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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 10 March 2006 3:55 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.
I’ve never completely understood the notion that athletes aren’t supposed to express the opinion that they’re going to win before competition commences. Remember the trouble Benny Agbayani got into when he went on Howard Stern in 2000 and, once properly goaded, predicted the Mets would beat the Yankees in five? That was pretty innocent if incorrect. Maybe less so was David Cone’s/Bob Klapisch’s declaration in the Daily News that the Dodgers were a “high school team” in 1988, one that wouldn’t graduate to the World Series, not with the Mets grabbing at least four of seven diplomas in the NLCS. In both cases, the Met who made the proclamation was proven wrong and thus gave more meat to age-old idea that you never give your opponent an excuse to get riled up.
Davey Johnson never got that memo. Never saw a bulletin board that gave him pause. Never didn’t speak his mind, at least not when it came to expressing confidence in his team. There’s nothing taboo about saying you’re going to win as long as you do. The Mets backed up their manager. Their manager led them well.
It was probably more disturbing to read from Ken Davidoff in Newsday last Sunday that current Team USA bench coach Davey Johnson remains, at best, passively estranged from the Mets than it was to hear anything about Barry Bonds’ prodigious hormonal intake. If the Mets don’t do everything in their power to make the manager who directed them to their last world championship the centerpiece of their 1986 commemoration, then that’s the baseball tragedy of the year.
What did Davey Johnson ever to do the Mets that left him a prophet without honor in his own land? He was prophetic. It may not have been as snappy as “can’t anybody here play this game?” but Johnson’s declaration that he didn’t just expect the Mets to win in ’86 but that he expected them to dominate the National League East was probably the most accurate and heartening sentiment ever uttered by one of our managers.
What Davey told his players, as captured in Jeff Pearlman’s spellbinding The Bad Guys Won:
This is our year. I know the Cardinals won last year, but that’s done with. We’re not just going to win, we’re going to win big. We’re going to dominate. We’re going to blow the rest of the division away. I have no doubt about that. And neither should you. Now let’s get to work.
He expected it and he got it. He had something to do with it. A lot.
I didn’t like Whitey Herzog but I did like something he said in 1986 as the Mets were revving up, something along the lines of “the Mets think they won the last two years anyway.” He nailed it. It wasn’t arrogance (a word I never bought when the Mets became, for a brief time, the team the rest of the country allegedly love to hate) as much as it was confidence — soaring, rooted, realistic confidence. The ever improving Davey Johnson Mets of 1984 and 1985 formed the basis for that confidence. Maybe you can still grow a team to get good, then get better, then get best, but it doesn’t seem that way anymore. Then you could and then they did. Those ’86 Mets we honor today were the end result of a three-year project. If it were a science fair, Davey would’ve earned a blue ribbon. He created a club that took its time to blossom but when it did, boy did it cast a shadow over everything in its way.
The great managers are the night & day ones, the ones who take over and change the atmosphere 180 degrees. Bobby V did that, rendering evil ol’ Dallas Green marvelously moot. Gil Hodges left Wes Westrum out to dwell on a cliff of irrelevancy (with a dash of Salty Parker). Davey Johnson was every bit the turnaround specialist as those two more thoroughly chronicled and celebrated helmsmen. Does anybody remember the Mets immediately before Davey Johnson? Can you even name, without thinking, the two managers who preceded him?
Quick…
Wrong. They were George Bamberger and Frank Howard. Bambi and Hondo; I think those were also the names of the detectives from Riptide. Bamberger looked miserable from the day he got here, the sum total of his managing amounting to one endless moan over Pete Falcone’s failure to throw strikes. Howard was an interim guy who bled the first sign of success out of the young group that wasn’t yet a core — and he kept after rookie Darryl Strawberry to run hard because “the cheapest commodity in this game is 90 feet” (a story Howie Rose repeated once a week on Mets Extra) — but the Mets were in Chuck Berry mode in 1982 and 1983: riding around with no particular place to go.
Davey Johnson hotwired them. The moment he took the gig, the twinkle in his eye and the shine on his cowboy boots practically screamed “I don’t expect us to win, I expect us to dominate” from the get-go. It was only a matter of time before he cashed the checks his demeanor was writing.
Do you realize that the man who led the Mets from a team that averaged 65-97 every year for seven years to one that won 90, 98, 108, 92 and 100 wins annually for the next five was never voted Manager of the Year? Got votes every year, but not the prize. When the Mets were shocking the world by roaring from last to second in ’84, Jim Frey’s Cubs were advancing from fifth to first. The Cubs in the playoffs? A seismic upheaval, no doubt about it. But those Cubs were an amalgam of veterans brought in to Win Now and they did. Davey was tending something beautiful in New York, something that kept flowering long after Frey’s one-year wonders withered and died.
Everything that was said about Davey Johnson later — that he didn’t have to really manage, that he favored experience, that with that kind of talent why shouldn’t you win? — completely forgets what he did in 1984. Davey Johnson built a team on youth and heart. He had two vets as starters, Hernandez and Foster. Everybody else was still in the proving ground of his career. Darryl was the obvious talent, but what was obvious about a team with Mike Fitzgerald, Ron Gardenhire, Kelvin Chapman, Wally Backman, Hubie Brooks, Mookie Wilson and Rafael Santana shifting in and out of the lineup for the better part of the spring and summer?
Who knew what to do with a rotation comprised of almost entirely unknown quantities? Once he shook out the guys he could do without, his most proven starter was Ed Lynch. Frank Cashen went out and got him Bruce Berenyi. And they were essentially window dressing. Everything about the pitching would be about the kids. Terrell. Darling. Fernandez.
Gooden.
Davey knew what to do. Davey played and pitched the kids in the heat of the pennant race they had wrought. Somehow he knew enough to not overplay them but play them just enough. Made true big leaguers out of a bunch of ’em. Got what was to be had out of the rest of ’em. Experimented with lineups. Plugged in a computer when that was George Jetson stuff. Was never afraid (witness the 19-year-old ace and his 17 victories) and neither was his team.
I’m not sure how that bunch held its own into September with the Cubs of Cey, Bowa, Sandberg, Matthews, Moreland, Durham, Dernier, Sutcliffe, Sanderson and Smith, but they did. Even given the Cubs’ outlastment of the Mets (to say nothing of their one-year futility remission, which expired after the second game of the playoffs against San Diego), I don’t see how Jim Frey could be said to have outmanaged Davey Johnson.
Nor do I believe that the guidance of a team to 10 wins more than it accumulated the year before to secure its first division title in 13 years — by 21-1/2 lengths — is undeserving of honor. But Manager of the Year in 1986 didn’t go to Davey Johnson either. It went to somebody named Hal Lanier, whose long and successful managing career after that certainly validated the choice…
Oh wait, Hal Lanier never did a damn thing after the 1986 regular season was over. But even if we file that under Unknowable At The Time, why is leading a team to 96 wins more of an accomplishment than leading a team to 108 wins?
