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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 8 August 2006 4:06 am For about a year, it was my pleasure to be associated with an enterprise called Gotham Baseball. The following is adapted from an article I wrote for the Winter 2006 issue of its print edition.
The game stops. Of course it does. The top of the seventh is over. This is when we stand, when we always stand. We stand and stretch. We sing something. “God Bless America.” “Take Me Out To The Ballgame.” “Lazy Mary.” Anything will usually suffice.
But today the game doesn’t so much take a break as it shifts into park. We’re not using the middle of this seventh inning to stand and stretch as we are to stand and salute. It would be superfluous to sing, so we don’t bother. We’re not here to beseech a Deity to do His best on our country’s behalf; sorry, America, you’re on your own this particular Sunday afternoon. And we already know we’re out to a ballgame.
Boy do we ever.
It’s the last ballgame Mike Piazza will play for the New York Mets. We know it without having it officially confirmed. Nobody who can pronounce the relationship over is prepared to say it is so. Words like “almost certainly” are our insurance policy in the wholly unlikely event lightning strikes and the catcher who is in the closing minutes of his seven-year contract and the organization that is receiving the last of its $91 million worth from him decide they might be as good together in the immediate future as they have been in the suddenly distant past.
But we all know lightning isn’t going to strike. We all know that this day, October 2, 2005, is Piazza and done. So we all stand and salute.
Mike. And only Mike.
There is only one.
We all know what’s coming. The public address announcer tells us to direct our attention to the DiamondVision. We’re already focused. We understand that we are going to see what sports teams’ A/V squads produce when they want to acknowledge one of their own. They’re going to play a montage of highlights: Mike Piazza’s greatest hits, set to music.
The song, as said before, doesn’t matter. That’s not why we’re standing. We’re standing for him…his accomplishments, our emotions and how both are inextricably enmeshed. Yet a career retrospective, no matter how well-intended or slickly produced, is almost inappropriate. Mike Piazza’s genius is not for giving us memories to look back on, but moments to look forward to.
If his era and its end must have a theme, Carly Simon’s “Anticipation” would work best. Anticipating Mike Piazza’s actions is what we’ve been doing continually for almost a decade.
When will Mike become a Met?
What will he do when he does?
How will he handle New York?
Can he lead us into the playoffs?
Can he get us to the World Series?
What will he do next?
There are no more nexts for Piazza here, but a nearly full Shea Stadium can dream, can’t it? Stay right here, Mike. These are the good old days.
Let’s not kid ourselves, though. He’s going, going, almost gone. Standing and saluting, then, is the least we can do for every track of NOW That’s What I Call Michael! 31 flickering on DiamondVision. We know all the hits by heart.
We know he will wander slightly dazed from L.A. to Miami to out of the Mets dugout on May 23, 1998 and double off the Brewers’ Jeff Juden. We know that he will deliver us from a summer of Spehr, Castillo and Wilkins, some of the trivia answers filling in for the injured and instantly obsolete Todd Hundley. We know that down two with two out and two on, he will blast a ninth-inning laser off of young, pea-throwing Billy Wagner in the Astrodome and that it will extend a Wild Card lunge a little longer than maybe it deserves.
We know that the following year he will own Roger Clemens and rent Ramiro Mendoza and make the Big Apple a two-team town again once and for all. We know that he will ache in his team’s first postseason in eleven years, but save most of his hurt for John Smoltz in the form of a liner above the right-centerfield fence at a not-so-sacred Met burial ground in Atlanta. It will be the centerpiece of a rally that highlights 1999’s NLCS Game Six, perhaps the greatest League Championship Series game ever — an eleven-inning 10-9 win for the Braves, yeah, but a triumph of the spirit for Met fans who have just spent a month finding reason after reason to believe.
We know that 2000 will be his best Met year, that he will make his case as a battered and bruised receiver for MVP; that he will cap one of this or any club’s most impossible comebacks by blitzing the first pitch Terry Mulholland deals him to left field and beyond. It will be an eighth inning that starts with the Mets behind 8-1 and will end with them ahead 11-8, the three go-ahead runs on his bat’s say-so. We further know that he will become the Monster in this year’s NLCS, the Monster who will bust Out Of The Cage against the Cardinals; that he will pave the way for the likes of Abbott, Alfonzo and Agbayani to claim a pennant. And we surely know that he will take the final mighty swing of the 2000 World Series; that it will land in the glove of the other team’s centerfielder…we know that, too.
We know of another game against archrival Atlanta on a night when civic and athletic hostilities will be rendered irrelevant in this nation and in this city. We know it will be September 21, 2001 and we know it will be only ten days after September 11, 2001 and we know it will be the first baseball game in town since then and we know it will be plenty, plenty weird to be at it let alone place any importance on it. But we know that by turning on what Steve Karsay offers him, he will make a baseball game seem more wonderful than anything could possibly seem given the circumstances. For this team, at this time, in this town, it will be tonic.
We know all that. We know a milestone, most shots launched long by a backstop, will be reached, but we also know it doesn’t come easy, that there are injuries and regime changes and lifestyle allegations and an uncomfortable, uninvited position switch and an increasingly evident decline to fight through. That stuff’s not in the highlight montage, but we see it if we look hard enough.
We also see the second half of 2005 when the man is dropped down in his batting order. It sparks a personal revival. He starts homering again right here at Shea, right after the All-Star break. A big one against the Braves. Then the Padres. Then the Dodgers. If he isn’t his old self, we know what he is is pretty damn special. We know that he takes Sunny Kim to the most distant precincts of Flushing, No. 397 careerwise, just three nights prior to today.
We can watch most of that on DiamondVision, but really all we need to do is close our eyes and we can see as much as we want of what one ballplayer does for one set of fans who have never had someone quite like him before and aren’t sure they will have someone remotely like him again.
The video ends. The man emerges. Mike Piazza steps out of the home dugout.
He waves.
He is applauded.
He waves some more.
He is cheered.
He waves again.
He is vocally and — this much is becoming obvious — endlessly worshipped. This goes on for…well, nobody’s looking at the Armitron clock. Mike Piazza should be used to the protracted attention. He’s absorbed it steadily across the late 1990s and early 2000s when trotting from home to home. This is different. This is 47,718 pairs of eyes fixed on him, not counting those of teammates, umpires and even that day’s irrelevant opponents. Pairs of eyes and pairs of hands. The clapping doesn’t cease. The chanting, a wishfully thought “One More Year!”, won’t relent. The stands are just that; seats go fannyless for the duration.
The seventh-inning stretch expands beyond its traditional parameters. The game is stuck in park. This isn’t Cal Ripken taking a victory lap for passing Lou Gehrig. No record is being broken here. This is, technically speaking, homage to a contract expiring.
Something about this strikes Mike Piazza as too much. There is a game in progress. It is still the middle of the seventh. Nobody calls the rest of it off. Nobody would mind, but a catcher knows the rules. There is more baseball that needs to be played, 18 players, including the home team’s catcher, required to complete it.
No, you can sense Piazza concluding, this isn’t quite right.
