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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 5 April 2006 4:02 pm On at least one meaningful count, I am not 100% well for the baseball season because I have not fully recovered the rhythms of the night. Yankees and Braves each finished their West Coast games long after I conked out on the couch. There was the satisfaction of snapping on WINS early this morning and learning both had been defeated, but I felt as if I'd lost valuable hours of gloating over their respective if temporary humblings. As Tony Soprano said about life Sunday night as he left the hospital, every new Yankee and Brave loss is a gift.
Though we are alone in first place (in the East and in the city), I also don't yet have the rhythms of rooting-against down pat. Sure I know who I want to lose, but I can't quite get it up to follow the necessary action and see it through. A couple of seconds of YES were a couple more than I could take (though I can't wait for another episode of Yankees BP — it comes on right after Yankees FU), while a glimpse of the Dodger-Brave game threatened more responsibility than I was willing to bear on April 4.
Die Yankees. Die Braves. But do it on your own time. I'll join your demise already in progress.
Wouldn't have been trawling for baseball had the Mets not left a winter-sized hole in their schedule on the second day of the new year, but that's regrettably necessary thinking. “Protecting the Opener,” Howie Rose calls it. “In case shit,” Chris Rock calls it (what he calls insurance, anyway). Of course I'm trying to imagine a scenario in which the Mets would turn away a crowd of 54,371 people holding bought-and-paid-for tickets.
It was a record crowd! It's almost always a record crowd! When did Shea start sprouting extra seats? And when did Opening Day, even the Home Opener, become an event of events attendancewise? I found two references made in the 'sphere to Opening Day 1975, which tickled me since it kicked off one of my favorite years. I was in sixth grade. Mr. Schneider turned the first inning on in class, and I raced home to watch the remainder to completion, skipping Hebrew School in the process (my Hebrew's for bupkis, but I speak fluent Del Unser). I'll bet a lot 12-year-olds and children of all ages were watching on Channel 9 because there were only 18,527 on hand.
This was more the norm than you'd imagine for Mets openers in the '70s, even in 1975 when there was a similar buzz about the reconstituted Mets being locked and loaded and when we still owned New York. The year before, the 1973 pennant running up the flagpole and all, drew 17,154. 1970, post-'69, didn't break 42,000. Attendance wouldn't top 30,000 again at a Shea Opener until 1982, when it edged past 40,000. Since then (which marked the debut of DiamondVision and George Foster, at least one of which might have affected flight patterns into and out of LaGuardia as the season ensued), the numbers have been what we're used to. But before then? It's a bit of a mystery to me. The Yankees, if you're wondering, did no better during the '60s and '70s until Yankee Stadium II opened in '76. Perhaps Opening Day, for all its romance, wasn't as big a deal in New York as it was in smaller Cincy and diminutive Detroit.
That's all behind us now. Opening Day is jam-packed and when the Mets win, people act so happy you'd think they lost.
I don't know if I have my rhythms in sync where reactions are concerned, either. I try to strike a balance between the Polyanna, my team right or wrong view and the sky is falling, anvils are dropping, we are doomed crowd. Particularly when I haven't had enough sleep (a couch conkout is never restful), neither of them is appealing.
Sorting through the litany I've picked up on here and there from both extremes since the last out Monday:
• The Mets didn't look good winning. Sure as hell beats looking great losing. When they issue style points, I'll worry. Until then, it's 1-0 with 161 chances to improve on the more worrisome facets of Monday's performance.
• Things went our way that we didn't deserve. What's the difference between selling a drop as a tag and injecting your ass full of hormones? I don't know, but the first one is fully acceptable, no matter our innate Met guilt at accepting it.
• There was no production from the Carloses. Good thing they have teammates who produced. Most days will feature some guys doing good things, others not. It's called a team for a reason.
• Booooooooo! It's stupid and self-defeating enough to get on Beltran, but Jorge Julio? He's what — 0-0, 0.00, 0.0 IP? Unless that was Juuuuuuuuulio, in which case never mind. But that doesn't explain Beltran. Does Carlos Beltran look like the kind of guy who's going to get all fired up if you abuse him? And if he doesn't, will you feel better that you were prescient enough to show your displeasure with his Opening Day ohfer come October when you're home watching others compete on TV? Then will it occur to you, gee, maybe I shouldn't have contributed to the mental breakdown of one of our most important regulars, but I sure showed some guy who makes a lot of money how displeased I was with him six months ago?
• Delgado wasn't seen during “God Bless America”. As long as he wasn't on the clubhouse phone giving away troop positions to the enemy (or signals to Frank Robinson), his whereabouts for those 75 or so seconds are none of my concern.
• Billy Wagner's song is the same as Marian… Sorry, I can't get through this sentence without breaking up into fits of hysterical laughter. It's pretty obvious, however, that the Yankees co-opted the whole idea of not winning the World Series after they saw us do it 2000 and you don't hear us complaining. Is not winning the World Series a Mets thing because we've been doing it longer or is it a Yankees thing because they seem to have trademarked it on a bigger stage more recently? Either way, it's made for a rousing chorus of Enter Also-Ran.
• This looks like the best-balanced lineup since 1986. The memory hole is a despicable place. Don't tell me 1999 — Rickey-Fonzie-Oly-Mike-Robin generating tons of runs — has tumbled down there already.
