandez had three hits, two doubles and a single, and Len Dykstra had another three-hit game.
There. The game in a nutshell. Colorful and concise. We know about the fight, we know about the offense, we know about the pitching. Just lay a bed of we’ve got the teamwork/to make the dream work underneath it and it’s 1986 again.
Not having others’ game stories from the July 12 papers with which to compare it, I couldn’t tell you if the reporters from Newsday, the Post or the Times covered it better or worse or if they, unlike Lang, plumbed the depths of David Palmer’s psyche. I don’t recall knowing until I read The Bad Guys Won! that Palmer was nursing a grudge against Carter that dated to their Expo battery days. Wrote Jeff Pearlman many years after the fact:
With bodies piling on top of them, Hernandez turned to Palmer and in a calm tone asked a simple question: “Dave, why would you do that?”
Palmer yelled back: “Carter and all that bullshit! I hate that guy!”
Amid the mayhem Hernandez was unmoved. “Look, if you hate Gary, why hit Darryl?” he said, bodies flying left and right. “It’s not right.”
Palmer had to admit, the man had a point.
The point about Jack Lang is he was a constant for us as Mets fans. Lang started covering the game when television was a novelty and stayed at it until sports talk radio was proliferating, easing up for good a bit shy of the Internet age. He was there when “sissy swipe” was considered neither patently offensive nor wholly outdated and he remained until you could print “butt” in a family paper. He bridged more than a couple of eras and by late in his career could still tell you what you needed to know about last night’s game particularly if you didn’t see it or hear it.
It’s different now. Results seem to get buried in all but wire service game stories, not without cause. Does anybody still wait for the News to get a score? For any paper? If you missed the game you can get the score without really trying. You can get an instant AP writeup on any number of sites minutes after the game is over. You get the likes of us picking it apart and putting it back together. Lang’s paper and its competitors are online like everybody else.
It’s not just sportswriting that assumes you know what you actually need to know and figures it’s role is to tell you something you didn’t know. Political coverage, especially when there’s no election in sight, chooses to dwell on mood and attitude before informing you what the guy or gal running for office actually said. In Sunday’s Times there was an interesting interview with Garry Shandling in which the most newsworthy tidbit — that a collection of The Larry Sanders Show DVDs will be released in April — wasn’t to be found until the reader got well down into the jump page.
No, it’s not just sports that’s written with more latitude than it used to be. But it is sports that we care about here. I wonder if we are truly better served in today’s marketplace than we were when Jack Lang was on duty.
On the face of it we are. The speed and accessibility and range of voices is not to be underestimated. 1986 wasn’t exactly prehistoric times but back then there was no discussion of the game to take you through the night on the radio. There was no ticker flashing scores and details on your cable television. There was no computer connecting you to anything that would help you fill in the blanks on those three hits by Lenny Dykstra. You could catch the score on WINS or WCBS, you could get a few highlights on one of the 10 o’clock or 11 o’clock newscasts or you could call Sportsphone if you were really desperate. WFAN and ESPNews and every dot com we count on did not exist.
We are better off for that. More is very much better in terms of delivery. More is often better in terms of insight and perspective. More is sometimes better in that all these vehicles that weren’t around when Lang was on the beat mean we get baseball news and opinion all year round.
Then again, it can also be inane as all get out.
Wally Matthews in Newsday last Wednesday:
Perhaps if Willie Randolph were still a player, and not the manager who led them to within a victory of the World Series, the Mets would show him a little more respect and a lot more money.
The rest of his column (a column, not a news story it should be noted) excoriated the Mets for cheaping out on their manager, for not getting a deal done during the winter, for blaming him for the Mets losing to the Cardinals in the NLCS.
There can be no other explanation for why this is not getting done.
Ken Davidoff in Newsday last Thursday:
A winter of discomfort will not carry over into the Mets’ spring. Willie Randolph will not be a lame-duck manager this season.
Randolph and the Mets agreed in principle yesterday to a three-year, $5.65-million extension, three people familiar with the situation confirmed. The extension will kick in immediately — Randolph’s $700,000 contract for 2007 was torn up — and run through 2009, with a team option for 2010.
Oh.
Without knowing who was whispering into whose ear in the course of November, December and January, I couldn’t say how serious any “discomfort” became between Randolph and ownership. They apparently entered into something called a negotiation. The negotiation ensued and a resolution, Willie’s contract, was agreed upon.