From in front of his dugout, he makes a gesture more familiar to overeager patrons in the first 20 minutes of a Bruce Springsteen concert than at a simple baseball game between two teams playing out the 162nd strand of the string. He gestures downward with both hands. He raises and lowers them again. He’s trying to tell us something.
It’s either…
1) The ol’ Wayne’s World “We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!” bit. But that would be ridiculous because Mike Piazza certainly has the presence of mind to understand — after eight Met seasons, 972 Met games, 220 Met home runs, 655 Met runs batted in and more momentous Met memories than any Met has manufactured — he is worthy of this extreme closeup.
Or…
2) Bruce’s classic “we’re gonna be here for a long time, so siddown!” sentiment. True, we aren’t scheduled to be here much longer, but like Springsteen, Piazza is at heart a workingman. Why stay on your feet when you put down good money for that chair?
For goodness sake, people, take your seats. You can’t keep applauding me forever.
Oh yeah?
We 47,718 Mikeminded individuals would do anything for Mr. Piazza the afternoon of October 2, 2005…but we won’t do that. We won’t sit down. We won’t go gently into that bottom of the seventh. We don’t care that the Colorado Rockies are on their way to an 11-3 victory. We don’t care that our New York Mets are on their way to an 11-3 loss. We won’t get on with our lives so you can get on with yours.
C’mon Mike.
You know better.
We know better.
Piazza gives up and gives in. He stops telling us to sit down. He waves a little longer. He soaks up the adulation, makes it a part of him if he is at all human. It will be something that he can carry with him into the cold of winter, into the not exactly warm waters of free agency, off to San Diego for whom he will sign in January and to wherever fate steers him after he finishes being an active legend.
An umpire at last declares “enough.” There’s nothing in Knotty Problems of Baseball that covers mass idolatry. Play ball. The fans, the Mets, the irrelevant opponents all sigh. Sure, Blue. Whatever you say.
We sit. They play. The bottom of the seventh arrives and departs. Mike takes his position behind the plate to start the eighth…and then almost shockingly abandons it before a pitch is tossed. Even though he is due an at-bat, his manager pulls him.
Aw, what’s this? This isn’t perfect. This isn’t even the perfectly lovely of 52 weeks ago when Todd Zeile was the aging kid Met fans bid adieu. On that Sunday afternoon, Todd got to squat behind home plate because he felt like it. Todd got to homer on the last pitch he ever saw because the fates thought it cool. Art Howe managed much of 2004 like it was a Todd Zeile fantasy camp. For a year it was too much. For the day it was just right. Apparently we used up our allotment of end-of-the-line karma on Todd Zeile. Hence, no more swings for Mike Piazza. On what turns out to be the last pitch he ever sees as a Met, back in the bottom of the sixth, he grounds out to Clint Barmes. He leaves some of us tearful, but he also leaves all of us hitless.
Maybe Mike only has only so much to give. Surely it is given. Unmasked, he waves. We applaud. He exits. So do many of the 47,718. With Mike DiFelice in for Mike Piazza, this day becomes much adieu about nothing.
Besides, we’ll have plenty of opportunities to watch the Mets without Piazza real soon.
He will reappear on this field after the game to be interviewed and talk about how, wow, that was something else, and he will elicit one final burst of recognition from those who stick around. We will learn much later that he will reappear on this field yet again on a Tuesday night in August of ’06 when his new team plays his old team, he and his new crew doing well, his old outfit and its new catcher going gangbusters. We will move on without Mike Piazza, but as we can easily forecast, we won’t forget him. We can anticipate, too, how he will someday return to Shea Stadium or its successor structure as not just an ex-Met but as an ex-ballplayer, once more to be loved and honored — as a Met Hall of Famer, as a Baseball Hall of Famer, as the last Met to wear 31.
But all we know, as we stand and cheer on October 2, 2005, is he will never again be Mike Piazza who plays for the New York Mets.
by Jason Fry on 7 August 2006 2:49 pm One of the things I write for the Online Journal is a daily roundup of the Web's best sportswriting called the Daily Fix. (It's co-written by Carl Bialik, a great writer, Mets fan and my neighbor in Brooklyn.) This week is the Fix's fifth anniversary, and over at wsj.com Carl and I will be marking the occasion with some retrospective pieces that we hope are only mildly self-indulgent.
The first of them looks back at the biggest sports stories of the Fix's first five years. Nary a Met to be seen, alas, but there are two links within it that I thought might be of interest. The first is my farewell to Ted Williams, one of my favorite pieces for the Online Journal. The second is a farewell to Tug McGraw I got some guy to write. Prince of a fellow, you might say.
by Greg Prince on 7 August 2006 1:43 pm Sunday Night Baseball is a contrivance. It was created for ESPN in 1990 and smacks of football, something we'd all keep out of our beloved pastoral pastime if given the choice…which we as fans rarely are. If we are one of its participants, it screws up our weekend rhythms completely. Wake to a gorgeous Sunday morning, count the hours to 1:10 PM — or, perhaps, wake to a gorgeous Sunday afternoon and click on the bedside radio, first or second inning already in progress — that's what summer is all about. Instead, thanks to MLB's deals with devils, it's not there. Your Sunday afternoon is a void. You're left loitering for seven hours, all the way to Sunday night when your rhythms tell you you have other things to do, whether it's dreading Monday or savoring HBO. To top it off, sometimes there's little warning. It's one thing when they saddle you with 8:05 in the pocket schedule; you can plan. But when they pull the plug on 1:10 because some network, which you know would rather be fawning on the Red Sox (or Steelers) 24/7, needs some between-X-Games filler? It's ghastly, I tell you. Ghastly.
I believe everything I've just said. Yet none of it meant a damn thing last night. I fucking love these Sunday night games. They're practically the only ones I go to that the Mets win.
Thanks to my friend Dan, whom Omar didn't mind selling a prorated Sunday plan, I was tucked into a happy corner of the loge for something I'd been missing all season. I finally got to see the Mets have one of those explosive innings that I'd only witnessed on TV, the kind they apparently meet and decide in advance not to have if they know I'm not going to be there.
The Mets' overall record's the thing, and taking the last two has suddenly dwindled our magic number to Casey Kasem proportions: 40. But this habit I'd had thrust upon me of trudging home in 2006 on the wrong end of one 9-3 score after another had made me cranky: Hot dogs, green grass all out at Shea, everybody but me (4-8) guaranteed to have a heckuva day.
Hence, they should play every home game on Sunday night; I'm 2-0, for crissake. And to think when Dan invited me for what was originally listed as an afternoon affair and we found out it had been switched, there was discontent in the air. Silly fans, day games are for kids.
You gotta understand that Dan and I have been jinxing each other for the past five seasons. We meet up inside and B.J. Surhoff in right throws out Jeff D'Amico at first. We wander in together and our September swoon receives a lethal injection. If we even know we're in the park at the same time, Bronson Arroyo shuts us down. The only times the Mets seemed to win games Dan and I attended was when we weren't aware of each other's presence. Oh, you were at that scintillating Seo-Maddux duel, too? I didn't know that! No wonder we won.
Neither of us lacks for logic, but we were convinced we were a whammy, Mets fans who couldn't go to Mets games in tandem, buddies forever cursed to end these affairs with “well, it was fun except for the result.” I hate that. So does Dan.
