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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 8 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.
by Greg Prince on 6 January 2006 1:29 am Dennis Cunningham, the longtime Channel 2 movie critic, reviewed St. Elmo's Fire as such:
It stars seven of Hollywood's freshest young faces. And if you don't like those, we've got seven more for you.
This is pretty much how teams build bullpens. Certainly it's how ours does. Closers are generally etched in stone and everything else takes a pencil.
When we approached 2005 in spring training, who were we looking at for those pesky innings between Pedro (who was going to be so decrepit he wouldn't see the sixth) and Looper?
Bell, Koo, DeJean. Something like that.
Where were we by year's end?
Padilla, Heilman, Hernandez.
In between, there was…oh, I don't need to run through them the way Randolph and Peterson did. Suffice it to say we won 83 games with a dinged-up fireman and a relief corps that was more vamped than revamped.
This is why I applaud Omar's recent efforts to bring in dependable bullpen guys. Or guys who could be dependable. Or guys who have been dependable somewhere. Or guys who weren't here a year ago at this time.
Duaner Sanchez, Steve Schmoll, Chad Bradford (he'd love your support, but requests you keep it to yourself)…sure, why not? They could be pretty darn good more often than they're not, and that's really all you can ask of middle and setup men.
I agree, to a point, with a friend who shakes his head at Minaya's latest trade by noting “setup men are almost a dime a dozen and finding really effective ones is a crapshoot.” By definition, every pitcher who isn't a starter or a closer is a setup man or one who would like to be so as to get out of being the Maytag long man. So yes, they are plentiful. And, yes, it is a crapshoot, judging by the dice we kept rolling on Matthews, Takatsu, Aybar, Hamulack, Ring, Santiago, Graves and all of the above last year.
Then why not try to reduce the odds and show up to camp with some guys in whom you have some confidence? That's hardly what was done in '05, a season in which the six games between us and the Wild Card may have been a matter of securing a better bullpen sooner than later. Seeing as how at least one relief pitcher and usually more are used in 154 or so games annually, the dime-a-dozen, bring 'em in, move 'em out philosophy should not be our default position.
I don't understand the outdated thinking that shudders at trading starters for relievers, no matter the pitchers in question. Early next week will likely bring a recurrence of perennial handwringing at the exclusion of Bruce Sutter and Goose Gossage from the Hall of Fame. Those who take relief pitching seriously will lower their voices and decry the shame of it all. The rest will blindly go about ignoring how important the sixth, seventh and eighth are and dismiss the significance of the men entrusted more often than not with securing their outs.
I liked Jae Seo. Not as much as other people and not nearly enough to adopt the colorful nickname another chum gave the Mets' GM in response to the trade that sent him and Hamulack to the Dodgers for Sanchez and Schmoll. I will not call him Omoron Minaya for this. Seo pitched us some real nice games in 2005, sort of like he did in 2003 and not at all like he didn't in 2004. In August, he was marvelous. In September, he was more than adequate.
But, boy, I just never felt comfortable with him out there on a going basis. Consider me as unwilling to adjust my worldview on Jae Seo as some are on relievers. He just didn't convince me he was a long-term proposition. He tends to teeter on the edge of oblivion in any given game and I sense he may have used up his rabbits in hats last year.
I wouldn't have rushed to trade him, but I don't think bolstering the bullpen is exactly giving him away. And let's remember that rosters aren't frozen on January 5. The general manager's desire is to do Omore. It may result in another setup type, like the long-discussed Danys Baez. This may be a piling up of chip after chip, and when the chips fall, we could wind up with Manny Ramirez. Or it could just be Seo & Hamulack for Sanchez & Schmoll and I could live with that.
Pedro, Glavine, Benson, Zambrano, Trachsel, perhaps Heilman. Seo is younger than all of them except Heilman and we don't know if Heilman is a starter (I liked him fine in the ninth when tried, but that ship has sailed). On the other hand, Seo had been bouncing around the Mets' system for eight seasons, was given to mound snits and has not shown a propensity for consistency. Youth isn't everything.
