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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 Jason Fry on 18 May 2006 4:04 am Well, damn.
I watched this one in the company of my friend Will, a diehard Cardinals fan whose inherent decency has been unsullied by his time in the Gotham irony mines, in a bar on 14th Street. (Last time we witnessed Mets/Cardinals, Will's Ankiel jersey and Cards rooting made him the target of peanut-throwers, which he found strangely delightful.) Before we get to the game, a reality check for any of us who think first place in the NL East should have changed something in this city of frontrunners: The tally of TVs in our bar was Yankees/Rangers 7, Some Fucking Soccer Game in Some Other Hemisphere 2, Mets/Cardinals 1.
Between Mark Mulder flinging ungodly curves and getting ground ball after ground ball and Steve Trachsel being possibly the most impressive I've ever seen him, this one had the look of one of those One Mistake games. Except Trachsel didn't make a mistake. Who didn't want him to walk Bad Albert? Who blamed him for Scott Rolen rocketing an 0-2 pitch off his shoe tops and seeing it go up the gap?
In the ninth, after Reyes wound up on second and it was obvious Mulder was exhausted, his arm angle jellied, I told Will: “This has gone from one of those games where you lose 1-0 and say, 'That was a great game' to one of those games that rips your heart out if you don't win.”
Alas, it would be the latter.
Not that I have a second-guess in me. I've studied the base-out matrix, and maybe it's just my old age talking, but I had no problem with Lo Duca bunting Reyes to third, not on the road with Beltran, Delgado and Wright coming up. Walking Beltran was obvious, Delgado's HBP was just the final sign that Mulder was finished, and Wright…ugh.
David Wright is my favorite player. And I have absolutely zero doubt that he's the next Franchise. But he's still just 23. Ray Knight famously said that “concentration is the ability to think about absolutely nothing when it is absolutely necessary,” but Knight was 33 when he said that. At the risk of waxing avuncular, there are things you learn in the decade between 23 and 33 that you only learn by watching a decade go by.
So chalk up one for the Cardinals — and alas, the rubber game awaits with Pujols hitless and Lima Time! no longer avoidable. But thinking of Knight, I'm imagining a 33-year-old David Wright (still in gray/black, blue and orange, of course) at the plate, bases loaded, one out, tying run on third.
And you know what? I'll take whatever odds you give me.
Meet me in St. Louis.
by Jason Fry on 17 May 2006 5:42 am Hope nobody's on when he hits one.
That, famously, was the scouting report for how to pitch to Hank Aaron, a.k.a. Bad Henry when the Mets were plotting a course past the terrifying Atlanta Braves in this newfangled thing called a League Championship Series. Now, a couple of generations later, we have Bad Albert — Jose Albert Pujols, the Ted Williams of our times. The man has 200+ home runs. The lowest batting average he's recorded as a big leaguer? .314. The fewest RBIs he's amassed in a season? 117. And he's 26 years old!
This is the terrible thing: that this curdled baseball age has us all looking askance at Pujols, wondering if that talent and power and consistency comes out of a syringe. This is what Mark and Sammy and Jason and Barry and all the guys whose names we'll never know have done to the game — they've made us look for something wrong with Pujols, who's never been connected to any shady business as far as I've heard, instead of just being in awe of his accomplishments. Doubt and cynicism are the new starting points for watching the game we love, and it will be years before it's otherwise.
Fortunately, there's a good thing, however small and temporary: Tonight Bad Albert was mortal. A bit fumbly, if anything, down to his pratfall on the rain-slicked surface of New Busch. A swinging bunt, a gorgeous dissection by Glavine after a 3-0 count, a groundout, a flyout and he even made a throwing error along the way. It's a measure of respect that this kind of washout by a player of Pujols' caliber leaves you a bit nervous: Might it have been better to see him hit a 500-foot solo shot than have him regress to the mean by pounding the tar out of us Wednesday or Thursday? You don't think that kind of thing after, say, Brady Clark goes 0-for-4. (Note I picked a player from a team we don't play again. I'm not a complete idiot.)
Still, no reason not to enjoy tonight in worrying about tomorrow. Floyd showed signs of luck and life, Lo Duca was his usual amusingly volatile self (anybody else want a game without a disagreement with an ump?), Glavine was good enough and Wright got his hits and made a gorgeous bare-handed play.
The rain delay felt inevitable — is there anywhere in North America that isn't sporting a good coat of mold right now? — and I had to go check on the rule for suspended games, for fear we'd somehow get screwed the way we did last week. (Rule 16.A.3 states that if a team takes the lead in the top of the inning but cannot complete the bottom of the inning, the results of that inning are discarded and the team that took the lead is docked an additional run for being presumptuous. Sorry Mets!) Sure, it was a nice piece of karmic balancing to put Glavine on the long end of the score after three years of frustration, but continuations have a way of getting out of hand, and I spent the time I wasn't scoffing at moronic FAN callers fretting about how Heilman would do, whenever the game would resume.
And, indeed, things did get out hand. For us.
by Greg Prince on 17 May 2006 3:52 am If all I did was watch SNY (and it’s close), I’d have no problem picking a Mets MVP for 2006.
Clearly, it’s Dave Magadan. Every time I turn this channel on, there he is going 3-for-4. He’s gotta be 21-for-28 by now. And the Mets are on the verge of clinching of the National League East in 1986 for the seventh time.
Hey, who doesn’t love a Mets Classic? I’m thrilled knowing that every time we play this game, we win this game. September 17, 1986 was a great night. But just for the hell of it, they could show, I don’t know, September 18, 1986. Or any game in any year. Isn’t there another Mets Classic? (They did say they’ll show Pedro’s 200th win again soon, but apparently not soon enough.)