“The big thing,” third base coach Buddy Harrelson told A Magic Summer author Stanley Cohen in 1986, “is that this team is expected to win, and that’s what creates pressure.” He compared the circumstances between what was going on then to what was had gone on 17 years earlier:
In ’69, if someone screwed up, no one made anything out of it. Now if someone screws up, it’s a big deal. People ask questions, you’re expected to explain why it happened. That’s the big difference between the two teams. This one is playing under pressure that we never really understood in ’69.
The ’69 Mets (73 to 100 wins) are one blessed thing. The ’86 Astros (83 to 96) are another. Why is emerging from mediocrity to a division title considered so much more of an accomplishment than pushing the stone of triumph from near miss to excruciatingly near miss to resounding glory? Where is the stone of shame in that? The 1986 Houston Astros had a very nice season. The 1986 New York Mets had an extraordinary one. If you’ve read anything about those characters, you know they didn’t manage themselves.
Maybe Davey isn’t honored now because he wasn’t honored then. Maybe he was written off as a pushbutton manager. Tell me what button he pushed that didn’t work, though. His bravest decision, I thought, was the one he made before the third game of the World Series when the Mets were still panting following the draining NLCS victory that won them the pennant (the one that hinged on moves like pinch-hitting Dykstra to lead off the ninth and allowing McDowell to go five innings in relief; whose ideas were those?). Davey Johnson told his players to blow off the off-day workout, the batting practice staged for TV’s sake, the political faceshowing. Just go relax and get here for Game Three.
Can you imagine any manager flaunting the sport’s conventions so matter of factly today? Even Ozzie Guillen? Even then? But his players listened. They got there for Game Three, scored four in the first at Fenway and, in a blink, tied the Series at two.
What’s remembered most about his actual managing from that Series, however, is what is perceived as negative. Why in Game Six didn’t he keep Darryl in the lineup to start the ninth and why did he have HoJo up in the bottom of the inning in a bunting situation?
Darryl made the last out of the eighth after Gary Carter’s sac fly knotted things at three. Aguilera took Straw’s place in the order. He was due up frigging ninth. Kevin Elster, as raw a rookie at the plate as you’ll ever see in a World Series, was due up third. By doing what he did, Davey got another inning of defense out of Elster (OK, he’d make an error, but he was on the roster for his glove) and saved Howard Johnson’s switch-hitting bat to pinch-hit for the kid against righty Schiraldi. His only other options were righthanded Kevin Mitchell, righthanded Tim Teufel and break-glass-in-case-of-emergency catcher Ed Hearn.
As it happened, HoJo did come up to pinch-hit for young Elster with runners on first and second and nobody out in the bottom of the ninth. He attempted one bunt and then hit away. I’ve heard both possible criticisms of Davey on that sequence:
Why have a guy who can’t bunt up in a bunt situation?
Why not have that guy bunt?
Howard Johnson could bunt. I saw it with my own eyes. There was an exhibition game that March on Channel 9 against the Twins. Howard Johnson laid down the most gorgeous bunt I ever saw in my life. It rolled fair halfway up the first base line and he beat it out for a hit. Maybe Davey, HoJo and I were the only three people with any recollection of that by late October. Alas, his one attempt at a bunt in Game Six didn’t take.
Then why not swing away? Howard Johnson had already shown himself a Major League power hitter. He nearly hit one out versus Clemens in Game Two. If Howard Johnson could connect, Knight would score. If he could loft a fly to deep right even, Ray would be on third and that would be as good as a bunt.
It didn’t happen. Sometimes guys don’t come through.
And that’s the big complaint on Davey’s head? That’s the moral equivalent of not inserting Dave Stapleton for defense in the bottom of the tenth? I’ve read in more than one place that both Davey Johnson and John McNamara managed awful games that Saturday night. You’re kidding me. McNamara didn’t remove Buckner but did take out Clemens and found a way to involve Bob Stanley. Davey Johnson took a couple of logical whacks at winning and crapped out. (And why does nobody ever blame Aguilera for failing on an Armandoesque scale?)
So Davey Johnson didn’t win awards for his managing, and in his team’s finest hour, he’s remembered as an impediment to victory rather than a cause of it. Is that why his legacy as the most successful manager the Mets have ever had is so obscured?
Maybe. That and the pretty apparent contempt in which management held him all along. The greatest story in Pearlman’s book involves Davey destroying the bill United Airlines sent Frank Cashen for the players’ demolition of their plane after the NLCS. He won the battle, one senses, but Cashen and the people he reported to seemed to have maintained long memories and deep grudges. I doubt it was all about that one episode, though. It was that “screw it, we’re gonna win, nothing else matters” persona, so endearing to the fans and so effective in screwing it and winning, that probably also worked against him. You do impolitic stuff, by definition you’re going to lose at politics. If Davey Johnson couldn’t bring home any more World Series rings — and the record shows he didn’t — politics was all that was left.
After six seasons of winning records, six seasons of contending ballclubs, six seasons that included the greatest season in the history of the franchise, Davey Johnson was dismissed early in his seventh season of managing the New York Mets. It wasn’t just his ways, but him, that had become taboo where he won like crazy. Was it was time for a change? The team did launch to a tepid stairt in 1990 and it didn’t seem like coincidence that Buddy Harrelson sparked them to what I still consider the most torrid stretch I ever watched the Mets burn through, the 26-5 run that vaulted them into first…briefly. But Buddy shrunk in the manager’s chair following the streak and he’d be succeeded by a series of pretenders who didn’t come close to measuring up to Davey Johnson’s standards. Not until Bobby Valentine came along was there anyone remotely worthy of the job. Maybe Davey just needed a weekend off in 1990.
Davey’s first appearance at Shea after his dismissal came on June 13, 1992, Old Timers Night (Upper Deck Heroes of Baseball, the sponsor dubbed it). It was a loosely themed Mets’ 30th anniversary gala. Keith Hernandez took his first bow as an ex-player. He was extremely well received. But his ovation finished, like the ’86 Phillies, a distant second to Davey Johnson. The fans (me among them) went wild for the old skipper. We knew he’d been wronged. We knew it was right to have him back not just for an evening but presumably in the good graces of the organization.
Next time he was back, it was as manager of the Reds, a team he rescued from Marge Schott’s claws for as long as something like that could be rescued from someone of that ilk. He got them to the playoffs in 1995, the last time they were there. Then he was shown the door. He immediately went to Baltimore and took the Orioles to the postseason twice more, another instance of his tenure being the last successful one a team has seen. Peter Angelos offed him and Davey materialized in Los Angeles. The Dodgers weren’t bad with him, but they didn’t win anything.
With those other jobs behind him, he should have been welcomed home for good. He should have been given some superscout role, a consultant-for-life contract. At the very least, he deserved a bust in the Diamond Club, the repository of the Mets’ supersecret Hall of Fame. At the very little more, No. 5 never should have been made available to David Wright. Casey’s 37 is on the left field wall. Gil’s 14 is. Davey Johnson was every bit as important to the good fortunes of the New York Mets as Stengel and Hodges were, yet he has received virtually no kudos from those who employed him.
He shouldn’t just win such honors. He should dominate them.
• Last week’s topic du jour, Game 6, opens today. Looked up a bunch of reviews this morning to see if it was just me, my bias and my blog partner who didn’t care for it. It wasn’t.