But Sunday Night Baseball changed all that. On Sunday night, we watched a rookie pitcher (ours, not theirs) squirm out of one unpleasant situation early and then cruise like Smokey Robinson the rest of his way. On Sunday night, we watched another rookie pitcher (theirs, not ours) show he had been studying fielding at the feet of Jon Lieber. On Sunday night, the Mets of John Valentin were finally buried deep in our past while the Mets of Jose Valentin delivered a joyful present right before our very eyes.
Most of all, Sunday night was the night we got to see what the future could and should look like at the Shea to be Named Later. David Wright, who can buy us all copious amounts peanuts and Cracker Jack and not care if he gets change back, lashed that huge double down the left field line. Lastings Milledge, looking like the guy none of us wanted to let go for just any pitcher, scorched one up the middle. And Professor Reyes earned his doctorate in bases-loaded home run hitting. The three of them, combined age barely enough to be Julio Franco's big brother, were primarily responsible (well, them and Mathieson's E-1) for the seven-run fourth. They'll be back for more.
After they did their young and frisky thing, Dan and I could no longer deny that maybe, just maybe, we weren't a mutual jinx, that the obstructed loge right field view is just about perfect, that Sunday night at 8:05 is not only convenient but appropriate, that ESPN can tell us to start whenever it wants from now on.
With nearly 40,000 compatriots a-hootin' and a-hollerin' and making Philadelphia feel like Punxsutawney (tiny and wondering where the hell its shadow went), you don't have to delineate between Sheas and anti-Sheas for me. In the context of my recent travels, Shea is the anti-Busch. It's not nice. It's not polite. It's not monochromatic. It is, however, on Sunday nights like these, pretty freaking awesome.
by Jason Fry on 7 August 2006 5:05 am It's no secret that Shea can be a boorish place, full of drunks who've advanced directly to Seriously Antisocial without ever having landed on Amiable or Funny, dimwits who can't find their seats and aren't interested to hear they're in yours, asleep/feckless ushers, catatonic cashiers and people who apparently forked over $18 to $25 to yap on their cellphones about how bored they are. There's no such thing as a visit to the big blue rattletrap without at least one of the above; on a bad night you'll find yourself beset by all of them and wondering why you didn't just watch it on TV.
But then every once in a while you get the opposite: convivial seatmates, a cheerful, interested crowd, and an all-around fine time — one that can make the occasional stopped escalator, geysering toilet or unplugged Carvel kiosk just something to shrug aside as colorful scenery.
Happily, this was one of those nights I got the Anti-Shea.
It started on the subway: My car was taken over, in a good way, by a six-foot-plus Montana cowboy, complete with a deep tan, the kind of moustache Sam Elliott sports in “The Big Lebowski,” 10-gallon hat, giant belt buckle and gorgeous ostrich boots. Anyone who got within five feet of him got cheerfully greeted and interrogated; to him, New York City was a rollicking good adventure, from the subway he was on to the folks on their way home to Flushing and the subway musicians who came by to entertain us and the view out the window and the prospect of the ballgame he was headed to. It was tempting to follow him and watch how many people he could befriend on the ticket line, but I had a friend of my own to meet, so I let him go his way, silently thanking him for putting me in such a fine mood. (And New York City is a rollicking good adventure, if you let it be.)
My pal Aileen had been kind enough to offer me a spare ticket; she and I made our way to the upper deck, ejected two puzzled but nice-enough interlopers from our seats and got down to the cheerful business of drinking beer, chatting about baseball and work and writing and childhood misadventures and enjoying a wonderfully cool summer evening with the playoff-bound Mets on the national stage. An efficient, pleasant vendor kept us supplied with Budweiser (and returned at the last minute with ice cream), didn't sweat a forgotten ID and offered an explanation of the vendor trade (vendors pick what they'll haul around in order of seniority, if you're curious), along with stray but welcome bits of existentialism. The guys behind us were loud and boisterous (after they left I noticed an impressive number of little airplane bottles of booze under their seats) but knew their stuff, down to Maine's newfound reliability and Wright's new contract and Utley's old hitting streak. The guys in front of us looked like “Dazed and Confused” extras, and were lackadaiscally babysitting a couple of junior metalheads, which meant protesting if their charges didn't check in every two innings or so and good-naturedly giving them crap about constantly needing more money. But all involved were just fine, and having a good time.
The nearest thing to a badly behaved fan? It was me, at least for the moment I noticed the Mets were fawning on Joe Morgan and had to scream “MORGAN! YOU SUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKK!!!!!” at the fullest volume I could muster.
One of the vaguely babysat metalheads could have passed for me circa 1981, in fact: He had long blond hair, was decked out in Iron Maiden garb and around the eighth inning was frantic to spend his last $20 or so of ballpark money on some souvenir — any souvenir. The kid returned with a fascimile autograph ball bescribbled in machine black, and it was all I could do to laugh out loud. On the few occasions I got to Shea as a kid, inevitably in the back of somebody's mother's station wagon, I'd spend the first four or five innings obsessing about what to get with whatever ballgame money my mom had given me, then spend two innings dithering or inhaling soft ice cream, and then realize the game was almost over and wind up racing frantically around the stadium (having been threatened with eternal grounding if I wasn't back before the ninth), only to find all the shutters had come down on all the forerunners of the clubhouse shops. I'd return at the last possible moment with a Toronto Blue Jays pennant or something equally stupid, which I'd lose within a week or two. Mrs. Heingartner kept a better eye on us and certainly didn't preface every other word with fuckin', but the overall effect wasn't dissimilar. Nice to see some things don't change.
Anyway, all good, helped by the fact that down on the field John Maine was flinging Phillies aside like bowling pins and Jose Reyes was celebrating his contract in grand style and all was right with the baseball world. Nice place, this Anti-Shea. It could grow on a fella.
by Greg Prince on 6 August 2006 8:01 am I expected to attend my the 25th-anniversary reunion of my high school class Saturday night. I followed the directions until I saw the sign outside that said WELCOME CLASS OF 1981. I went inside, grabbed my nametag and affixed it to my lapel.
Talk about embarrassing. Like in one of those sitcoms, the first guy who comes up to me is someone I don’t recognize.
“Hey…Greg!” He was squinting at my nametag. I didn’t bring my reading glasses (yet another sign of aging) so I couldn’t easily read his.
“Hi!”
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember me?”
“Um…”
“Ha! That’s OK! I didn’t come into the class of ’81 until late in the year. I moved to New York from Milwaukee, remember?”
I couldn’t say I did.
“Aw, come on! Dan…Danny!”
“Uh, Dan…”
“Dan Boitano!”
“Oh yeah. Dan Boitano.”
“Aw, c’mon Greg! You can call me Danny!”
I zipped through the high school yearbook in my head but I couldn’t remember any Dan or Danny Boitano. But the name rang a bell. Wait a sec…
“Dan?”
“Yeah, Greg?”
“You didn’t go to high school with me, did you?”
“Uh, not unless you’re from Sacramento and were born in 1953.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Then, no, we didn’t go to high school together…kidder!”
I wasn’t kidding.
“Dan?”
“Call me Danny.”