It would be classic enough if we could successfully finish out the current game against the Cardinals which, if I can think back that far, has us out in front 4-3 going to the bottom of the seventh. If we don’t start up again, we don’t get a win, just a suspension. Last week, when it rained in the fifth in Philadelphia, we lost. Is there even a single rule that goes in our favor?
Not that I’m paranoid or anything, just a Mets fan. If I were paranoid, I’d be sure my flagship radio station hates me.
Didja see this? Didja hear about this? Next Thursday, in some misguided act of charity, the Mets will give Howie Rose and Tom McCarthy the day off and replace them with WFAN’s afternoon drive time team, the same guys who have taken undisguised glee in every Mets misstep of the past 17 years. The kicker is two Mets executives (one of them an owner) get to sit in and take calls later, but it’s hardly an even trade.
Listen, you wanna mess around in the middle of March, all right. Not really, but no harm done. But this is a regulation game they’re gonna pollute. It’s against the Phillies. At the moment, that’s a showdown for first (if the Braves don’t blow by both of us any minute now). The Mets and WFAN are screwing with their brand and their product. They’re screwing with us. Anybody who tunes into the game at 1:10 on May 25 will not be treated to a professional broadcast. They’ll just be treated with contempt.
It’s just one game, you say? Yeah, OK. But what if it’s a BIG game? What if it’s the kind of game that you’ll want to have the call of forever? What if there’s a walkoff homer? Six hits by a Met? What if, not god forbid because you’re not gonna toss it back but still…what if the Mets experience their first no-hitter and instead of Howie Rose describing it from the sanctity of the Bob Murphy Radio Booth it’s Mike Fucking Francesa and Chris Fucking Russo?
What if?
Strike three. There it is. Pedro Martinez completes the game without giving up a hit. Dog, I don’t wanna take anything away from the Mets because it is a no-hitter and they haven’t had one before, but it wasn’t a perfect game like Cone or Wells or Larsen threw. Now THAT’S pitching!
Right, Mikey. It wasn’t even as dramatic as Gooden’s with the Yankees.
Gooden? What about Abbott? He threw that no-hitter with one arm! Pedro needed two! It’s not even half as impressive!
Right again, Mikey. Don’t know why Pedro and Lo Duca are jumping around out there. It’s just one game. You’d think they won the World Series! They haven’t won anything!
Look, they’re entitled to be a LITTLE excited, but why don’t we wait until October to go nuts? It’s only May 25, folks. They still have to play the Phillies 13 more times and the Phillies are gonna remember this. And don’t forget, Dog, they’ve got the Yankees in another month. If you want perspective, there it is. Never mind their little no-hitter. You’re going up against the varsity at the end of June. Why don’tcha save a little of that energy you’re using celebrating for when you have to face Moose and the Big Unit?
They’re carrying Pedro off the field, Mikey. Bad job. I’m sorry, but Willie’s gotta put a stop to this. There’s no need for the Mets to be this happy. There’s just no reason for it. None! Very bad job.
You know something else we have to get on Willie about when he comes on with us is letting Pedro finish the game. Just because it’s a no-hitter doesn’t mean you should let him go nine innings. That’s a hundred pitches! He’s gonna break down!
It’s not like the game was out of reach either. Willie was being Grady Little there!
I understand it’s a no-hitter, but c’mon, who cares? The only thing I can say in Willie’s defense is he doesn’t exactly have Mariano out in the pen. We know who the REAL Sandman is in New York, Dog.
Wagner’s no Rivera, that’s for sure, Mikey.
The big problem with the Mets, Dog, is they don’t have a captain like Jeter to keep things in perspective. He’s all about winning in October, not June. You wouldn’t see the Yankees piling on each other like that in JUNE! They’ve been there, they know how to win. That’s experience. Pennants aren’t won in June, folks. They’re won in October. The Mets don’t know that. But how could they?
When you’re right, you’re right, Mikey.
We gotta wrap this up and get it to Mink in the studio. The final totals: Phillies no runs, no hits, no errors…
by Greg Prince on 16 May 2006 3:51 am While the Mets have been taking a week or so off from their winning ways, Stephanie and I have been looking forward to our own vacation. Oddly enough, we had the same idea they did for when it comes time to take a break from working. We're gonna go to St. Louis.
We won't be there for a few months. The Mets, unfortunately, have decided it would be fun to try to pitch professionally and hit consistently — or perhaps continue to do not enough of either — in the home of the twice-defending National League Central division champion Cardinals right away.
We're going because we want to check out the new ballpark and revisit our favorite Midwestern chain restaurant. What's the Mets' excuse? This is very poor planning on their part, a total foul-up of logistics. When you've been stumbling, stammering and stinking up Philadelphia and Milwaukee, the last place you want to try and freshen up is in St. Louis.
Where are the freaking Marlins when you need them?
Tom Glavine won't be afraid of Albert Pujols even if I will be and Steve Trachsel should be and Jose Lima needn't bother. He should be afraid of David Eckstein and work his way down the lineup from there. I'm more worried about Lima than I am Pujols, actually. I've seen Pujols punish the Mets plenty before. I'm just getting used to Lima Time coming on our time. Would prefer not to, but it's an occupational hazard.
(Aside for literal thinking: Lima's last top-notch National League start — his last Senior Circuit notch of any kind — came against the Cardinals of Pujols, Rolen and Edmonds in the 2004 National League Division Series. So you never know…but, really, sometimes you do.)
Here's a thought that others have had, but I'll pretend I just came up with it: Let's get Aaron Heilman back into the rotation. Let's stretch him out and put him on the mound by the end of the week. There. Done.
Didn't feel this way two months ago, so why the about-face? It's not two months ago. It's not two weeks ago. Besides the extended absence of Victor Zambrano, the unknown return date of Brian Bannister and the refusal of Mike Pelfrey to step into an experience machine? Let's call it intellectual consistency. If there's nothing wrong with inserting a starter into the bullpen to get a team through the post-season (and there isn't), why not do the inverse to not deny yourself a trip to the post-season?
