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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 21 January 2006 1:24 am One minute you're imagining what your new home will look like, the next minute somebody tells you.
Bloomberg.com baseball writer Danielle Sessa broke details Friday afternoon of just how inspired by Ebbets Field the Mets' new ballpark will be. (If this link doesn't take you there, there is a summary of the salient points at Gotham Baseball.)
The good news? If you've spent the past 48 or so years bemoaning the kidnapping of your beloved Dodgers the way — I don't know — a certain MLB owner seems to have, you'll be elated.
The bad news? It doesn't sound very Top Hat & Apple-friendly.
It's not right to prejudge something of which we've just now read but a few proposed highlights, but the Sheaness that many Mets fans cherish (judging by the comments we've been receiving on this topic) does not appear to be in evidence. If the Wilpons have their way, which they almost certainly will, Ebbets will live on and Shea will fade away.
To be fair, it's bound to be a very nice place. Seating capacity will be human-scale at 42,500. There are apparently touches of Petco Park with some standing room built into an office building overlooking right field. And, hey, there's an office building overlooking right field. One assumes this edifice and its retail space will be more attractive than the blight that towers over Madison Square Garden. Also, New York's bridges will be paid homage, which seems reasonable since one of them is a Carlos Delgado poke away from the new site.
It sounds spiffy and it may be sweet. But it's not likely to be Shea in any sense of the word.
Take that for what it's worth.
by Greg Prince on 20 January 2006 8:23 am Welcome to Flashback Friday, a weekly feature devoted to the 20th anniversary of the 1986 World Champion New York Mets.
Twenty years, 43 Fridays. This is one of them.
I’d love to tell you how I balanced the thus far once-in-a-lifetime sensation of following the 1986 Mets with carrying out my happening social life of twenty years ago. I’d love to tell you about all the dates I had to make and break depending on the schedule, all the ladies who had to share the front seat with Bob Murphy and Gary Thorne, how I broke up with this one girl because she wanted to go see that hunky Tom Cruise in The Color of Money on Saturday night, October 25, 1986, but I begged off because I was otherwise engaged.
I’d love to tell you all that because it might make for a nice story, but I can’t, because none of that ever happened. And we’ve seen what happens when you fake your own memoir.
I had no social life to speak of in 1986, at least not one that involved women. Oh, there were a couple of misfires, maybe an imaginary relationship or two, but my only genuine romantic involvement was with 24 men — several more after the September 1 callups. I wasn’t seeing anyone except the Mets in 1986 and though I probably didn’t think that was completely the way to go at the time, it worked out fine.
Honestly, what was I going to do? Not watch the 1986 Mets so I could “get lucky”? What could be luckier than being alive and sentient for the 1986 Mets? I caught some or all of 160 of 162 regular-season games that year (and, yes, it is to my everlasting shame that I was in on only 98.7% of the year’s action). Games were probably shorter then, but I needed several hours a day to read the papers and anticipate the next matchup. There was no WFAN, so I had to conduct my own post-game show in my head. Throw in a little working, a little eating and a little sleeping, and my days and nights were pretty darn full.
I imagine it occurred to me every now and then that this did not constitute a “lifestyle” for a 23-year-old guy, but I was bearing witness to the only Mets juggernaut there’s ever been. That occupies a fellow’s time. The skirts would have to wait.
Perhaps you remember the dust kicked up when Baseball conspired to schedule not one but two of the National League Championship Series games during Yom Kippur, Sunday night and Monday afternoon. It was kind of a slap in the face given that the games were in New York, home of the Majors’ largest Jewish population. No problem here since I had already forsaken all others for the Lord God Mex, but it did seem a little rude. I bring that up here, because the end of Yom Kippur — the breaking of the fast — was supposed to be a setup of the non-McDowell variety. That is, I was supposed to be set up with a girl who liked the Mets.
They had those? The only evidence I had seen of that was the chick who ran through the stands in a bridal grown wielding a placard that read MARRY ME LENNY. But OK, these are the ’86 Mets we’re talking about. Just because I hadn’t met any girls who cared didn’t mean they hadn’t existed. If they did, it might not be the worst thing in the world. This was October 1986 and the Mets and Astros were knotted at two games apiece. The air was thick with fodder for meaningful small talk.
The lass in question lived next door to my sister. Her neighbors Harold and Miriam, Suzan told my mother, had a daughter, roughly my age, who was “really into baseball,” a big plus it was figured. And she was Jewish, which was why this mattered to Mom in the first place. So when the Day of Atonement ended, the night of introduction followed. Our whole family was at Suzan’s house when Harold, Miriam and the daughter came by for new year’s greetings and sponge cake.
I don’t remember the girl’s name, but I remember this: My mother, who hoped I’d find a Nice Jewish Girl the way I hoped Doc would pitch us a no-hitter, said, “so, I hear you’re a big Mets fan.”
“Oh, the Mets,” she said. “Mets, Mets, Mets. I am so sick of the Mets!”
I guarantee you I said not one word to this person the rest of the evening. If she didn’t want to talk about Gooden facing Ryan in the next afternoon’s rainout makeup — Someone Upstairs had not been pleased by the Yom Kippur scheduling, apparently — I didn’t want to talk to her. Nothing personal. Such decisions represented my default stance throughout 1986.
After the Mets won the World Series (gosh, it’s fun to write that sentence), I made several trips to the Gold Coast Vendors Market in Oceanside to procure championship trinkets, including a fistful of buttons that indicated the identity of the 1986 World Champions. I decided to mail them out like World Series rings to just about anybody I’d ever known who’d put up with me during the long winless drought of the late ’70s and early ’80s. I packaged one up and sent it to a girl I had unhealthily obsessed on when I was in college. We had been good friends and she’d had a boyfriend, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her and after graduation I had made her a mix tape…
You can be sure any long-distance courting that includes “made her a mix tape” doesn’t end well, but I figured that by enduring my entreaties she had earned the World Champions button, the same way Frank Cashen awarded rings to Ed Lynch, George Foster and Bruce Berenyi even though they were gone by October. I didn’t expect anything to come of it. But I also didn’t expect it to bounce back to me marked “addressee unknown”.
That was the dichotomy of 1986. A white hot baseball romance, a solid .000 on other matters of the heart.
Now at the top of this thing, I told you I’d love to tell you about my social life exploits in 1986, but I realize now I’m glad I have so little to report. That’s because while 1986 remains unmatched in Mets annals, it was also the last year during which I was left stranded on base alone. The calendar, like baseball, is often a game of redeeming features.
1987 was indeed a different story for me. It was a different story for the Mets, too, as you’re all aware, but that’s irrelevant at the moment. The Mets did one thing right in ’87. They took the field as defending world champions. They ultimately didn’t defend their title effectively, but they still carried the aura of something special.
And what better than something special than to take someone special on a first date?
May 11, 1987 was my very own June 15, 1983. On June 15, 1983, the Mets traded for Keith Hernandez and the franchise changed forever and for the better. On May 11, 1987, the fates dealt me Stephanie West and I was blessedly never the same either.
Our first evening together — recounted last September in the first half of Flashback Friday: 1990 — culminated in my suggesting a lovely evening on the town, the town being Flushing.
She went for it. She even said she had watched “the last three games” of the 1986 World Series. She said “three” in a way that indicated an uncertainty over what she watched, but she was definitely aware that the Mets had won a championship of some sort and that she was in favor of it. Though she was born in Kansas and living in Florida, I had learned there were a couple of significant slivers of her childhood spent in the general vicinity of New York City.