• Traffic was beyond the usual Opening Day horrible. Yeah, that'll happen when 54,370 of your close, personal friends join you at the game. Too bad there's not a mass transit line or two that run parallel to the ballpark.
• SNY struck out not looking. Hard to argue on behalf of a network that takes off the third inning; they would have helped their cause had they not kept running promos telling us how amazing (if not Amazin') they are while the contest they were supposed to be airing went on without them. A baseball telecast is not a Mars probe — just show us the whole game and don't insult our intelligence (not employing Fran Healy remains an excellent start) and you'll be fine. Subcomplaint that there wasn't enough post-game coverage is another growing-pains symptom. If you can remember the early WFAN, you'll recall it sounded more concerned with adhering to a format than reflecting the mission at hand. Now the FAN is an indispensable part of the New York sportscape, except between 1:00 and 6:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, when it's dumber than dirt and proud of it. (All apologies to dirt, which isn't dumb let alone pretentious enough to whine that “Yankee fans will have an issue” with which reliever uses which METallica song.)
No complaints for KingmanFan who alertly notes the strong shoutout in this week's Sopranos to his namesake. For those of you not immersed, Tony, Paulie Walnuts, the now-late Dick Barone and his then-tiny son Jason all attended the 1981 Home Opener.
That's at least the sixth Mets reference, direct or implied, that I can remember in six seasons of paying close attention. Previously on the The Sopranos…
• Tony (Tony Uncle Johnny) and cousin Tony (Tony Uncle Al) watch a Mets game on television (well before Tony Uncle Johnny takes out Tony Uncle Al, and not to the ballgame).
• Junior and Livia plot against Tony, with Junior arguing, “Yeah, and I'm playing shortstop for the Mets.”
• A.J. objects to being told by Grandpa Hugh that you're not Italian if you don't eat your vegetables: “Mike Piazza eats nothing but artichokes? I mean, that's dicked up.”
• Svetlana tells Tony that her boyfriend Bill is not around because he is in Port St. Lucie “watching his Mets”.
• Tony and Johnny Sack rendezvous in a deserted Shea parking lot, Tony joking that they could be “getting in line early for Opening Day.”
Which is certainly one way to get around the traffic, even if you're coming from Jersey.
The mention in this week's episode filled my heart since it would have had to have taken place in 1981 (“the year Kingman was back from the Cubs”), meaning it was the makeup of the rainout Joel and I experienced in high school. There's your reason they don't schedule anything the day after the Home Opener, as lame as it is to go without so soon after one stinkin' game.
Paid attendance for the 1981 Home Opener: 15,205. I doubt anybody needed Barone Sanitation-type connections to get a box seat.
Finally, in a dream sequence worthy of comatose Tony, I dreamt last night, sleeping with the television on, that I was dining in a Manhattan deli owned by Jon Stewart. Though I complained to him about the food and the service, he delighted in telling me the best part about running a restaurant is that he doesn't have to let Mike DeJean hit a double off the wall. “I just tell him to get out,” Jon said.
Good policy.
How did the New York Giants do in their opener Monday at the Polo Grounds? According to Gotham Baseball, things were quiet…again.
by Jason Fry on 4 April 2006 5:26 am As I get older, one of the things I’ve tried to take to heart is that the baseball gods are fickle deities, and as their playthings we have selective memories.
If an ump blows a call against us or our luck turns inexplicably rotten and costs us a game, it’s a tragedy never to be forgotten, a thing to be fumed over for the rest of the season and into the winter, a game that goes in the “We Shoulda Had That One” column for review in September, when you total those unfair losses up and announce that by all rights you should be rooting for a 90-win team. But there’s no column in our mental ledgers for “We Had No Business Winning That One” — should a crazed bounce go our way or an umpire be struck momentarily blind, it’s not injustice. It’s destiny.
Well, put Opening Day in the Column of Which We Do Not Speak, for we had no business winning it. This wasn’t a Met win so much as it was a Nationals loss, with our friends from Washington getting no breaks and commencing to play stupid whenever given a chance. Frank Robinson’s 2006 ulcer? He’ll tell the doctor he’s pretty sure it started today.
To review just some of the bullets that whizzed by our collective heads: Lo Duca ended a hair-raising second with an underhand toss to Delgado to get Brian Schneider out on a swinging bunt, and the ball didn’t go down the line or arrive a moment too late. (I didn’t see a replay, but I’d be amazed if Glavine was covering home.) Glavine kept getting squeezed on the inside pitch and losing his command. Nady, for all that his 4-for-4 looks keen in the box score, had some baserunning misadventures. Beltran made a horrible throw home in the fourth that didn’t cost us. In the fifth Glavine did everything but run wind sprints in a crazed trip three-quarters of the way around the bases. Heilman danced spastically through a downpour and somehow only came out damp. Wright made a nice stab in the ninth and then promptly fired the ball in the dirt — and Delgado picked it clean. And Vidro did the right thing with two out against Wagner by going for a double that would leave the Nats a hit away from tying it — only to just get nipped on a good throw from Beltran for the ballgame.
Oh, and there was that play at the plate, with Soriano getting a hand in ahead of Lo Duca’s tag and Tim Tschida hurrying down from first too late to get into position, leaving him blocked out and unable to see Lo Duca drop the ball and then pick it back up. Nice call on the presence of Royce Clayton summoning up that eerily similar play from Opening Day a decade ago. Would this be the wrong time to note that I’ve always been pretty sure Clayton was safe in 1996?