Willie Randolph got his millions. The Mets got their manager. Wally Matthews got his word quota filled even if it read very shakily before the Randolph deal was announced and as a total waste of space afterwards.
Seriously, read it. There’s nothing in there that any blogger or commenter or poster on any Mets board couldn’t have dreamt up if he or she were so inclined. There is nothing professional about Matthews’ accusations and assessments (“there can be no other explanation…”). There is nothing from sources, even unnamed sources, to suggest the organization and its skipper were heading for the meltdown the columnist implies. It was all just insipid speculation whose shelf life was mercifully short even by the standards of today’s reduced newscycles.
Columns that grasp at any passing breeze weren’t invented with the connection of the first T1 line.
Across the breadth of Lang’s long day on the beat there was bad sportswriting as well as good sportswriting. Yet it’s discouraging to realize that in an era when we the fans are superserved — regularly serving ourselves — we are often badly served by the credentialed media in whom we’re supposed to invest our trust. In Matthews’ case, it wasn’t just an opinion that you could take or leave. He was presenting as fact an impending crisis based exclusively on his innuendo about the Mets’ supposedly unreasonable stance toward Randolph. And if you read or listen enough to the pros, Matthews’ methodology is hardly isolated.
Somehow, especially since I like to believe we become more enlightened the more we progress as a society, I find this more offensive than the most vicious Dick Young broadside against the integrity of a player we loved but he didn’t particularly like. Dick Young died in 1987. Everybody in his profession should know better by now.
by Greg Prince on 29 January 2007 10:06 pm The swings Darryl Strawberry and David Palmer took at each other last night during a bench-clearing brawl in the first inning were sissy swipes compared to the real punch Gary Carter displayed.
Sissy swipes? Did somebody actually use the phrase “sissy swipes” in a baseball game story at some point in the past quarter-century? Without irony?
Yup. That's how Jack Lang of the Daily News led his report on the Mets-Braves game of July 11, 1986, one in which Palmer “plunked Strawberry in the butt” after surrendering a three-run homer to Carter. Though “Darryl dropped his bat, threw his helmet and started for the mound,” Lang reassured his readers that “no one got hurt and it was all over in a matter of minutes.”
Kind of describes the game story as we knew it when newspapers were our primary conduit to baseball information.
Jack Lang, you've probably heard, passed away last week at 85. If I hadn't been paying attention, I would have thought Lang was still writing for the News. Or the Long Island Press even.
Without looking it up, I couldn't remember any particular piece Jack Lang wrote in his more than 25 years on the Mets beat. That's not a knock on Jack. He had a job to do: sum up the game and, if deadline permitted, gather a few quotes. Rereading his story on the 11-0 drubbing the Mets put on the Braves in their championship season, there are no quotes (Friday night game, late start for NBC, Saturday paper) but I got the flavor of what happened all over again.
By 1986 the reader almost certainly knew the score by the next morning. Lang could sum up the feel of the game in the first paragraph and then get to the meat of the matter in the second and third:
Carter hit a three-run homer and a grand slam his first two trips as the Mets treated Sid Fernandez to a fun festival in walloping the Braves, 11-0.
Carter drove in the Mets' first seven runs and that was much more than El Sid needed as he rolled to his 12th win — the most by any NL pitcher this season. Fernandez had three hits, two doubles and a single, and Len Dykstra had another three-hit game.
There. The game in a nutshell. Colorful and concise. We know about the fight, we know about the offense, we know about the pitching. Just lay a bed of we've got the teamwork/to make the dream work underneath it and it's 1986 again.
Not having others' game stories from the July 12 papers with which to compare it, I couldn't tell you if the reporters from Newsday, the Post or the Times covered it better or worse or if they, unlike Lang, plumbed the depths of David Palmer's psyche. I don't recall knowing until I read The Bad Guys Won! that Palmer was nursing a grudge against Carter that dated to their Expo battery days. Wrote Jeff Pearlman many years after the fact:
With bodies piling on top of them, Hernandez turned to Palmer and in a calm tone asked a simple question: “Dave, why would you do that?”
Palmer yelled back: “Carter and all that bullshit! I hate that guy!”
Amid the mayhem Hernandez was unmoved. “Look, if you hate Gary, why hit Darryl?” he said, bodies flying left and right. “It's not right.”
Palmer had to admit, the man had a point.