• Happy birthday to someone situated way too far away for my tastes, someone with whom I saw one win, one loss and one decade of friendship come to baseball fruition in 1986. Joel Lugo is as old as me today, but still lagging well behind Julio Franco. Then again, aren’t we all?
by Jason Fry on 9 March 2006 4:48 am I'm horrified by the news about Barry Bonds.
No, not the news in the book by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams that says that, well, Barry Bonds took Winstrol. And the Cream. And the Clear. And testosterone decanoate, sometimes known as Mexican beans. And insulin. And human growth hormone. And Clomid, used to treat female infertility. And trenbolone, used to make friggin' cattle more muscular. I'm a bit stunned at the frightful breadth of the shopping list, but I'm not surprised, exactly. In fact, if you can find a Giants fan or Bonds fan out there who is surprised, ask them to come by my house next time there's a poker game going. And bring plenty of money.
No, what horrifies me is the reason offered for why Bonds first turned to the pharmaceutical cupboard after the 1998 season: He was jealous of Mark McGwire, then dominating the headlines during his chase of Roger Maris's record.
Mark McGwire? Really?
Even in the best of times, being a baseball fan means watching your team get beat at least 60 times a year. Losing 60 times a year guarantees some of those losses are going to really hurt — a fatal error, a desperate comeback that falls just short, a reliever spits the bit. Or you wind up facing the other team's best player with everything in the balance, and he carries the day.
I've had an interesting reaction to a small number of players who've beaten us in that situation — regret, almost immediately followed by a quiet acceptance and a little dose of wonder. In such situations, I don't throw things or swear a blue streak or turn on the FAN to be reminded that there are Met fans way crazier than I am. Instead, I find myself thinking, “You know, someday I'll tell my grandchildren that I saw [Player X Who Just Beat Us] play.”
There aren't very many players in that group. The example I always use is Tony Gwynn. But Barry Bonds was in that club — and he was a member before 1999. In his first years with the Pirates you could see he was going to be something special — you knew that perfect swing, those break-the-sound-barrier-fast hands, the superb batting eye and the combination of ferocity and smarts with which he played the game would make him a superstar before long. And he became one, and then he got better in San Francisco, and when he came to town it was an event, and when he beat us, I'd think, “You know, someday I'll tell my grandchildren that I saw Barry Bonds play.”
Mark McGwire? Please. An oversized masher with a feast-or-famine bat, glued to first base, lumbering around the bases. Even before reporters starting asking questions about andro, I never gave him much thought. Did I see Mark McGwire play? Sure, kiddo. But Grandpa saw Dave Kingman and Cecil Fielder and Rob Deer play, too. What of it? (While we're on the subject, I never cared for his unctuous sidekick from the Summer of Drugs, either. Plus Sammy Sosa was a Cub.)
If you weren't careful, McGwire could hit a ball a long way and beat you. Bonds could do that too. But he could also steal bases and beat you. Or gun down your runners and beat you. McGwire seemed a nice enough guy, and genuinely passionate about abused kids, but I can't remember an interview with him that amounted to more than back-of-the-Bull-Durham-bus cliches and bromides about family. Bonds wasn't a nice guy, but on the rare occasions he felt like talking, he was funny and intriguing and very, very smart.
But wait, you say: Mark McGwire was an event in '98. Well, yeah, but not one I wanted any part of. I remember the fans who came to Shea for Mets-Cards in '98. Not many of them struck me as Mets fans, or even Cardinals fans — who are reliably inoffensive in their Midwestern way. No, the McGwire attendees were the kind of fans you see at Shea in the playoffs or for Mets-Yankees: the clueless and the bored, the ones who spend half the game on their cellphones and eat their one hot dog at arm's length from whatever expensive nonballpark attire they have on, the ones who give you the gimlet eye if you ask them not to stand up throughout another inning and seem vaguely affronted that their chatter has to compete with discussions of the actual game. Long home runs were the fad that summer, but the folks who came to Shea to see them would have been equally happy to watch, say, cockfighting or demolition derby. Later, Bonds would attract these idiots too — but then that's part of the tragedy of Barry Bonds.
Yep, I called it a tragedy. I'll go further, in fact: Barry Bonds is the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy. A man who grew up in baseball clubhouses, whose godfather was Willie Mays, who saw his father's career derailed by alcohol and a bad reputation, one that may or may not have been earned. Who then surpassed his father in every respect, something that can't have been simple or easy for one proud, defiant man raised by another. A man I'd call the greatest player of his generation — and who was that before 1999. A man who was one of the greatest players in baseball history — before 1999. A man who was in the I'll-tell-my-grandkids-I-saw-him-play club — before 1999. Barry Bonds was great before you could buy great in a syringe or an ointment or something to stick under your tongue. And he destroyed all of it because he was jealous of Mark McGwire?
Mark McGwire! Destined to be remembered for a virtual-asterisked single season, who showed up before a congressional panel looking shrunken and lost, and took a match to his reputation in a few shameful minutes of pathetic ducking and weaving. Mark McGwire's name should have been all but forgotten while Bonds's was still mentioned in awe, and now, because Barry Bonds somehow didn't realize or didn't care that he was already the kind of player Mark McGwire could only dream of being, the two of them will be linked forever. Sure, Bonds took that home-run record away. Fat lot of good it will do him now.
There are steroids in baseball? Not news to me — hell, there's a Met or two whom I strongly suspect knew his way around the business end of a syringe.
Barry Bonds is a jerk of the first order? I don't particularly care — I think I'd be unhappy to find out how many players are.
The greatest player of his generation burned down his own legacy because he wanted the attention given to a bottle-bred circus freak by a cynical sport and its dimwitted pretend fans? I do care about that. In fact, it makes me furious. What a waste. What an absolutely infuriating, frustrating, confounding, horrifying, tragic waste.
by Greg Prince on 8 March 2006 3:33 am David Wright should put us in a good mood. He's Xanax in a big blue and orange bottle. He makes it fun to look back on the sordid history of Mets' third basemen (as I did at Gotham Baseball this week) and think, my, we've come a long way from the days when Richie Hebner lurked like a surefire hot corner upgrade.
I've felt for some time that the reality of the Mets' third base situation, historically, has been swallowed by myth, at least going back to the days of Hubie Brooks. Hubie wasn't bad at all. Nor were Knight or HoJo or Fonzie or Robin. It's just that there continued to be so darn many of them.
After reviewing the whole Zimmerian line of succession that led us through the desert until we reached our apparent 3B pinnacle, the Star of David, something dreadful did occur to me…proving that on some days — especially those when Kirby Puckett is gone, Barry Bonds grows ever smaller and I couldn't find a single store in these parts selling a single pack of 2006 Topps baseball cards (no wonder kids' bicycle spokes look so bare around here) — I am capable of finding a cloudy lining in anything.
Best Mets' third base seasons:
1969: Ed Charles
I'm not even going to bother backing this with numbers. He's Ed Charles, they were the 1969 Mets. What else do you need to know?
Ed Charles was retired/released 11 days after the 1969 World Series.
1973: Wayne Garrett
It wasn't much to look at statistically (16-58-.256), but Red got red hot down the stretch and was as good a reason as any to Believe we would get as far as we did.