Yes, Heilman's an asset in the bullpen. A tremendous asset. And maybe when Bannister comes back and Pelfrey's ready and Barry Zito swings by for the stretch run, it would be a good idea to bank that asset. But for now, liquidate a little. Heilman is the Mets' third-best starter and their third-best reliever. At this moment for where this team is (on a 2-5 slide; down two starters; one game from second place; in St. Louis), starting is a better use of his right arm than relieving.
It breaks up a pretty good thing in the pen, but antsy times call for ad hoc measures. Let's assume Wagner is Wagner, Sanchez isn't Mike DeJean and Jorge Julio…well, it's a lot to assume, but the Mets seem to lug around eight or nine relievers at any given moment. If that doesn't allow them to plug a hole for a couple, three starts with a semi-proven arm like Heilman's (thus avoiding tapping Lima and counting on Gonzalez), then why bother with the Bells and Bartolomes and whoever is up or down today, I forget. In other words, do what you have to do. You have to do something.
When we're in St. Louis, we'll be doing Steak 'N Shake. I love that place. It's the West Wing of burger, chili & shake joints. I highly recommend the Mets visit it this week if they have to be in St. Louis at all. Are we sure they have to?
by Greg Prince on 14 May 2006 9:17 pm “I’m going to Port St. Lucie, which may not mean anything to you, but happens to be the spring training home of the…”
“New York Jets. Yes, you’ve told me. Josh, you can watch basketball on TV.”
“Yes, except the New York Knicks are a basketball team, the New York Jets are a football team and Port St. Lucie is the spring training home of the New York…”
“Mets! Yes. Dammit, I’m inadequate.”
Some seasons may present evidence to the contrary, but Major League baseball teams generally don’t get cancelled. Their ratings may tank, their pitching goes on hiatus, their catchers get recast, their settings — Montreal out, Washington in — are reimagined and they may even move to a new network (like the Brewers shifting from the American to National Baseball Conference in 1998), but at no time since 1900 have baseball teams had final episodes…or have you seen the Louisville Colonels in syndication lately?
That, among other things, makes them different from television series. But not much different.
Take Saturday night, another ready-for-prime time installment of 2006 Mets baseball. The TV Guide description barely did it justice.
7:00 – 60: A veteran hurler makes his debut, but it’s a struggling bit player who surprises everybody with a big performance in place of a frustrated regular, while the team’s hardnosed catcher takes it upon himself to compensate for the shortcomings of a suddenly inconsistent bullpen and a frighteningly unreliable home plate umpire. Willie Randolph, Paul Lo Duca, Cliff Floyd, Duaner Sanchez. Guest Stars: Jeremi Gonzalez, Jose Valentin, Tim Tschida, Derrick Turnbow.
They can’t give everything away in these capsules, though it hardly seems unexpected anymore that the Mets don’t settle anything until the fourth act. How many shows have they put on this year that involve scores like 9-8, unlikely storylines like those of Valentin’s 4 RBI and Gonzalez’s 5+ innings, tense subplots involving a slump (Floyd’s), a blown call (Tschida’s), hairtrigger ejections (Sanchez and Randolph) and leads that aren’t what they appear to be until the credits roll? When they end like Saturday night’s did (or last Friday night’s against Atlanta or the Wednesday afternoon before that in San Francisco), we’ll stay tuned. It sure beats the hell out of watching any more of what was on during the week:
You know that guy you see coming to the plate in the late innings against whoever your closer is and you just know he’s gonna bring you bad karma? The guy who makes you cover your eyes and your ears even though it’s almost impossible to do both at the same time? Well, that guy is me. My name is Burrell.
Before it went to Hall in a handbasket, I was pretty excited to join Sunday’s edition of The Pedro Martinez Show already in progress, but I’d actually been looking ahead all afternoon. No, not to the Cardinal series Tuesday night, but to two series that end tonight. It’s goodbye to one of my favorite sitcoms of the past decade and farewell and amen to the best drama an over-the-air network has ever broadcast.
The sitcom is Malcolm in the Middle, that rarest of television concoctions that was great at the beginning, greater at the finish, yet rather mushy in the middle. I was ready to write it off two or so years ago as another That ’70s Show, a comedy with lots of kids who grew uncomfortably old to watch. But once Stephanie and I start with a series, we usually stick with a series (as we do with our team). We stuck with Malcolm and we were rewarded. Its final two seasons have been its strongest, its aura more eccentric and nuanced than ever before.
Malcolm got a lot of notice when it debuted in January 2000 for looking different from most sitcoms, but it should be remembered for inhabiting its own universe in the way the best art does. Of course Fox sentenced it to a slow demise by pre-empting and yanking it about the schedule as deemed temporarily convenient (they did the same to the aggressively subversive Arrested Development and the hilariously heartwarming Bernie Mac, two other recently defunct Foxcoms abused to death by their handlers in 2006), so it probably won’t be remembered very much. But the passing of the family with no discernible last name deserves a nod. Malcolm will never get satisfaction, Reese will never get a brain, Francis will never get it together, Dewey will never get his way, Jamie will never get to speak and Hal and Lois will never get completely played by their kids the way so many TV parents do. They will never quite garner the kudos they merit either, but Stephanie and I enjoyed their company immensely. (8:30, Channel 5, in case you’ve forgotten it was still on.)
“A weekend at spring training. Mike Piazza is going to be standing in the batting cage. He’s going to turn and see me. He’s going to say, ‘Dude.'”
“Well, I wouldn’t want you to miss a legitimate ‘dude’ sighting.”
“So I can take off?”
“No.”