As I tend to do, I quickly constructed a backstory for personal use, one that had my new girlfriend sitting in her dorm room in October ’86 watching a portable TV, telling anybody who wandered by that of course I’m watching the World Series. I’m from New York, you know. I was disappointed that my hometown team, the Mets, lost Game Five in Fenway, but I stayed up late Saturday night and they didn’t let me down. They came back when that ball went through the first baseman’s legs. Even though I have early classes Tuesday, I’m not going to bed until this seventh game is settled. Her enthusiasm was infectious as all the girls of Gamma Hall gathered around the black & white set, and when Jesse Orosco struck out Marty Barrett, there were hugs everywhere, maybe even a celebratory pillow fight or two.
OK, I didn’t imagine the pillow fight until now, but you get my drift.
I never fully investigated the claim of “last three games.” I was just happy that a) Stephanie knew who the Mets were; and b) she wanted to go to Shea Stadium. There was no hesitation, just anticipation.
The lineup the Mets fielded Friday night, May 15, 1987 was reasonably close to a 1986 lineup. Gary Carter was off, but Barry Lyons, up early the year before, was behind the plate. Kevin McReynolds was the only non-’86er who played that night. Otherwise, it was very much like it had been the season before.
Sid Fernandez threw five hitless innings.
Darryl Strawberry homered.
Lenny Dykstra homered.
Howard Johnson homered.
Doug Sisk was booed.
The Mets won easily.
Though the ’87 Mets were off to a suspiciously crummy start (even after the win the Mets were three under .500), it was an ’86 kind of night. The Mets were the Mets as I wanted to share them. They were as special as I was sure Stephanie was.
Conveniently scrubbed from the telling to this point is we were with another couple, the couple who put us together four nights earlier. Their role at the Mets game was to act silly. They bought a pair of those Snoopy knockoff hand-puppets that used to be sold in the stands, the kind with a Mets cap that would stick its tongue out when you squeezed it. It was funny for about five minutes. Our friends squeezed them much longer than that. And they nicknamed their beagle puppets Barfy.
Stephanie and I were already rolling our eyes at them; our sense of “aren’t they ridiculous?” drew us only closer. She was not a Barfy girl. Much classier. When we arrived at Shea, she immediately bought a program. You go to the theater, you get a Playbill, you go to a Mets game, you do the same. I liked that.
Shortly after Barfy appeared, I excused myself to the nearest concession. I wanted to give her something Metsian but something that fit her personality. Maybe a batting helmet…no, that’s not right. I saw a gorgeous print, a fisheye view of Shea from behind centerfield taken during the introductions prior to Game One of the World Series. I bought two. One for her, one for me. The next time I visited her, I found she had hung it up over her bed. That and a picture of Jesse Orosco celebrating. She clipped it from the program.
Stephanie liked the Mets. The Mets played like the world champions they technically still were for Stephanie. I was in heaven and I haven’t left since.
That was our first of many ballgames in many ballparks together. We were married in November 1991. My best man’s toast came from a letter I wrote him the morning after that first game. In it, I had told Chuck that because it was getting chilly as the innings grew later that I’d offered Stephanie my Mets jacket for warmth. “If you know Greg,” he said, “you know that meant he was serious.”
Not at all incidentally, Happy Birthday, today, to my darling wife. Thank you in particular on this Flashback Friday for making my semi-conscious decision to do nothing but watch baseball and avoid entanglements with all others in 1986 pay off so beautifully ever since 1987.
by Jason Fry on 19 January 2006 5:10 am So today Reuters reported that the Empire State Development Corporation has given preliminary approval for two new stadiums in town — ours, and one to be occupied by some random American League team. (Tip of the cap to Metsblog, where I saw it.) Our park's supposed to start rising in the spring and open for the 2009 season.
All well and good, but it leads me to a basic question I've felt compelled to ask too often in the last year: If there's a groundbreaking in a few months, where the heck are the plans? The renderings? The 3-D, CGI goodness that lets us fly through the park like crazed pigeons escaping death by engine intake? Down there on the left somewheres you'll find a link to New Shea, but it's old and out of date. Then there was that watercolor rendering of an Olympic stadium that would turn into our stadium, but nobody took it seriously, probably not even the mayor. Since then? Not a peep.
So what the heck's going on? Is there a stadium plan at all? Are the Mets keeping quiet to avoid a lot of hoorah from the no-public-money-for-stadiums jihadists? (They're entitled to their opinion, of course, but I can't help noticing that most stadium opponents around these parts don't have a problem with the government paying for a near-infinite number of other things. It's just sports they don't like.) C'mon fellas, it's January. There's nothing going on, unless you count signing another less-than-impressive-sounding Japanese reliever or wondering if Danny Graves is on the Mickey Lolich Diet. (Thank God it's the Indians' problem and not ours.) This is the hell of late January; some stadium pictures would be the perfect thing to get us through it.
In the absence of new park pictures, allow me to rattle on a bit about what I'd like to see.
1. Tradition: This is not the time to decide to think different. Last I heard HOK was the architect, and let's keep it that way. Let the people who claim to be bored by the new breed of ballparks spend an hour trudging up and down stalled Shea escalators and trying to identify the various rusted, piled-up and destroyed curiosities beyond the outfield fence. I would give my eyeteeth to be bored by a beautiful new ballpark. The new Met park doesn't have to be Ebbets Field — there's such a thing as being enslaved by tradition — but it sure as heck doesn't have to be trendy, edgy or any other thing that we'll regret in five years.
2. Shea Holdovers: Um, there's the home-run apple. And honestly, that's all I can think of. The only other thing I like about Shea is the marker for Tommie Agee's improbable home run into the left-field upper deck. Obviously we can't take that with us. Put a marker in the new parking lot where home plate was, put a flagpole where Agee's shot landed, pack up the apple and let's call it an era.
3. This Is Our Turf: You've summed up our annoyance at Snigh's apparent embarrassment to be known as the Mets Network better than I could — I'd rather watch Metography: Hank Webb than anything about the Knicks, Jets, St. John's or what have you. Let's not pull the same prudish act with our park. I want that stadium dripping with Metsiana, darn it.
Such as….
4. Statues: Let's say we get five gates in the new park. How about a statue per gate, one more or less for each decade? Gate A is Casey Stengel. (Or possibly Gil Hodges.) Gate B is Tom Seaver. (Or bump him to Gate A and give it to Tug McGraw.) Gate C is Keith Hernandez. (Or maybe Gary Carter. Doc and Darryl's self-destructions, alas, have aced them out.) Gate D is Mike Piazza. Gate E? Let's leave an empty plinth there for kids to pose on in their Met gear until it becomes more clear. (I'm hoping for David Wright, but once I would have been holding it in reserve for Edgardo Alfonzo. You never know.)
Then there's….
5. The Wall: If you wear the orange and blue, you get your name engraved on the Wall, in chronological order divided by year. Fans would make rubbings. OK, I'd make rubbings. Still.
6. Markers: A new park is like a new house; nobody knows where anything is and nobody's figured out the spots that are comfy or legendary or tormented. That's OK, it'll come. But we can help it along: Put markers on seats for epic home runs, something even the spectacularly hideous Vet managed. (Because of course we'll have bleachers that can be entered without soda bottles on days besides Wednesdays, right?) I wanna see people pay hundreds extra on eBay to sit in the magic bleacher seat where Lastings Milledge's blast that won the World Series landed. I wanna see the knowledgeable fans demand that clueless newbies clear out of the accursed seat where Prince Fielder's drive ruined the playoffs. And so on.
