The Alou family connection to the Mets has been revived. It goes back a long way.
First, there was the game of September 22, 1963 at Candlestick Park during which the Giants were drubbing the Mets so decisively (13-2 en route to 13-4) that manager Alvin Dark could afford to choreograph history. In the seventh inning, Dark removed Willie Mays from center and inserted Matty Alou in left, replacing Mays with Felipe Alou who had been in right and shifting Jesus Alou from left to right. Everywhere you looked in the Giants' outfield, there were Alous, the first time three brothers played alongside one another out there. After the season, Felipe was traded to the Braves, so it was the only time, too.
Three other notes of trivia from that day so trivial as to be infinitesimal: 1) It was the Mets' first series away from home after the final baseball game ever played at the Polo Grounds, so technically they no longer had a home; 2) It was the road debut of Cleon Jones; 3) It was the last time the famous Dodger Duke Snider would ever face his old nemeses the Giants; a year later, having worn out his welcome with the Mets, he would finish his career as a displaced San Franciscan.
The Alous were a staple of National League ball through the '60s and into the early '70s, but the next time one of them played in games of surpassing importance against the Mets, it would be as an American Leaguer. Jesus Alou was a part-time outfielder on the 1973 A's, thrown into a greater role in that World Series after the club lost centerfielder Bill North to injury late in the year. Alou started five of the seven games versus the Mets, his most notable performance coming in Game Two in Oakland with three hits and two RBI in six at-bats.
That game, won 10-7 in 12 innings by the Mets, is better remembered for three other events: 1) Mike Andrews' two errors, miscues that Charlie Finley tried to parlay into an in-Series roster switch that wouldn't fly with Bowie Kuhn; 2) The piss-poor out call on Bud Harrelson at home plate in the tenth which stood even as Willie Mays pleaded with Augie Donatelli to rule Buddy safe; 3) Willie, one bridge and ten years removed from coming out to allow the all-Alou outfield, perhaps realizing at last that it was time to come out of the Oakland sun once and for all.
In 1975, Jesus Alou would become the first Met World Series opponent to play for them, joining the Mets on April 16 in St. Louis and serving mostly as a righty pinch-hitter. Though he hit .350 in 40 such at-bats (complementing the .400 Ed Kranpeool put up as a lefty off the bench), he showed no power, driving in 11 runs and homering not at all. Alou would be released the following spring. With Matty and Felipe no longer active, 1976 was the first season with no Alous in the Majors since 1957. But Jesus persevered away from the bigs and would hook on with the Astros in '78 and '79 before retiring.
Felipe Alou, of course, became a fixture in the visitors' dugout at Shea from 1992 to 2004 as his Expos regularly tormented the Mets (or so it seemed). One of his key early weapons was reliever Mel Rojas, a nephew of all three Alou brothers. Montreal being Montreal, the team let him go when he got too expensive. He signed unhappily with the Cubs in December 1996 and was traded to the Mets in August 1997. He pitched for his Uncle Jesus' old club most of the 1998 season. The Met uncle-nephew combination that was always a rumored trade away was Doc Gooden and Gary Sheffield. Instead, it turned out to be Jesus Alou and Mel Rojas, albeit 22 years removed from each other.
The less said about Mel Rojas' Met tenure, the better. I think we were all calling out some variation of “UNCLE JESUS!” when he'd trot in from the bullpen, though we may have been pronouncing it differently than Mel did.
And now Moises Alou, son of Felipe, becomes a Met, presumably unseating his and Cousin Mel's onetime Expo teammate Cliff Floyd…whose 2007 destination is not yet known, so let's pretend his departure is not yet official. Alou and Floyd went back-to-back in April, in a manner of speaking. On a Monday night in San Francisco, Willie Randolph ordered Tom Glavine (also still not altogether gone, sort of) to walk Barry Bonds so he could face Moises Alou. Alou made him pay, homering with two on, driving in five in all and leading the Giants to a frustrating — for us — 6-2 win. The next night, Floyd, slumping viciously, broke out for an evening, or at least a swing, taking Jamey Wright on a guided tour of McCovey Cove. The Mets won 4-1.
(The next day was the Brian Bannister/Barry Bonds affair, repeated so endlessly on Snigh that it's easy to forget the Mets and Giants played a three-game series.)
Used to be a 40-year-old outfielder implied a fellow who earned the right to hang around but was probably staying at the fair too long — someone like Willie Mays, who logged 98 games in center as a Met at ages 41 and 42, including that final glaring afternoon in Oakland. But players play longer and stay in better shape today. Moises Alou got into 98 games total in 2006, the year he turned 40, and that was considered not miraculous but a little disappointing. He hit 22 homers and drove in 74 runs. That should be considered encouraging.
If you need something else, there's the day he was born: Sunday, July 3, 1966. The Mets hosted Pittsburgh a twinbill, falling short in the opener 8-7 (after trailing 8-1), recovering in the nightcap 9-8 (after trailing 6-3). One of the Pirates on the field that day at Shea? Moises Alou's uncle Matty. He singled as a pinch-hitter in the first game and went 0-for-3 in the second.

