Apologies for the recent screwiness. (We don't know what went wrong; we just work here.) Welcome back to August 26th, in which we're all older but hey, our baseball team is much better. Let us never discuss July 6th again. Or be .500.
 
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. Got something to say? Leave a comment, or email us at faithandfear@gmail.com. (Sorry, but we have no interest in ads, sponsored content or guest posts.) Need our RSS feed? It's here. Visit our Facebook page, or drop by the personal pages for Greg and Jason. Or follow us on Twitter: Here's Greg, and here's Jason. |
The year was 1975. I was 12 years old. The world was full of possibilities. I graduated from elementary school and was heading for junior high. I wriggled out of an involuntary tour of duty at Camp Avnet, the last time I’d be bothered with that thing of childhood, and was left to my own devices for the summer. I started to have funny feelings that had nothing to do with Ed Kranepool, but I was 12, so never mind that right now. Mostly I was enchanted with the possibility that the Mets would win the World Series in 1975. I was taken with the idea that the Mets could have good players, the kinds of players other teams had — actually a bunch of players other teams did have. I was thrilled that several of the players the Mets had had almost since I started watching them were going away. I was loyal to the Mets, but as for individual Mets, I’d turn almost any and every one of them over if it meant putting behind us the miserable 71-91 record of 1974. That was the first losing season I ever experienced and I sure hoped I would never, ever see another one. It was as if Monty Hall was asking me to choose between displaying loyalty and eschewing futility. I opted for Door No. 2. For as long as I could remember, the Mets had counted on miracles. I preferred to maintain a solid, all-around team, one with not just pitchers but hitters. We would have that in 1975. I was certain. So goodbye old players. See ya later Ken Boswell; see ya now Bob Gallagher. It’s been nice knowin’ ya Duffy Dyer; it’ll be nicer knowing Gene Clines. Ray Sadecki, it was fun, but Joe Torre could be a barrel of laughs and RBIs. Teddy Martinez’s utility was interchangeable with Jack Heidemann’s and we get some minor leaguer named Vail. Joe McDonald, the new GM, did all that for me in the fall of 1974. Then he went to the winter meetings, an affair I followed breathlessly, and brought us back a professional centerfielder named Del Unser, a stud catching prospect named John Stearns and a relief pitcher I’d heard of, Mac Scarce. We dumped Don Hahn (who never hit), Dave Schneck (who let me down) and, uh, Tug McGraw. The Mets traded Tug McGraw. I was less than a month from turning 12 when I heard the news. Tug McGraw had led the Mets to their most recent pennant. Tug McGraw had been with the Mets as long as I could remember. Tug McGraw was already a legend. But I liked the trade. Where the 1975 Mets were concerned, I loved trades. I loved trades more than I loved players. 1969 was a long time ago. I was getting tired of being beaten by the Pirates almost every year. We needed to shake things up and Joe McDonald held my proxy. Besides, I said to myself, Tug McGraw had only had six good weeks in the last two years. Even as I bought the paperback edition of his autobiography Screwball and wrote what would be the first of three book reports in three years on it, I was confident we wouldn’t miss him. Mac Scarce lived up to his surname but we filled in with Tom “The Blade” Hall, Bob Apodaca (who got hurt), Ken Sanders (who got hit by a throw from the catcher) and, finally, Skip Lockwood. Tug? No longer my concern. The Mets gave his uniform number, 45, to Rick Baldwin and Rick Baldwin’s wife appeared at a fashion show at the TSS in Oceanside. Life went on. I was more excited entering spring training in 1975 than I ever was before. We had all these new players. And then Joe McDonald went out and got us one more. He got us Dave Kingman. Dave Kingman! Dave Kingman of the Giants! He hit home runs! He hit long home runs! He once hit a home run that broke a bus window in the Shea parking lot! This was like acquiring Paul Bunyan. Wow! Would ya get a load of the new Mets? Getting new players was as much fun as getting new cards, something I did 660 times in 1975. For the second year in a row, I managed to obtain a complete set of Topps by buying and trading and flipping. My parents even took me to my first-ever baseball card show — we heard about it on the channel 2 news — at the Statler-Hilton in the city. Who knew they had such things? I bought a mint 1966 Sandy Koufax for a dollar. My mother laughed that somebody would spend that much for a baseball card. You’ll see, I said. It’ll be worth something. Collecting every baseball I could was crucial to me. It wouldn’t always be, but I couldn’t have known that then. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the old Mets who remained Mets. Tom Seaver was still around, bouncing back from sciatica (how many medical terms did I learn because of achy Mets?). Jerry Koosman seemed to be getting better. There was one night when Kooz stole second. The announcers were floored (though not as floored as I was to realize Koosman was only five steals behind the team leader, Kingman, at the end of the season). The next night, channel 9 showed Tom presenting Jerry with his base which had been marked up with a big 2 as if he were Lou Brock. As much as I liked getting new guys, I kept a soft spot for the familiar. Seaver and Koosman, Matlack and Grote, Buddy and Felix, Rusty and Krane, Cleon and Yogi. Cleon and Yogi…two guys who’d been Mets forever, at least my version of forever. In all the baseball preview magazines (it was my first spring of buying every one I could find), Cleon Jones was listed as the starting left fielder. That was before Kingman and before an injury and, most pointedly, before he was found by the side of a road in a van in St. Petersburg in bed with a white woman. That’s how it was reported as if to insert shock value. Much tut-tutting followed. M. Donald Grant forced Cleon to apologize at a press conference with his wife at his side. That didn’t seem necessary. Eventually, with Kingman around, neither did Cleon. He was released in July. Somewhere between his humiliation and his farewell, a neighbor of ours named Marge, a social studies teacher with a reputation for assuring you she was very right about everything, hired my sister to type up a sample chapter of an American history textbook she wanted to sell to McGraw-Hill. The chapter dealt with “black history”. It included a multiple-choice test on great black Americans. There was one question in which the four choices were something like: A) George Washington Carver B) Martin Luther King, Jr. C) Hank Aaron D) Cleon Jones After his roadside affair, my entire family, not normally conversant in baseball, knew who Cleon Jones was. “Cleon Jones” immediately became shorthand around our house for Marge’s utter cluelessness. I never heard if McGraw-Hill got back to her. Yogi didn’t know from history books, he just knew Cleon refused to go into a game for defense. Yogi got Cleon released. And the Mets’ mediocre play got Yogi fired. Two of the icons of my childhood were replaced within two weeks of each other. Other teams fired managers. This was the first time I ever saw the Mets do it. No offense, Yogi, but maybe a change needs to be made. And they’re saying Roy McMillan is a lot like Gil Hodges. So let’s see what happens. As the season wore into August, the Mets kept hanging around, not making a big move but not falling out of the race either. They were definitely close enough to keep me watching, listening and reading every single day. Seaver returned to being Seaver. He would go 22-9 and win his third Cy Young, this one over Randy Jones. Matlack seemed a lock to win 20 (he was the winning pitcher in the All-Star Game, too). Randy Tate, the fourth starter who came out of nowhere, flirted with a no-hitter one night. Took it into the eighth against the Expos until Jim Lyttle broke it up. Tate would lose the game. Tate lost a lot of games but this one seemed particularly unfair. Later on, Ed Halicki no-hit the Mets. And a while after that, Seaver carried a no-hitter into the ninth against the Cubs but he didn’t get it. The Mets lost in ten. I didn’t like the way this no-hitter stuff was going. Dave Kingman, however, was as scary as he appeared when he was a Giant. I had waited my whole life for somebody to come along and hit homers the way SkyKing did. He hated being called Kong…and didn’t like to talk about home runs…but they said he was a good guy. There was a game in Florida in March televised back to New York on channel 11, a night game between the Mets and the Yankees in Fort Lauderdale. Tom Seaver vs. Catfish Hunter. Our first prime time look at Dave Kingman. He hit one off Hunter that went an estimated 600 feet. Into the Everglades, it was said. Phil Rizzuto practically fainted. The Yankees may have just reeled in