And finally:
7. Flags: And no, I don't mean a ring of American flags fluttering in a horseshoe somewhere up there between us and the approach vectors. Put them in order of the standings like they do at Wrigley — a good idea no one should be ashamed to borrow. We did this before Shea succumbed to patriotic overkill, but up there at the top of the stadium no one could tell. Make it so they can.
Is this too much to ask? Well, probably. Heck, between the statues and the Wall it's borderline demented. But you know what? Borderline demented is what you get when fans hear about a park in late January and don't get to see it.
by Greg Prince on 17 January 2006 11:53 am Who's gonna buck me up this summer? Who's gonna remind me that when things look bad that they really look good? Who's gonna tell me to forget everything I know and instead remember everything I don't?
Who's gonna boost my cahn-fidence?
It's been said that one of the profound effects of losing a parent is that you lose someone who was generally a cheerleader in your life. If that's so, what's it like to lose somebody who talked to you like you were a three-year-old but always with the intention of making you believe that the thing you had a child's attachment to was very, very good?
Who's gonna lead our vapid cheers now that Fran Healy has been invited to keep himself at a safe distance from the Mets cablecasting booth?
The whole Fran Healy thing has been the longest-running mystery in Mets history. Some people wonder why Kenny Rogers was sent out to pitch the eleventh. Others scratch their heads over why Randy Myers wasn't warming up in order to face Mike Scioscia. There are probably fans who want to know who thought placing a ballpark at the far end of the Delta runway at LaGuardia was a bright idea. But those are easy compared to deconstructing this stat:
MOST SEASONS ANNOUNCING METS ON TV AND/OR RADIO, 1962-2005
Ralph Kiner: 44
Bob Murphy: 42
Fran Healy: 22
Lindsey Nelson: 17
Gary Cohen: 17
Tim McCarver: 16
Gary Thorne: 13
Howie Rose: 10
Rusty Staub: 10
Ed Coleman: 10
How wrong is this? Look at it this way:
You wake up Metsopotamians of a certain vintage in the middle of a sound sleep even now and ask them to name Mets announcers, and the name Lindsey Nelson will come up no later than fourth as they gather their thoughts. That's how strong his imprint was on the collective Met consciousness. That's how identified the original trio of Lindsey, Ralph and Bob is with the franchise still.
Fran Healy is the third-longest tenured Mets announcer in team history. He's five seasons ahead of Lindsey Freaking Nelson! LINDSEY FREAKING NELSON!
As best as I've been able to determine since 1984, Fran's first year as SportsChannel broadcaster for the New York Mets, no Mets fan likes Fran Healy. Sure, some people may not hate him, or they tolerate him, or they say it doesn't matter who does the games because they're going to watch the games no matter what. That is the highest praise I've been able to divine.
Fran Healy — he was not always minded.
Somebody calls your games for nearly a quarter-of-a-century and there should be more than that. Somebody should be a cherished institution. Beloved. That voice should be conjured in January to produce a smile. “Wow, if I close my eyes, I can hear Fran Healy. April can't be too far off now.”
I don't often speak for every Mets fan but in this case I will. Nobody — nobody — felt that way about Fran Healy.
We're in the early stages of 20th anniversary mode here, right? If you were creating a pitch-perfect Old Timers Day to celebrate 1986, you'd want as many touches as possible. You'd be willing to put aside your animus for certain guys for an afternoon. Me, I can't stand Gary Thorne, but I'd want to hear Gary Thorne introduce some players from '86 (he can do Randy Niemann). Tim McCarver's been estranged from the organization but Tim McCarver should come back. Steve Zabriskie should come back.
Fran Healy, who called close to half of the games of the best season in the history of this enterprise, should come nowhere near Shea Stadium for the occasion. Should come nowhere near Shea Stadium at all in 2006.
And he won't, at least not in the capacity that he has for the past 22 seasons.
Surely you've heard by now that Snigh has gone the ex-Met route to complement Gary Cohen, that the fearless Keith Hernandez and the adjective-to-be-determined Ron Darling will be the new house voices, and that everybody else we've heard on Mets TV of late will either be deleted or reduced.
And that Fran Healy will have nothing to do with anything. Fran Healy, as SportsNet New York dryly replied when asked if he was in their plans, is under contract to MSG Network for another year.
So don't cry for Francis Xavier Healy. He continues on the Dolan dole. I've seen him on SportsDesk a couple of times over the winter as their Baseball Analyst. He's looked lost. John Giannone or whichever host is on duty tosses him slow curves (“Fran, what about second base?”) and Healy fouls them off. He no longer has to tell us that Willie Randolph (or Dallas Green or Buddy Harrelson) is going to work wonders with Kaz Matsui (or Jeff Kent or Gregg Jefferies), so he searches for actual analysis. It's not there. He tells us that, uh, yeah, that could be a problem for the Mets.
That's not what Fran Healy tells us. Fran Healy tells us Kaz is coming around in winter ball or is working out vigorously in Japan or getting first-class tutoring from Matt Galante and that he's going to come to camp rarin' to go.
Fran Healy whispers sweet nothings in our ear. We say we don't want to hear it anymore but when the time comes to be told unpleasant truths (“no, Gary, Kaz hasn't improved one iota and the Mets may as well leave a Pitchback out there if they don't want Reyes to break a leg covering his position as well as Matsui's”), will we be able to handle it? Have we unknowingly become dependent on Fran Healy spoonfeeding us his own special brand of analysis? Will we still want to buy tickets if neither Mex nor Ronnie has the presence of mind to tell us that those Cubbies will be coming to town on the 8th, 9th and 10th and that Shea will be rocking?
It's not like we haven't had time to work on our withdrawal. Seen any Hot Stove Report? Me neither. That was Fran's baby. MSG, a fair and balanced sports operation if ever one existed, pulled the plug. Hence, nobody has appeared this offseason to ask David Wright what it's like to compete in the most intense city in the world, to inquire of Paul Lo Duca what it will be like to compete in the most intense city in the world, to get a feel from Jerry Grote for what it was like to compete in the most intense city in the world.
Likewise, there will be no Spring Training Report (I always liked how Fran felt it necessary at winter's end to explain how it and Hot Stove weren't the same thing), no chats with Omar Minaya around the Indian River Plantation Resort conference room about which relievers might have the stuff to compete in the world's most intense city. And, finally, there will be no New York Mets Inside Pitch television show popping up more often than Doug Mientkiewicz with men on base, no interviews with Steve Trachsel about what it's like to compete in the world's most intense city.
That was just the Fran ephemera. Fran Healy didn't really come alive until gametime. For every nine innings of Mets baseball on cable — my god, we paid for this — we got six of Fran. More in extras. Every Met victory called by Fran Healy was a triumph of the human spirit. Every Met loss called by Fran Healy was a mere aberration. A team as good as the New York Mets hadn't so much lost as it had delayed winning another night. Shea will be rocking.
Why couldn't Fran Healy pull it off? Why did we so embrace Bob Murphy's optimism on behalf of a team that frequently found itself chanceless as the stuff of eternal heart and soul and dismiss Fran Healy as a shill and a tool, corporate and otherwise?
For a million reasons, I'm guessing. Bob was warm. Fran was calculating. Bob gave us hope. Fran misled us. Bob was real. Fran was a fraud. Bob Murphy was a Hall of Fame announcer who painted a word picture. Fran Healy stepped all over the action with Calls to the Bullpen sponsored by Omnipoint and Build-A-Bear Workshop Day spots.