In the twenty seasons they called it home, I never visited Shea Stadium to see the Jets play. It never came up as a possibility or as a desire. I wasn’t a committed Jets fan (a redundancy) until I was 15 and the mechanics of seeing an NFL game in person, even though the Jets didn’t necessarily sell out every week until late in their Queens tenure, struck me as too daunting to even consider. Baseball was something you wanted to go to. Football was something you watched on TV if it wasn’t blacked out.

Watching the Jets from Shea on television was strange, especially once I started going to baseball games there enough to be familiar with its topography. Where did home plate go? What happened to the dugouts? Is that the 410 sign? If Lee Mazzilli can handle centerfield, why can’t Pat Leahy?

Most stadiums used to have baseball teams and football teams. Even historic old ballparks had both. The Lions played in Tiger Stadium forever. The Bears used to kick up dust amid the brown Wrigley ivy. Lyric little bandbox Fenway hosted Patriot games. When Yankee Stadium was still Yankee Stadium, it was also the Giants’ stadium. It wasn’t unusual. The Mets and Jets as co-tenants, albeit with the Mets as seniors treating the Jets like perpetual freshmen, was the way business was taken care of until fairly recently.

Somewhere between the Jets threatening to move to the Meadowlands in the spring of 1977 and the fall of 1983 when they abandoned New York in search of spiffier restrooms, I decided that it was OK they were here…even if they were tearing up our grass. As one who didn’t attend Jets games, there were no practical concerns for me, but New Jersey? For the Jets? That was Giants territory. It was Giants Stadium, for crissake. The Jets were headquartered at Hofstra. What were they going to do? Practice in Hempstead all week and then cross two rivers on a bus to play on Sunday?

Yeah, that’s exactly what they did and still do and will do for at least a little longer before they relocate all operations to the Garden State and begin playing on a new piece of swampland in conjunction with their Big Blue cousins. The setting has never set right by me (the green drapes help only a little), but again, it’s all a matter of television when I bother to be interested, and they do sell out every game over there, so what do I know?

With the floodgates wide open for Shea Met memories since last Monday, it occurred to me that we happen to be right upon the 25th anniversary of the greatest Jet game I ever watched from Flushing. That I saw it on a portable black & white set in Tampa doesn’t diminish the joy I recall at its resolution.

In the first semester of my freshman year at USF I didn’t really know anybody, so the first acquaintance I made was sports. Sports I knew. No baseball in Florida then, but there was football. The Bucs were in their sixth season in 1981, on the verge of an unlikely Central Division title in the NFC. I couldn’t stand the Bucs, though. They were just too damn absurd to take seriously. Since they were all that Tampa Bay had to get excited about — besides the NASL Rowdies, that is — I took an abiding dislike to them the whole time I was in school. (If you heard “hey, hey, hey we’re the Buccaneers!” a dozen times a day on Q-105, you would have, too.)