“Danny?”
“Yeah, Gregster?”
I hate when people call me that.
“Um, if you weren’t in the Long Beach High School Class of 1981 what are you doing here?”
“Gregster, you always did have the sense of humor. I don’t get the joke, but I’ll go along. What are you doing here?”
That didn’t make any sense. But neither did much of high school.
“Dan, am I in the right place?”
“Well, this is where the Class of ’81 is meeting. See, look at the banner?”
And there it was. NEW YORK METS CLASS OF 1981 25TH REUNION.
“I think I’m in the wrong room.”
“Why do you say that? You’re a Mets fan, right?”
“Sure.”
“And you were a Mets fan in 1981, right?”
“Sure.”
“Then you’re in the right room!”
“The ’81 Mets are having a class reunion?”
“All teams do. Didn’t you know that?”
I didn’t know that.
“To be honest, Dan, no. I didn’t know. I’m a little surprised.”
“Don’t know why. If high school classes can reconvene in awkward, uncomfortable, possibly pointless fashion every five or ten years into seeming perpetuity, why shouldn’t baseball teams?”
“Well, I know the Mets are having the ’86 champions back…”
“That? Oh, that’s Old Timers Night. That’s the official stuff. I’m not talking about that. You think the Mets could sell ten tickets to a 25th anniversary 1981 reunion?”
“I’d buy one.”
“I know ya would, Greg. That’s why we fixed it so you’d be here tonight.”
“You did?”
“Sure! Some editions of the Mets — most editions of the Mets, actually — don’t get those fancy Old Timers Days, don’t get Dunkin’ Donuts quarters and commemorative logo t-shirts…”
“I was supposed to get one of those Friday night, but they ran out.”
“See? What’s the point?”
The point was I bought the ’86-pack in part so I’d get goodies like the t-shirt, but I wasn’t going to start arguing with Dan Boitano, possibly the most obscure of the 1981 Mets. So far he was still the only one at the reunion talking to me.
“What I mean, Greg, is there’s the 1969 team and they got all sorts of sanctioned reunions and there’s 1973 and now there’s 1986. You think the Mets are going to do anything for anybody else?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it.”
“Yes you have.”
“Yes I have.”
“Yes you have, and you’ve figured out that the Mets are almost surely going to ignore 1988 and 1999 and maybe they’ll do something for 2000 and, if things go well, 2006, but that they’ll never do it the way you want them to and, worse yet to your way of thinking, they’ll never, ever honor the Mets teams that you remember so fondly, the teams whose only mistake was not making the playoffs.”
“Y’know, Danny, you’re right.”
He was. It’s great that the Mets are doing the 20th anniversary of 1986 all year, but where was any acknowledgement of 1985 last year? Will there be even the slightest note about 1997 next year? Those are two of my favorite years, but because they never made it into the postseason, they just pass into the mists of history.
“I am right, Greg. It’s up to fans like you to keep teams like the 1981 Mets alive. You’re the only way we keep getting together.”
“Gee, Dan, I didn’t realize it.”
“You should! Especially after all the good times you and me had, huh?”
Talk about awkward. As much as I appreciated being invited in a roundabout way to the 1981 Mets class reunion, Dan Boitano was the guy I least remembered. Naturally that didn’t stop him from assuming different.
“Hey, what about Pete Rose?”
“Um, what about him?”
“Gregster, you and that sense of humor of yours! You’re killin’ me here!”
Dan was laughing. I was confused.
“You’re pretending you don’t remember how in my first Mets appearance I walked Greg Gross but then got a double play ball out of Mister Hit King himself. C’mon, you remember that!”
“Uh, I guess. It’s been a good 25 years.”
“Yeah, that was a good game. Gave up just the one run in two innings. Zachry got the win and Allen got the save, but I got the hold.”
“Is the hold even a real statistic?”
Dan Boitano turned a little defensive.
“Man, some people!”
“Dan, I meant no offense. I just didn’t know.”
“Geez, Greg, don’t tell me you’re one of those fans who thinks the closers are so great. This is just like back in the Mets cafeteria where Swan and Zachry and Randy Jones and Dave Roberts that quiff would sit at one table and Allen and Reardon would sit at another. Guys like me and Ray Searage and Dyar Miller were treated like outcasts. It wasn’t fair!”
Wow. I didn’t know baseball was just like high school. I wanted to get away from Dan Boitano, but he was being kind of clingy, so I figured maybe I could just change the subject.
“So, who else is here?”
“Well, look around. Lee’s over there chatting up the cheerleaders. What else is new? Big man on campus…hmmph. Doug’s by the bar looking a whiskey sour into his glove hand — right next to Dude, crushing that beer can against his forehead. Oh, and there’s Frankie T, acting all bored. Like usual.”
“Dave Kingman coming?”
“That beatnik who used to sulk by himself in the back row of the auditorium? Nobody here’s heard from him since like 1983.”
“Tim Leary?”
“He was here at the beginning, but said his elbow ached and left. Pussy.”
“Rusty?”
“Won’t come out of the kitchen.”
“Mookie? Jesse? Wally?”
“Eff them. They all act like they weren’t even in the class of ’81. But I think Eddie Lynch will be coming by later.”
“Oh.”
What Dan Boitano said earlier was true, to a point. I mean, sure, I liked the Mets in 1981. I guess I loved the Mets in 1981. But the guys who really made something of themselves, especially those who became 1986 Mets, aren’t guys you’d associate with that team. Either way, we were joined by one of Dan’s classmates.
“Danny!”
“Greggers!”
It was Greg Harris, the ambidextrous pitcher.
“Hey, both you guys are Gregs. That’s hilarious!”
I didn’t laugh. Greg Harris chuckled.
“Hey Dan! Remember this?”
Greg Harris dug three baseballs out of his pockets and started juggling. “I can do it with either hand!”
Dan Boitano doubled over in laughter. A fourth joined our little circle and he wasn’t at all amused.
“Damn.”
“Dyarrhea! What’s up?”
“Cut that shit out, Boitano. My name’s Dyar.”
I had a vague recollection that Dyar Miller as being angry. I guess he still was.
“Chill out Dyar! I was just hangin’ with the Gregs.”
“Harris, you I remember. Who’s this?”
“He’s a big Mets fan. He’s cool.”
“Yeah? Ya wanna be cool? Where’s Coach Pignatano? I want another shot at that old coot!”
The only thing I remembered for sure about Dyar Miller was he got into a fight in a hotel bar with Piggy. I assumed guys get over gripes like that a quarter-century after the fact, but I guess not.
“What about Torre? He owes me!”
“Mr. Torre had to work tonight, Dyar.”
“He had to work? After 25 years he still has to work Saturday nights? HA! What a loser! Well, Screw him, and you can tell him I said that, Harris. Torre used me only 23 times all year. And not at all after September 2. No wonder we didn’t win the division.”
“Uh, Dyar?”
“Yeah, you, the fan?”
“Listen, I was as optimistic as anybody that you guys were going to pull out that split-season thing, but you can’t be serious that Joe Torre not using you in September is the reason we didn’t win.”
“Who the…who let you in? What are you, some kind of Mike Marshall? I see he’s not here. Probably thinks he’s too smart for us with all that kinesiology crap. I need a Schlitz!”