Catfish, but we had captured Kong. SkyKing, I mean. Hunter and the Yankees were the big story coming into the season, but they got left in the dust by Fred Lynn, Jim Rice and Boston. The Mets remained top cat in New York as summer dawned. There was a Doublemint Chewing Gum jingle that went, “even those crazy fans at Shea do it!” For the first time, I was one of those fans twice in the same season. On June 28, my sister took me to Old Timers Day — we left in a rain delay; not my choice. Then, having bonded over baseball in the aftermath of Marge the Social Studies Teacher’s history lesson, our family went to our first game as a unit on July 2. Matlack beat the Cubs. Later in the year, when my sister was working in the NYU registrar’s office, she encountered a student named Alfred Matlack. “Any relation?” she queried. Turns out Alfred Matlack was Jon Matlack’s fifth cousin. I was more impressed that my sister recalled the Matlack name at all. On the other hand, my mother was turned off by the very large man in our section who stole the gigantic mustard dispenser and brought it back to his seat like a trophy. My father was annoyed that somebody messed with our car’s antenna. We never went to another game, the four of us, ever again. During my brief day camp tenure, there was a group outing to Shea for a Yankees game. I refused to go. Why, I asked, would I want ever to see them? As for the outcome of those trades from the winter, Bob Gallagher and Gene Clines were pretty much no-shows, but Del Unser became one of my immediate favorites. Should’ve been an All-Star. So should’ve Rusty, en route to becoming the first Met to drive in more than a hundred runs. Joe Torre, a Brooklyn boy, seemed at home as a Met, but he couldn’t play third anymore. Couldn’t run either. There was a game against the Astros in which Felix Millan singled four times and was wiped out by Torre on four double play grounders. Don’t blame me, Torre told reporters afterwards. Blame Felix for getting the hits. The Mets lost. Everybody laughed. But Joe still couldn’t play third. He moved to first and the Mets resorted to Wayne Garrett. The Mets were always trading for old third basemen and falling back on Wayne Garrett. Wayne Garrett depressed me greatly. I looked forward to the day the Mets could bring up their own great third baseman. I looked forward to the day the Mets could bring up Roy Staiger. Roy Staiger was tearing up Tidewater. I knew. As a reward for graduating sixth grade, my father bought me a copy of The Sporting News. The Cubs’ “Three M’s” were on the cover: Bill Madlock, Rick Monday and Jerry Morales. He told me it was The Bible of Baseball and he wasn’t kidding. It became as essential to my existence as Baseball Digest (I got a subscription for my birthday) and Sportsphone (a brand-new service that I called every ten minutes; I even won the Quickie Quiz one night). The Sporting News had statistics for every Major League team and, better yet, every minor league team. I began to buy it every week to monitor the Tides and see who our future stars would be. I was sure, from reading the Bible, that I knew, absolutely knew, who was going to be a big-time Met. I couldn’t say that before 1975, but now I could. History would show that I was wrong about Roy Staiger being the one to come up and turn the Mets around. The first Tide from 1975 to roll into New York and create a wave was Vail. Mike Vail. The throw-in from the Heidemann deal. While Jack Heidemann didn’t stick (he was essentially replaced by another utilityman from somewhere else, Mike Phillips), Mike Vail was the real deal. The Mets brought him up in late August and, with this Tide in tow, they started to make their move. I got really excited right before Labor Day. The Mets were on the verge. We’d be talking 1969, 1973 and 1975, I just knew it. My family went up to the Catskills for the weekend, but I could still get the Mets on WNEW and buy the Post up there. Saturday, after Friday night’s rout of the Dodgers — we scored six in the first, Kingman hit a three-run homer and Matlack won his 16th — the back page headline blared, THE GUNS OF AUGUST. That put us nine over .500 for the first time all year and I was giddy. I’d tell anybody who cared and several who didn’t how the Mets were going all the way. At the Homowack (what a weird name for a hotel), they made you sit with other people for meals. “Family-style” dining. One of the guys at our table was a man from Quebec named Claude. An Expos fan (poor guy). I was just telling him that Seaver and Matlack are