Then there was the problem of figuring out what on earth Fran Healy was doing in the Mets booth. Ralph Kiner was a Pirate and Tim McCarver was a Phillie, but they were part of the family in no time at all. Fran Healy had been a Skank. Not just a Skank, but a Skankcaster. He was whooping it up with the Scooter for several seasons before alighting with the Mets in '84.
Not only was there an anti-connection in terms of where he came from, but what suggested he would contribute anything? Did you ever watch a game and learn anything from Fran Healy? I mean in the way Tom Seaver can tell you about pitching and Ralph Kiner can tell you about hitting and Tim McCarver can tell you about catching? Healy wasn't an All-Star but he wasn't Bob Uecker. He had a decent career. But he brought nothing of substance from that phase of his life to his viewers. Did you ever, say, see the wheel put on and think, “oh yeah, Fran explained why they do that”? He came across as the ex-jock who figured the fans would be none the wiser as long as he offered no wisdom.
There were various rumors and theories given for why Fran Healy endured for two-plus decades as a Mets announcer even though nobody liked him and he wasn't any good at it. Charles Dolan wanted him there. Nelson Doubleday wanted him there. The sponsors wanted him there. Halls of Fame was too valuable a property to screw with. After a while, I think Fran maintained his spot the same way Milton did in Office Space. He had been laid off years earlier but a computer glitch kept spitting out paychecks, so Fran just kept coming to work until somebody dared to snatch his red Swingline stapler from him.
One more possibility: In every establishing shot, Fran appeared far taller than everybody he worked with. Maybe the powers that be were afraid to tell him to take a hike. Milton burned down the Innotech office park when he was pushed into the basement. Why risk an unhappy confrontation?
I wish I could be more charitable toward Fran Healy as he doesn't approach the 23rd season of his Mets broadcasting tenure. I can be for everybody else who won't be a Mets announcer anymore. While I won't cobble black armbands to mourn the departures from Met matters of Ted Robinson, Dave O'Brien and Matt Loughlin, I appreciated their professionalism and wish them well. I do hope Kiner (the classest of acts) and Seaver (an on-air disappointment but still Tom Seaver) are given something to do because of who they are and what I think they still have to offer.
But Fran Healy? The excellence of Gary & Howie on radio was only half the reason I turned down the sound on my TV these last couple of years.
Find more thoughts on what Snigh is and isn't doing at the snappily redesigned Gotham Baseball.
by Greg Prince on 14 January 2006 12:23 am Welcome to Flashback Friday, a weekly feature devoted to the 20th anniversary of the 1986 World Champion New York Mets.
Twenty years, 43 Fridays. This is one of them.
Let’s kick off the proceedings with one very simple question: Was 1986 the best year ever?
That’s not a snarky VH-1 formulation. It is a sincere inquiry. Was there ever a better time to be a Mets fan than 1986?
During that summer, Newsday, presumably running out of angles related to the National League East standings, dared to consider that it wasn’t or that at least by the second half a certain tedium was setting in. I remember a story by Marty Noble bemoaning that whereas 1985 brought day after day of pennant race tension, 1986 with its double-digit leads and surfeit of certainty was kinda…boring. Future Snighcaster Ron Darling and Rafael Santana agreed, each looking back on the heated, ultimately unsuccessful hand-to-hand combat against St. Louis almost wistfully. A year later, the Cards and everybody else in the division were smote early and often. We had gotten everything we wished for, the article seemed to say. Should have we been careful?
When I read that, I nodded. Yes, first place as a way of life was and is highly aspirational, but in 1986 I was already missing 1985. As the notion that the ’86 Mets represented the pinnacle of baseball existence was hardening — even as that season was in progress — I wondered if the breath-holding we had collectively undertaken less than 12 months earlier would be overlooked for the ages. The only thing not marvy about ’85 was the Mets’ inability to win a couple of extra contests versus the Cardinals and the refusal of the Wild Card to materialize as a second-place option for another decade.
History loves a winner and occasionally dotes on a highly memorable loser. What does it do with a phenomenally well intentioned runner-up?
Forgets it a little too soon, I fear. You play, a football coach has said, to win the game. By extension, you execute a baseball season to garner titles in the division and the league and the World Series. You win 98 games, as the ’85ers did, and then go home with nothing more than goosebumps and something in your eye. Without a line in the almanac, did a year like that even happen outside of your mind?
A mind, of course, is a terrible thing to waste, so what goes on there endures forever. Perhaps 1985 wouldn’t and didn’t get its due from historians who don’t have time nor space in their nine-part documentaries for nuance, but no Mets fan who lived through it would dare forget it or skip over it. Every discussion of “what’s your favorite season?” I’ve ever come across in online Mets talk almost always gravitates to oh-so-close 1985 rather than land definitively on run-and-hide 1986. It’s almost that the year that is represented by no flag and no decal above the rightfield fence cries out for the extra attention. ’85 was no pathetic Charlie Brown Christmas tree, but there seems to be implicit agreement that it does need a little love in order to flourish for eternity. (I believe the same principle guides the general fan consensus that 1999 beat 2000 even if 2000’s results outdistanced 1999’s.)
Quite simply, there is no 1986 without 1985. Without the frustrating no, there is no pleasurable yes. There is no nearly guaranteed promise of a championship without the agonzing lunge that came up short. There is no fan base on the edge of its collective couch between October 6, 1985 and April 8, 1986 waiting until it can’t wait any longer for the next pitch to be thrown. There is no Davey Johnson obliterating the rule about providing material for the other guys’ clubhouse bulletin board. When Davey matter-of-factly insisted the Mets would not just win but dominate, that was confidence built on 98 wins from the year before and the knowledge that most of the talent that procured it was coming back even hungrier.
1985 was a magnificent year to be a Mets fan. It was necessary in terms far deeper than chronological to set up 1986 and, in its way, it was more fun than 1986.
But let’s be serious. 1986 was the best year ever.
1986 was da bomb before that expression exploded into consciousness. It was the highest of highs. What ’85 was to heavy petting, ’86 was to climaxes. Every morning that a Mets fan woke up in 1986 was the best day there ever was to wake up a Mets fan. To live in New York and to be a Metsopotamian citizen of baseball in 1986 was to hover above everything and look down and laugh because, damn it, we’re the Mets and we’re in first place by eight, ten, twelve and counting games at any given instant.
How did that feel?
It felt like President Josiah Bartlett’s explanation of ancient Rome:
Did you know that two thousand years ago a Roman citizen could walk across the face of the known world free of the fear of molestation? He could walk across the earth unharmed, cloaked only in the words ‘Civis Romanis’ I am a Roman citizen. So great was the retribution of Rome, universally understood as certain, should any harm befall even one of its citizens.
It felt like Henry Hill’s definition of being made:
It means you belong to a family and a crew. It means nobody can fuck around with you. Also, you can fuck around with anybody, as long as they aren’t also a member. It’s like a license to steal. A license to do anything.
It felt like this at the close of business, April 30, 1986:
x-New York 13-3, .813, 5 GA
x-clinched division
Long before the Wild Card provided a potential virtual bye into the playoffs, it felt like we had one by May Day.
The tense moments that October would bring kept us honest and characteristically Metlike — damp hankies, novenas, booze…you name it — by the time it was all over. For storyline purposes, it made for better drama. Otherwise, we’d be the ’84 Tigers or the ’89 A’s, vaguely recalled as a one-year champion that was really good, but we don’t really remember you that well. The postseason that shook the Mets to their Amazin’ roots also added a dash of the lovable to what outsiders saw as huffy and haughty.