(While I’m grousing, the fans need to show a little decency and lay off Beltran, even Keith Hernandez couldn’t make that pimp coat look cool, SNY needs to stay on the air for the whole game, and those blue-and-black batting helmets are an atrocity.)
None of this is to say that Opening Day wasn’t thoroughly enjoyable, or there weren’t plenty of good things to see. Glavine looked like The Eventual Met of last year’s second half, refusing to give up on the inside of the plate even when the ump wasn’t cooperating and prevailing in a superb battle against Soriano in the fifth — that at-bat alone was more exciting than the entirety of spring training, with the gutsy inside fastball that sent Sori back out to left yielding a whoop from me on my couch. Anderson Hernandez celebrated 1986 by making like Rafael Santana — if he keeps turning plays like that airborne beauty behind second, no one will much care if he hits .220. Heilman’s struggles were character-building. That character Braden Looper wasn’t in the building. And as you noted, Lo Duca is in no position to get that critical call without nifty plays by Floyd and Reyes. Umpires are only human; they get caught up in the excitement of things, too.
As do bloggers. Today was (of course) a vacation day, and I spent the morning burning off my nervousness by wandering Brooklyn doing the world’s most pointless errands, then enjoyed the first Shake Shack outing of the year before heading home in time for the introduction of the starting lineups. Hmmm. Twenty-four hours that included the first evening of Daylight Savings Time, Shake Shack and a victory on Opening Day? Forget all the above — I have no complaints whatsoever.
by Greg Prince on 3 April 2006 8:57 pm Life never begins on Opening Day for Royce Clayton. It just keeps repeating itself in ways he must not care for.
The play of the game in the Mets’ first game, the Mets’ first win of 2006, unfolded with Mets up by one: Ryan Zimmerman’s eighth-inning double down the left field line, Alfonso Soriano on first and running all the way. Floyd gets to the ball. Good throw to Reyes. Reyes turns and fires to Lo Duca. Great relay. Lo Duca blocks the plate. Soriano slides. Maybe he gets a hand in there. Maybe Lo Duca tags him. Lo Duca doesn’t hold on but Soriano doesn’t reach back. Either way, he’s out, and either way, Soriano would have had an easier time of it had the on-deck batter cleared Zimmerman’s bat from the basepath.
The on-deck batter was Royce Clayton. The same Royce Clayton who ten years and two days ago on the same occasion, Opening Day, in the same weather, gray and chilly and damp, ran from first to home for the Cardinals with the Cardinals trying to expand a 6-3 lead by one with two out. Ray Lankford doubled. The left fielder — Bernard Gilkey, not Cliff Floyd — handled it and fired it to the shortstop — Rey Ordoñez, not Jose Reyes — who delivered it in a zip to the catcher — Todd Hundley, not Paul Lo Duca. Clayton was out. Then the Mets came up in the bottom of the seventh and completed a historic comeback, from 0-6 to 7-6.
Ordoñez’s 1996 bullet (launched from his knees, it must be recalled; we were there) was the star of that show, meaning, in a way, that Clayton’s role hasn’t changed in a decade. He’s still an unwitting and ineffectual bystander in Met Opening Day heroics at Shea Stadium.
It was a day of renewal and revival and all that “re-” stuff for our guys, the 3-2 winners. Tom Glavine turned 276. Savior Nady leads the world in batting (first Met with four hits in his first game since Richie Hebner, but never mind that, never mind that, never mind that, never mind that). David Wright earned another five magazine covers with another four bases. Aaron Heilman overcame his reluctance and relieved to no ill effect despite throwing like a demoted starter. Anderson Hernandez picked one clean. Carlos Beltran nailed Jose Vidro at second for the final out. Billy Wagner closed out all thoughts of Braden Whatshisname. And SNY, despite having to make an emergency trip to Home Depot for a surge protector (their telecast disappeared for an inning or two, though they were kind enough to entertain us once more with Dave Magadan’s youthful exploits), got through nine.
But I can’t get over Royce Clayton being again where Royce Clayton was ten years and two days ago: home plate, Shea Stadium, emptyhanded, his side’s futility expertly announced for all our enjoyment by Howie Rose (then in his first SportsChannel gig, now in his first official assignment alongside the inoffensive Tom McCarthy).
I didn’t even realize Royce Clayton was on the Nationals. Royce Clayton’s been one of everything: Giant, Cardinal, Ranger, White Sock, Brewer, Rockie, D’Back, now this. He was playing for Arizona when the Mets were scoring 14 and 18 runs on consecutive nights last August and I was surprised to find he was a Snake. He was struck out by Jim Morris in The Rookie. He bounces from one wan outfit to the next with no apparent hope of ever getting close to a World Series. He’s a Major League Baseball player, which is pretty damn cool, but at 36 and on his eighth team and in his sixteenth season, this must be getting old for him.
Life begins on Opening Day, though for some, it just continues.
by Greg Prince on 3 April 2006 5:21 am Starting at 1:10 PM, you have a job to do and you have a job to do and you have a job to do and I have a job to do. Our Commandments remain perennial, but it’s good to post a reminder every once in a while.
Opening Day is one of those onces.
Happy New Year, fellow Mets fans.
Let’s go get ’em.