The point about Jack Lang is he was a constant for us as Mets fans. Lang started covering the game when television was a novelty and stayed at it until sports talk radio was proliferating, easing up for good a bit shy of the Internet age. He was there when “sissy swipe” was considered neither patently offensive nor wholly outdated and he remained until you could print “butt” in a family paper. He bridged more than a couple of eras and by late in his career could still tell you what you needed to know about last night's game particularly if you didn't see it or hear it.
It's different now. Results seem to get buried in all but wire service game stories, not without cause. Does anybody still wait for the News to get a score? For any paper? If you missed the game you can get the score without really trying. You can get an instant AP writeup on any number of sites minutes after the game is over. You get the likes of us picking it apart and putting it back together. Lang's paper and its competitors are online like everybody else.
It's not just sportswriting that assumes you know what you actually need to know and figures it's role is to tell you something you didn't know. Political coverage, especially when there's no election in sight, chooses to dwell on mood and attitude before informing you what the guy or gal running for office actually said. In Sunday's Times there was an interesting interview with Garry Shandling in which the most newsworthy tidbit — that a collection of The Larry Sanders Show DVDs will be released in April — wasn't to be found until the reader got well down into the jump page.
No, it's not just sports that's written with more latitude than it used to be. But it is sports that we care about here. I wonder if we are truly better served in today's marketplace than we were when Jack Lang was on duty.
On the face of it we are. The speed and accessibility and range of voices is not to be underestimated. 1986 wasn't exactly prehistoric times but back then there was no discussion of the game to take you through the night on the radio. There was no ticker flashing scores and details on your cable television. There was no computer connecting you to anything that would help you fill in the blanks on those three hits by Lenny Dykstra. You could catch the score on WINS or WCBS, you could get a few highlights on one of the 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock newscasts or you could call Sportsphone if you were really desperate. WFAN and ESPNews and every dot com we count on did not exist.
We are better off for that. More is very much better in terms of delivery. More is often better in terms of insight and perspective. More is sometimes better in that all these vehicles that weren't around when Lang was on the beat mean we get baseball news and opinion all year round.
Then again, it can also be inane as all get out.
Wally Matthews in Newsday last Wednesday:
Perhaps if Willie Randolph were still a player, and not the manager who led them to within a victory of the World Series, the Mets would show him a little more respect and a lot more money.
The rest of his column (a column, not a news story it should be noted) excoriated the Mets for cheaping out on their manager, for not getting a deal done during the winter, for blaming him for the Mets losing to the Cardinals in the NLCS.
There can be no other explanation for why this is not getting done.
Ken Davidoff in Newsday last Thursday:
A winter of discomfort will not carry over into the Mets' spring. Willie Randolph will not be a lame-duck manager this season.
Randolph and the Mets agreed in principle yesterday to a three-year, $5.65-million extension, three people familiar with the situation confirmed. The extension will kick in immediately — Randolph's $700,000 contract for 2007 was torn up — and run through 2009, with a team option for 2010.
Oh.
Without knowing who was whispering into whose ear in the course of November, December and January, I couldn't say how serious any “discomfort” became between Randolph and ownership. They apparently entered into something called a negotiation. The negotiation ensued and a resolution, Willie's contract, was agreed upon.
Willie Randolph got his millions. The Mets got their manager. Wally Matthews got his word quota filled even if it read very shakily before the Randolph deal was announced and as a total waste of space afterwards.
Seriously, read it. There's nothing in there that any blogger or commenter or poster on any Mets board couldn't have dreamt up if he or she were so inclined. There is nothing professional about Matthews' accusations and assessments (“there can be no other explanation…”). There is nothing from sources, even unnamed sources, to suggest the organization and its skipper were heading for the meltdown the columnist implies. It was all just insipid speculation whose shelf life was mercifully short even by the standards of today's reduced newscycles.
Columns that grasp at any passing breeze weren't invented with the connection of the first T1 line. Across the breadth of Lang's long day on the beat there was bad sportswriting as well as good sportswriting. Yet it's discouraging to realize that in an era when we the fans are superserved — regularly serving ourselves — we are often badly served by the credentialed media in whom we're supposed to invest our trust. In Matthews' case, it wasn't just an opinion that you could take or leave. He was presenting as fact an impending crisis based exclusively on his innuendo about the Mets' supposedly unreasonable stance toward Randolph. And if you read or listen enough to the pros, Matthews' methodology is hardly isolated.