Imagine you found out about the 1986 Mets around 1989. Let’s say you saw Games Six and Seven against the Red Sox or came across a copy of A Year to Remember and were intrigued. You then somehow found a way to watch every game from 1986. It took you a while, but you got through it and after watching every previously recorded inning of the regular season, the playoffs and the World Series, you were hooked. By now, it’s 1991 and you’re up to speed and you consider yourself a full-fledged Mets fan and you’re ready to follow them in full. Alas, you find out that 1986 was five years ago and that the Mets aren’t close to what they used to be.
This, in a so-so analogy nutshell, was how I got hooked on The West Wing. A great deal of fuss was made over this show when it premiered in the fall of 1999. The pilot aired on September 22, the same night the Mets were trying to even a three-game series with the Braves in Turner Field and reduce their deficit in the N.L. East to one. As you can imagine, my attention was on what was really going on in Atlanta, not some made-up nonsense in a fictional White House. Even when the ’99 Mets took their final bow, I wasn’t particularly interested in this show. Though well-meaning folk urged me — given my bent toward the political — to check it out, I decided I watched a lot of TV, I had plenty of shows, I didn’t need another one.
The only thing I knew about The West Wing while it was winning awards and praise was it was winning awards and praise, awards and praise I figured belonged to The Sopranos, a cable drama that had the good sense to debut in January and air in a time slot with limited competition and hardly any baseball to distract me.
NBC eventually funneled the first few seasons of The West Wing to Bravo, which ran it and reran it. One Friday night in very late 2003, I came across a marathon of what I would later learn were episodes from the third season. Around 11 o’clock, I was intrigued. By 4 in the morning, I was absorbed. I started catching the nightly repeats on Bravo. Hey, this is pretty good after all. I stopped by the Virgin Megastore near where I worked in January 2004 and took a flyer on the first-season DVDs. Brought them home on a Friday night and popped one in the machine. Stephanie found me on the couch at dawn Saturday, prying open my eyelids, working on my eighth or ninth episode.
In a matter of weeks I went from non-fan to hardcore fan. It was conversion of the most intense sort. The only thing like it in my life was when I morphed from petless soul to Cat Person in the hour or two it took to adopt and carry home our first kitten. Between Bravo, the DVDs, a handy paperback guide and a number of helpful Web sites, I had become immersed in the first four seasons of The West Wing. It took probably seven months before I figured out who exactly was who and understood how what I had seen on Bravo connected to what I had seen on the discs.
What I didn’t know, come summer 2004, was that the best of The West Wing was already over. It was the first four seasons, 1999-2003, that enchanted me so. When I was ready to dive into the fifth-season reruns and the sixth-season launch, it was no longer what it once was. Aaron Sorkin, who had created President Josiah Bartlet and chief of staff Leo McGarry and deputy COS Josh Lyman and communications director Toby Ziegler and his deputy Sam Seaborn and press secretary C.J. Cregg and everybody and everything else that filled this wondrous version of Washington, had already left the show. It continued without him and, sort of like the 1991 Mets, didn’t perform like a champion despite a good bit of the cast remaining the same.
Hence, it’s not all that sad that tonight on Channel 4 at 8:00 that The West Wing ends after seven seasons (overlaps Malcolm; God Bless DVRs). It’s been pretty good this year, but it hasn’t been The West Wing with which I fell in love in early ’04. And that West Wing is the one that has severely impacted what you’ve been reading here since early ’05.
“Oh, this is going to be a good night. My woman, a fine stew, and a Mets game on national TV. You see how I slipped that last one in?”
“I saw.”
I still watch a lot of TV, comedy mostly. I don’t like heavy stuff as a rule, I don’t care for conflict; I sort of (sort of) wish the Mets would win every game 9-zip. Yet I consider it my very good fortune to have lived in this golden age of dramas, to have been exposed regularly to the three greatest ever created for the medium: The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and The West Wing. The first two have been on HBO where they don’t demand as many episodes and they let you curse a lot. That gives them something of an advantage over The West Wing, I suppose. On any given evening, depending which one I run into, I’ll tell you that any of the three is tops. I like the profane and profound ground The Sopranos broke. I like how nobody on Six Feet Under was obviously good or bad, just alive until dead. But I really like how The West Wing of Aaron Sorkin infiltrated the way I think and the way I write.
Maybe because there are more installments of it than the others and maybe because they’re still on Bravo fairly frequently and maybe because I subjected myself to such a crash course in it, I can’t think of another show (not even the eminently quotable Simpsons) that’s influenced me the way The West Wing has. It probably has more to do with the indelible characters and their unimpeachable aspirations, all of which flowed from Sorkin. Everything they did was in the service of creating a better government and a better country. I love to watch them walk fast and talk faster, to see the rows of neon bulbs light up over their heads, to piece together what’s next, to attempt and occasionally effect meaningful change in sixty minutes including commercials. First it made me want to be like them. Eventually it made me want to write like that.
I’ve made the occasional blatant West Wing reference in these pages. More often, I’ve dropped an homage or two into the text that maybe only another Wingnut would get. If I’m lucky enough that you notice a certain pace or rhythm to my writing and if I’ve managed to truly tell a story in the course of a thing, that’s likely the unseen hand of Sorkin at work. When I’m framing our fervor for this baseball team in unusually high moral terms, I’m pretty much channeling the spirit of that show. Many writers have unknowingly contributed to my pastiche stylings, but there is only one whose television show absolutely altered the way I go about my craft, hopefully for the better.
My thanks to Aaron Sorkin. That was awfully nice of you.
Because TV series available as boxed DVD sets are pushing indoor plumbing and the drag bunt as eternity’s most important invention, I’ll never be without The West Wing, the one that I was slow to catch on to but relentless about staying with. I’ll always have the noble Bartlet, the warm and wise McGarry, the cynical but righteous Toby, the former teen-schlock actor I came to consider My Sam, the passion of the Cregg, the steadfastly supportive Donna Moss, the admirably alert Charlie Young and, now that all is said and done, my favorite character, Josh Lyman.