√ Focus On The Mets.
√ Pay Attention.
√ Pace Yourself.
√ Be Loyal.
√ Hate The Yankees.
√ Dislike Your Opponents.
√ Choose A Second Team With Care.
√ Respect The Other Team’s Best.
√ Acknowledge Ex-Mets.
√ Don’t Boo Your Own.
√ Conceive Trades Realistically.
√ Record Judiciously.
√ Know Your History.
√ Absorb Details.
√ Keep Your Years Straight.
√ Believe In A Place Called Hope.
√ Go On The Road.
√ Bet Sparingly.
√ Collect Stuff.
√ Display Stuff.
√ Wear Stuff.
√ If You’re Wearing, You Should Be Watching.
√ Keep Up.
√ Sweat The Small Stuff.
√ Don’t Root For Injuries.
√ Abide By Karma.
√ Understand Luck.
√ Welcome Sincere Newcomers.
√ Manage Your Quirks.
√ Find The Game.
√ Carry A Walkman.
√ Read The Papers.
√ Acknowledge Your Sources.
√ Know The Score.
√ Prospect Lightly.
√ Moneyball Isn’t Everything.
√ Think Before You Think.
√ Curb Your Enthusiasm.
√ No Poormouthing.
√ No Apologies Necessary.
√ No Being Glad The Season’s Ending.
√ Shea Is Readily Reachable.
√ High-Five The Good Things.
√ Faith And Fear In Flushing: Read It, Recommend It, Retain It.
by Jason Fry on 2 April 2006 8:43 pm It's a crack, I'm back yeah
I'm standing on the rooftops shouting out
Baby I'm ready to go
Tonight two long-awaited things will finally happen:
1. It will be light for a respectable amount of time into the evening.
2. There will be a baseball game that means something.
The fact that these two marvels fall on the same day this year is so obviously right and fitting that it seems a bit dimwitted to have ever done it any other way. Granted, it's always nice to have Daylight Savings Time arrive — in fact, my longstanding position has been that the government should manipulate the clock in whatever fashion necessary so it's light until at least 7:30 year-round. (Who cares if in December the sun doesn't come up until 2? I'm in an office, kids are in school, and there's no baseball. Yeah yeah, farmers. Whatever.) On the other hand, getting Daylight Savings Time before baseball just means the extra sunlight illuminates a little more winter. And there's no amount of sunlight, warmth or other atmospheric phenomenon that can make a day without baseball, at its root, something to be enjoyed rather than endured.
Well, farewell endurance. Our long national nightmare is once more at an end. Summer is here. Youth is returning. Hope is escaping from its icy cage. Things are being put right.
I'm back and ready to go
From the rooftops shout it out
My blog brother's normal spring baseball rhythms are to fret from mid-March until mid-April that this is the year the boys in orange and blue don't seem to resonate with him, that this is the year he's somehow missed his berth on the S.S. Grand Old Game and it's gone sailing off without him. (Happily, by April 16 this is all just cobwebs of bad-dream stuff.) My normal spring baseball rhythms are wild excitement, followed by a lot of grousing about the endless pointlessness of spring training, followed by a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation as camp breaks, one that sees me fling myself into mad activities like, well, watching two AL Central teams do battle.
This year's transformation was even more pronounced, because today found Emily and Joshua and me flying back from North Carolina. In the airport I caught sight of the Sports Illustrated Baseball Preview, with Albert Pujols looking gigantic and frightening on the cover. I devoured it quickly enough to leave finger smudges on each page, pausing only to carefully tear out all Yankee faces and logos, roll them into balls the approximate density of titanium, and discard them in the seatback pocket. David Wright dominates our preview, and we're picked to finish second but take the wild card. Vulnerable as the Braves look, I think I'd take SI's prediction. (Though they can keep the part about us losing in the NLDS to their cover boy and the rest of the Cardinals.)
It's a crack, I'm back yeah
I'm standing on the rooftops having it
Baby I'm ready to go
I was just finishing dutiful pondering of the dregs of the AL West (Ian Kinsler and Michael Young should switch positions? Sounds good to me!) when we came winging over the Gowanus and then Newtown Creek, and I did what any sensible Met fan on approach to La Guardia does: I peered out the window and hoped I was on the correct side to see Shea.
And I was.
And there were cars in the parking lot.
And people in the stands.
Wha? No! Shit! SHIT! Hey, wait a minute, the mound's covered….
No, I hadn't lost my mind, though that was a pretty bad moment. It was just a workout, albeit one with thousands in attendance. When the panic subsided, I realized it was the perfect thing for a crazed fan who'd just whipped through the baseball preview and was mildly worried he'd weep at the sight of Grady Sizemore in seven hours or so. Those little dots down there on the green part of the field? They were Mets, Mets where they were supposed to be, getting ready to do what they're supposed to do. Getting ready to make the world perfect again. Just in time, too.
I'm back and ready to go
From the rooftops shout it out
Shout it out
by Greg Prince on 2 April 2006 6:11 am What kind of sick mind hatches the idea that Roger Clemens might sign with the Mets, let alone pretends to approve of it?
Guilty. Hope the near-strokes and inner-mouth vomit reported in yesterday's comments section were not fatal and that the second annual Faith and Fear April Fools post was taken in the spirit it was intended.