Not that we cared. Maybe we were huffy and haughty thanks to a pile of wins that reached the sky, a presumptuous if catchy World Series Shuffle video and a once-in-a-lifetime sense of entitlement bubbling up through our veins like so much RC Cola, but we knew we were the good guys. When the last glove was flung in the air, the good guys — no matter what you might have read elsewhere — won.
By the same one-dollar subway token, the conniption fits that accompanied our penultimate and ultimate competitions with Houston and Boston, respectively, skewed the truth. We were not Amazin’ for the balance of 1986. We were simply amazing. We marauded. We stomped. We swept all four games of three-game series. That’s how good we were.
That was fun, too.
The only other Mets year that can be reasonably compared to 1986 is 1969. Only one was instantly legendary to the world at large and remained so. That was 1969.
George Burns as the title character in Oh, God! claimed his last miracle was the ’69 Mets. More than a quarter-century later, Ray Barone and his sad-sack cop brother Robert — his dog was named Shamsky — drove to Cooperstown to commune with seven of their childhood heroes. “Do they know who we are?” asked Tommie Agee during that Everybody Loves Raymond episode. It was the most rhetorical of queries — the whole world knew the ’69 Mets. Some weird ham radio netherworld knew them, too, as demonstrated in the 2000 film Frequency. A modern-day fireman saved the day three decades earlier by getting in touch with his late dad in Queens who was alive sitting at home smoking too many cigarettes as the Mets were about to throw down with the Orioles…honestly, it was a pretty stupid movie, except for the ’69 Mets playing backdrop, which made it a pretty awesome movie.
The 1969 Mets may be the stuff of legend, but the 1986 Mets were better. They were greater, and not just because 108 is more than 100. Maybe their bottom line accomplishments were equal (they both won a World Series — and the ’69ers essentially rampaged through the postseason at 7-1), but I can’t discount the prevailing dominance factor. If nothing was as uplifting as the underdogs of 1969 rising up to shame Chicago, addle Atlanta and bean Baltimore, there’s nothing in Mets history that matches us playing the role of overcat and playing it to the hilt. There’s always been an element of ’69 in every good thing the Mets have accomplished, but 1986 has thus far served as precedent for feats to be named later. The only ’86 successors who whispered at that kind of success were the 1988 Mets and they morphed into the ’69 Orioles at the absolute worst time.
My very first Mets memories are of 1969, so I don’t dismiss it lightly. Hey, I don’t dismiss it at all. It was a wondrous season. It is to be cherished and held with the family jewels for as long as there is a New York Mets franchise. The 1986 bauble, however, is just that much shinier. Call it the Every Morning Factor. Every morning that we woke up in 1986, our team was the best team in baseball.
That’s the greatest feeling there is.
by Greg Prince on 10 January 2006 9:24 am We should have been able to set our watches or at least our calendars by Dwight Gooden's retirement. The first post-BCS Tuesday in the first January that followed his first five years of not pitching was supposed to be a day of celebration and validation in Metsopotamia. No matter what historical Hall of Fame judgment was passed on Gary Carter or Keith Hernandez or Darryl Strawberry, we knew that the 1986 Mets would be represented in the sanctioned ranks of the immortals because we could absolutely count on an announcement that Dr. K was going to be elevated to Dr. Koop — as in Kooperstown.
Yes, they were going to change the spelling in his honor. It was a mortal lock.
The Dwight Gooden watch that was so state-of-the-art when we first strapped it on in 1984 turned out to keep not such good time. It slowed down perceptibly in 1987, but we brought it to the jewelers for rehab and repair, and it worked pretty well into 1991. However, it stopped ticking altogether in 1994.
We threw it out in 1996.
Dwight Gooden is not going into the Hall of Fame this afternoon or ever. By now, we're not surprised. There was a time…well, you know what happened and what didn't happen. (If you somehow don't, find out.)
Gregg Jefferies, Rick Aguilera and Orel Hershiser joined Doc on this year's Hall of Fame ballot and will no doubt keep him company on the castoff pile when the voting is announced at 2 PM. I'd be surprised if any of our four 2006 candidacies live to be considered in 2007.
But let's not give up on gaining another plaque for our guys. Let's start a movement. Let's get Jerry Koosman into the Hall of Fame.
So what if he retired in 1985? Who cares if he passed from the Baseball Writers Association of America ballot with four votes in 1991? Or that two revamped Veterans Committee elections came and went in 2003 and 2005 with 26 and 25 players listed, respectively, and that none of them was Jerry Koosman?
Big deal that it's almost never occurred to anybody with or without BBWAA credentials that Jerry Koosman is a Hall of Famer. He should be in anyway.
Why? Because Jim Bunning is. And if Bunning is, there's no good reason Koosman isn't.
Jim Bunning was not voted in by the writers but he had a ton more supporters than Kooz. He made the ballot all 15 years that he was eligible from 1977 to 1991. His support fluctuated from the 38.12% he got his first time out, down to 33.25% five years later and then, magically, up over 50% for the first time in his ninth attempt. In 1988, he came thisclose, with 74.24%. Seventy-five is what's needed.
Naturally, you'd think he'd make it the next year, but his vote total dipped to 63.31% in '89, then 57.88% in '90. His last shot saw him bounce back to over 63%.
Jim Bunning was voted on 15 times and passed over 15 times. That was it, over and out…until he was eligible to be elected by the Veterans Committee, which did just that in 1996.
His win total remained stagnant in the five years that followed the end of his career, stayed just as stagnant in his decade-and-a-half on the writers' ballot, held steady during the five years thereafter and hadn't increased or decreased by as many as one when he finally gained entrance to Cooperstown. To be fair about it, he had as many career losses in 1996 as he did in 1971 when he stopped pitching.
You could say the same about Koosman. Actually, you could say a lot of the same about Bunning and Koosman.
Jim Bunning pitched 17 seasons in the big leagues.
Jerry Koosman pitched 19 seasons in the big leagues.
Jim Bunning won 224 games.
Jerry Koosman won 222 games.
Jim Bunning won 20 games once.
Jerry Koosman won 20 games twice.
Jim Bunning won at least 14 games in nine separate seasons.
Jerry Koosman won at least 14 games in nine separate seasons.
Jim Bunning's average won-lost record, according to Baseball Reference, was 13-11.
Jerry Koosman's average won-lost record, according to Baseball Reference, was 13-12.
Jim Bunning won 54.9% of his decisions.
Jerry Koosman won 51.5% of his decisions.
Jim Bunning's career ERA was 3.27.
Jerry Koosman's career ERA was 3.36.
Jim Bunning threw 3,760-1/3 innings.
Jerry Koosman threw 3,839-1/3 innings.
Jim Bunning struck out 2,855 batters.
Jerry Koosman struck out 2,556 batters.
Jim Bunning gave up 1,000 walks.
Jerry Koosman gave up 1,198 walks.
Jim Bunning completed 151 games.
Jerry Koosman completed 140 games.
Jim Bunning tossed 40 shutouts.
Jerry Koosman tossed 33 shutouts.
Jim Bunning pitched a perfect game at Shea Stadium.
Jerry Koosman pitched a complete game to win a World Series at Shea Stadium.
Jim Bunning never pitched in the postseason.
Jerry Koosman was 4-0 in six postseason starts.
Jim Bunning won 106 games in the National League and 118 games in the American League.
Jerry Koosman won 160 games in the National League and 62 games in the American League.
Jim Bunning was an All-Star seven times.
Jerry Koosman was an All-Star twice.
Jim Bunning's most prominent pitching staff cohorts were Frank Lary, Chris Short and Rick Wise.