So I wouldn’t have to follow the Bucs with any kind of commitment stronger than osmosis, I listened to Dolphins games. Miami was nowhere near Tampa, but they’d been the state’s team before anybody knew what a Buccaneer was, hence their games aired in locally on WFLA. I had liked the Dolphins when I was 9 and they were finishing 14-0 while my family was spending Christmas in North Miami Beach (though if I knew they were going to be annually obnoxious about it, I wouldn’t have). I hadn’t given them any thought since they stopped appearing in Super Bowls except to hope the Jets beat them twice a year. One Sunday in mid-November, my first semester, I was listening to the Dolphins’ postgame show after they lost to the Raiders (boy did I have no social life) when it was noted the Jets had won in Foxboro and had moved to within one game of Miami for the division lead. Next week, it would be the Dolphins (7-3-1) and the Jets (6-4-1 after an 0-3 start) in a battle for first. At Shea.

Having grown up in New York in the ’70s loyal as a matter of principle to our home teams (how the bleep could you live here and root for the bleeping Cowboys?), I had had very few football games to which I could look forward, Jets or Giants. This one, on November 22, 1981, automatically became my biggest autumn Sunday to date. I anticipated it all week. I may have been something of a Johnny “Lam” Jones-come-lately to the Jets’ cause, but a battle for first at Shea was a battle for first at Shea. I’d been waiting for one since 1973.

So it wasn’t the Mets. You can’t have everything.

One of my suitemates at my off-campus dorm (four guys, two rooms, connected by a bathroom) was from Fort Myers, about two hours down the coast. He was a Dolphins fan. Although the Mets were my calling card, I had made it clear that I liked the Jets. Well, he said, looks like we’re going to have something to watch on Sunday. Lucky for me he had a TV and even luckier just about all Dolphins games were televised in Tampa.

Well, it was a great game. Richard Todd wasn’t even supposed to play because of cracked ribs, but they outfitted him in a flak jacket. Generally not having Richard Todd wasn’t that much of a hardship, but he was the starter and it was no time to leave our starters on the bench. Todd played magnificently. The Jet defense (in this, the year of the New York Sack Exchange) curbed Miami and gave Todd a chance to lead the Jets to victory. It would be tough. They were down 15-9 and on their own 23 with just over three minutes left.

But he did it. He hit six different receivers along the way. The last pass was to Jerome Barkum for a touchdown. It was 15-15. Then Leahy, never a sure thing kicking into Shea’s Edmund Fitzgerald winds, nailed the extra point. Just like that the Jets were in first place.

The Jets were in first place!

My suitemate whose TV it was had left for work by the time his Dolphins lost. So it was just me and his non-fan roommate watching at the end. At the final gun, I did one of those leaps from a sitting position that one does without thinking. You’re pretty excited there, the other suitemate said. You’ve got to understand, I told him. This is the first time I’ve seen the Jets in first place since 1969, a year I always liked to stick into sentences whenever I could.

He didn’t care. But I did.

Shea Stadium was going wild, too. Sitting and leaping out there that late afternoon/early evening were 50,000-plus of the green and white who considered Shea home every bit as much then as I would for the next quarter-century. No doubt a lot of them were Mets fans as well as Jets fans. No doubt a lot of them were season-ticket holders who packed up with the Jets in 1984 and kept going to see them in the Meadowlands, fall after fall, decade after decade (bus after bus).

But the Jets have never looked right over there, even on TV, even when they were beating the Dolphins 51-45 in 1986, even considering they’ve now spent more years in Jersey than they did in Queens. They looked good at Shea a quarter-of-a-century ago tomorrow. They looked great. So did Shea.

Nothing strange about that.