We still need a lefty in the pen and none of the new guys (acquired after and projected to pitch before Wagner) is that. And we're still shy a second baseman, even with the minor league contract proffered to Bret Boone. Guys get minor league contracts all winter long, so I'm not ready to recalculate the lineup's average age upward just yet. We haven't had much luck with erstwhile All-Star second-sackers. Bret Boone wouldn't be my first option. I doubt he'll be Willie's.
by Greg Prince on 5 January 2006 9:12 pm It's been a fun trip to Met Hell, especially because we can leave it anytime we want. But the Mets aren't about hell. They're about something higher.
Today is the second anniversary of a terrible loss and the beginning of a bad year for luminescent Met presences; two would wind up wind leaving us. I couldn't help but think of both last spring when I was considering the man who died two years ago today as the No. 7 Greatest Met of the First Forty Years.
One pitched. One talked. No, check that — both talked, but only one got paid for it, technically speaking.
In 2004, the Mets' soul absorbed two body blows delivered by the deaths of Tug McGraw in January and Bob Murphy in August. The genuine sadness that greeted their departures was so deep that it had to go further than proper respect for two people so associated with one ballclub.
It came from this: For the better part of the fortysomething seasons that the Mets have existed, the optimism and limitless possibilities expressed long ago by McGraw and continually by Murphy were articles of faith for fans who saw past won-lost results that would discourage more rational folks.
Tug and Murph, in their own fashions, told the Mets faithful to ignore mere statistical and empirical evidence. Forget the Games Behind column. Don't worry about the score if it's not in our favor. Good things can always happen.
The essential nature of the Mets fan accepted this throughout the tenure of Tug and right up to the end of Murph's days. By the early 2000s, operating in a city overrun by Yankees and a division controlled by Braves, Mets fans, the hardest core of us, dug in and unfurled miles and miles of hope, nightly and yearly.
A singular sentence uttered by Tug and the consistent tone set by Murph goes a long way toward explaining our perpetual state of delighted delusion. Whatever brought them to their own brands of hopefulness and their impulse to share it, each was infectious.
Behind a mike or leaping off a mound, they channeled Churchill: Never give in…never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy…not even down two in the tenth with two out and nobody on or 6-1/2 back and behind five teams at the end of August.
While the modern-day Mets marketing department churns out obtuse come-ons like “Catch The Energy” for sub-.500 goods, Tug caught the zeitgeist of the Mets fan in 1973 and tossed it back to us for safe keeping. “You Gotta Believe” was a simple enough directive. Echoing down the decades, it spoke to Mets fans then and later. We can do it, said Tug — I'll pitch, you persevere and together we'll figure this thing out. It worked in 1973, as the Mets rose from a late last to a furious first, and it cobbled its way into the Met DNA.
Every unlikely scenario since, whether it's gone in the Mets' favor (the Buckner affair, the grand-slam single) or not, has played out under Tug's rule.
Murph's game, meanwhile, wasn't just a game of inches, as the cliché allows, but more universally, “a game of redeeming features.” In more cynical times, his reliable forecast that the sun'll come out tomorrow — breaking through a few harmless, puffy, cumulus clouds — would qualify as shilling. But for Bob Murphy, it was natural and, by all accounts, real. Thus it resonated.
What sold McGraw's and Murphy's chin-up admonitions was their audience's desire to buy them, hold onto them and never let them go. It became the Mets fan's nature to, yes, believe. No season was so far gone until mathematical elimination struck that you couldn't. No game was beyond the reach of one of Murph's happy recaps until the third out of the final inning was recorded. If the Mets lost, the recap may have been less giddy, but it was never morose. In a game of redeeming features, redemption is only a day away, all you need is belief.
That and a bitchin' scroogie.
by Jason Fry on 5 January 2006 5:24 am And here we are at last. The Ninth Circle of Met Hell.