Not by everybody, I can see:
Clemens? Excuse me? Who the hell wants the Mets to win if that's the Mets? Maybe your entry isn't entirely serious Greg, but I'm a little appalled.
Me too, Jacobs27. The holiday hoax wasn't so much the Mets getting Clemens but the possibility that a meta-Mets fan such as myself could embrace it. I'd like to be holier (or at least Tim Folier) than thou and say, “Me? Clemens? NEVER!” but as much as that would pass a polygraph right now, you stick a guy I can't stomach in a Mets uniform and if he strikes out the side…well, let's just say it's pretty unlikely we'll have to find out where Roger & Me are concerned. But cripes, I did hate Glavine and I root for him now. I hated post-Bonilla I and I rooted for Bonilla II. I hated Coleman and Herr as Cardinals, but when they alit here, I gave them the benefit of the clothes.
Never mind laundry. We root for teams and are sometimes compelled to root for fragments we find objectionable. Yet there do have to be limits.
No Clemens.
No Chipper.
No Jeter.
Ever.
But if Feliciano doesn't work out — and it wouldn't be the first time — I hear there's an experienced lefty reliever who's available and interested in coming to New York. You know, John Rocker has probably learned his lesson and if Rick Peterson could work with him…
KIDDING!
Didn't sit home on a warm Saturday afternoon to watch Mets Weekly? Don't worry, SNY will give you multiple chances to catch the latest installment, featuring the long-awaited Bloggers Roundtable in which yours truly and several blogger buddies exchange tales from the online front. It airs again Sunday night at 7 and 11:30, Monday night at 6:30 and…well, just leave it on SNY and eventually you'll see us.
by Greg Prince on 1 April 2006 11:27 am It’s not so much that the Mets are going to sign Roger Clemens that worries me. It’s how much I like the move that frightens me down to what I thought was my very soul. I dunno. Maybe as I age, I don’t have one anymore.
All I know for sure is I saw Victor Zambrano leave his final exhibition appearance with a strained left hamstring. No matter what Willie says, it’s a hamstring, a serious thing for a pitcher (even Zambrano). Suddenly we’re looking a Trachselian hole in the rotation again. Who ya gonna call?
Kaz Ishii? Let’s get serious.
Aaron Heilman? Sorry, we need him in the pen, one springing Jorge Julio-size leaks ahead of Billy Wags (good night Mrs. Benson, wherever you are).
If not Heilman, then it’s suddenly a choice of coping with Lima or Iriki or rushing Pelfrey. Instead, thanks to the miracle of free agency and the shortsightedness of Drayton McLane, the Mets have an option. And that option happens to be a legend.
Man, Roger Clemens a Met. Can you believe it? Isn’t this the opposite of You Gotta Believe? I mean, c’mon, Roger Clemens donning the same uniform as Tug. Then again, it’s the same uniform as Richie, Bobby, Robbie and Vinny, so maybe it’s not as sacred a garment as we like to think. Or am I making an argument against myself?
Let’s remove personalities for the moment and think about what Clemens becoming a Met means.
It means winning.
I know, we used to consider him the Antichrist and all, but didja see him pitch last year? He started with Doc and long after Gooden took a powder, Roger was having a Dwightlike season 20 years after Dwight’s last one. He’s been a little sore (hell, so have we where he’s concerned), but he showed he could still pitch in the WBC. If he can beat South Africa once, he can handle Florida five or six times.
It’s an old rotation with him in it, I grant you, but did you ever think you’d see three future Hall of Famers in our midst like this? Pedro, Glavine and Clemens? Whatever order you put it in, that’s a lot of wins and a lot of savvy. What’s age anymore? I say that not as a 43-year-old but as a fan who’s noticed (from afar) the great condition these guys keep themselves in. Forty’s the new thirty, though when I think of 40, I think of Pat Zachry and George Stone.
Prediction: Clemens will pitch better than Pat Zachry and George Stone. And Xavier Nady better start shopping for a new number.
Need I remind you that the Mets drafted Roger Clemens out of high school in 1981? Took him long enough to get here.
I don’t think anybody here is going to dispute the contribution Roger Clemens can make to the 2006 Mets, but I seem to be avoiding the elephant in the room.
Don’t we hate him? I mean don’t we despise him with every fiber of our souls (for those of who still have such quaint things)? Aren’t we still pissed off about the ball and the bat and the explanation?
All right, here goes…
That was 2000. This is 2006. Time heals wounds. It has to. Especially when there’s a sub-2.00 ERA on the table before Opening Day and nobody’s signed it (the post-pennant Houston hangover is officially underway). We didn’t like Pedro for hitting Mike either. Hell, there was a time I couldn’t stand to look at Tom Glavine and I’m fine with him now. Glavine beat the Mets a whole lot more than Clemens ever did.
Sure, there is a part of me that will never forgive Roger Clemens for a) beaning Mike Piazza; b) throwing a bat fragment at him; c) being what I suspect was less than frank in his recounting of the incident. But guess what?
Mike’s not a Met anymore. I liked him. I liked him a lot. But Mike Piazza’s a Padre. He’s not worried about who pitches for the Mets anymore, but I am. Not sure if he’ll be ready to go by the time we’re in San Diego in a few weeks, but we could be looking at Clemens-Piazza: The Rematch (Again) from a whole new perspective. It’ll be weird, but I’ve gotta root for the Met in that one.