Somehow, especially since I like to believe we become more enlightened the more we progress as a society, I find this more offensive than the most vicious Dick Young broadside against the integrity of a player we loved but he didn't particularly like. Dick Young died in 1987. Everybody in his profession should know better by now.
by Greg Prince on 27 January 2007 12:57 pm Before Opening Day, before Spring Training, before Pitchers & Catchers, there has been revealed the first physical evidence that we will indeed be granted another baseball season.
There is light in the late afternoon.
It’s a surprise every winter. Light takes an extended holiday in December and half of January, long enough so that you think it will be in short supply forever. But maybe a week ago, the darkness began to noticeably yield. Come 4 o’clock every day, the sky suddenly showed signs of generosity. Come 4:30 there was still something to see. Come five, streetlights and headlights were cooling their heels until we absolutely needed them. Keep an eye out the window: it’s going to stay a little lighter a littler longer every day for a while now. And where there is light, surely there will be our game.
Light is the gift we receive from above. It is our signal that everything will eventually turn out fine. If you could do anything to spread the light, I’m guessing you would.
A loyal Faith and Fear reader has alerted us to a fundraising drive going on for the Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation, an organization devoted to improving the lives of seriously ill children and their parents as they persevere together through unimaginably tough times. The impetus for this particular initiative was the devastating loss suffered by a Mets fan family of good standing in the online community. Their daughter Miranda was born fighting. She gave it her all for 36 hours. The fight ended far too quickly.
Our loyal reader and other terrific Mets fans in the acquaintance of this family are determined there be light spread in the wake of this terrible darkness. They have established the Baby Miranda Memorial with the Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation. It’s a way of remembering one child while trying to make things better for another.
You can read more about Starlight Starbright here. You can find out about the Mets’ involvement with the foundation here. And if you choose to, you are invited to join in the tribute to Baby Miranda here.
Your contribution, however slight, will do one of the best things possible. Where there would otherwise be darkness, you will help spread the light.
by Greg Prince on 27 January 2007 12:57 pm Before Opening Day, before Spring Training, before Pitchers & Catchers, there has been revealed the first physical evidence that we will indeed be granted another baseball season.
There is light in the late afternoon.
It's a surprise every winter. Light takes an extended holiday in December and half of January, long enough so that you think it will be in short supply forever. But maybe a week ago, the darkness began to noticeably yield. Come 4 o'clock every day, the sky suddenly showed signs of generosity. Come 4:30 there was still something to see. Come five, streetlights and headlights were cooling their heels until we absolutely needed them. Keep an eye out the window: it's going to stay a little lighter a littler longer every day for a while now. And where there is light, surely there will be our game.
Light is the gift we receive from above. It is our signal that everything will eventually turn out fine. If you could do anything to spread the light, I'm guessing you would.
A loyal Faith and Fear reader has alerted us to a fundraising drive going on for the Starlight Starbright Children's Foundation, an organization devoted to improving the lives of seriously ill children and their parents as they persevere together through unimaginably tough times. The impetus for this particular initiative was the devastating loss suffered by a Mets fan family of good standing in the online community. Their daughter Miranda was born fighting. She gave it her all for 36 hours. The fight ended far too quickly.
Our loyal reader and other terrific Mets fans in the acquaintance of this family are determined there be light spread in the wake of this terrible darkness. They have established the Baby Miranda Memorial with the Starlight Starbright Children's Foundation. It's a way of remembering one child while trying to make things better for another.
You can read more about Starlight Starbright here. You can find out about the Mets' involvement with the foundation here. And if you choose to, you are invited to join in the tribute to Baby Miranda here. Your contribution, however slight, will do one of the best things possible. Where there would otherwise be darkness, you will help spread the light.
by Greg Prince on 26 January 2007 11:15 am If it’s the final Friday of the month, then it’s the first installment of the special Top 10 Songs of All-Time edition of Flashback Friday at Faith and Fear in Flushing.
Bud Harrelson was breaking his hand. George Theodore was colliding with Don Hahn. Jon Matlack was not avoiding a line drive.
In the spring of 1973, the Mets were a bruised and budding calamity. Reasons to believe in them would not reveal themselves for several months. But on WGBB 1240-AM Freeport, I found a more immediate repository for my faith when I heard “One Of A Kind (Love Affair)” by the Spinners. I liked it so much that it stands today as the No. 10 Song of All-Time.
I had to believe in the Spinners. They were showing me the time of my musical life.
They weren’t the only ones. In those final months of fourth grade, I bought fewer baseball cards than I had in any of the three preceding springs. Taking the time to think about “One Of A Kind (Love Affair)” has reminded me why. It’s because I was buying 45s like I never had before and never would again.