Dyar Miller stalked off. Greg A. Harris took his juggling act over to Bob Bailor’s table, where he and Cubbage and Jorgensen were sitting and nursing their vodka tonics, seemingly not in the mood for any parlor tricks. Once more, I was left alone with Boitano.
“Crazy, Greg, huh?”
“Yeah, Dan. Sure is.”
Uncomfortable silence. I groped for conversation.
“So Dan…”
“Yeah?”
“Um…is Mark Bomback coming?”
“Bomback? Oh, that’s hilarious! Bomback was Mets Class of ’80! Man, that’s priceless. Bomback! I gotta go find Gardenhire and tell him you said that!”
With that, Dan Boitano was off to find Ron Gardenhire. I assumed that like Joe Torre he was probably working, but I didn’t tell Dan. It was the clean break I was looking for.
Still, I was tempted to hang around. The DJ was cueing up “Bette Davis Eyes” and I was hoping to say hi to Hubie Brooks or even Charlie Puleo, but their nametags sat on the registration table unaccounted for. Meanwhile, I could hear Dyar getting into an argument with Searage, telling Ray he wasn’t “such a big man for batting a thousand and going one-and-fucking oh!” Not ten feet away, Pete Falcone started giving his “testimony” to Ellis Valentine, who didn’t look quite right. Then I found out the pickup in the parking lot with the bumpersticker I DON’T BRAKE FOR ANIMALS AND OTHER LIVING THINGS belonged to Joel Youngblood and Youngblood didn’t look much happier than Miller. Besides, I couldn’t believe he wore camo to this affair. Trouble was brewing.
As if that weren’t enough, Boitano was fast reapproaching, this time waving a clipping of a box score and yelling something about how he “struck out Dave Concepcion and got the win.” That did it. I fished out my valet stub as fast as I could, before a tipsy Ron Hodges told the Dave Augustine story again. I’d had enough of the New York Mets Class of 1981 to last me another 25 years.
Remind me not to RSVP for any more of these.
by Jason Fry on 5 August 2006 8:27 pm If you brought a newcomer to last night's game and then today's, he or she got a lesson in how two baseball games with more or less similar scores can be pretty different.
Last night's, despite being won by the bad guys, was a gem: intrigue, drama, history, and a touch of wackiness.
Today's, despite being won by the good guys, was at best a cubic zirconia: crummy fielding, good but not great pitching, and it was on Fox.
Yeah, Jon Leiber was quite good — he got blooped and bled in the first inning and then was betrayed by Pat Burrell and by himself in the sixth. Yeah, Glavine was pretty good himself, aside from that messy first inning. But neither one of them were dominant-good, leading to the sneaking suspicion that there was a certain amount of Day Game After a Night Game at work. (Game time: a tidy 2:11, as if it were a Cyclones game. BTW, the Cyclones have won 12 in a row and just booted the Staten Island Yankees out of first. If you've never been down to Keyspan, go.)
The best news had to be David Wright looking better: He had some of the best swings against Leiber, though his crucial blow was a ball Burrell misplayed hideously. (As always, it's an unfair game.) And he made two sparkling plays to his right, including saving Wagner from yet another bad ending against his old team and preventing the inevitable Gotham back-pages immolation. (Billy, you guys have the night off — go buy David a steak.)
But wait! I was wrapping this up without acknowledging the resumption of the Mike DiFelice Era!
At first glance, DiFelice might seem like he belongs to the Gerald Williams/Jose Lima category of Returns Nobody Asked For. And though it isn't his fault, we'll always remember that he was the guy who wound up taking what should have been Mike Piazza's final at-bat as a New York Met. (Not Willie's finest hour, though it might have been my illustrious co-blogger's.)
But go easy on DiFelice. He got brought back this year to play Crash to Mike Pelfrey's Nuke: At 37, with 512 big-league games and seven teams on his resume, he found himself in the Eastern League tutoring a bonus baby. Sure, that's better than working at Sears (do even ex-backup catchers still work at Sears?), but it's pretty far from the bright lights at a pretty advanced age.
Besides, you think Crash wouldn't have blown Annie off for another couple of days of hitting white balls in batting practice and hotels with room service? Welcome back, Little Mike. It would be taking it too far to say I've missed you, but welcome back.
by Jason Fry on 5 August 2006 4:24 am I don't know why the 43,000-odd who accompanied Greg and me to Shea tonight were booing Chase Utley like he was A-Rod; I really don't. I have nothing against Chase Utley — hell, I wish he were one of ours. (Granted, approximately since Alfonzo left town I've had a habit of coveting other teams' second basemen — I'd love to see Utley or Marcus Giles in our unis.) This isn't to say I was rooting for Utley, but I certainly wasn't rooting against him. What was with the venom? As was discussed often earlier this year, the Mets and Phillies have approximately zero history considering their proximity in the division and on the eastern seaboard. Nor do Shea fans have a habit of booing visitors chasing records — hell, I found it infuriating the way moronic looky-loos and supposed Met fans cheered Mark McGwire as he juiced his way toward Roger Maris in '98, when every McGwire blow at Shea was a blow to our playoff hopes. (But we're not here to talk about the past.)
Other than the outcome, that was a tidy, intriguing game: lots of action, lead changes, some anger, something you've never seen before (OK, I probably have seen two balks in an inning, but I sure don't remember it), a laugh-out-loud moment (El Duque! A triple!) and plenty of tension. It did lack one thing, though — the right outcome.
But, hey, we stopped Chase Utley!
Sigh.
As Greg and I remarked while wedged into a Calcuttaesque 7 train, we'd have traded Utley a cycle for a W.
Addendum: El Duque's triple reminded us that we were in the park once before for a triple by a pitcher, none other than Al Leiter — an occasion that let us hear the sound of 30,000 people laughing. And it got us wondering — surely Met pitchers haven't tripled all that often.
Nope, they haven't — that was the 29th triple by a Met pitcher ever. In fact, El Duque's three-bagger moves him into a tie for sixth place in the Met Pitcher Triples ranks, with 1.
The full list (best I could determine it from Baseball Reference. Math/searching done by me, so it's probably wrong):
2006 — Orlando Hernandez
2005 — Victor Zambrano
2002 — Al Leiter
2001 — Al Leiter
2000 — Eric Cammack
1993 — Dwight Gooden (2), Frank Tanana
1992 — Dwight Gooden
1990 — Dwight Gooden
1988 — Ron Darling (2)
1987 — Sid Fernandez
1986 — Dwight Gooden
1985 — Sid Fernandez
1983 — Tom Seaver (2)
1981 — Neil Allen
1980 — Roy Lee Jackson
1974 — Jerry Koosman
1973 — Tom Seaver
1972 — Tom Seaver
1971 — Nolan Ryan
1970 — Tom Seaver
1966 — Dick Selma
1965 — Darrell Sutherland
1964 — Al Jackson
1963 — Larry Bearnarth
1962 — Bob L. Miller
(I'll save you the calculations: Gooden and Seaver are the leaders with 5; Darling, Leiter and El Sid [!] each managed 2. Now go forth and amaze your friends!)
by Greg Prince on 4 August 2006 4:26 pm Welcome to Flashback Friday, a weekly feature devoted to the 20th anniversary of the 1986 World Champion New York Mets.