In the Inferno, the Ninth Circle is a frozen lake, at whose center Dante and Virgil find Satan, trapped in the ice and chewing on Brutus, Cassius and the head of Judas Iscariot. The deepest part of Met Hell, however, does not look like the cover of a heavy-metal album. All you’ll find here is a small, dimly lit room. It is empty except for a tarp cylinder. There’s a man trapped under the tarp cylinder. He’s been down here for some time.
Why? Let’s go back and find out.
It’s July 24, 1993. We’re in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium. Meet Vincent Maurice Coleman, a 31-year-old professional baseball player. He’s in his third year with the New York Mets, and it’s not going well. Once a Cardinals speedster, he arrived in New York before the 1991 season, signing a four-year, $12 million deal as the key man in the team’s post-Darryl makeover. But various injuries — usually to his hamstrings — have prevented him from ever putting together a decent season as a Met, and he’s done himself zero favors with his off-field behavior. There have been, well, incidents. Like the time he cursed out coach Mike Cubbage during batting practice and refused to apologize. Like the ugly confrontation with Jeff Torborg in the Atlanta clubhouse that ended with a two-game suspension. Like the time he hit Dwight Gooden in the shoulder swinging a golf club, costing Doc a start. Like the ridicule he brought on himself by saying that Shea’s sandy infield was keeping him out of the Hall of Fame.
No, life as a Met has not gone well for Vince Coleman, who has just finished going 1-for-5 in a 5-4 extra-inning loss to the Dodgers. Now, at about 4:10 in the afternoon, he’s riding with Bobby Bonilla (figures he’d be involved somehow, doesn’t it?) in a Jeep Cherokee being driven by the Dodgers’ Eric Davis. Life isn’t great for Vince Coleman, but it’s about to get worse. He’s about to earn a date with Met Hell’s hungriest, heaviest tarp cylinder.
The Dodger Stadium parking lot is bordered by a chain-link fence, and on the other side of that fence are some 200 to 300 fans. Coleman steps out of the Jeep and lights a small green explosive. It explodes at a distance from the fans that Los Angeles fire officials will later estimate at 27 feet. Arson investigators will determine the explosive was similar to an M-100. This has been called a firecracker or cherry bomb, but those are rather innocent-sounding terms for this particular explosive: It’s about three inches long, about seven-eighths of an inch in diameter, and packs the explosive power of more than a quarter of a stick of dynamite.
The explosion leaves Cindy Mayhew, 33, with inner-ear damage. Marshall Savoy, 11, winds up with a cut shin. And a two-year-old girl, Amanda Santos, suffers a finger injury, second-degree burns under her right eye and lacerations of her cornea. Coleman gets back in the Jeep and Davis drives off. Coleman will play three more games for the Mets, going a robust 1-for-7, before the team puts him on “adminstrative leave” and vows he’ll never play for them again. (He doesn’t — he’s sent to Kansas City in the offseason for Kevin McReynolds.) In the real world, Coleman gets a one-year suspended sentence, three years’ probation, a $1,000 fine and 200 hours of community service. His lawyer says he’ll start serving his community service by helping with the cleanup from the Malibu fires, noting that “the jeans and shovel are in the car.” Coleman is then seen barbequeing chicken for firemen. A civil suit is later settled; details unknown. At least we’ll always have Vince’s public apology, in which he vomits forth some of the most scrofulous scripted regret in the sorry history of grudging athlete apologies, reading that “Amanda stood out near a gate to catch a glimpse of a ballplayer. But today, I want her to catch a glimpse of a loving father and a helpful friend.”
Baseball players’ contracts contain a lot of things they’re not allowed to do — typical banned activities include surfing and motocross, though a Met fan might want to add to the list puttering around with garden shears and pitching for the Dominican Republic in March with a bum toe. As far as I know, baseball contracts don’t bother to forbid things that should be perfectly obvious to anyone sentient. For instance, there’s presumably no line like this:
43(a). Player shall refrain from discharging quarter-sticks of dynamite in a fashion that deliberately or through absurdly stupid negligence causes eye injuries in children attending a baseball game.