In April, May and June of 1973, I collected 26 different 45s. I bought them at Delman’s, at TSS, at Alexander’s and, in the case of “One of a Kind (Love Affair),” Tilben’s, Long Beach’s premier retailer of records, cameras and prehistoric electronics. The day I had to have the Spinners’ latest release was during the Memorial Day weekend visit of my mother’s older relatives from Florida, Cousin Lee and her husband Victor. He was talked about as not the loosest soul with a dime. It was literally true. Vic and I were walking by Tilben’s when I insisted on going in and finding three 45s I’d been wanting, one of which was, as advertised, one of a kind. The bill came to $2.40. I was carrying exactly $2.30. I asked Vic if I could borrow a dime. He relented slowly, making it clear that I’d have to pay him back. I could tell he was kidding but wasn’t kidding. I tried to give him the dime when we got home. He didn’t take it. Probably wanted to.
I never saw Lee or Victor after 1981. In the meantime I still have that 45. As the years and the media have progressed I have multiple recordings of the song on LP and tape and compact disc and anthology and box set and MP3. But the 45 is the 45. It is, because of the format in which I originally bought it and because of those magical months when I bought it, a record in a way that none of my other Top 10 songs are. I hear “One Of A Kind (Love Affair)” and I can see the black circle spin on what we used to call a record player. It’s a pleasing sensation.
In defending his licensing of “Our Country” to Chevrolet, John Mellencamp — once a virulent opponent of such sellouts — says Chevy is a better record company than Columbia ever was for him, that these days it’s the best way to get his music heard. Record company? It occurred to me I have no idea who puts out the music today. When I was collecting 45s, the round colorful label with the oversized hole in the middle was half the fun of owning the record. Bell, Epic, MAM, Fantasy, Kama Sutra, Tamla, Chelsea, Vibration…they’re still mixed in there with the presumably better known Columbias and Capitols, Apples and Elektras, Deccas and A&Ms. I can see them all, too, and not just because I still have every last one of them sitting in a box at my feet as I type.
Each label was like the back of a baseball card. The Spinners, I learned, recorded for Atlantic. “One Of A Kind (Love Affair)” was 3:31 long, written by Joseph B. Jefferson (the songwriter’s credit, like the last two-thirds of the title, appeared in parentheses) and produced, arranged & conducted by Thom Bell. I saw his name a lot on records. Turns out he was the genius behind Philly Soul, a genre I’d discover and rediscover over the ensuing decades until I decided it was my favorite music in the whole world.
My relationship with the Spinners worked pretty much the same way. If you asked me in 1973 to name my favorite song of the year, it probably wouldn’t have been “One Of A Kind (Love Affair)”. In those early days of my making list after list of song after song, the Spinners were so omnipresent in the atmosphere that I didn’t realize just how much I loved them. I was living in a golden age without understanding it until years later.
There isn’t a Spinners’ radio hit from their halcyon and gorgeous period between 1972 and 1976 that doesn’t flat out make me happy. None makes me happier than “One Of A Kind (Love Affair)”. I was ten. I didn’t know from love affairs. I didn’t always know from happy. But I could tell when other people did, and so could the Spinners. Upbeat…hopeful…spring. From the bass drum that opens the affair to the Wynne-ing vamping that ends it, this is indeed a singular trip into matters of the heart.
It took adulthood and a closer listen to realize the protagonist (given voice by the awesome Phillipé Soul Wynne) is having a terrible time in love. Yes, the title implies heavenly activity, “the kind of love that you read about in a fairy tale”. The first verse lays out the reward: a “sun that shines on a rainy day — it’s a cloud of love”. What could be better than that?
But guess what…he doesn’t have that! His love has taken a hike. How does he find out? She wrote a line or two upon the wall: “Said I’m leaving you, know I love you too, I can’t stay with you.” (This actually happened to the songwriter Mr. Jefferson.) He never saw it coming, never “thought about today would come.” Nevertheless, to this very day he could never say “a discouraging word ’cause I love you.”
Things are quite unrequited now. Yet the song is never sad. To be honest, I never exactly get to the end of the three minutes and thirty-one seconds in full concentration. I’m so enamored with the blend of musical happiness and willful stubbornness in the lyric (you’re not discouraged by that kissoff?) that the Wynne coda, devoted to how this kind of love affair makes a blind man talk about seein’ again, almost takes me by surprise every time. I’m high, I’m thrown, I’m lost in thought and then I’m back. All in about 211 seconds.