Why is he my favorite? Oh, no particular reason…
“I don’t know why you think the Committee to Re-Elect needs us to protect them. And if Ritchie’s strategy is what you say it is, won’t Josh Lyman figure that out in five minutes?”
“It’ll take his assistant Donna five minutes. It’ll take Josh half that time.”
“Really?”
“Maybe a little longer because the Mets lost last night, and he’ll need to focus.”
by Jason Fry on 13 May 2006 1:16 pm No need to panic. But wipe that smile off your face, Met fans. We've got trouble.
In any other situation, Jose Lima would now be James Baldwin: An old starter who comes apart like a cheap suit above 70 pitches is useless to a major-league-baseball team with any aspirations to play extra games. Lima may be charming, but he's also done. (And he didn't help our collective cause by muttering about umpire conspiracies after the game.) Yet he's not necessarily out of the rotation, because we have no idea what Jeremi Gonzalez (a flyball pitcher facing the grunt-and-uppercut Brewers, oh boy) will do tonight. And have you seen the way Steve Trachsel's pitching recently?
It also doesn't help matters that we've developed an aggravating habit of putting our foot on teams' throats, then letting them get up and winding up surprised when they knock us upside the head. Two nights ago the clubhouse boy had the shower on for Gavin Floyd, who was in not-if-but-when territory as we hit fastball after fastball on the screws. Between resilience and Rowand and rain, he wound up with the crappiest shutout in the history of baseball. Dave Bush's location was wretched and his vaunted control was nonexistent, but we let him hang around and get comfortable and when Lima's extra-small tank hit E, he wound up with a W. (And I wound up PO'ed.)
This is a very good team. The bats will come around — heck, we did score six runs last night, even if some of those should go on Rickie Weeks' ledger. The back end of the rotation will heal and get replaced through acquisition or promotion. The Phillies aren't this good. The Braves are still back there a ways. But we're heading into the toughest six weeks of the schedule while a bit of a mess.
Buckle up.
And if something whizzes by in the left lane, well, remind yourself it's May.
by Greg Prince on 13 May 2006 12:36 am 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.
Harking back to Spring Training 2006, the regular reader may recall one of my intermittent fits of panic regarding our team and my ability to relate to it for another season:
This is the spring of our diaspora. The Metropolitan-Americans seem to have been ruthlessly dispersed, scattered from their homeland, no longer allowed to live as a single, coherent tribe.
At the time, I was annoyed that the World Baseball Classic had plucked about half of our roster from our midst, that the new network allegedly devoted to our franchise had yet to transmit a signal and who were all these new guys anyway?
Blog buddy Jason offered up a pithy reminder that this happened every spring and felt “compelled, by way of reassurance, to point out that every year you get worried in mid-March that you’re just not interested in this year’s collection of Mets, and it always goes away by mid-April.”
Maybe to probably, I thought, but it’s not so much that I fear I’ll suddenly find something else to do or somebody else for whom to root. What it boils down to is I need my getting-acquainted period, a proper courtship phase. I wasn’t getting it in 2006, but once I did, I loved Carlos and Billy and Xavier on a first-name basis just like the rest of them. (The fact that it took maybe 20 innings total to achieve that state proves just how easy I am.)
Same deal in 1986. I had to get to know the guys who were total strangers to me when 1985 ended. They couldn’t just show up on my 98-win team and tell me they were Mets. They had to prove they were worthy, they were worthy.
When MTV rolled the credits for its New Year’s Eve ball during the December/January in between, they cleverly (for them) finished with a graphic that read We 86’d ’85!. In baseball terms, that was going to be a harder job. The 1985 Mets, as I never seem to tire of mentioning, were a very special club, accomplishing everything you could ask for except extending their schedule a few weeks. I’m not at all amazed that ’85 keeps coming up in these discussions of ’86. The two really were of a piece.
But even then in those collusionary days of relatively limited player movement, no team remained the same for consecutive years. Turnover was a part of baseball if not as much as it today. Nevertheless, the 1986 Mets benefited by maintaining almost all of its 1985 contributors.
Who didn’t come back? In a word, Rusty. Rusty Staub, 41, retired after making the final out of the 1985 season. He got into 54 games, had 45 at-bats, hit .267 and made one stupendous catch. We understand fully that his stats don’t nearly tell the story, that he put the flourish on the end of lefthanded pinch-hitter deluxe!. He was almost a luxury, but good teams find way to have Rusty Staubs on hand. The 1985 Mets weren’t just keeping him around to drive Keith Hernandez to the park.
Hard to imagine they couldn’t have continued to save him a spot if he had somehow decided to keep playing, but it’s worth noting again that 1986 was the year the rosters shrunk from 25 to 24. A player whose only core competency by then was pinch-hitting — albeit historically well — would have had a tough time justifying taking up space…not that Rusty Staub ever just took up space. Ah, you know what I mean.
Otherwise, the ’85ers who weren’t around for even a cameo in ’86 never made their absence felt. Who would have been missed? Tom Paciorek? Kelvin Chapman? Ronn Reynolds? Joe Sambito? Gone and immediately forgotten. The very good teams can make you think their 24-man rosters are composed of 42 men. That’s what it felt like in ’86.
Ray Knight returned from 1985 but he was a different Ray Knight. George Foster seemed to stagger from the fourth to the fifth and final year of his contract but during the crucial period when the Mets were building a fortress of a lead, George Foster’s black bat was positively Metsmerizing. Lenny Dykstra was in the house for a full year, as was Rick Aguilera, as was Sid Fernandez (demoted to the Tides to start ’85 after flashing heavy promise in ’84). Obviously the mainstays stayed put as well.
So what was tangibly different about the ’86 Mets from the ’85 Mets? Who gave us what we needed that we didn’t already possess?