Truth be told, I don’t loathe Vince Coleman quite as thoroughly as I do Roberto Alomar or Bobby Bonilla. But no matter what our psychic ulcers, we have to have some perspective, and some standards. And that calls on us to confront the undeniable. Let’s recall who populates the ranks of the Met Damned, and compare their crimes.
The First Circle of Met Hell is wandered by creeps we couldn’t truly embrace. But Rey Ordonez, Rickey Henderson, Kevin McReynolds and Darryl Strawberry never injured a child with an explosive.
The Second Circle of Met Hell is reserved for those tarred by image problems, but who escape further sanction because most of their bad behavior happened elsewhere. But Carl Everett, Eddie Murray, Julio Machado, Juan Samuel and Jeff Kent never injured a child with an explosive. Well, OK, Julio Machado did kill somebody. But it was in South America, and he was a Brewer, and…um, we’ve got to move on. Nothing to see here.
The Second Second Circle of Met Hell is a prison for those who tarnished their tenure with bad exits. But George Foster and Mike Hampton never injured a child with an explosive.
The Fourth Circle of Met Hell is the eternal home for minor Mets who commited major sins. But Mickey Lolich, Tony Tarasco, Jim Leyritz, Jose Offerman, Rey Sanchez, Karim Garcia, Mike DeJean and Don Zimmer never injured a child with an explosive.
The Fifth Circle of Met Hell is the unhappy kingdom of Mets we may not have hated, but we sure disliked. But Dave Kingman, Gregg Jefferies and Armando Benitez never injured a child with an explosive.
Following the Fifth Circle, Greg rounded up some other Mets deserving of infernal internment. But Brett Butler, Pete Harnisch, Doug Sisk, Rich Rodriguez and Mike Bacsik never injured a child with an explosive.
The Sixth Circle of Met Hell is the dreary hotel domain of unmotivated third baseman and one-time gravedigger Richie Hebner. But while Hebner dug his own grave, he never injured a child with an explosive.
The Seventh Circle of Met Hell is a brimstone-fueled flight with the two Bobby Bonillas. But while at least one of them was an eyewitness to such an act, neither Bobby Bonilla ever injured a child with an explosive.
The Eighth Circle of Hell is marked by a plaque for disgraceful quitter Roberto Alomar. But Alomar never injured a child with an explosive.
Vince Coleman did. And therefore, here he is under that rather heavy-looking tarp cylinder. And here he will stay, forever. I’m turning out the lights now, and shutting the door. Rest in peace, Vince.
And now our hellish tour is done. Ignore the screams of the condemned and come along with me, away from this place. Because it’s 2006. And you know what? February’s not so far away.
by Jason Fry on 4 January 2006 5:20 am We may be more than halfway home, but down in Met Hell we’ve still got a little ways to go. And two more permanent residents to confront.
In the non-baseball Inferno, the Eighth Circle of Hell was Malebolge, a domain of ditches separated by great folds of earth. The inhabitants of those ditches included hypocrites, thieves, false counselors, sowers of schism and falsifiers — all apt descriptions for the man who dwells forever in the Eighth Circle of Met Hell.
When he arrived in 2002, he seemed destined for a realm both loftier and gentler: He’d just turned 34 and had a fair amount of mileage, but hardly seemed like he was about to slow down. Why, the previous year he’d hit .336, driven in 100 runs, stolen 30 bases and won a Gold Glove. He was a sure-fire Hall of Famer and a member-in-waiting of the 3,000 Hit Club. It seemed quite possible that he’d reach that lofty plateau as a Met — after all, he had 2,389 hits on his resume already, and spent his first winter in Port St. Lucie talking about a contract extension.
When things hit a bump early, our latest Met hero kept talking a good game. Officially, anyway: “I’m happy here. I want to play here and I want to stay here and hopefully things can get better. There’s things said that I haven’t said. I haven’t opened my mouth, and then other people open their mouth and say, ‘Robbie’s not happy,’ this and that. Maybe there’s another Robbie Alomar out there.”