Wayne Garrett leveled off in 1974, a nice way of saying he didn't stay hot.
1977: Lenny Randle
What a revelation! An average over .300 and all those steals. The brightest spot of a most dismal season.
Lenny Randle's average dropped 71 points in 1978, while he stole 19 fewer bases.
1981: Hubie Brooks
In a year when two to-be perennial All-Stars broke in with a bang, Hubie held his own with Fernando Valenzuela and Tim Raines, finishing third in Rookie of the Year voting on the strength of batting .307.
Hubie Brooks batted .249 in 1982 while his power numbers barely nudged despite receiving the benefit of about a hundred more at-bats in a non-strike season. Hubie didn't manage another very good campaign until 1984 by which time he was being groomed for a trade to Montreal. Good trade for us, good trade for Hubie. But no more Hubie for us.
1986: Ray Knight
An awesome April, an awesome October and some wicked punches in between. Ray Knight was The Man on The Team.
Ray Knight was a Baltimore Oriole in 1987.
1987, 1989, 1991: Howard Johnson
HoJo combined power and speed as no corner infielder ever had, certainly no Met corner infielder, barely any Met. Three times he slugged over .500; three times he cracked at least 34 home runs; three times he swiped at least 30 bags. Average RBI accumulation in those seasons: 106.
Howard Johnson suffered hangovers in 1988, 1990 and 1992 that tended to make everybody forget how good he was in the preceding seasons. His BA — never his strong suit to begin with — dropped 35, 33 and 36 points, respectively. No more than 24 homers, no more than 90 RBIs (not even close to that the other two times). He'd get hurt, he'd get down on himself, he'd get scapegoated. It wasn't easy being Howard Johnson in even years.
1997: Edgardo Alfonzo
This was the breakout Fonzie season. This was the year we told anybody who'd listen that this guy is a star whether you've heard of him or not or whether or not you take our team seriously yet. Hit .315. Drove in every run that required plating. Gold Glove defense without the hardware.
Edgardo Alfonzo wasn't bad in 1998. He just wasn't as good (.278, not enough pop to justify the drop) as he'd been in 1997. Fortunately, he'd get better in 1999. By then he'd be a second baseman because of the arrival of…
1999: Robin Ventura
It pays to pay attention a little to the American League where Robin was creating quite a career for himself. Forgive those of us who weren't particularly excited when he signed up to be our 3B. We just weren't, you know, paying attention. The guy could hit, the guy could field, the guy could lead, the guy could traffic in the dramatic. The guy could do it all.
Robin Ventura did a little less in 2000. A lot less, actually. Batting average plummeted from .301 to .232. RBIs from 120 to 84. No Gold Glove. No Mr. Mojo Risin'. No Grand Slam Single. Ventura wasn't terrible. He just wasn't Robin.
2005: David Wright
Home runs? 27. Runs batted in? 102. Batting average? .306. Age? 22. Future? Limitless.
David Wright in 2006 will attempt to do what none of his competent-or-better predecessors has ever done. He will attempt to follow an excellent season playing third base for the New York Mets with a second consecutive excellent season playing third base for the New York Mets.
Pedro's toe and Carlos D's elbow and Carlos B's psyche and so forth are all important to our forthcoming fortunes, but we assume David as a given and I imagine we've all inked in David Wright for a year at least as magnificent as the one we just witnessed. The great thing about his '05 was it just kept getting better. Remember that he was goofing up all kinds of grounders in June and seemed sapped of power in September. What made him wonderful, wonderful was the way he fought his way out of his various predicaments. David was the first Met we had seen tangibly improve on our watch at least since Fonzie. And we all believe, even those of who still can't look at No. 13 without dying a little inside, that David Wright's upside will make Fonzie's look fairly ordinary.
How could he, and as a result we, not keep getting better every day in every way in 2006?
Perhaps it's just coincidence, but Mets third base precedent suggests he might take a step back this year.
Then again, precedents are capable of being shattered.
Somebody hand this kid a bat. He's got some shatterin' to do.
by Greg Prince on 6 March 2006 8:40 pm Suddenly, everybody seems to have noticed how light on Mets the Mets are, thanks to the World Baseball Classic and the apparent allegiance some of our guys are showing to their respective countries. It's unfortunate (perhaps teams should be given a ceiling on how many players can be lost to the tournament if the tournament lives beyond this month), but the organization is at least playing ball, so to speak, for what is perceived as the greater MLB good.
Unlike some others.
Well of course the Skanks are lowlifes and creeps. That's right there with sun is coming up tomorrow among the certainties of the day. Latest evidence? Their insistence on apologizing that several of their leading lowlifes and creeps would be unavailable for local fawning in Tampa because they were selfishly serving their country (and making Team USA a tough root to boot).
But it's not about them. It never really is, save for six Seligrigged games in late May and early July, so let's not hate on them too much for now.
It's not even about hating all-time archvillain Roger Clemens, though I do feel compelled to repeat the best line of the spring thus far, courtesy of the one, the only Metstradamus, uttered after Hey I'm Retired/No I'm Not buzzed his son in Astros camp:
Shawn Estes also threw BP to the Astros' minor leaguers today, and missed Koby Clemens' hip by three feet.
If we're going to direct our bile wisely (and what else is Spring Training for except to get worked up over things we can't control?), let's align it toward Orlando and, ultimately, Atlanta. Let's hate the Braves. It's never too early and there's never not a reason.
The Braves are poormouthing again. I heard John Schuerholz revving up his “wetol'yaso” mode on the FAN a couple of Saturdays ago a good seven months early as if their fifteenth straight division flag is folded snugly in the bag. Andruw Jones came to camp with this number: “Every year people talk about how this is the year the Braves fall, and we prove them wrong…Last year it was the Mets, too. Two years ago it was who, the Phillies? All those years we still finished in first place.”
Well, fellas, nobody's not picking you anywhere I've seen. We've all learned our lesson. Just about every publication I've invested in has surrendered to precedent. The Sporting News likes the Braves. Street & Smith's likes the Braves. Cat Fancy is partial to the Tigers, but Cat Fancy isn't a reliable source on these matters. You get the picture, though. All the pre-aches/pains euphoria in Metsopotamia hasn't fooled a single one of us. We'll all pick the Braves if we know what's good for us.
So the Braves can cut it out. They can stop acting as if it's them against the world. The world thinks they'll find a way.
Which may make this the perfect time to knock them off. After years of button-down humility, they're suddenly smugger than Smoltz, surely the most irritating Brave of them all based on longevity. John Smoltz even has the nerve to imply that Leo Mazzone is no big loss.
Now you've disturbed the forces of nature, old-timer. How many pitchers have trudged into Atlanta unsure of which hand goes in the glove and emerged as solid starters because of Leo Freaking Mazzone? Maybe Smoltz has to put up a Brave front and talk up Roger McDowell (be sure to check that personality at the door, Rog'), but it strikes me as the height of pretension to pretend Mazzone is no more than a used rocking chair.
Tom Glavine understands. “I'd venture to say some people felt he got too much credit,” the ex-Brave mentioned upon alighting in St. Lucie for his fourth season as one of Us. “He was a big help in me becoming the successful pitcher I was” and will hopefully remain for another year or as long as he's here. (We love our Tom Glavine now, you know.)