That’s easy. There were three newbies whose contributions from the start recalibrated the Mets from very good to awfully great. They weren’t Hernandez and Carter in terms of instant impact. It was more subtle than that. But in their way, they were just as important. It’s not called a team sport for nothing.
The most obvious and beautiful addition was Bobby Ojeda. I’ll plead retroactive ignorance on his qualifications. He was just another pitcher from another team from another league as far as I knew. All the mid-’80s Red Sox arms were a jumble of names to me: Clemens, Boyd, Ojeda, Malone…if everybody knew their name, it was news to me.
Hence, when we traded ’85 underachievers Calvin Schiraldi, Wes Gardner and John Christensen to get Ojeda, I was just glad to have rid ourselves of Calvin Schiraldi, Wes Gardner and John Christensen. Never would’ve guessed that we had added the man who would lead us in victories in ’86 (18-5 overall). On a staff led by Cy Gooden, you had to be kidding. But boy could that southpaw pitch and boy did he show it right away (7-0, 1.70 after six starts and some relief). Or left away. Even though I had watched baseball for going on 18 years in 1986, it was only dawning on me that choice of arm mattered in the scheme of things.
Same could be said for Teufel, another steal. Teuf was had for ’85 flotsam Bill Latham and Billy Beane in a trade Billy Beane would love. To be fair, I didn’t see what the big deal about Teufel was, either as a righthanded peg in a righthanded hole or, for quite a while, as a piece of the ’86 puzzle. I was so in baseball love with Wally Backman that it didn’t really penetrate my batting helmet that his status as a switch-hitter was primarily an honorific, that he was a lefty getting by on outdated Topps information. Tim Teufel was the antidote to all the ’85 platoon stopgaps. Better than Chapman, better than Ron Gardenhire, better than Larry Bowa. All had been on the Mets in 1985, none ever played for anybody ever again.
Teufel performed competently most of the year and spectacularly once, on June 10. He came up with the bases loaded and one out in the bottom of the eleventh inning at Shea needing to loft a sacrifice fly to break a tie. Instead he launched Tom Hume’s delivery beyond the blue wall. Mets 8 Phillies 4. Mets 5 Phillies 4 would have been sufficient, but it was Tim’s first humongous contribution and if it loosened him up, then that was grand, too.
The loosest rookie I ever saw was ostensible third baseman Kevin Mitchell. He won a job in spring which was significant in itself considering these were the 1986 Mets, locked and loaded with or without a part-time frosh. If Mitchell was intimidated by his surroundings, he never showed it. As late as July 6, he was batting .370, having put on a glove everywhere you could, save pitcher and catcher. With switch-hitting HoJo and Danny Heep handling the lefty pinch-hitting possibilities, righty Mitchell essentially replaced Staub and probably a few others who shuttled up and down from Tidewater in 1985, where All-World Mitchell honed his multiple crafts for the duration despite a cup of 1984 coffee.
The ’86 Mets were a year older, a year wiser, a year better than the ’85 Mets. And they had changed just enough to make the great leap forward. Kevin Mitchell and his surprise versatility was Davey Johnson’s genius. Frank Cashen should get more credit from posterity for acquiring a useful complement in Tim Teufel and a tremendous competitor in Bobby Ojeda. Why Ojeda for Schiraldi, et al (with Schiraldi making his greatest contribution to Mets history in a Red Sox uniform) isn’t routinely mentioned as one of the top trades in team annals is beyond me.
They all stopped being strangers pretty quickly. Just like Carlos Delgado and Billy Wagner and Xavier Nady and all our new pals. I like when my team gives me every reason to get to know them intimately.
by Jason Fry on 12 May 2006 3:52 am This had to be one of the more quietly infuriating losses in recent memory.
First off, early on Gavin Floyd was making Cory Lidle look like Cy Young. He had nothing, and I was actually worried we would run up a big lead in the first couple of innings, watch the Phillies step out after every pitch and generally behave like they were wearing cement shoes (and with Trachsel, aka the Human Continental Drift, on the mound) and the game would be called in a howling gale with us up 8-1 in the third.
And if a couple of things had broken a bit differently, that might have been exactly what happened.
Wright just missed a three-run homer. Aaron Rowand made one of the gutsier plays by a center fielder since Lenny Dykstra walked the earth, depriving Nady of a three-run double or triple. (The Phillies being the Phillies, Rowand will eventually realize he's one of the only players with a pulse and bemoan his exile to a colorless franchise run by bloodless marketers. Just ask Billy Wagner.) Trachsel's bid to make like Tom Glavine got snuffed in the hole. Each time their Floyd slipped the noose, he got a little more confident, until that decent fastball and that big curve were actually hitting their spots. And meanwhile Trachsel was being Trachsel: not bad enough to make you throw things at the set, but not good enough so you felt you could hit the bathroom if they had a runner on second.
When the monsoon came, seconds after Beltran struck out to make it an official game on a night when both teams were headed to the airport…well, you learn a couple of things in three decades of watching baseball. “Boy, did we just get fucked,” I announced to nobody in particular.
I suppose that's baseball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes it rains. And once in a while it rains, you get fucked, and you lose.
by Greg Prince on 11 May 2006 11:57 pm Behold the blowout! The mighty aberration! My team is kicking your team’s ass like there’s no tomorrow. You don’t want there to be a tomorrow because it is obvious that your team can never hope to compete with my team, because my team is blowing your team…OUT!
Perspective is pummeled in a blowout. I can’t see the forest for the lumber. If the Mets win by a lot on a Wednesday, as they did last night, I’ve decided they’ll win by even more on Thursday (if they’re not rained out* as might be the case on this particular Thursday), and come Friday, the rest of the league will cower in the opposing clubhouse and forfeit the flag. Why even bother? We’re the Mets. We blow you out.
It never quite occurs to me that a 13-4 laugher is not normal. I’m intoxicated. I’m a big man. My team’s a big team. Too bad it doesn’t last.