Hmm. If there was, it would explain a lot. Because the Roberto Alomar Met fans endured for 222 dismal games in 2002 and 2003 sure didn’t seem very interested in playing baseball.
In 2002 he hit .266, drove in 53 runs and stole 16 bases. Mediocre numbers, but rarely has a player shown so little in achieving mediocrity. Shea Stadium didn’t seem to agree with him: There were mutterings (always secondhand) that he was dismayed to see previous years’ home runs turn into flyouts, that he was miffed to find Shea’s thick grass turning ground-ball hits into 5-3s and 6-3s and 3-1s. Maybe that was the explanation for his mulish insistence on dropping down bunt after bunt, regardless of whether or not the situation called for one. And then plenty of times Alomar would snatch defeat from the jaws of questionable ideas, turning potential bunt hits, however ill-conceived, into outs by trying to dive head-first into first base.
In the field, that Gold Glove turned into pyrite. Balls that he snapped up in San Diego and Toronto and Baltimore and Cleveland skittered by him, but the worst thing was watching him turn the pivot. One of the most-acrobatic second basemen in the history of the game had turned into Gregg Jefferies: He’d take throws from shortstop with his rear end heading for left-center, shot-putting a lollipop throw that would float into the first baseman’s glove or bounce into it after the batter crossed first. It happened again and again and again, as Met announcers wondered what was going on and the boos came down from the stands.
But surely a lock for Cooperstown made his teammates better with his intangibles? Ha ha ha. Alomar sulked about being moving around in the batting order and took such umbrage to needling about his rookie card from Roger Cedeno (who may not be able to play baseball but has always been hailed as a prince of a guy) that Mo Vaughn had to intervene in the dugout in front of TV, God and everyone. Then in April 2003 he was part of the double-play tandem that blamed Jae Seo — a rookie — for the well-coiffed, Bentley-driving Rey Sanchez’s failure to cover the bag against the Expos. That’s veteran leadership! (Given that Jose Reyes’ first two double-play mates and counselors were Alomar and Sanchez, it’s a testament to his character that he isn’t Maurice Clarett.)
Then, in late June 2003, a miraculous thing happened. Suddenly Alomar was hanging in there on the pivot. Suddenly plays not made for a season and a half were being made. Suddenly he looked like…well, suddenly he looked like Roberto Alomar. The source of this miracle? The Mets were openly shopping him on the trade market. (Talk about testaments to character.) When Alomar was sent to the White Sox, he departed without mentioning the mysterious Other Roberto Alomar: “I didn’t feel real comfortable with the situation. Sometimes teams don’t work for you. I think the New York Mets weren’t the right team for me.”
Of course, sometimes players don’t work for teams. Gary Cohen, witnessing the Miracle of Robbie, turned the blowtorch on, offering a furious, dead-on indictment of his halfhearted play and famously calling him a disgrace. The response from Alomar (who was honoring the White Sox by showing actual interest in the game he was paid millions to play) was to boycott the New York media. “I heard the tape,” he said of Cohen, adding that “I did the best I could. It just didn’t work out. But to say I was a disgrace or I didn’t play hard, I don’t understand that.”
Perhaps he was also baffled by the Arizona Diamondbacks’ reaction to the mystery of Roberto Alomar. Alomar went to camp with the D’Backs in 2004, where it was hoped he’d tutor young Matt Kata. Instead, Arizona officials were left puzzled by his vanished range and lack of interest in fielding uncooperative grounders. He wound up back with the White Sox briefly, signed with the Devil Rays, then retired in March 2005, explaining (without apparent irony) that “I played a lot of games and I said I would never embarrass myself on the field.”
Alomar will undoubtedly be part of the 2010 Hall of Fame class, which means I will seethe at the voting results and again at whatever self-serving nonsense emerges from his mouth upon his induction. But I take comfort in this: No examination of his career that’s more than a couple of paragraphs long will fail to note his precipitous decline, or ponder the reasons for it. And no one who ever watched him play in New York will let a discussion of him go by without noting that he was a selfish, malingering washout in baseball’s premier city.