One can figure the guy knows what he's talking about where Mazzone is concerned. When the world was young and Atlanta was in the West and the spunky Braves were a feelgood story, Mazzone told John Feinstein in Play Ball, “Payback is a bitch with Tommy Glavine. Just look into his eyes sometime.”
Those eyes have aged, but let's assume that the guy with 275 career wins — ought to be 285 considering all the leads that have been blown on his behalf since '03 — still operates under the same principle that he did when Feinstein's book was written in 1992. Let's figure that Tom Glavine has finally turned a corner where facing his ex-mates is concerned, something he showed signs of having done in the second half last year. And let's assume that the unceremonious dispatch of his old buddy the pitching coach throws him a little extra motivation.
It would nice to be the beneficiary of some of Tommy Glavine's bitchy payback instead of its unhappy, unwilling victim.
Hopefully Julio Franco mixes in some vengeance with those dozen egg whites he wolfs down for breakfast every morning. We kid Julio about his age, but what a remarkable specimen in every sense of the word he's proven himself to be. Reported Ben Shpigel in the Times last week, “He has the sculpted muscle definition and trim waist of an athlete half his age,” to say nothing of the work ethic that makes it so.
The same profile mentioned the drinking and carousing of his earlier years in the Majors. “Julio needed some guidance,” Tony Bernazard told Shpigel. “I'll leave it at that.”
How about adding this? Feinstein's book (a dollar find at Stephanie's senior center last year) attempted to cover the baseball world as it existed in 1992. It's subtitled The Life and Troubled Times of Major League Baseball, so you can infer that it's kind of a Worst Team Money Could Buy times 26 franchises. Anyway, one of the plagues on baseball's house in 1992 was, according to the author, Gary Sheffield, that talented kid with the bad rep.
“Most general managers,” Feinstein wrote, “would shake their head when his name came up and say one word: poison. There is no worse label for a baseball player. Its meaning is simple: Put this guy in your clubhouse and he is capable of killing the entire club.”
Example 1A was, naturally, Vince Coleman. Others tagged with the P-word by '92 included Rob Dibble, Wade Boggs…and Julio Franco.
Our Julio Franco? Isn't this the guy who we signed to set a great example for the youngsters, all of whom are young enough to be his grandkids? Yet you stay at it as long as Franco has, you have a chance to turn your rep around for real.
Never heard a discouraging word about Julio when he was in Atlanta. Chances are they were too cheap to keep him. Let's hope that whatever motivated Julio Franco to morph from poison-spreader to egg-white-eater and world-beater will add a little extra oomph to the Mets in their quest to topple those bleeping Braves.
Much has changed since John Feinstein wrote his book, but the Braves' status as a divisional champion hasn't. It's about time that it does. They've had too long a run. Saying it doesn't mean anything will be done about it, so maybe saying it is the last thing we want to do. Like Andruw said, they've been disregarded before…though it was the Marlins, not us, who were supposed to do it in 2005. If you're going to whine about history, at least get your history straight.
So smug. So self-assured. So quick to cast off Glavine and Franco and Mazzone. Somebody's got to be made to pay. Schuerholz* and Andruw should at the very least test positive for misuse of vowels.
Francoeur, too.
*Full disclosure: I spelled his name wrong when I first posted this. Wow, I hate the Braves.
by Jason Fry on 6 March 2006 5:00 am OK, I'm officially too old for spring training.
Even though it was the first chance to see the boys in blue and orange and black and white, I got to the set late and managed to pay fitful attention at best. Couldn't even work myself into a frenzy over Steve Phillips, though I tried. (To follow up on my blog brother's outrage, it seems only fair that every team should get a certain number of dissolved relationships that come with restraining orders once the other party is out of baseball. Steve Phillips isn't permitted near the Mets for 10 years. Bobby Bonilla gets 15 years of forced separation — or as long as we're paying him, which will unfortunately be longer than that. And snipers will follow Vince Coleman around for the rest of his life, with orders to go for the head shot if he so much as mentions us.)
I walked away with exactly three impressions:
1. Lastings Milledge has extraordinarily fast hands, as he demonstrated on that double down the line. And the ball just does something different coming off his bat. My goodness, keep the kid!
2. The young shortstop we had in there from minor-league camp (I think it was Jose Coronado, but don't quote me on that) made a couple of superb plays and got a hit off at least Quadruple-A pitching. Worth watching.
3. The much-heralded Fernando Martinez may be lying about his age. He looks more 15 than 17. And in the at-bat I saw, he got gunned down on three straight pitches. Even phenoms need a little work in the before-shaving years.
Meanwhile, I was struck by the swirl of bad omens. Carlos Delgado didn't join the demolition of Us by Us because he has elbow tendinitis. He's felt it for weeks. That ragged sound is me trying to breathe again. Paul Lo Duca sat things out because of arthritis. Pedro is now demolishing the hopeful conspiracy theories by admitting that, yeah, he might not be ready for Opening Day. Even what appeared to be hopeful white puffy clouds against nice blue skies turned out to have dark linings: Juan Padilla, he of the spectacles and very decent 2005, quit Puerto Rico after the game to concentrate on his Metsian work. But he stood down because his arm doesn't feel 100%. Fantastic. (Puerto Rico then helped themselves to another of our pitchers.)
Still, consider the case of poor Jason Scobie. Last year Scobie quietly had a good season at AAA but never got a call-up and never seemed to be even an afterthought in discussions of the team's future. So today against the Dodgers (a split-squad affair in which our marquee player was Victor Diaz) Scobie faced seven batters. He walked three, gave up four hits including a home run, and walked off the mound (or more likely trudged, possibly even crawled) having given up eight runs in zero innings pitched. Zero!
Bet he's suddenly hoping the whole not-paying-attention thing has extended into 2006.
by Greg Prince on 5 March 2006 8:02 pm Carlos Beltran is playing against the Mets in today’s St. Lucie appeteaser. Well, that’s just wrong. So much for instructing Jeremi Gonzalez to stick it in his ear. We need that ear. Jose Valentin’s, too, I suppose. What are their/our ears doing under red batting helmets emblazoned PR instead of ventilated, two-tone jobs sporting NY? And who knew Dicky Gonzalez was alive and well?
Gosh I hope Beltran tells Bernie Williams, “I always thought it would be a thrill to play alongside you, but now that I have, it’s not that special.”
For all the storm and stress over the World Baseball Classic, it was nice to have a game to watch live at 4 in the morning. Couldn’t stay up for the conclusion, but Korea and Japan presented an entertaining, professional contest in a big league setting.
Which is why this thing is more enticing than the Olympics or the hundreds of college baseball games that I assiduously avoid when they seep out of the cable. These are pros, with wooden bats and everything. They’re playing in stadiums where pros play. (Don’t say you don’t remember our mornings in the Tokyo Dome.)
In other words, big league-type baseball games make for viewing preferable to almost anything else.
Spring training games fit or fill — I’ve seen it both ways — that bill very nicely, too, which is why springing this WBC in spring made as little sense as possible. Gather these players a month ago and it would have been heavenly. Now it’s just a finger-crossing exercise, as in oh, please, please, please, don’t let anybody I care about get conked.