Twenty years, 43 Fridays. This is one of them.
On a summer Sunday morning in 1986, I called Fred Bunz to tell him I’d be on my way over to pick him up for our trip to Shea Stadium. Fine with him, though he said his mother didn’t understand why we were going to a Mets game. After all, it was going to be so crowded. I didn’t cotton to that sort of thinking. If we want to avoid crowds, I said, we can just go to a minor league game.
“Or a Negro League game,” said Fred.
And that, folks, was and, I suppose, is the essence of the wit and wisdom of Fred Bunz. He didn’t quite get this whole baseball thing, or at least why exactly people like me were so heavily into it, but the beauty of Fred, among other things, is he was up for anything and could find something to say about it that nobody else could; semi-sequiturs, if you will. His mother, a sweet-natured German-born woman, hadn’t raised a son who watched a lot of sports, so when Fred told her he was going to see the Mets with Greg and Larry, she didn’t get it either. Why fight the crowds, especially when the games are on television?
Sure, I suggested. Let’s just grill some hot dogs and watch TV.
Fred, deadpanning again: “And we can park at Waldbaum’s and walk home.”
Waldbaum’s was pretty far from where we lived, see, and the Negro Leagues hadn’t existed for…oh hell, I’m not going to explain it. I knew it was funny. If you knew Fred, you’d still be laughing, too.
In high school, I attempted to organize our newspaper staff into a softball team. Our coverage of the field didn’t quite match our coverage of scholastic sports (which generally consisted of visiting one practice and doing one interview with one coach), so it was a tall order whipping us into shape. Feature page editor John Gillespie — ironically later an intramural softball demon at Boston University — bundled himself up in a parka and wool hat (I didn’t wait for spring to start our drills) and chased a fly ball into centerfield. The fly ball won. Fred watched and, apropos of a dozen sportscasters he’d casually overheard, declared of John, “He’s on his horse!”
We never actually played a game, but “he’s on his horse!” remains in the record books.
There was seemingly no limit to what Fred knew at least a little about. He had finished his undergraduate work about the time the 1986 season got underway and was en route to a long program that would take him into a career of medical research. He was also a security guard at TSS, the department store in Oceanside that every family in Long Beach frequented when they needed anything at all. He was well-rounded that way.
But there was one thing Fred didn’t know: That you could just buy tickets to a professional baseball game. Mets, Yankees, Minor League, Negro League; he confessed it was a mystery to him. But when I brought it up that hey, this is 1986, the Mets are great, we should go to a game…well, like I said, Fred was up for anything.
So, I suppose, was Larry Russo. Larry knew you could buy tickets to a baseball game. Approximately once a year since we were in high school, Larry and I would go to a game together, usually with Joel Lugo. Joel was my go-to guy where Mets games were concerned. He was pretty much the only serious Mets fan I was friends with through high school and into the years that followed college. I knew other serious Mets fans, but not well. I was friends with Mets sympathizers and empathizers, but not fans. It had been Joel and me for roughly a decade.
Joel and I made it to Shea twice in 1986. That’s one less time than we did in 1982. It wasn’t that we couldn’t handle prosperity, it was that Joel either had to work days (regular hours at Chwatsky’s of Oceanside, odd shifts at Shell Creek Park) or wanted to go out, drink and find women at night. What an odd priority for 1986. Somehow, Joel was scarcer than he should have been for baseball.
Larry didn’t particularly care for the game, know a lot about it or offer up nifty bon mots in spite of it. If he had heard the “Negro Leagues” crack, I get the feeling he’d have innocently countered that if that’s going to be less crowded, then maybe that’s the game we should go to. I probably would have exploded in disbelieving indignation that he didn’t know something I took for granted. Instead of wondering why Larry wasn’t more interested in baseball, I probably should have been amazed he consented to one afternoon or evening a year of it with me and my stringent standards. But since we had a pretty good relationship that involved long discussions on the state of television and movies (he was a budding filmmaker) and life, I think he considered the annual Mets game kind of the cost of doing business with me.
Fred had said yes to August 3 against the Expos. Larry said OK, too. Joel? Chwatsky’s or Shell Creek or Chivas the night before kept him at bay. We’d hook up with him later for Chinese food in Atlantic Beach. Hence, it was an unusual baseball threesome. Me and two of my closest friends from high school, neither of whom had given the slightest thought to Mookie, to Lenny, to even Doug Sisk.
I picked them up and, per Mrs. Bunz’s forecast, parking was at a premium. We wound up in one of those lots more suitable to tennis than baseball. It was like three Waldbaum’s away from Shea. I’m sure I tried to put a good face on it, but I don’t think I was swaying my pals to the baseball fan’s regimen. We trudged through marshes and meadows and asphalt and up those notorious escalators until we were in the upper deck, way the hell out in left field. A nice crisp view of nine dots in the field and one more dot at bat. Back in Long Beach, Fred’s mother was probably clicking right by Channel 9.
It didn’t rain but it looked like it might, so I brought my Mets cap umbrella. You opened it, it was an oversized blue cap with an orange NY. My mother found it at a Macy’s in North Miami Beach. When the Mets scored — as they did early when Santana singled home Heep — I waved it. Fred, Larry and everybody in our section got a kick out of it. I’d have been on TV if we weren’t twenty sections removed from all the cameras.
Bobby Ojeda took it from there. He retired the Expos inning in and inning out. Our section and presumably all others couldn’t help but notice a no-hitter was in the works. Even Fred caught on; he knew baseball etiquette, however light he may have been on the particulars. Maybe Larry did, too, but as the tension mounted, he had wandered off to see if there was something on the premises more amusing than the game itself. Larry liked to wander around that way. Years in the future, I might do the same at a new ballpark and call it research. Larry, I determined then, was just being Larry.
Ojeda carried the no-hitter into the seventh. Could this be it? Even then, it was common knowledge that the Mets had never pitched a no-hitter. Four years earlier, Joel and I had watched Phil Niekro take one into the eighth here, but that was against us.
Alas, Luis Rivera, the Expos shortstop (making his Major League debut, no less) singled to right with one out in the seventh. Bobby O, who had been the Mets’ best pitcher all year, got a tremendous ovation. We had been conditioned to give those when no-hitters went awry. With that bit of business done, the Expos scored in the seventh to tie it.
Never occurred to me that the Mets wouldn’t win. And when Ray Knight doubled in two runs in the eighth, I brought out the umbrella and we cheered some more. Bobby started the ninth, but after getting the first batter, Montreal strung together three singles, the third of which, by Tim Raines, tied the score. A minute ago he had a no-hitter, now Ojeda was facing a loss.
But this was 1986. McDowell came in and got the Mets out of trouble. Larry returned to his seat for extra innings. In the bottom of the tenth, with two on and two out, Ray Knight stepped up. Most of the 47,167 who remained yelled and clapped and looked to unnerve Expos reliever Tim Burke. I say most, because one person somewhere in the stadium threw a paper airplane that was visible from where we sat. And Larry followed the path of the paper airplane. He was fascinated by it.