Congratulations to Ryan Howard, the National League's Most Valuable Player. He joins Joe Girardi, N.L. Manager of the Year, and Brandon Webb, the circuit's Cy Young winner in the 2006 awards pantheon. Great jobs, fellas.
Howard, you beat out Carlos Beltran (fourth in the voting after becoming the first Met to win a Gold Glove and a Silver Slugger and start an All-Star Game in the same year), Jose Reyes (seventh), David Wright (ninth) and Carlos Delgado (twelfth).
Girardi, you topped Willie Randolph, the runner-up skipper.
And Webb, you finished way ahead of Billy Wagner, sixth among pitchers when all the ballots were counted.
You guys rocked. And you were smart. You piled up your qualifications and then beat the rush. I mean you and your Phillies, your Marlins and your Diamondbacks were all home by the evening of October 1, the morning of October 2 at the latest. Our Mets had to keep working for almost three more weeks.
What suckers.
But seriously…
Franchise record for homers (tied).
Franchise record for runs scored (broken).
Silver Slugger.
Gold Glove.
All-Star starter.
Team has best record in sport and wins division by largest margin.
And he finishes FOURTH?
Where's that New York bias we're always hearing about?

Congratulations to Ryan Howard, the National League's Most Valuable Player. He joins Joe Girardi, N.L. Manager of the Year, and Brandon Webb, the circuit's Cy Young winner in the 2006 awards pantheon. Great jobs, fellas.

Howard, you beat out Carlos Beltran (fourth in the voting after becoming the first Met to win a Gold Glove and a Silver Slugger and start an All-Star Game in the same year), Jose Reyes (seventh), David Wright (ninth) and Carlos Delgado (twelfth).

Girardi, you topped Willie Randolph, the runner-up skipper.

And Webb, you finished way ahead of Billy Wagner, sixth among pitchers when all the ballots were counted.

You guys rocked. And you were smart. You piled up your qualifications and then beat the rush. I mean you and your Phillies, your Marlins and your Diamondbacks were all home by the evening of October 1, the morning of October 2 at the latest. Our Mets had to keep working for almost three more weeks.

What suckers.

But seriously…

Where's that New York bias we're always hearing about?

Greetings from Omar Minaya's pocket. That's where I'm wintering.
The healthy level of skepticism one should maintain in any situation has seeped away where me and the Mets' GM are concerned.
Trade away relatively young lefty Royce Ring when lefties are lefties? Omar knows what he's doing.
Sign potentially decrepit Damion Easley off a tepid year? Omar knows what he's doing.
About to grab Moises Alou, the recently achy 40-year-old who doesn't move well and isn't a stickler for hand sanitation? Omar knows what he's doing.
I'm a shill. I'm Tony Snow. I've got sunshine on a cloudy day if Omar Minaya's my forecaster. My hot stove is room temperature. There's nothing to debate: Omar says it; I believe it; that settles it.
When did I get this easy? I didn't trust Steve Phillips as far as I could throw him even after he general-managed us to a World Series. Omar Minaya could package Jose Reyes and David Wright for Jimmy Wynn and lawn furniture and I suspect I'd rationalize it.
Getting rid of those contracts now is going to free up the budget nicely. Reyes never did get to 20 homers or 20 triples. Wright has yet to win an MVP. That GQ spread was pretty embarrassing. Wynn's a proven commodity. He's the Toy Cannon! Sixty-five isn't that old for a slugger. If he hit 37 homers playing in the Astrodome in '67, imagine what he'll do at Citi Field in '09 when his option kicks in. Lawn furniture will come in handy when we start to move. Omar's a genius!
This is supposed to be the time of year when we question authority, when we assume that every move our team makes is the wrong one. You know, like swapping that stud Mike Jacobs for that malcontent Carlos Delgado…like taking on the overrated Paul Lo Duca…like letting go of good ol' Jae Seo for Duaner Somebody…like giving up dependable Kris Benson for a Yankee patsy and a minor leaguer nobody ever heard of…like soaking up Quadruple-A flotsam along the lines of Endy Chavez…like signing clearly decrepit Jose Valentin off a tepid year.
What I can't figure out is where I got the idea that Omar knows what he's doing.

Greetings from Omar Minaya's pocket. That's where I'm wintering.

The healthy level of skepticism one should maintain in any situation has seeped away where me and the Mets' GM are concerned.