Remove the Rocket’s objectionable years in pinstripes — though at least there’s no New York transition period to worry about (and he knows Willie and Willie knows him) — and what do you have? A great pitcher in the Tom Seaver mold. Come to think of it, Seaver and Clemens were teammates in 1986. It was almost a pre-emptive benediction, a laying on of hands that was derailed somewhere between Toronto and Houston. (Maybe the blister that removed Rocket from Game Six was a signal from Tom through Roger to Buddy Harrelson that we were going to win the World Series; just a conspiracy theory.) And where’s Roger from? Texas. Just like Nolan Ryan. Ryan won his only World Series with the Mets and then went out and pitched seven no-hitters. Roger’s got his rings. Maybe he’ll get his and our no-hitter here. We’ll look at him differently then than we have until now.
Oh, and did I mention the Subway Series? In addition to him potentially facing the ‘Stros, the Jays and the Sox in a Mets uniform, imagine Clemens taking aim once more at Jeter and Posada and whomever he threw at in 1998. No Shawn Estes nonsense here. We’ll remember why we might have admired Roger from afar to begin with and why they hated him which will make us like him that much more. If he’s not a Yankee, how bad can he be? Shoot, we know how good he can be. And best of all, you know he doesn’t walk many and he’ll never retire.
Could be worse. We could be getting Roger Cedeño.
Listen, my head is spinning right now. I’m as surprised as any of you at the notion of Roger Clemens as a Met. I couldn’t have imagined it yesterday and I can’t say I’ll feel the same way about it tomorrow. But on this particular day in very early April, I have to tell you I think it’s awesome.
by Greg Prince on 31 March 2006 9:49 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.
Who should bat second, Lo Duca or Beltran? Lo Duca doesn’t strike out much, which will help Reyes steal bases. But Beltran has historically thrived more out of the two-hole than batting third, where he tends to put pressure on himself. And will Reyes learn to take more pitches batting leadoff than he did last year?
Boy, it’s gotten complicated. Twenty years ago, it was simple.
Lenny Dykstra batted first.
Wally Backman batted second.
Magic ensued.
That’s how I remember it. That’s how I think we all remember it, even if both Lenny and Wally were only part of the story at the top of the lineup. They were platoon partners, and not just to each other in the batting order. When a lefty started, Lenny and Wally sat in favor of Mookie Wilson and Tim Teufel.
Why don’t we think of Mookie and Teuf the way we think of Lenny and Wally?
You have to ask?
C’mon. Lenny and Wally were more than tablesetters. They were the between-meals snack that spoiled your dinner but you didn’t mind. They gave you frequent chances to score and just as many opportunities to annoy the opposing pitcher. It was a lot of fun to watch them. A lot.
Lenny Dykstra and Wally Backman were our way of life. Never did two men so small loom so large in the Metsopotamian consciousness. Or as Houston Astros coach Yogi Berra said in October of 1986, “It’s always some little guy who beats the hell out of you.”
They were dirty and scruffy and lovable, Lenny more than Wally where lovable was concerned, but Wally more than Lenny where the rubber met the road, at least at that stage of their development.
Leonard Kyle Dykstra and Walter Wayne Backman…doesn’t it surprise you to learn they had middle names? What for? It’s not like they stopped between first and third.
Individually, they were outstanding. Together, they were quintessential. Partners in grime they were called. The Dust Brothers. Pig Pen come to life times two (no reflection on their off-field hygiene).
If I had to guess, I would assume that each player’s on-base percentage in 1986 was about Always. In fact, it wasn’t even .999. Wally got on 34.4% of the time, Lenny 37.7%. The proto-statgeeks might have had a field day with this, letting us know that these were not optimal rates for the top of the order, that the Mets must immediately insert John Gibbons and his .545 OBP in the leadoff slot (or Randy Niemann — 2 for 6 with a walk).
Balderdash! That’s not my argument. That’s the sound Lenny and Wally made as they raced around the bases.
They were the perfect sparkplugs in the era before your lyin’ eyes were trumped by pesky numbers. Seems Tim Raines led the NL in OBP in ’86 (a shade ahead of Mex). Raines was an awesome player, but I’ll take Lenny to lead off twenty years ago. I’ll take him to find his way on and pester the poor sap who thinks keeping him close to first is doable. I’ll take him to take off and take Wally to slap the ball through the hole to right.
Hey, look! It’s first and third, nobody out, with Mex, Kid and Straw up next. No wonder we won 108 games.
Though it is sadly conventional, there is statistical proof that Lenny and Wally enjoyed something like career-to-date years in 1986, something not many of their teammates could claim (even if the franchise could). Wally, totally: batted .320, 45 points above his final lifetime average. Lenny, partially: His Phillie phuture a phar-phetched phantasy, he burst out of his rookie season and into his first full year by raising his average 41 points. Pressed into full-time duty after Mookie had that scary spring incident when his sunglasses shattered, Lenny batted .327 in that 13-3 April. Talk about leading off effectively.
They were our dirty little secrets for a while. Not everyday players, not picked as All-Stars (stupid Whitey), we grew to know them and love them in the way fans do when things are going well. We knew Wally was from Oregon, a place whose immense distance from everywhere became one of those cute little facts when he flew back from the break just in time to catalyze a rout of the Astros in Houston. His main concern? Not that he nearly missed the chance to post 5 RBI but that “I missed all the card games. I missed dominoes.” We knew Lenny had an odd effect on women, at least one of whom donned a wedding gown and followed him around ballparks hoisting a sign urging him to MARRY ME LENNY.