The most legendary blowout in Mets history (the one they were on the walking-tall end of) was in 1964, their third year of wretched existence. The Mets beat the Cubs 19-1. A fellow was said to have called Newsday.
“How many runs did the Mets score today?”
“19.”
“Did they win?”
The Mets have scored as many as 23 runs, in 1987. Beat the Cubs 23-10. That was silly. The Mets have given up as many as 26, to the Phillies in 1985. They were down 16-0 after two. I preferred to focus on the seven they scored between the third and the ninth, but that’s another story for another rainy evening.
My favorite blowout — maybe even more so than last night’s — was a 17-1 smackdown of the Pirates thirty years ago this spring. I had nothing in particular against the Pirates. They’d won more division titles than us (to that point, we were the only two kings of the National League East, founded 1969), but I wasn’t thinking about that on the third Saturday in April. The victim didn’t matter. The score did.
The 1976 Mets were nothing special, I suspected. They were managed by dishwater-dull Joe Frazier. Not the boxer Joe Frazier. The manager Joe Frazier. See? Doesn’t that sound lame? He managed at Tidewater the year before. When he was appointed to replace Roy McMillan, the papers’ reaction was, “Who?” The Mets tried to get across the idea that nobody’d ever heard of Walter Alston when Brooklyn brought him up to manage 22 years ago and he was still helming the Dodgers. That sounded like a stretch to me.
I was also as sore as Mets fan could be that Rusty Staub had been traded for Mickey Lolich over the winter. Rusty was the best player on the 1975 Mets, a team that for a few (OK, a hundred) breaks could’ve beaten the Pirates. Staub was considered a clubhouse lawyer, so M. Donald Grant had to off him. He was to be replaced by Mike Vail, who’d lit up the previous September with a 23-game hitting streak. Just staring at the name Mike Vail conjures images of hope and, as often happens where a Met prospect is concerned, dreams dashed. Rusty was traded to open up a spot for Vail. Vail broke his leg playing basketball. And Mickey Lolich was about 55.
But the Mets were off to an OK start. A couple of days earlier, Dave Kingman hit one of those Dave Kingman home runs in Chicago. He broke a window on Waveland Avenue, Ralph Kiner told us. We were over .500, we still had Seaver and Koosman and Matlack and Del Unser (a journeyman outfielder on whom I was briefly fixated). Maybe we could do something. But just maybe
My doubts did a 180 on this beautiful Saturday afternoon. Did I say beautiful? It was 96 degrees…96 degrees on April 17 in New York! The weather report that night announced we were the hottest spot in the country today. Wow! Honest to god, I assumed that if it was 96 degrees in New York, it must be, I don’t know, 125 in Florida.
It was too a nice a day to be outside once the top of the first at Three Rivers commenced.
Wayne Garrett led off against Bruce Kison and singled. My boy Del struck out but John Milner singled. Ed Kranepool, a Met as long as any of us could remember yet mysteriously merely 31 (which sounded older when I was 13), singled to make it 1-0. SkyKing struck out but then Ron Hodges walked to load the bases. Bud Harrelson singled to plate two. Felix Millan doubled and went to third on an error. Two more scored. When Jerry Koosman struck out against Kent Tekulve (brought into face one of the worst-hitting pitchers in the world), the Mets led 5-0.
5-0! The Mets scored five runs in the first inning! It wasn’t even five-nothing. It was, in the parlance of Bob Murphy, the Mets five, the Pirates coming to bat. The point is the Mets, in my 13-year-old mind, never scored in the first inning. I suppose they had. I know they had. The leadoff hitters in Game 3 of both the 1969 and 1973 World Series — Agee and Garrett, respectively — hit home runs (10 years later, Lenny Dykstra would do the same). Two sets of numbers that made no sense to me were 96 degrees on 4/17 and 5-0 in the middle of the 1st.
I wasn’t yet familiar with the quote from the Mets’ first president George Weiss, spoken in his Yankee days, that the ideal situation was for his team to score five runs in the first and then slowly pull away. For at least a few minutes, rooting for the Mets was like rooting for U.S. Steel. We’re up 5-0 and the Pirates haven’t batted. When are we going to see some more?
The top of the second looked promising. Wayne Garrett doubled. Unser singled, but Garrett was thrown out at home. The Mets were turned away in this frame. Damn! Damn Wayne Garrett! Why was Wayne Garrett still playing third? Every year we were promised a new third baseman. The great third hope of this off-season was Roy Staiger. I’d read about him every week in The Sporting News in ’75. He was tearing up the International League. Bring up Roy Staiger!
Garrett withstood Roy Staiger and held onto his job, much to my chagrin. Wayne Garrett was exactly what was wrong with my team in the mid-1970s. Not him specifically, but our inability to rid ourselves of boring players and replace them with exciting players. Why didn’t they just do that?
The Pirates pushed a run across in the bottom of the fourth — singles from Sanguillen, Oliver and Bob Robertson. It ended 5-1. I didn’t take that as a threat. I assumed there was no legal way the Mets could lose if they led 5-0 in the first. But it was beginning not to feel like something great was going to happen.
Oh me of little faith. With two out in the top of the fifth, Krane reached on an error by Dave Parker. Kingman doubled Eddie to third. Then Ron Hodges singled them both home. I wouldn’t swear to it, but it was probably one of the last three or four hits of any consequence Ron Hodges ever got. Ron Hodges came up from Double-A in 1973 when Jerry Grote was injured. Against these very same Bucs, the No. 79 Greatest Met of the First Forty Years put a tag on Richie Zisk in extra innings in late September, then drove in the winning run in a huge game.