Trade away relatively young lefty Royce Ring when lefties are lefties? Omar knows what he's doing.

Sign potentially decrepit Damion Easley off a tepid year? Omar knows what he's doing.

About to grab Moises Alou, the recently achy 40-year-old who doesn't move well and isn't a stickler for hand sanitation? Omar knows what he's doing.

I'm a shill. I'm Tony Snow. I've got sunshine on a cloudy day if Omar Minaya's my forecaster. My hot stove is room temperature. There's nothing to debate: Omar says it; I believe it; that settles it.

When did I get this easy? I didn't trust Steve Phillips as far as I could throw him even after he general-managed us to a World Series. Omar Minaya could package Jose Reyes and David Wright for Jimmy Wynn and lawn furniture and I suspect I'd rationalize it.

Getting rid of those contracts now is going to free up the budget nicely. Reyes never did get to 20 homers or 20 triples. Wright has yet to win an MVP. That GQ spread was pretty embarrassing. Wynn's a proven commodity. He's the Toy Cannon! Sixty-five isn't that old for a slugger. If he hit 37 homers playing in the Astrodome in '67, imagine what he'll do at Citi Field in '09 when his option kicks in. Lawn furniture will come in handy when we start to move. Omar's a genius!

This is supposed to be the time of year when we question authority, when we assume that every move our team makes is the wrong one. You know, like swapping that stud Mike Jacobs for that malcontent Carlos Delgado…like taking on the overrated Paul Lo Duca…like letting go of good ol' Jae Seo for Duaner Somebody…like giving up dependable Kris Benson for a Yankee patsy and a minor leaguer nobody ever heard of…like soaking up Quadruple-A flotsam along the lines of Endy Chavez…like signing clearly decrepit Jose Valentin off a tepid year.

What I can't figure out is where I got the idea that Omar knows what he's doing.

I like to give Hozzie The Cat a little chest/belly rub when he allows it, which is infrequently. Tonight he did. As I crouched down to find his purr zone, I serenaded him with a quick and unoriginal chorus of Ha-ZEE! Ha-zee Ha-zee Ha-ZEEE! I was a little more off-key than usual when it occurred to me that it must be more than a week since I'd caught myself wandering around the house singing the “Jose!” song. I'd been doing that a lot during the playoffs and afterwards. Same for “off to never never land!” I even entered November breaking into occasional chants of LET'S GO METS! with no Mets (or cats) in sight. So much of that stuff had built up on my brain since the first game of the postseason that there was no way it would evaporate with the last out of October 19.
It's November 19 now. An entire month has passed since Carlos Beltran passed on a curveball. Somewhere along the way, the mourning period passed. Just like that, we've crept deep into the offseason.
The World Series came and went. Sports Illustrated's World Series issue came and went…into the trash. An MLB holiday gift catalog came today. The back page features all kinds of world championship merchandise, with the METS misspelled terribly and various shades of orange and blue registering as red. MLB should get itself some better copyeditors and a new printer.
It's been a month and it still annoys. But it's been a month. You think you'll never get over these kinds of losses and…well, you don't, but you do. You don't in the sense that you're always going to replay and regret in your mind what you can do no longer do anything about on the field. That's baseball's evil beauty. But you do get on with your life, limp as your life is without any new baseball to fill it.
A month is behind us. Nineteen weeks are ahead of us until Opening Night in St. Louis. ESPN has been thoughtful enough to make a rematch between us and the Cardinals their Sunday night lidlifter on April 1. The bad news is the last time we were assigned this particular slot and responsibility, we were postponed (it was April 2, 1995, “Mets” and “Marlins” in replacement baseball until a judge issued an injunction to stop the madness; actually, that wasn't bad news at all). The good news is the Baseball Equinox has been moved up by ten hours from our previous estimate. On Tuesday, January 9, at 9:55 PM, we will be just about exactly between that final called strike in October and whatever 2007 brings us starting in April.
One month removed from 2006, we're closer to next year than we've ever been before.