Knight singled, Backman scored, Shea shook and Larry asked, “What happened?” He was sore he missed the big moment, probably sorer that I pointed out he shouldn’t have been watching the stupid paper airplane. Fred likely said something droll that got Larry even madder.
Airplane or no, those ten innings got Larry off the hook Sheawise for 1986. Fred didn’t join me for any more games there either, but a week later when I said, real spur-of-the-momentlike, “Let’s go to Philadelphia to see the Mets!” he said, “Sure!” He had never been to a ballgame in his life before August 3. On August 13, he’d be going to his second. Maybe he was falling for baseball or maybe it was just the undeniable appeal of “ROAD TRIP!” to two twentysomething guys working irregular schedules.
I had never been to Veterans Stadium. Despite it being in a major city on the other end of a major turnpike that connected to the major city we lived near, I got us a little lost on the way down, but we made it in plenty of time. Though there were plenty of fellow travelers from New York and a few highlights to speak of — notably Lee Mazzilli’s first second-tour Mets home run — we lost 8-4. Fred, no more an expert on the Phillies than any other club, nevertheless managed to sum up the situation perfectly:
“Schmitty hit one out and the crowd went nuts.”
There’d be a handful of ballpark trips with various combinations of Joel, Larry and Fred over the next several years, though never all at once. It took Joel’s moving to Phoenix and Arizona getting a team and Joel having a family to lure each of us out there one weekend in 1999 to see the Mets play the Diamondbacks. By then, Fred had been living in Baltimore for quite a while, his passing youthful interest in baseball — the Yankees, alas — rekindled into a genuine appreciation for the sport by the opportunity to see games at Camden Yards. Larry was Larry as ever. His reception of baseball faded in and out like an AM station hundreds of miles away.
In the summer of 2006, however, Larry’s antenna proved unusually sharp. He got the idea that the two of us should travel down to Baltimore to see the Orioles with Fred — “ROAD TRIP!” redux — even though he had never heard of Camden Yards or its landmark impact on ballpark design. Twenty years earlier I would have lectured him for obliviousness and we would’ve gotten into a pointless argument. Now? I calmly explained its retro essence and added, “I think you’ll like it.” He said he looked forward to it.
Luck put a day game on the schedule on a Wednesday afternoon when each of the three of us could make it. Fred, no longer baffled by the process, bought the tickets. We went, shvitzed, watched Barry Zito outpitch Kris Benson and chatted about everything and nothing. I thought about mentioning that this was practically the twentieth anniversary of that game in the upper deck with the Expos, the cap umbrella, the near no-no, the Negro Leagues, the Waldbaum’s parking lot, the paper airplane and the missing of the walkoff hit, but I didn’t. I get accused of remembering too many details as is.
Among the three of us, everybody has grown as a person since 1986. We are deeper, more experienced, have lived life as you might expect men in their forties would have. That said, it became abundantly clear that hot day in Baltimore a couple of weeks ago that none of us has really changed a damn bit. Fred stays Fred, Larry remains Larry, I’m me.
No complaints here.
Thanks in great part to this series of tubes known as the Internet, I’m fortunate to have lots of friends these days who are Mets fans. When I want to see the Mets play in person, I can find that kind of company rather easily, and that makes me mighty happy. But these friends of mine from high school? The ones who don’t like awake juggling the 25-man roster in anticipation of October? Who wouldn’t know Jose Valentin if his mustache tickled them on the subway? As little as I see them anymore and as little as they are interested in the only thing that seems to interest me on a going basis, I wouldn’t trade their friendship for a dependable third starter, bullpen help and a lefty pinch-hitter…not even the reincarnation of Rusty Staub.
Fred and Larry, despite my putting them in front of the best team the franchise ever had to offer, aren’t Mets fans. My failure to convert them has always disappointed me a touch, but they are my friends and always will be. They indulge or at least humor me when it comes to baseball and I manage to focus on whatever the hell it is they’re talking about for minutes at a time when they bring up that stuff. After the game and a trip to the adjacent and surprisingly awesome sports museum in Baltimore, we went back to Fred’s house, met his lovely girlfriend and the four of us went to dinner in their neighborhood. About halfway through, I realized the entire day had gone by and nobody had mentioned the godlike characteristics of David Wright — not even me. I have to admit it made me a little antsy to get back on the train to New York and go back to being my usual Mets-myopic self with my usual Mets-myopic crowd, but otherwise, it was as nice a Metsless day as I could imagine.
Tomorrow night, the Long Beach High School Class of 1981 holds its 25th-anniversary reunion. Fred (Class of ’82) won’t be there, but Joel is flying in from California. Larry was on the organizing committee, so I’ll see him, too. I’m hoping he’ll show the film he prepared for the 20th reunion. It was quite moving, his weaving of all the still photos and footage he culled of our class from when we were our younger selves. I think there was even a shot of me in my brand new Starter satin Mets warmup jacket.
Like I said, I haven’t really changed a damn bit.
by Greg Prince on 4 August 2006 3:13 am On the same trip when we buried now and forever The Curse of Turner Field, have we discovered we are subject to a new kind of locale-based dysfunction?
Things don't go as well as they could at the big sack of Soilmaster. Pedro outdistanced by Dontrelle despite pitching brilliantly? That in and of itself ain't nothin' but a thang until you consider that Pedro's odyssey to hip-riddled ineffectiveness began inside the sack when he was ordered to change an undershirt. 'Twas only the first bad thing to happen a Mets pitching stalwart because the schedulemaker insists they go to Miami. Or would Duaner Sanchez be chillin' down South Beach way otherwise?
There's far too much of this sort of nonsense surrounding the Mets at a venue that is audibly friendly to them. The legend of Shingo Takatsu and the infamous “funk” happened there. Mr. Delgado battered Mr. Koo there. Mr. Delgado needlessly detoured there. Mr. Jacobs, who wouldn't have had to have been traded to the Floridians had the idiot agent with the Joe Cocker jones steered his client more eptly, kicked a ball from Paul Lo Duca's glove tonight. That after denting Pedro's armor. Since when does Lo Duca not get a call at home just because he doesn't have control of the ball? Who could forget his brilliant masking of a bobble on Opening Day, the same game when Xavier Nady went 4-for-4.
Xavier Nady was traded with the Mets in Florida.
The Lincoln-Kennedy comparison between Turner Field and Your Name Here/Football Team Stadium doesn't run perfectly down the 50-yard line. The biggest difference is the Braves used their Metmashing as a pivot point from which to dominate the division. The Marlins merely annoy — albeit effectively — now and then. Also, the Marlins have won two World Series since Turner Field opened, the Braves none.
We just lost two of three to the Fish, but we swept the Braves on what is hard to remember was this very same trip. We can still bask in that a bit until the Abreuless, Lidleless, so-happy-they're-gone-they're-hot Phillies cut our lead to a single digit.
Gotta have something besides the steam rising up from the asphalt to sweat over, Mets fans.
by Greg Prince on 3 August 2006 10:39 pm The problem with being one of those bloggers who blogs virtually every day is when you take a little trip and decide you're not going to blog that you still think like a blogger. You hear stuff, you see stuff and it is your impulse to post stuff. But you don't 'cause you can't or you won't.