I saw Jung Bong, the erstwhile Brave pitcher, on the hill for Korea. Bong was the kid Bobby Cox sent up on the last day of the 2002 season to pinch-hit, allegedly because Bong was a good tweak of Bobby V’s sinking Mets after Grant Roberts was pictured in the paper with a bong of his own. Seemed a little deep for Bobby Cox, but spying a Brave, even an erstwhile one, made me root for Japan to the extent I rooted for anyone. I found out that Korea came back and won. Well, as long as Bong didn’t benefit. Or Bobby Cox.
Japan? Korea? It’s Atlanta I hate. Which gives me an idea…
Baseball needs to take the idea of playing for national pride one step further. How about instead of teams identified by country, we split them by city? Figure out a way to assign players to teams in each major American town (the players may have to get paid, but that can be worked out). In the bigger markets, we’ll have two teams. Then those of us who live in a particular city can develop a rooting interest for that city’s team, and rivalries between our own city and others who compete against ours can flourish.
See, if baseball had that, there’d be no need for contrivances like the WBC.
First looks at Milledge and Pelfrey, courtesy of ESPN. I could think of worse guys to look at. I’d be lying if I said I came up with anything deeper than “he sure is fast” and “he sure is big.”
Pelfrey vs. Beltran: C’mon…one of you.
How come the Mets don’t have a restraining order in place against Steve Phillips?
No judgments, I swear, but as three different correspondents have suggested, Tom McCarthy is vocally not altogether dissimilar from Gary Cohen. I’d say the voice is a cross* between Cohen and, no offense to Tom, Todd Kalas. Maybe that’s an occupational hazard of McCarthy having hung around with Todd’s dad Harry in Philly these last seven years.
Todd Kalas…brrrr…
Eddie Coleman sounds like Eddie Coleman sounds like Eddie Coleman. And the fifteenth batter of the game was…well, I’ve already forgotten, but it’s good to know somebody’s keeping track again. Must be March. And that must be not at all bad.
*Imagine tuning into a Mets game between 1989 and 2005 on WFAN, except instead of turning the dial to 660, you’ve accidentally set it at 650. THAT’S what McCarthy kind of sounds like vis-à-vis Cohen.
by Greg Prince on 5 March 2006 9:50 am Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were Steely Dan. Still are, I suppose, but they broke up as a going concern in 1981. Then Donald Fagen went out and recorded The Nightfly a year later, creating what would become one of my two favorite albums ever.
Friday night, Stephanie and I went to see Donald Fagen at Westbury, fulfilling one of those mutual dreams you don't realize you both have because neither of you thinks somebody like that would actually bother to come play before people like you (or at a place like this). I went with a touch of trepidation, not because I thought we'd be disappointed in one of our musical idols, but because it meant I'd be missing most of the debut of Tom McCarthy as the new co-voice of the Mets.
On the night when we finally got to see live and in person the half of Steely Dan whose music has captivated me for half a lifetime, I was presented with indisputable evidence that our own Becker & Fagen — hell, our own Lennon & McCartney — would be no more.
Those days are gone forever…
Over a long time ago…
Howie Rose and Gary Cohen will keep on making music, just not as part of the same revered act. They're in different bands now. Maybe somehow they'll reunite for a project or two as Walter and Donald have. Until then, it's Howie and Tom, with Gary's tour schedule TBA on SNY.
I managed to catch a touch of Tom: some pregame chat over dark and ice-scarred Nassau County side roads, a few pitches while waiting for the curtain to come up (a cherished Westbury tradition). I'm not going to say one word for public consumption regarding what I thought because it wouldn't be fair to McCarthy. It was a small sample of the first exhibition before the first season of a new job taking over for a legend at the top of his game.
How would you like to be judged on that?
I will say this, though: It was strange hearing an unfamiliar voice exchange Mets pleasantries with a member of the extended family and realize he's moving in to stay for the summer…and, Wilpon willing, many summers beyond. There was a time when it was strange listening to Gary Cohen take Gary Thorne's place, just as it was odd taking in Gary Thorne from the same speakers that used to offer Steve Lamar. Your announcers are like any other offseason acquisitions — they're all new players in a whole new ballgame. Tom McCarthy can be the greatest thing since sliced Scully and he will take some getting used to.
But I can't wait to get used to him. The more McCarthy I hear, the more the Mets there will be. The rest is up to him.
Seeing an artist like Fagen, just as with listening to the radio craftsmen with whom we've been blessed over time, reminds you why you love what you love. Steely Dan was famous (or infamous) for not wanting to transfer their music from the studio to the masses, so you're not prepared — even though you've paid top dollar for the privilege — to actually witness the voice of the group working in your midst. It's the music, not the personality, that's meant so much to me, particularly since college, thus it never occurred to me what it would be like to absorb it and him in person. The Nightfly, in particular, has always been my nocturnal go-to. Who pictures keeping company in the middle of the night with a thousand other people?
But you're part of a crowd and out come seven musicians and two backup vocalists. Then out comes Donald Fagen. Just like that, he's right in front of you singing great new numbers from a promising CD alongside the songs you've adored for decades. He's bringing “I.G.Y.” and “New Frontier” and “Green Flower Street” and “The Goodbye Look” to life. In front of all these people, he's doing your song, “The Nightfly,” and you mouth the words silently so as to retain part ownership of the track that you claimed way back when, but only silently so as not to get in his way.
Sweet music…
Tonight the night is mine…
Late line…
Till the sun (till the sun)
Comes through…
The skylight…
The Nightfly is for 2, 3, 4 in the morning in Fontana Hall, flipping the cassette over and over again or, if the clouds are in alignment, coming up the Gulf Coast from The Wave 102-1/2 FM in Sarasota. It's not something you imagined the Donald Fagen, reticent celebrity and all, playing for you and singing to you from ten rows away. But it's happening and you are experiencing it, and it's not a forced analogy to tell you that it's every bit as sweet as those bottoms of the first when my Long Island Rail Road car would rumble homebound out of the East River tunnel and a voice I loved would tell me that Rusch surrendered a one-out double to Vidro but got out of it, and now Benny Agbayani will lead off for the Mets with Bell on deck and Fonzie to follow. I had been prompt enough to grab a window seat so I could hear it all clearly as the sun began to fall over my left shoulder, behind the Manhattan skyline.
Ball one to Benny. Tonight the night is mine.
The things we hear. The things that stay with us.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that somebody in the audience did eventually yell PLAY 'FREEBIRD'!, to which Donald Fagen replied, “You sing 'Whipping Post' and I'll play 'Freebird'.”
Howie Rose himself couldn't have been quicker on the draw.
by Greg Prince on 4 March 2006 8:33 pm Gotham Baseball, which you’ll recognize from the incessant Tuesday plugs I give here for my weekly column there, is seeking a hand or six in building what is already a budding and fairly substantial baseball media organization. If you or somebody you know might be interested, check out what’s below and please get in touch. Thanks.
Gotham Baseball magazine and GothamBaseball.com, the only media outlets that relentlessly cover the Mets, Yankees, their minor leagues, local independent minors and college baseball, are seeking interns for the 2006 baseball season.