Jerry Koosman's most prominent pitching staff cohorts were Tom Seaver, LaMarr Hoyt and Steve Carlton.
Jim Bunning appeared on the BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot 15 times, receiving 3,213 votes and was later elected to the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee as soon as they had the chance.
Jerry Koosman appeared on the BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot once, receiving 4 votes and has never been considered by the Veterans Committee.
Conclusion: The respective Hall of Fame statuses of Jim Bunning and Jerry Koosman make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Either they're both Hall of Famers or neither of them are.
Why on earth was Bunning a consistent if solid also-ran with the writers and then enough of a cause célèbre to merit immediate inclusion by the veterans? And with a career that was in so many ways a lefty mirror image of Bunning's, why was Koosman completely shunted aside by both constituencies?
A few theories for Bunning:
• He was in the U.S. House of Representatives when admitted to the Hall in '96 and baseball, still trying to nail down a Basic Agreement after the '94-'95 strike, figured it could use all the friends it could get in Washington.
• He helped form the Players Association in 1966, and while Marvin Miller's work has gone unrecognized by those who make these decisions, the players on the Veterans Committee appreciated their peer's action on their behalf.
• He threw a perfect game, which is pretty rare — and was extraordinarily so when he did it in 1964.
• He won 100 games in both leagues, a neat trick.
• He was the undisputed ace of most of the staffs on which he pitched.
• He was remembered fondly by some old buddy who got the ball rolling, standard operating procedure for the Vets before their committee was retooled in 2003.
Koosman?
• He wasn't a politician, either before or after he played. Though he was well liked by teammates, I don't know much about his networking skills.
• He didn't throw a perfect game.
• He didn't win 100 games in each league.
• He pitched alongside Cy Young winners and wasn't often looked upon as the No. 1 starter on his teams.
However…
• His numbers are almost the same as Bunning's in virtually every relevant category.
• He was a 20-game winner for the Mets in 1976 and the Twins in 1979. That's two different leagues. It's not a hundred wins, but it's an accomplishment. Besides that, both 20-win seasons marked personal renaissances that followed first a series of beleaguering injuries and then two off-years in which non-support saddled him with dreadful records. Jerry Koosman won 20 for the first time at age 33 and 20 for the second time at age 36.
• He won 19 games as a rookie on a ninth-place team and would have been Rookie of the Year most any other year, but 1968 happened to be the year Johnny Bench debuted.
• He didn't make nearly as many All-Star teams as Bunning — perhaps a symptom of not being the ace on the Mets, the White Sox or the Phils — but he was considered the clutchest of September pitchers. (All-Star teams are picked in July.)
• He is arguably the best postseason pitcher the Mets have ever had, something Bunning can't claim for any team, as Bunning never got to October. The closest he came was 1964 when the Phillies fell apart. Bunning was shelled in his two must-win starts in the final week of that year, though it must be said he was pitching on two days' rest at the behest of the legendarily panicking Gene Mauch.
Truthfully, it's not so much that I think Jerry Koosman belongs in the Hall of Fame. Sure, I'd like to see it, but that's not my point. My point is what is Jim Bunning doing there? I recall only the tail end of Bunning's career first-hand, but I don't remember him being discussed in the stratosphere of the great pitchers of the day, either the old hands like Gibson and Marichal or the young guns like Seaver and Carlton. When his career was complete, there were no surprising Blylevenian totals that caught your attention. While it's interesting that his wins were split pretty evenly between the N.L. and A.L., he was facing Major Leaguers every year either way. In these days of player movement (perhaps facilitated by Bunning's union activity), it's less uncommon to see a pitcher succeed in two leagues. The perfect game was memorable but it was against us…the 1964 (53-109) us. And it was one game in June.
Speaking of feats at Shea, if I had to have one pitcher for one game, I'd take Kooz over just about anybody, based on the way he hung in against and then dominated the Orioles — 6-1/3 one-hit innings after spotting them a 3-0 lead in the third — in Game Five of the '69 World Series. He pitched 8-2/3 innings of two-hit ball four days earlier in Baltimore. Jerry Koosman pitched a New York team to a world championship. It was he who threw the last pitch of the most fabled underdog season of modern times. Ed Charles and Jerry Grote creating a Koosman sandwich is one of baseball's truly iconic baseball images. Where's that supposed New York bias when a fella needs it?
In his illuminating 1994 book The Politics of Glory, Bill James warned against falling head over heels for the “If-One-Then” argument, which goes “if this player is in and he's comparable to this other player, then the other player should be in, too.” What it gets you, he wrote, is a Hall of Fame filled with players whose main qualification is they are all better than the worst Hall of Famer. Comparisons of the “If-One-Then” nature, James said, can help you make a case but they shouldn't be the case.
Understood. But I'm still stumped as to why Jim Bunning was considered such a legitimate candidate for so long and why Jerry Koosman, his statistical near-doppelganger and the No. 13 Greatest Met of the First Forty Years, received all of four votes. Ideally, I'd simply throw Bunning out of Cooperstown, but they don't do that sort of thing.
If the Doc Gooden watch had kept better time, this wouldn't be an issue here today.
Even though Kooz wasn't on this year's HOF ballot, I filled one out anyway at Gotham Baseball.
by Jason Fry on 10 January 2006 3:57 am Walked home over the Brooklyn Bridge tonight, marveling that it was 58 degrees out, and had the inevitable thought.
Y'know, I've sat through three-hour games in far worse weather than this. Why the heck isn't there a game on? Slackers.
When there is (not too long from now), how about some musical changes at the old ball yard? Something to shake up the usual tired blend of screech metal, whompin' jingo-country, chugga-chugga hip-hop and hyperactive salsa, leavened with novelties and hits o' yesteryear accompanied by really easy trivia questions. (If you hear “Born in the U.S.A.,” the hint will be something like “It was the year right after 1983….”)
It's not that all the music is terrible, though most of it is, but that with the exception of the salsa none of it moves. The players' music is mostly young aggro stuff for young aggro guys, and it kind of cuffs you around, but the players get what they want, within reason. (I still wanna know why Braden Looper kept coming out to “Lightning Strikes,” an obscurity from the years in which an Aerosmith show was Steven Tyler falling down onstage while hired guns waved over the EMTs.) But you get whiplash when these various concussions are followed by lowest-common-denominator tunes that sheepishly alternate three years ago's marketing with bleached-out oldies. There have been songs I've heard at Shea and come to like, but usually only because they accompanied good things happening on the field in the late 1990s. I heard “We Like to Party” or “Let's Get Loud” or “Stop the Rock” while we were winning baseball games back then and now I'm as helpless as a dog responding to the bell that he's learned precedes chow. But that's not the same as actually liking these songs — in fact, I can only think of two songs I first heard at Shea and legitimately like in any context: “Double Shot (Of My Baby's Love)” and the original, Slade version of “Cum On Feel the Noize,” which was inexplicably popular a couple of years back.
If I was musical King for a Day at Shea, things would be different. Here's a handful of songs I'd love to hear instead of the usual parade of pablum. (Links will lead you to streaming Amazon samples in WMA format. They're supposed to open in their own windows, but that's not happening for some reason that's beyond me.)
* Steve Earle, “N.Y.C.” — More a stomp than a groove, but it would kill as the soundtrack for a video montage for a new player from the sticks. Here's the chorus:
I'm going to New York City
I never really been there
Just like the way it sounds
I heard the girls are pretty
There must be something happening there
It's just too big a town
The camera operators could objectify cute women for the “girls are pretty” line (inevitably freezing their image just after some mook sticks his Yankee hat into the frame), and the song's readily adaptable to a certain gloating over one's own town, which is perfectly honorable in this context. But the clincher? It's the narrator telling the song's hero: “Billy, give 'em hell!” How can this not be Billy Wagner's song?