The Spinners outlasted all their 1973 classmates in my box of 45s even if it took another dozen years for me to fully appreciate how amazin’, amazin’, amazin their pop output was when I was a kid: “I’ll Be Around”; “Could It Be I’m Falling In Love”; “Ghetto Child”; “Mighty Love”; “Then Came You”; “They Just Can’t Stop It The (Games People Play”): “Rubberband Man”; along with “One Of A Kind (Love Affair)”. Others may have had more hits but I can’t think of any artist, any vocalist, any band, any group that just brought the goods so regularly. Every one of those 1970s hits is in my Top 500 and there is no contest when it comes to identifying my favorite act of all-time.
That decision began to get made in 1985. There was an autumn day (not long after the Cardinals eliminated the Mets) when I was hit with my first big automotive repair bill. I needed a pick-me-up and decided it was worth dropping an additional five bucks on The Best Of The Spinners (a Carvel ice cream cone may also have been involved). Wow. Every one of those babies came roaring back from their release date and every one of them just washed over me. Sure, some of it was a matter of bringing me back to fourth grade and the Magnolia School playground and all that, but this wasn’t pure nostalgia. The Spinners were a living organism. The more I played them through my twenties and into my thirties and now in my forties, the better they got and continued to get.
They’re the group that millions love yet are too often left out of the conversation when talk turns to the greats. Did you know that before they blossomed on Atlantic they were on Motown? They were bench players there in the ’60s. They were treated like Chris Woodward — Berry Gordy sent them on errands, for crissake. Stevie Wonder wrote them a hit, 1970’s “It’s A Shame,” but by then they were spinning out the door and over to Atlantic, praise be. Bell came in and Wynne took many of the lead vocals and, in the company of Bobbie Smith, Purvis Short, Billy Henderson and Henry Fambrough, indelible magic was made.
“One Of A Kind (Love Affair)” peaked at No. 11 in June of 1973 on Billboard‘s Hot 100. It went all the way to No. 1 on the R&B chart where it enjoyed a four-week run. The Spinners’ only pop No. 1 was “Then Came You,” recorded with Dionne Warwicke in ’74. Wynne left the group three years later. The Spinners soldiered on with John Edwards fronting. They laid down some shimmering tracks in the late ’70s, including the underheard “Heaven On Earth (So Fine),” but their last big score was in 1980 with two post-Bell, discofied remakes: “Working My Way Back To You/Forgive Me Girl” and “Cupid/I’ve Loved You For A Long Time”. Those are all right, but they’ve never sounded like the Spinners I knew and adored.
Got one up close and personal listen to the Spinners, at Westbury in 1997. Stephanie and I were in the third row for an evening with them and the three surviving Four Tops. A disc jockey from Long Island oldies station B-103 introduced the show by announcing we’d hear first from the Spinners and then from some real “rock ‘n’ roll royalty.” The Four Tops, he shilled, were in the Hall of Fame!
I like the Four Tops a lot but I was livid. Royalty? The royalty opened the show. The group, the bulk of which had been together since 1961, was beautiful. Stephanie liked the canary yellow suits more than I did, but otherwise it was a transcendent performance. It was frigging royal. (And you can take that from the Princes.)
The Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame holds no particular sway over the tagging of immortality the way baseball’s does, but come on. Who’s been more influential, more constant, more better for more years?
Stevie Wonder wrote for them. Marvin Gaye admired them. David Bowie called seeing them at the Apollo “the best night ever” in his experiences at that particular venue. Hall and Oates covered them generously not long ago. Barry Manilow is considering doing the same soon. Monie Love reinvented “It’s A Shame”. R. Kelly paid homage with “Sadie”. Rappin’ FoTay sampled “I’ll Be Around”. AT&T borrowed it to sell long-distance service. “Rubberband Man” found a new life with Office Max some twenty years after it was featured in Stripes. Elton John teamed with them on “Are You Ready For Love”. They were all over the radio in the heart of the ’70s and the core of their canon has stayed evergreen on various Jammin’s, Mixes and Lites up and down the dial into this century.
They haunt. They soothe. They cajole. They revive. They romance. They reflect. They get a move on. They make lots and lots and lots of us as happy as three-and-a-half minutes will allow. The Spinners will always be my one of a kind love.
The No. 9 record will be played at the end of February.
Next Friday: Proof that the Mets have been around a very long time.
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