Now, the opportunity to learn first-hand about the exciting world of sportswriting from industry veterans is here. If you want to learn about magazine design, media performance or distribution, now here’s your chance.
Gotham needs about a half-dozen people to help with expanded coverage of local college baseball and independent and affiliated minor league coverage. GB seeks individuals who wish to learn photojournalism, Web design, and media planning as well.
The ideal applicant already writes constantly, maybe on his or her own Web site — but wants to learn from professionals. All interns should be 18 years of age or older and have a valid driver’s license. A sense of humor is required, also.
There are thousands of internships out there, but at Gotham Baseball, nobody will be sending you out for coffee and sandwiches. GB will teach you the skills that you need to succeed, and actually give you the opportunity to prove yourself with real hands-on experience.
Qualified applicants will get the chance to hone their writing style (including broadcast, print and online), learn how to conduct interviews, as well as getting Web design experience, photo gallery design and magazine layout tutorials.
If you love baseball and relish the opportunity to start your media career off the right way, no other internship will teach you more, give you more experience or most importantly, be more fun.
Apply today, time is limited. Interested individuals should send a cover letter, resume and clippings (if applicable) to info@gothambaseball.com. Applications must be received by April 1.
by Greg Prince on 3 March 2006 8:16 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.
Maybe DiamondVision was right. Maybe when it infamously and prematurely congratulated the Boston Red Sox on winning the 1986 World Series, it didn’t jump the gun. Maybe that big screen had Omnivision — or at least could see into the future.
History, we’ve been told, is written by the winners. But too often in the retelling of the cataclysmic events of late October 1986, the winners are reduced to lucky-bastard bystanders. The real story of that fall classic has been portrayed time and again as a tale emblematic not of joy, but woe; not of achievement but disaster; not of winners, but losers.
Congratulations 1986 Boston Red Sox. The biggest loser seems to have received the lion’s share of the lines in history’s script.
I thought it was behind us after 2004. I thought once Doug Mientkiewicz clutched the final out of that World Series that we could finally let go of the myth that rose up years after 1986 (even if Minky could never let go of the actual final out). I thought the first Red Sox’ world championship in 86 years would diminish if not completely erase the failure to secure the first Red Sox’ world championship in 68 years.
But myths die hard, especially if they have caretakers keeping them on life support.
A couple of nights ago, my blog partner and I were invited to a screening of a new film called Game 6. A period piece set in New York in the autumn of 1986, it could only be about two things: the Mets vs. Houston or the Mets vs. Boston.
Surprise, surprise, it’s not about the Mets vs. Houston. Movies don’t get made about the NLCS apparently. Movies don’t get made about the Mets either, at least not about the Mets in their absolute greatest moment of triumph.
It’s about the Red Sox. Or a Red Sox fan, one who lives in New York on October 25, 1986. We are meant to feel his pain, for it is the Red Sox who represent…
Ah, crap, you don’t even need to see the movie — trust me, you don’t — to know where this is going. All literary men are Red Sox fans, said John Cheever (whoever he played for). All metaphors and perhaps half the similes are Red Socked as well. Oh, the Cubs stand for a different strain of disappointment and the Yankees get their props from lazy writers who need an overbearing symbol now and then, and the Dodgers did leave Brooklyn, sniff, sniff, but honestly, what would baseball be without the Boston Red Sox?
It’s like it would just be a game or something. And that’s hardly good enough. It wasn’t good enough for Ken Burns, the prime villain, by my reckoning, in the twisting of 1986 from a parable of perseverance, faith and miracle to one of haunted houses and black nights and did somebody say curses?
Ken Burns’ Baseball, presented in nine parts or “innings,” was magnificent in many respects. It was beautifully and thoughtfully produced. It bled for its game, and its timing, appearing as it did on PBS’ air in September of 1994, was a stanch of stanches for the deepening wound that was that year’s strike. It introduced the world at large to Buck O’Neil. It unearthed the full version of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”. It made Billy Crystal surprisingly tolerable.
But it choked big-time in the bottom of its own ninth.
The 1986 Mets were the most captivating team since at least the Reggie Jackson Yankees. No club that excelled in the 1980s or early 1990s — not the Phillies (Burns went 18+ hours and never mentioned Mike Schmidt) or the Tigers or the A’s or the Jays could match the charisma or the climb or the climax of those Mets. Within the context of their times, they were every bit the historic touchstone that the Gashouse Gang or the Boys of Summer were. And Ken Burns gave them no love. None.
The mid-1980s Mets existed in Burns’ world for one thing: to benefit from the skewed karma of Boston. It was the Red Sox’ dratted fortunes rearing their ugly head yet again that was the story of October 1986. Some stupid team from New York just happened to be the recipient of somebody else’s fallout. They never should’ve sold Ruth. They should’ve given Jackie Robinson a legitimate tryout. Woe art the Sox! Bill Buckner was of course the logical conclusion of all that.
Who won again?
In the eight years prior to 1994, the story of 1986 was told as at least a twofold tale. Sure the Red Sox were screwed, but look who screwed them. Look at those guys who never gave up. Look at what a team like that does when its back is so close to the wall that its uniform numbers are obscured by blue paint. The Red Sox lost that World Series because the Mets beat them. The Mets won that World Series.
Except at Ken Burns’ hand. A Red Sox fan himself (don’t suppose that had anything to do with the skewing and screwing), Burns dropped the notion that there was an effective antagonist in his version of the drama, and never mind that he recast the Red Sox as the protagonist. All this would be a matter of a public broadcasting documentary and “so what?” except the tide turned from 1994 forward. The achievement of the 1986 Mets was sapped because, you know, the Red Sox blew it.
That’s not how it happened. The 1986 Mets were tremendous from first pitch to last. They didn’t just happen to be in the right place at the right time. They were not bit players in somebody else’s psychobabble. The bottom of the tenth (of the sixth game of the World Series, that is) required two to tango. That one dancer tripped over his feet is the way it goes sometimes.
Flash forward to 2002. Major League Baseball and MasterCard are asking fans to vote on the Ten Most memorable Moments in baseball ever. The ballot included thirty choices. One of them was this:
The New York Mets come back from a 3-2 series deficit to win Game 6 and Game 7 against the Boston Red Sox and clinch the World Series.
Yeah, that pretty much describes why it was so memorable.
Of course the moment boiled down in the public consciousness to “Buckner,” but MLB couldn’t accentuate the negative. To describe it properly would take a little honesty and depth.
Down to their last strike, the New York Mets stage a breathtaking two-out, three-hit rally, three-run rally, aided by a wild pitch and an error, and surge past the Boston Red Sox in the bottom of the tenth inning to win the sixth game of the 1986 World Series, 6-5, and force a seventh game.
But by 2002, the Mets hadn’t done that. They were handed the win. Ken Burns told everybody that and the canard had been repeated endlessly for eight years. No wonder the most memorable moment in baseball history, certainly of this generation, did not make the Top Ten.
Anybody remember what did? No. 10 was Nolan Ryan’s seventh no-hitter. Sure it was. Who doesn’t remember where they were when Ryan beat…uh, who?…on…when?