* The Sugarhill Gang, “Apache” — Here's an experiment. Go to a Sunday matinee at Shea, then head out to Keyspan Park for a Cyclones game. It's just sad how much cooler everything is at Keyspan, even considering there are dizzy bat races and God knows what between innings. (Unhappily, “God knows what” has sometimes included the mascot being rude to my child.) But the Cyclones have more fun, keep the crowd more entertained, have better food and better music. Much better music. Like “Apache.” Scientists have actually proven it's impossible to be completely unhappy as long as “Apache” is playing over a PA system. “Lazy Mary,” on the other hand, has never been cool. Not for a nanosecond.
* The Hives, “Hate to Say I Told You So” — I don't know how a bunch of Swedes managed to pen the perfect song for taunting the opposing team after a manager's visited the mound, left his pitcher in, then had to return to get him after he's given up the big hit, but they did, and we ought to take advantage. (The sample doesn't quite get this across, but trust me.)
* The Figgs, “The Daylight Strong” — Give me a Met highlight reel, this song and access to the Diamondvision and I will create power-pop heaven and an immediate surge in record sales for a criminally unappreciated band: Mets hitting drives on the drum parts, going deep, flexing, etc. There's even a “watch it go round and round” line that would sync perfectly with footage of an umpire signaling home run. Then pair it with the same band's “Reaction,” a song made for alternating shots of good things happening on the field with fans going nuts in the stands.
* Earth, Wind and Fire, “September” — A month of happiness packed into three minutes and 36 seconds. Play it after every September win with pennant-race implications and let karma take over.
Of course it's January, and right now I would pay an inordinately large amount of money to watch us lose 7-2 to the Brewers and wouldn't complain if the PA played a rotation of “Lazy Mary,” “The Best,” “The Final Countdown” and “New York State of Mind.” (OK, maybe not “The Best” — though losing 7-2 to the Brewers would presumably keep it from rearing its gloppy little head anyway.) But summer's coming, and while I can't wait to get back to Shea, I can definitely wait until I have to endure the Blackout Allstars yet again.
by Greg Prince on 8 January 2006 11:58 am This afternoon will mark the 21st time in my sentient life that I will be delightfully surprised by a particular televised event. It will be the 21st time since I started paying attention to their intermittently competent antics that the New York Football Giants will be playing a playoff game.
When I was growing up, I never thought I’d see even one. I was happy when there was simply the hint of contention in the air, a dab of a dream that the Giants and not the Cowboys or the Redskins or the Eagles (or the Cardinals a couple of times, for cryin’ out loud) would represent the National Football Conference’s Eastern Division in the National Football League’s postseason tournament. If I could get a 5-3 going in early November, I found that highly satisfying. If such a year ended smashed to 6-10 pieces, well, it was nice to remember when they were 5-3.
I was born with the promise of something better. In fact, I’m fairly confident that the lead sports story in all the New York papers on the very day I trotted onto the gridiron we call Earth was the Giants’ participation in the NFL championship game the day before. Indeed, on December 30, 1962 (or Greg Minus One as I like to think of it), the Giants lost the league title to the Green Bay Packers, 16-7. It was part of a natal-era trend, the Giants playing for and losing it all. The Giants won the NFL East in 1961 and would do so again in 1963, getting beaten by the Packers and Bears, respectively, after doing so…not that I could possibly remember the former or reasonably recall the latter.
My mild absorption into the New York Football Giants (I love that they’re still called that, as if somebody hasn’t found out there’s nothing but an ugly housing project hard by Coogan’s Bluff) began in the fall of 1969, presumably after I settled down from that year’s World Series and on a Sunday when the Knickerbockers were off. My dad liked the Giants, so I liked the Giants. There was nothing to like, mind you. The Giants had to streak to get to 6-8 in the old Century Division. Right then and there I learned to have no pretensions to success where my favorite football team was concerned.
They didn’t disappoint in that sense. The Giants gave me nothing through the decade of the 1970s. Absolutely nothing. Nevertheless, I gave them my habitual viewership — if there was no league-mandated TV blackout — and earspace (do today’s 6-year-olds rabidly listen to sports on the radio and accept it to be normal behavior as I did?). I was rewarded with an endless string of 4-10/5-9 seasons that changed only when the NFL tossed an extra couple of loss possibilities on the pile with a 16-game schedule. Then it was 6-10 or 4-12.
It’s not that I was in the Giants’ camp on par with the way I was a Mets fan. Nothing of the sort. Sports required a local allegiance (a pox on New York-area children who choose favorite teams from other places) in each of its sectors, so it was kind of a default thing. I knew nobody else who rooted for the Giants besides my dad — he wasn’t that rabid on the subject — and I wasn’t going to start watching football with anybody but him. I had no Giant clothing or any desire to wear any. There was no 1969 in the Mets’ sense or 1969-70 in the Knicks’ sense in which to invest a little residual faith. I knew they had been good about the time I was born, but that may as well have been in the 1800s. If it didn’t happen on my watch, it didn’t happen.
To be fair, I didn’t take it all that seriously. It was only football. I loved baseball. By the late ’70s, I liked football a lot more than I had earlier in the decade — it left basketball in the dust for second place in personal sports affection — but the Giants weren’t cooperating with my ramped-up interest. There’d be a hint that something good was about to happen, but it was usually fumbled away (rather than sensibly fallen on and protected) in the last minute of play.
All I wanted was one lousy playoff appearance. The kids in Dallas and Miami and Oakland and Minnesota and Pittsburgh and Los Angeles seemed to have had them provided in a trust fund. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to see my favorite football team play once there were only a couple of games on any given Sunday. Lord knows I couldn’t fathom winning one of those games and I surely never would have taken it for granted as I assume the Cowboy and Viking and Steeler and Raider fans must have.
Even the perennial crappy teams were getting in on the action. The Eagles started being good. The Oilers. The Broncos. The Patriots. Almost everybody but the Giants was getting a shot.
Almost. There was another football team that was equally inept. Naturally I started rooting for it, too.
This is where the baseball me becomes completely unfamiliar to you. This is where I grow so desperate for New York to get in on some of that sweet playoff action that I divide my loyalties. Or increase their parameters.
In 1978, I started rooting for the Jets. Not instead of the Giants, but in addition to them. I saw nothing strange or hypocritical about any of this. If anything, at 15, I was finally doing what I think I was supposed to be doing. Mets…Jets…Shea…it’s a natural.
I never made the connection even as I recognized it. I think the roundabout reason I didn’t go green upon my introduction to football was because it was exactly the one and only time there was a Jets’ bandwagon worth jumping on. I’d already decided the Giants were my team. The Jets, in their post-Super Bowl glory — I remember them being defending champs but have no recollection of them getting there — were the ones getting most of the attention circa 1969. I actually knew kids who rooted for the Jets. Namath, even on gimpy knees, was more glamorous than all the Giants combined. But the Giants were my team. In an early example of the principles that would guide me well into middle age, I found myself resenting the Jets for the very act of being somebody else’s choice, leaving my choice as the de facto odd team out. I didn’t like being ignored, whether accidentally or deservedly.