Ron Hodges would play for another eleven seasons, all as a Met; only Kranepool exceeds him in team history for once a Met, always a Met longevity. I don’t remember him doing much between that magical night at Shea and this hot afternoon in Pittsburgh. I know he didn’t do anything afterwards, all the way to 1984. I doubt he ever drove in two runs with a single again, but don’t hold me to that. Ron Hodges was sort of a Wayne Garrett in training. If our roster had room for Ron Hodges, there was something terribly wrong.
Regardless, it was 7-1 through six.
What is a blowout? I don’t mean philosophically. I mean by how many runs do you have to win? That’s easy. Seven. Seven runs makes a blowout. Winning by six (or one) is fine, but it’s not a blowout. A run here, a run there, and you could win 7-1 and forget about it. If you win 8-1, however, you’re bringing the pain.
In the seventh, eighth and ninth innings, the Mets would inflict upon the Pirates a whupping worthy of a Bicentennial. Five in the seventh. Two in the eighth. Three in the ninth. Along the way, Dave Kingman hit a three-run job, Ron Hodges got another hit and Steady Eddie Kranepool went deep. Jerry Freaking Koosman doubled and scored en route to a complete game victory.
Mets 17 Pirates 1. 18-1 if Garrett’s safe at home in the second.
The 1976 Mets were going to be all right. More than all right. Unstoppable.
Except there was a tomorrow, and the Mets lost during it. Ralph or Bob or Lindsey probably said something about momentum being akin to the next day’s starting pitcher. Whoever pitched, the ruthless streak of world domination was over at one (yeah, they lost Friday night and didn’t even win the series). Though they straddled first place around the end of April, mediocrity caught up to the aging Mets in 1976. Their record was deceptively respectable (86-76) but the team of my youth, the one that had three great starters, never enough hitting and finished third almost every year, and in fact finished third that year, was done.
Where’d it all go?
Wayne Garrett and Del Unser were traded in July to Montreal for Pepe Mangual and Jim Dwyer. It was a trade that helped nobody.
Roy Staiger took over and made me miss Wayne Garrett.
Mike Vail recovered from his injury but never put together another hitting streak that I heard about.
Mickey Lolich looked lost, fat and for the first bus home to Michigan. Rusty Staub made the American League All-Stars.
Nobody accused Joe Frazier of smokin’ or even breathin’. Walt Alston retired at the end of the season. Of all the hearts and flowers sent his way, none mentioned that the logical heir to his obscurity-to-longevity career path was Joe Frazier. Pulseless Joe was fired at the end of the following May. Replaced by a guy named Torre. Wonder where he went.
Jerry Koosman won 21 games but was robbed of the Cy Young by those who voted for Randy Jones who left enough of an impression to be signed by the Mets five years later when he was more Anthony than Cy Young. Kooz continues to escape Hall of Fame consideration.
Dave Kingman hit 37 homers, 32 of them before a misguided attempt at catching a fly ball put him on the DL. After being on pace to break Hack Wilson’s National League record, Sky lost the home run crown for the year to Mike Schmidt by one. His charm, never more than tenuous, also seemed to go out the window by the spring of ’77.
Tom Seaver won 14 games. I insisted that if he pitched for the Big Red Machine, he’d have won 30. I didn’t plan on actually finding out the accuracy of that assessment.
Ron Hodges hit .226.
The Mets’ and Pirates’ exclusive hold on the National League East ended after seven seasons of one or the other winning the division, thanks to the Phillies’ not blowing their big lead, no matter how hard they tried. The Pirates would stay competitive. The Mets would go away.
There would be tomorrows for the Mets. All of them, as far as my 13-year-old eye could see, were terrible. The 1976 Mets — decrepit, flawed, torpid when not blowing out opponents — won more games and finished higher in the standings than any Mets team would for eight long years. I was in seventh grade when they pounded the Pirates. I was a senior in college the next time they posted a winning record. Given what was to come, the ’76 Mets blew out all their successors.
*It’s one hour later and raining torrentially, but it’s a half-inning too late for a rainout: Phillies 2 Mets 0, middle of the fifth. Gavin Bleeping Floyd? Where’s Bruce Kison when you need him?
by Jason Fry on 11 May 2006 2:05 am Feel better?
Before tonight's game, I told Joshua “Tom Glavine is going to throw a no-hitter tonight.” Emily rolled her eyes. Joshua wanted to know what a no-hitter was. (See, he's already a Met fan.) So I told him, and then I decided to offer a twist on my usual no-hit ritual. Normally, each inning a Met pitcher completes without allowing a hit, I blithely (i.e., I affect what I imagine is the tone of a fan who's used to no-hitters) announce: “[# of outs] to go!” Tonight I decided I'd do that at the beginning of the game. “27 to go!” I chirped as Glavine got set on the rubber. And I decided I'd count the outs down one by one, something I'd figured I might do if a Met pitcher ever took the mound after I got to say “three to go.” Unless that happened and I was convinced changing would jinx things. (Probably doesn't matter: If we ever get that far I'll undoubtedly be huddled in a ball behind the couch, unable to speak.)
Anyway, it didn't work. Though Glavine did get to 16, which isn't bad. And don't tell me that was tempting the baseball gods, because all the superstitions of millions of superstitious Met fans haven't been worth a damn for 40+ years.
But nearly everything else worked. Glavine pitched exactly the way you'd want a crafty old pitcher with a big lead to pitch (and hit like a lithe young power hitter), the boys hit doubles and home runs and took advantage of errors and kept the hammer down. And I'd say the leather got flashed, but we were even better bare-handed: I'd barely gotten over oohing and ahhing over Reyes' flip to Matsui's bare hand and nice turn to Delgado (Kaz apparently rehabbed his knee under the tutelage of Bill Mazeroski) when Wright made that stunning bare-handed grab of a ball pinwheeling off the third-base bag. (At the time, that one looked potentially significant: It got Glavine to “21 to go.”)
Whew. It's nice to relax from a third inning on. Rubber game tomorrow, weather permitting.
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