Honestly, it's not so much the substance that went wanting. That's what a two-man operation is for (thanks bro). It's all those headlines that zip through your brain as perfect to the occasion, but the occasion slips away and it's too soon to treat it like nostalgia.
Hence, in the interest of satisfying my own needs, I will share with whoever wants them, my slightly stale, possibly irrelevant headlines and accompanying explanations to make them somewhat useful.
Aw, Hail No!
A cab? A pitcher and a fucking cab? AGAIN?
Nady of Shea I Adored You
I have to admit I've had this one simmering for the right spot — walkoff hit, something like that — since April, albeit in the present tense. All you many accordion fans should get it without prompting. (Sometimes I think I should be writing for Joe Franklin.)
He Was The X-Man, Coo-Coo-Ca-Choo
Some weeks ago, my partner advised not falling in love with players to the point you can't bear to trade them if it's for the good of the team. As a practitioner traditionally guilty of just such sentiment, I nodded and thought, “Nady would be like that.” I could see myself, if he were ever swapped out, trying to balance the “he was really important to our big start” instinct with “in the big picture, he's an OK rightfielder and a No. 7 hitter”. But we weren't going to trade Xavier Nady this year, so it was going to be moot.
He's His Own Grandpa
Given an evening to reflect on the events of Monday — Sanchez freakishly (or perhaps flukily) injured, R. Hernandez repurposed, Oliver Perez not traded for Scott Linebrink despite what ESPNews kept reporting over and over and over again — this is what I came up with: We traded Mike Cameron and got a reliever we already had. That thinking is so 2005 and ignores a dozen variables, but it is the bottom line on which I landed. Also, as ever, I blame Heath Bell.
King of the N-Men
What bugs me the most (given that little bugs me with a 13-game lead) is that while the rest of the world dwelled on the X in Xavier, I was quite proud of noticing how few Mets there were with a last name that began with N, and Nady was about to trump the lot of them. He left with, what, 14 homers? Well, eleven previous Mets, including pitchers, had last names beginning with the letter N. Those N-Men combined to hit 25 homers in 1,357 Met at-bats. Before Nady 'nocked one out (vs. the Nats) on 4/3/06, no N-Met had gone deep since Jon Nunnally took Russ Ortiz into McCovey Cove on 5/3/00. If Xavier had hit 15 Met HRs, he would have surpassed Charlie Neal's lifetime team N-mark, set at Crosley Field on 6/15/63. Instead, like Marcus Giles and Atlanta's Wild Card aspirations, Nady and Neal will forever be kissing their sisters until we trade for Albert Nujols.
It's Like One Million Degrees
Speaking of whom, I was in St. Louis for the last three days. You think it's hot here? Well, it probably is, but St. Louis took the hot cake.
It's Like One Billion Degrees
How hot was it? I don't have a swift reply. It was too darn hot for that sort of thing (the Post-Dispatch ran a front-page story this morning about how nobody in town was in the mood for “hot enough for ya?” repartee). Every time we got into our hotel elevator, it posted the outdoor temperature and every time we looked, it was 102. That's not a temperature. That's a fever.
It's Like One Trillion Degrees
If it's the searing middle of summer and I've dragged my wife to a mid-sized American city, it can mean only one thing: Somebody opened a new ballpark. Stephanie agreed to visit Busch Stadium II — or III, depending on how you take your Sportsman's Park — in early May when it sounded charming. Then came that nasty heartland hurricane followed by bulletins of power outages followed by forecasts for like one trillion degrees. My wife has the prettiest eyes, but that's not to say they're not capable of transmitting the stare of death.
It Sure Holds The Heat Well
We conserved energy in St. Louis. No, we blasted the hotel AC at will (while allowing our home to rise to a WLIR-high of 92.7 degrees while we were away). I mean we left the midday sun, which was straight out of that Twilight Zone episode in which the earth is heading the wrong way, to mad dogs, Englishmen and Cardinal Nation. If I wanted Stephanie's company for the Wednesday night game, she insisted on the joys of room service and demurred my bright ideas about going over to the park and taking many looks around.
I See Red People
Fortunately, our hotel was directly across the street from Busch. By paying through the beak for the desired view, we could watch Tuesday night's game go on in virtual luxury box isolation. And what a view! We could see just about everything one needed to see, augmenting the silent tableau with the folksy radio call of Mike Shannon (whose classy eatery we visited and enjoyed if not as much as the pilgrimage we made to The Greatest Restaurant Chain Ever) and the professional pipes of John Rooney. Almost as good was the chance to stand sentry, peek out the curtain at odd hours and make sure nobody stole the stadium. We could see life go on from climate-controlled comfort. What Stephanie and I couldn't help but notice was how red everybody was. Not from the burn of Ol' Sol but in homage to their lord god bird. We knew this from watching St. Louis games on television for many years, but it really strikes you being in the heart of it. As Stephanie noted, for all the ballparks we've been to (30 for me, 22 for her…all with, uh, me), it's an unmatched phenomenon. Not wanting to fire the ire of the locals, she requested an evening's blue and orange amnesty to purchase a red shirt with a red bird. Sportsman that I am, I went out into the heat and bought it for her with the caveat that come a potential Met-Cardinal LDS/LCS, it is hidden deep in the closet along with that one snapshot she took of a baseball-related tickertape parade that passed beneath her office window in the late 1990s.
Soulless Cages
For those of you itching to plant yourself inside Sheabbets Field in three years and partake of all that retro goodness you've seen elsewhere, I'm here to report it's overrated if not delivered correctly. Though I found Cardinals fans' self-ballyhooment as the best in baseball to be as laughable as Jeff Weaver's pitching — they boo bad things, they cheer good things, they say lame things, they wear red things — I'm willing to concede the franchise's historical track record…or as Stephanie observed as we listened to Shannon, “Do you think he brings up Stan the Man every game?” For all its brickiness and Musial statuary, I didn't feel very much Cardinalogy in the new building. Busch II/III only has four months in the books and it's perfectly fair to assume you can't manufacture ballpark lore like Whitey's Rats could manufacture runs. Maybe it takes time, but they got it right in Baltimore and Pittsburgh and even Philadelphia. Something's missing in St. Louis. Something needs to happen in that stadium before it can truly be their home field; God forbid it's a pennant in 2006. Until then, it will remain a very nice piece from the retro catalogue and not a lot more. Keep that in mind as you kiss Bill Shea's playpen goodbye. Our current facility may not be objectively gorgeous, but like the round Busch that's not there anymore, its team's fans spent four decades imbuing it with soul to spare.
No News Is Good News
It was a good trip and perhaps more details will seep out should they seem pertinent to our ongoing discussions, but after three days of the oppressive Missouri suns (surely there was more than one) and monitoring Tony LaRussa's moods (they're not good) and keeping up with a trickle of crooked numbers from Miami (we're still in first by a ton, right?) and discovering that our prime setup man and starting rightfielder are now, respectively, a Pirate and a patient, home is the place to be: Pedro and Dontrelle, me and the couch, the remote and Snigh. Long-term, any baseball that isn't the Mets is for the birds.
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