But I didn’t hate the Jets. What would’ve been the point? To my mind, they were in another league. It took me a couple of years to sort out that the AFL was now the AFC and in the NFL. As long as they weren’t bothering the Giants very often, I wished them well. In fourth grade, there was the added motivation of one of the Jets’ player’s kids (the kicker’s daughter) being in my class. “Hey, I’m glad the Dolphins kicked your dad’s team’s ass yesterday while Norm Snead teased a little more false hope from me!” wasn’t my style.
Sheer desperation for one lousy playoff game including one lousy New York football team drove me to give one half of my football self over to the Jets in ’78. They won their first game and did so in snazzy new green uniforms with their name spelled out on their green helmets in a way that made JETS look really cool, like the SST. That’s about all it took for me to think that maybe they could be my ticket to ride. (Though we never discussed it, that was also the season when my father quietly began shifting to the Jets; I doubt he gave it as much as a paragraph of thought.) As for their playing in Shea, I grudgingly forgave them that. Forgave? Not embraced? What can I tell ya? As a preteen I was a junior Pete Flynn, continually bristling (albeit without the brogue) that my precious baseball surface was being torn up by large men in cleats. Baseball, gentlemen.
In whatever color they came and wherever they deigned to call home, I decided it was fun to have this other New York team to pull for, quantifiable evidence aside. No matter how well they were going, the Jets always seemed one series of downs from toppling like a tenuous banana republic tinhorn dictator whose army wasn’t nearly the force he thought it was during the walkthrough. That sense of danger made the Jets more entertaining than the win some/lose some/muddle through Giants. I didn’t like my new team more than my old team. I just liked them differently.
The ’78 Jets had a few moments — Matt Robinson is a name that echoes amid the cobwebs — but they managed to let me down with the same thunderous thud the Giants delivered weekly. Surely you’re familiar with the Joe Pisarcik episode at the Meadowlands. On that very afternoon at virtually the same moment (both locals were playing home games at 1 o’clock, unthinkable now), Pat Leahy, the kicker who replaced my erstwhile classmate’s father, shanked a 19-yard field goal that would’ve beaten the Pats. I was stung by both defeats. Ow! OW! Although the Giants had a nine-season head start on being my wet blanket of autumn, the Jets caught up quickly in the doling of disappointment.
Come 1981, I got my wish twice. The Giants made the playoffs. The Jets made the playoffs. In fact, the Jets making the playoffs by beating the Packers ensured the Giants their spot, so it felt very right to cheer on both teams. By then, I was in college in another state and had to taste my first iota of New York football success while sitting in my parents’ condo in Florida.
That was all right because the games were on TV. That’s where I’ve seen every NFL game I’ve ever seen save two (the Giants and the Jets each visited Tampa Stadium once while I was at USF and I took advantage), and that’s fine. I’ve been careful to not have used the phrases “Giants fan” or “Jets fan” here to describe myself. It’s not because I don’t share some of the characteristics common to fans of these teams (for instance, I have a decent stash of Giant and Jet apparel these days), but as an identifier, I realize it’s one thing to follow a team, rejoice when it wins, bum when it loses, stick with it regardless, but it’s another thing entirely to declare yourself a [Blank] Fan.
I thought I could call myself a Giants Fan when they put all the Pisarcik behind them at the dawn of 1987 and reached the Super Bowl. Then I watched the true diehard Giants Fans who were on hand for the NFC championship win at the Meadowlands express how much it meant to them, how long they’d been going to the games, how big a part of their existence the Giants composed. Wow, I thought, that’s not me — I just like them a lot and want them to beat Denver. Listening to Joe Benigno on WFAN when he was hosting early Monday mornings after dismal Sunday afternoons (think of Fireman Ed with more than four letters to his vocabulary) told me I wasn’t that way about the Jets either.
I may sincerely if modestly revel in their triumphs and just as sincerely if modestly suffer in their traumas and occasionally yell at the TV or radio on these teams’ behalves or very occasionally lie awake calculating who will have to lose to whom so one or both of them can win the right to compete in January, but that doesn’t grant me license to refer to myself as an upper-case Giants Fan or Jets Fan. Not the way I’m a Mets Fan. Or METS FAN.
Rooting for the Giants or the Jets is something I do when they’re in season and the Mets are not. During the Giants’ Wild Card round game against the Panthers today, I’ll be a Mets Fan first and foremost. Still, I always find it wonderful to have at least one of the New York football teams playing right about now. If the Giants beat the Carolina Panthers, it will make me happy. If they lose to them, I’ll still be delightfully surprised they had a game at all.
by Greg Prince on 7 January 2006 6:22 pm It was a week or two before Opening Day 1992. My car was still new as was my fascination with having my very own built-in cassette deck. I had just bought Rhino’s Soul Hits of the ’70s: Didn’t It Blow Your Mind Vol. 6. Playing Side B, driving home from work after midnight, I came across a song that was vaguely familiar.
Before it was over, the chorus had become mine.
‘Cause I want to be happy and free
Livin’ and loving for me
I want to be happy and free
Livin’ and loving for me
Like a natural man (like a natural man)
A natural man (like a natural man)
It was written by Bobby Hebb and Sandy Baron, but the emotion was purely that of Mr. Lou Rawls, the transcendent vocalist who died yesterday from cancer at the age of 72.
This 1971 classic, in fact, belonged to Lou Rawls, but he was kind enough to let me borrow it that night and I got a lot of use out of it. I kept rewinding the tape and singing along with it. By the time I got to my dark suburban street, I saw no point in parking until the song was over. I drove around the block a couple of times so I could absorb every drop of “A Natural Man”.
Fourteen years later, it’s a part of me still. Voices through a Toyota speaker, whether they belong to baseball announcers or silky soul singers, can have that kind of long-term effect on you.
Amazin’.
by Greg Prince on 6 January 2006 9:13 am With all due respect to 1971, 1976, 1981, 1991, 1996 and 2001, there’s only one Met milestone anniversary worth wallowing in via the now legendary Flashback Friday treatment (see the “A Year To Remember” listing along the sidebar) in 2006. And I think you know which year I’m talking about.
Welcome to 1986 + 20. Welcome to the most overwhelmingly successful year in Mets history all over again.
In wedding terms, it’s the China or platinum celebration. In baseball terms, it’s the one that says what has reflexively seemed like yesterday is now truly a long time ago. Tenth anniversaries are tentative. They’re too close to what we’re commemorating to allow us to be completely lost in the past. Thirtieth anniversaries are historical. Our remove from the event in question is suddenly a little too distant. The 25th strikes me as a do-over for the twentieth; Hey, didn’t we just do this five years ago?
The twentieth anniversary of the 1986 Mets. Honestly, I feel like I’ve been waiting 19 years for this.
This was no typical season, so this is not a one- or two- or even three-part job. 1986 is stitched too deeply into our fabric for one Friday. This needs to be a weekly series.
So it will be.
From this Friday to next Friday to the Friday after next, clear through — should vigilance be properly committed — to the final Friday in October (which just happens to be October 27), we will be, in some form or fashion, commemorating 1986.
There’s a lot to remember, a lot to sift through, a lot to say. Some of it will call up the obvious, some will invoke the mostly forgotten and not a little, I imagine, will be peppered by the personal. I look forward to sharing, and to you sharing back…bit by bit, week by week. No need to rush straight to Buckner, if you get my drift.
Consider this programming advisory the first of our Flashbacks. But don’t worry. We have ten months of Fridays to mull in detail what Met life was like two decades ago and how what happened then continues to impact us now. As a great voice probably said more than once in those halcyon days, fasten your seatbelts.
Twenty years, 43 Fridays. This was the first of them.
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