Robbie, I know you have to wait until 2010 to get to Cooperstown. But you don’t have to wait another minute for your induction into Met Hell, where your plaque will always be displayed. If you’re passing by, here are some words on it that might jump out at you:
HYPOCRITE
THIEF
FALSE COUNSELOR
SOWER OF SCHISMS
FALSIFIER
And finally, this one:
DISGRACE
by Greg Prince on 3 January 2006 3:55 am The final out of the 2005 season was made at approximately 3:56 PM, October 2.
The first pitch of the 2006 season is scheduled to be thrown at 1:10 PM, April 3.
Thus, the baseball equinox occurred at 2:33 AM, January 2.
At that exact moment, we were equidistant from Jose Offerman’s last swing and Pedro Martinez’s (toe pending) next pitch.
Barring weather, we are now closer to the Mets playing again than we are to them having played last.
I knew there was a point to January.
Some thoughts on the baseball media dynamic, particularly between the paper you just put down and the computer you’re now staring into, at Gotham Baseball.
by Greg Prince on 2 January 2006 11:51 pm How do you measure…measure a year? Here's one way:
In 2005, Faith and Fear in Flushing received 380,887 page views. Or roughly 380,886 more than we envisioned last February 16, Day One of the great Met dialogue.
All I can say is…
1) Holy Cram!
2) Just as many thank yous as there were page views from Jason and myself to everybody who was doin' the viewin'. Special acknowledgement goes to FAFIF's final visitors of '05, the rightly prioritized who registered 78 page views between 11 PM and midnight on December 31. The champagne industry's loss is our gain. In 2006, we'll do our best to make you skip other occasions that have been, to this point, mysteriously unaffiliated with baseball.
On a personal note, I appreciate from all both the happy birthday wishes and the condolences on the USF Bulls' understated entry into small-time bowls (a 14-0 loss to the N.C. State Wolfpack). I overcame the football hurt pretty quickly — and I got, belatedly, what I wanted most of all for my big day very early this morning. I got a ballgame.
XM 175 came through with a rebroadcast of Game Four of the 1999 National League Division Series. You know it as the Pratt Game. It was the WFAN feed, so it was Murph and Cohen at their finest. Having been at that game (thanks to the largesse of my now second-year blogging buddy), I never bore concentrated earwitness to it until now. I only got to hear an inning-and-a-half between 5:30 and 6:00, but that's pretty good for January 2.
(And you thought this sort of thing happened only in the parallel universe.)
Things I learned or was reminded of:
• The first seven innings had gone by in less than two hours before things turned “riveting”.
• Todd Pratt had gone 0-for-7 in the series prior to his 10th inning at-bat.
• John Franco had waited his whole life for that week.
• Lenny Harris, then a Diamondback, nearly ruined Franco's week with a grounder that Franco had to make a sensational play on.
• Tony Womack, though the goat for dropping the crucial flyball that gave the Mets life, was in the middle of the eighth-inning rally that was briefly the Mets' undoing.
• With a runner at second and two out, there was actually some question about whether to pitch to John Olerud or Roger Cedeño.
• By the tenth, the only available player left on Bobby Valentine's bench was Bobby Bonilla.
• “Bucky” Showalter, as Murph called him, sprinted out to the mound when he wanted to annoy his pitcher.
• Fonzie can't be the hero every time (said before he didn't drive home the winning run in the ninth).
• Matt Williams' removal from that game in a double-switch while it was tied was insane.
• Todd Pratt was “downcast” between first and second when his deep fly looked Finleybound.
• Shea Stadium was “bedlam” after it was clear it had gone out. I didn't need to be reminded of that, actually, but it was good to be.
• Bob, observing how the Mets were pouring out of the dugout and jumping around, reported you never saw a happier bunch of fellows.
“I wish,” he said, “that you could be here.”
by Jason Fry on 1 January 2006 4:59 am
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