When you’ve got a team winning like the Mets were, almost everything about them becomes public domain. During the postseason, Newsday ran a profile of the lady who actually had MARRIED LENNY. The one who wed Wally, too. “Married to the Mets,” it was called, and it contained this priceless exchange between Terri Dykstra and Margie Backman:
TERRI: Wally and Lenny are so spoiled.
MARGIE: That’s true. Wally can’t do anything. Wally has to have his clothes laid out for him, you have to take off his shoes for him.
TERRI: You take off his shoes?
MARGIE: Well, I don’t expect him to take off his shoes after a game. He’s so exhausted. He comes home and heads straight for the couch and he wants food and he doesn’t want to move.
TERRI: Well, I take off Lenny’s shoes. I feed him, take his shoes and socks off, and when it’s time to go to bed, I pull him off the couch. People are going to think we’re crazy.
To the contrary. Who wouldn’t have wanted to aid and comfort our one- and two-batters by then? They were carrying us on their diminutive backs to the Promised Land.
• Together, they teamed to chase Nolan Ryan to the showers in Game Two of the NLCS, scoring three of the five runs that beat him. Lenny, in particular, showed what the Mets were made of by hitting the deck after a Ryan fastball whizzed by him and hitting the heck out of Nolan’s next delivery. Take that, Mr. No-Hitter!
• It was Wally who set the stage for one of the great ninth innings in Mets history, drag bunting his way on past hapless Dave Smith with the Mets down one in Game Three and it was Lenny who chewed up the scenery with his game-winning walkoff homer. Actually, it was more of a hugoff. Said Keith Hernandez at the time, “It was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.”
• Wally was the catalyst to another all-time memorable inning, the twelfth in Game Five, smashing a single off the glove of Denny Walling and coaxed an errant pickoff throw off of proto-Rocker Charlie Kerfeld. Wally was now on second, implicitly sending Keith to first on an intentional walk (nice managing, Lanier), giving Gary Carter the chance to take a bow. Wally crossed the plate with the winning run, just as he technically tied things up three afternoons earlier.
• Game Six? You mean the first Game Six? No Lenny or Wally in the starting lineup, yet they combined to go 3-for-6 with two runs scored and two runs batted in. So you see, Dykstra (who woke up the Mets with a leadoff, pinch-triple in the ninth) and Backman (who scored the seventh Mets run of the afternoon/evening, the eventual difference by the bottom of the 16th) didn’t just open games. They knew how to close them.
The World Series was another showcase for the little guys. Dykstra went deep twice at Fenway while Backman batted .333. We became champions because they were champions. It wasn’t odd at all that they wound up on the field for the final out even if it was Mookie and Teufel who played in the front end of Game. Lenny and Wally had our backs. They always did.
Their post-Mets careers and after-playing lives haven’t always been smooth rides. Not quite Darryl/Doc difficulties, but dust continues to cling to them, more to Wally than to Lenny. Backman was manager of the Diamondbacks for five minutes before a murky past came to light and his dream job was deleted from his under decidedly tired feet. Lenny? He’s been mentioned in the context of gambling, of steroids, of quitting (a job as a minor league instructor with the Reds), but he remains an imp in collective perception and has been nostalgically embraced by Mets ownership. Wally moves under a cloud. The guy has paid his dues and copped to the part of his past that isn’t as flattering as 1986, but he hasn’t been embraced by the organization he helped make famous.
I hope that’s not the case for much longer. I can still see Lenny and Wally exactly as they appeared twenty years ago.
They were huge.
• Do you know who’s throwing out the first ball on Opening Day? Jesse Orosco. Catching it? Gary Carter. Now THAT’S the way to kick off an anniversary season.
• Will get into it a little more on another Friday, but picked up my ’86 DVD set the night it came out. If you didn’t do the same, run along and get yours right now. The bonus disk alone is worth the price of admission, yet there are eight others to watch as well. Go ahead — I mean it. I’ll wait here ’til you get back…
by Jason Fry on 31 March 2006 9:18 pm
by Greg Prince on 30 March 2006 7:14 am We just refreshed our links section over there on the left side of the screen, particularly the New Breed, our now exceedingly expansive guide to our blolleagues on the Mets' Worry, Wallow & Wail circuit. Give 'em a try sometime. You'll also find a few new fun things to distract you at work in the Picnic Area and a piled-high snow drift of our cold-weather contemplations under the heading Winter League. The more-or-less best of us from last year can be found by clicking on the newly stashed 2005 Faith and Fear Yearbook.
2005 will always be special to us here as it was our first year of doing this. And it certainly had its charms from a purely baseball standpoint, what with the winning more than losing for the first time in four years and the making a move on a playoff spot until September and the Pedro and the whatnot.
But putting aside personal attachment and hardcore Metsopotamian values, it's hard to imagine a tied-for-third, 83-79 enterprise would be straight-up memorialized as it has been in a real book by a real Mets beat writer.
Pedro, Carlos and Omar by Adam Rubin is all about last year. It's 2005 in 210 pages. It's all there, front office intrigue to final day curtain calls — everything you remember, a lot you forgot and a bunch you can't imagine any sane person would need to know again.