I’ll skip the rest of the list because it’s mostly insulting, as much for what it includes for what it excludes (The Giants Win The Pennant! The Giants Win…Hello? Hello? Anyone home?) But No. 9 bears scrutiny in our conversation:
Kirk Gibson’s pinch-hit homer off Oakland’s Dennis Eckersley with two outs in the bottom of the ninth gives Los Angeles a 5-4 win in Game 1 of the World Series.
Helluva shot. Quite a piece of video. No mean accomplishment. It put the Dodgers up one game to none. After that, the Oakland A’s had no more than six chances to win the Series.
How on EARTH does that make a list like this and Game Six doesn’t? Could it because one was mythologized as a victory and the other as a defeat? And who ramped up the mythologizing?
Ken Burns. Ken Burns, who couldn’t give the 1986 Mets their due, lavished pixie dust all over Kirk Gibson’s gimpy home run. The Dodgers won that game. Dennis Eckersley and the A’s didn’t lose it even though it was one of the more notable blows in the history of relief pitching as practiced by elite closers. The companion book to Baseball has a nice section on Kirk Gibson’s home run. It has next to nothing on the ’86 Mets.
I’m not suggesting a documentary filmmaker singularly sets the agenda for the popular imagination, but I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that, after 1994, Gibson’s historical stock shot up and the ’86 Mets’ faded. There were a lot of budding segment producers watching that September when there was no other baseball. The storylines began to set in stone. It can’t be a coincidence. When the Red Sox began to come close and not win again a few years later, the Buckner thing became their thing whether they wanted it or not. Remember how the Red Sox lost that World Series in 1986? Say, who’d they play anyway?
When that blessed night in 2004 came along to end the Red Sox’ championship drought, I celebrated for any number of reasons (empathetic, humanitarian, Yankees Suck), but primarily because I figured it meant we’d get 1986 back. The Red Sox solipists wouldn’t need it anymore. No matter what befell Boston in some future postseason, Buckner could no longer be the default reference. The Red Sox didn’t deserve that and 1986 didn’t deserve that. Two for the price of one: A championship for them, no more misguided footnote status — *World Series won by Mets — for us.
Then along comes Game 6, the movie.
This is what they call a small movie. A real small movie. Alex Rodriguez gets paid in a week of repelling people what it cost to make this film. Blink, I imagine, and you’ll miss it.
Blink. Miss it. You’ll be glad you did.
Nobody asked this movie to come along now. One senses it didn’t get greenlighted until the Sox became big news to those who don’t follow baseball all that closely. So among its other sins, it’s late.
I wouldn’t blame you if you were tempted to see it. When they make a movie that is nominally about one of the greatest moments of your life, you can’t help but anticipate it. Help yourself, though. It’s not about Game Six of the 1986 World Series, it’s surely not about the Mets and it’s barely about anything. But it does take place on the day the sixth game took place. I’d call that a plot device, but you’d probably need a plot for that assessment to be fully accurate.
The main character is a Red Sox fan living in New York. That’s pretty much all you need to know about where this thing attempts to lurch. The Red Sox fan is tortured because the Red Sox never win, et al, and you can pretty much figure out the rest. What irritated me beyond what would ordinarily inflame my standard limited-perspective bias (How could they remake King Kong and NOT show him breaking that window across the street from Wrigley?) was how Mets fans were portrayed as furniture. The Red Sox fan gets to ramble all over Manhattan muttering about the fates and destiny and Johnny Pesky while Mets fans are reduced to a leaden Greek chorus.
There’s one scene early in which some kitchen workers on a break in a restaurant are discussing the upcoming game (mispronouncing that night’s starter as O-Hey-da, but that was always iffy) and getting pumped up on behalf of the local team when the Red Sox fan interrupts. “I hate the Mets,” he says. A rant follows about how they don’t know how to lose, how it leaves him flat, that they’re not the Red Sox with their torturous ways. The kitchen workers’ response? They just stare at this man who obviously has so much more soul than they do as if he has given them so much to think about.
That’s not any group of Mets fans I could imagine, not in 1986, not in 2006, not at any time in the history of the franchise. Game 6 may have had a minuscule budget, but it doesn’t cost any extra to portray a type accurately. The Mets fan as mute spectator to a Red Sox angstfest? I give you the immortal Leonard Koppett on the Mets fan:
An orgiastic mixture of defiance and futility.
That’s who we’ve been since the Polo Grounds, that’s who we were even when we were kings. If ya can’t get that right in your pretentious, warmed-over, Church of Baseball, Red Sox are fascinating, opponents are incidental botching of fact and feel, then how dare you use our Greatest Moment for your 87 minutes of nothingness?
Cherish Game Six, but avoid Game 6. Save your money for the 1986 DVD due out in a few weeks. Watch most of Ken Burns again. Or just rent Fever Pitch. Jimmy Fallon’s wavering New England accent and Drew Barrymore’s romantic comedy bullspit notwithstanding, it’s kind of good.
There’s a great Buckner scene in there.
by Jason Fry on 3 March 2006 3:54 am Hey! We beat the Cardinals today!
No, it didn't matter worth a hill of beans, except for the fact that while it was snowing, sleeting, spitting freezing rain and otherwise offering a thorough overview of vile weather up New York City way, down in Florida guys in Mets uniforms were beating guys in Cardinals uniforms. Numbers were being put up. Notes taken. Impressions gathered.
And Day 1 of the spring-training season brought the first of many “Oh yeah, that's what that feels like” moments to come: As the score zoomed from a happy Mets 9, Cardinals 0 to a less-happy Mets 9, Cardinals 4 and then to an even-less-happy Mets 9, Cardinals 7, I had that thought you only have in spring training.
I hope nobody important gave up those runs.
This feeling has a near-twin we'll meet later this month, namely I hope that just means this is his dead-arm period. But in the regular season things are not so cavalier. The closest thing in the regular season is I hope that means we finally get of Useless Pitcher X, but that one's cold comfort when it accompanies an L on the ledger. (And last year Omar let Useless Pitcher X, in his various disguises, rack up a heckuva lot of roster time.)
Anyway, final score Mets 12, Cardinals 7. Steve Trachsel, this year assuming an importance he probably never had before, walked the planet and gave up a three-run dinger in a bad inning and a no-credit remainder. (He had the flu; he gets a mulligan.) Someone named Juan Perez gave up a three-run shot to Albert Pujols — everything was unearned, but that's just silly. Rule Five dreamer Mitch Wylie worked two hitless innings. Xavier Nady went 4-for-4 with 6 RBIs; Victor Diaz, perhaps soon to be known as Victor Diaz Who Has Options Remaining, went 1-for-5. (And with that little bit of math, we know what the story in every New York paper will be tomorrow.)
Isn't it nice to talk about these things, instead of the phrenology of those first couple of gameless weeks? Never mind how Xavier Nady looked, let's talk about how Xavier Nady hit a grand slam off enemy pitching.
And it gets better: Tomorrow night's game is on WFAN.
Why, it's enough to make you imagine a world with actual games. Games that count. That are shown on TV. That are played in New York. And there are leaves on the trees. And light after 5:30 pm. And warm breezes. And tinny-sounding radios on the beach. And ice cream on a stick.
You know, life as it's supposed to be lived.
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