Every sit-through-two-rain-delays Mets fan (“because I wouldn't want to miss a comeback from down 13-1 in the eighth inning, and besides I never ever. leave early”) should own this book. It needs to be nestled in your baseball library somewhere below your Breslin and your Koppett and somewhere above your Shamsky and your Golenbock (way above your Golenbock). If you're not of the “no, that wasn't Lee Guetterman, that was Eric Gunderson” strain of human, then, honestly, it might strike you as The Bland Guys Won.
While almost none of PC&O is salacious, let's just say there are details and then there are details. If you're curious about the kinds of t-shirts that were popular in the clubhouse in 2005 versus 2004, then you're a detail devotee and, therefore, the audience for this book. If it fulfills you to know which Met draws faces on watermelons and which Met tosses them, go for it. If you need to relive a four-game series in Houston in which the biggest development was nothing much changed, why are you waiting? Buy it now.
Yet as someone who is squarely in the demo for this book, I found myself thinking this is nice, but if I want to recall what it was like to lose three to the Astros in July or how it felt to watch Carlos Beltran grab his quad in Washington or remember how Pedro Martinez lit up an early June night with a smile and a sprinkle, I'd read us. I don't mean us us, per se. I mean I'd dig through the archives of the blogs written by Mets fans. That's where I lived a lot of 2005, that's where I'd relive it if so motivated.
No disrespect to Rubin of the News, Shpigel of the Times, Lennon of Newsday or any of the local beat reporters. Nothing but respect for them, actually. They're doing the heavy lifting that we can't do from our keyboards and, in the case of most of us (I assume), never seriously tried to do. Last baseball game I covered, for a journalism class, was the opener of a fall league doubleheader between the University of South Florida and South Florida Community College; South Florida won. After it was over, I interviewed USF coach Robin Roberts, Hall of Fame pitcher himself. Whatever it was I asked him, it wasn't enough to get him to look up at me from his between-games sandwich. I didn't stick around for the nightcap.
Couldn't tell you what grade I received for the assignment, but I do recall my teacher demanding to know what kind of sandwich Coach Roberts was munching on. From there, I pretty much lost whatever appetite for sportswriting I might have had.
But somebody has to sit in the press box and delve into the clubhouse and record the thoughts of undressed 24-year-old millionaires and take note of who draws faces on watermelons in case a publisher might ask. I never planned on it being me, so my hat's off to the beat guys.
That said, my hat's off to the likes of us as well. Reading PC&O, it struck me that something was missing from Rubin's reality-based account. It was the passion that a baseball season nurtures among the people most passionate about it. It was what it felt like to watch the 2005 Mets and listen to the 2005 Mets and live with the 2005 Mets…literally if not physically. I got that feeling blogging in 2005 and blog-reading in 2005. I got it that way over the winter and I know I'm going to get it again starting Monday when 2006 begins and the New Breed gears up in earnest.
Last week, Sports Illustrated acknowledged us as a class in a feature that declared “the Internet is changing sports coverage.” It was about sports bloggers and online sports sites and the people who swear by them and how the sports fan has become empowered by technology. Author Chris Ballard and his sidebar sidekick Albert Chen visited with a number of veritable icons in our field, including ESPN.com's Bill Simmons, Deadspin's Will Leitch and Aaron Gleeman, the Twins fan credited with helping to make baseball blogging relatively fashionable (I hope he's not expecting residuals). As he explored this territory in his respectable publication, I could almost see Ballard's eyes roll.
The tone of the article was less “hey, there's some interesting stuff out there, but buyer beware” and more “irresponsible idiots write this stuff and brain-dead morons actually bother to read it.” The undercurrent was these…these…these bloggers aren't real sportswriters like Chris Ballard, but rather fans who decided sports piqued their thoughts enough so that they downloaded them onto a server and shared them with anybody who might get a kick out of them. In Ballard's view, we are practicing “fan-alism” and “reclinerporting,” making each of us a “self-appointed expert.”
The nerve of us.
Seems to me I've read variations on this theme for a decade or more. If it's information and it shoots through a wire to a place convenient to your eyeballs, there must be something wrong with it. The new thing has to be belittled before it's accepted. Potential users — in our case readers — have to be turned off before they have a chance to tune in. In the mid-'90s, it was the Internet as a whole. Of late it's been blogging. Tomorrow or the next day it will be some other heretofore unfamiliar element. The most extreme and uncomfortable examples (Ballard chuckled at Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers blogging basketball) are plucked out of context and held up as wholly unprofessional or inanely unorthodox. Cumulatively, we are led to believe the whole world is going to hell in a hand BasKet.
Funny I should find myself a defender of the electronic faith in that I don't much know what I'm doing technologically. This just happens to be a more efficient means of communication than the Brother electric typewriter my sister gave me for my high school graduation. The rest is thinking/talking/writing about the Mets. I check my spelling, I avoid libel and I attempt to tell a story from a perspective that's mine. Give or take some proofreading, I think that describes what each of us in the New Breed is about.
I'm happy every Wednesday when SI appears in my snailmailbox. I still dutifully lay out two dollar bills to feed my lifelong daily newspaper habit. But I dare say that when it comes to reading about baseball, I go to the blogs, the ones I enjoy and trust, first and last. This is truly where it feels like it's happening — here and over on the left side of the screen.
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