both going to win 20. Labor Day is September 1. School starts the third. Junior high. I’d rather not think about that. What I’m focused on is the Mets are playing the Pirates at Shea. They’re in first place, five ahead of us. But this is the game that can turn it all around. Driving home from the Homowack, I’m sitting in the backseat with my transistor. Everything is going the Mets’ way. Seaver is not only winning his 20th game, but he’s struck out 10. That means he’s struck out 200 or more for eight years in a row. From a hurting hip to a live arm. Tom Seaver is healthy and the best pitcher in baseball again. With Seaver pitching, and Vail homering for the first time and hitting in his eighth straight game and Bud Harrelson off the Disabled List (he always seems to be on it), the Mets win 3-0. Now we’re four back and, clearly, on a roll. Well, Vail was anyway. He’d go on to hit in 23 consecutive games, a Mets record and a rookie record. And Kingman set a team high for home runs with 36, nudging aside, at last, Frank Thomas from 1962. But that was about it for September. Roy McMillan wasn’t Gil Hodges and 1975 was neither 1969 nor 1973. I kept taking books out of the library about those years and suddenly 1975 felt sadder than I ever thought it would. It hadn’t occurred to me while it was in progress that THE GUNS OF AUGUST and Labor Day might very well be the high point of the season or that Matlack wouldn’t win another game in 1975 or that the Mets would fall apart down the stretch and finish barely above .500, tied for third. Just because it seemed right that the Mets should win didn’t mean it was going to happen. When you’re a Mets fan, you grow up believing the improbable isn’t impossible. The only problem is, it’s still improbable. The year was 1975, 30 years ago. I was 12. Flashback Friday is a weekly tour through the years, every half-decade on the half-decade, wherein a younger Mets fan develops into the Mets fan he is today. Previous stop: 1970. Next stop: 1980. 8:40 pm: Child safely in bed, lie down in own bed for a minute. Ah, bed. Bed good. Nice bed. 8:41 pm: Decide to rest eyes. Vaguely aware as consciousness departs that game is in an hour. No manner. Will wake up in time or soon after. Besides, Mets did quite well in first two games with blogger slumbering through first third of game. [Zzzzzzz] Wake up with start. Check clock. 2:15 am: Whoa! Uh-oh! Did we win? Must go to computer. 2:16 am: Gmail shows 4 unread messages. Seems like a lot. Did we lose horribly? Seems likely. Alternately, did Pedro pitch a no-hitter? If so, would I be horribly disappointed to have slept through it? Tell myself that I'd still be happy and am being a bad, selfish fan, even while knowing I'd be crushed. 2:17 am: Open email from co-blogger. Its subject line is “First-Guess Reiterated.” Mysterious. It's from 11:59 pm. Hmmm, that's during the game. Second graf begins “Heilman? Why Heilman? Why Heilman for a second night in a row?” Uh-oh. Home run by Chad Tracy then lamented. Uh-oh redux. 2:18 am: Flip over to Yahoo Sports. Mets 3, D-Backs 1. Huh. 2:19 am: Ponder mystery that what I do 2,000 miles away does not, in fact, affect what baseball team does. Who knew? Took a look down a westbound road Right away I made my choice Headed out to my big two-wheeler Is it here? We've been waiting and waiting. I've screamed. You've screamed. We've all screamed. Is it here? It sure looks like it, but it's been so long since I've seen one up close that it's hard to tell. It's only ten games and eight wins. Is that enough? Is it here? Do three series against middling (to be kind) competition add up to what we want it to add up to? Does it matter who else is playing as long as we are prevailing? And what about positioning? Suddenly we have the desirable kind. Is it here? Does winning behind your best pitcher when he doesn't have his best stuff and you've stopped swinging with tree trunks mean a little more? Does the third baseman making a smart, gutsy throw home that could've easily been a stupid, reckless play qualify as a touchstone because it worked? What about the rightfielder who breached etiquette one night but kept raking the next? Is it here? Could a bullpen malfunction that only serves to set up better and braver performances from aged and maligned relievers that in turn preserve victory mean something's happening here, and what it is is precisely clear? Is it here? It must be because I didn't remember to let out a BOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!! until the top of the second (albeit with our best player at bat so as to compensate for the lateness of the mandatory jeer) and we won anyway. Hell, we swept. Roll me away. It's here. About once a year, my mother would hand down to me a parable that her father handed down to her. It involved two brothers who agreed to go into business together and how they began dreaming of all the success they would experience and all the fine things, like a horse-drawn carriage, they would buy with their profits. The more they talked about it, the more they disagreed with each other over who would do what and who would get what from the partnership. Their argument boiled over until all their hypothetical riches came tumbling down on top of them before cent one was earned. The parable ended with one brother screaming at the other, “Jakey, get out of the buggy!” The moral of the story is Mike Jacobs kicks ass, but so did Mike Vail and Gregg Jefferies and Benny Agbayani and Jason Phillips even…and in case you were wondering where I get my aversion to presumptuousness vis-à-vis winning, now you know. OK, that necessary dollop of downer delivered, let's have a party. Better yet, let's move to Arizona, all of us. Our team is already at home there. I haven't seen the Mets smile this much in the dugout since they had the teamwork to make the dream work. Gotta be that dry heat. Cleared up their sinuses and whatnot. Seriously, we'll just trade locales with the Diamondbacks. How does Faith and Fear in Flagstaff grab you? Here's the difference between now and earlier in the season. In May, the Mets had a pitcher throw seven innings of one-hit ball and they demoted him immediately thereafter. In August, the Mets had a rookie hit a three-run homer in his first at-bat and resisted the urge to do the same. Fool them once, shame on them, fool them twice and sooner or later they'll get a clue. For a team whose three greatest players arrived by fluky circumstances (Seaver: drawn out of a hat; Hernandez: trapped via a White Rat snit; Piazza: Rupert Murdoch's budget bravado ran amok), it's only fitting that Mike Jacobs should have gotten here accidentally and been allowed to stay only most reluctantly. In August, the Mets also recalled that one-hit pitcher, the fella who pitched Wednesday night. Met management sure is stupid-lucky sometimes. On a night when there wasn't much to get upset by, I'm going to stand up for the base choice made by Victor Diaz. Yeah, yeah, I know, the code and not rubbing it in and letting sleeping Snakes lie. I don't buy it. I watched this team hold Dog Night for the better part of the last five years and I'm not talking terriers. Guys didn't run to first. Guys didn't move up. Guys didn't pay attention, not even in the World Bleeping Series. Look at what was going on tonight as the score was building to absurd and lovely proportions: • Beltran ran hard on a grounder when he “didn't have to” • Floyd ran hard on a grounder when he “didn't have to” • Reyes ran hard on a squib when he “didn't have to” It is so gosh darn refreshing to see players wearing Mets uniforms uniformly hustle. The ineptitude of the Diamondbacks had a great deal to do with the jumping ugly of the past two games but it takes two to blow out. The Mets are rolling (after waiting out an April-to-August roll delay) and that's a result of playing the game the right way. Playing the game the right way means that if you're a young player and you're on second with less than two out, it is your obligation to make a habit of tagging up when a fly ball is hit to deep center. It is Victor Diaz's obligation to hustle every moment he is on the field unless his manager or a designated lieutenant informs him it is not in the team's best interest to do so (for example, not flashing the steal sign when up 17 runs). If Victor Diaz is not yet so schooled or jaded in the so-called unwritten rules of the game, I applaud him. Hone that instinct, don't curb it. He'll figure out game situations eventually. The Diamondbacks don't like it? They shouldn't let so many Mets get on base. But really, for our sake, they should continue to do just that. I don't particularly care if they like it or not. They deserve what they get for firing Wally Backman. Shoot, this is a team that lost 18-4 after Tony Clark called a clubhouse meeting that lasted 90 minutes. As motivational speakers go, Tony Clark is no Tony Robbins. And oh yeah — BOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!! Wham! Biff! Sock! Pow! Wright. Reyes. Jacobs. Castro. Matsui. (Matsui? Yes, Matsui.) Seo. As Willie Randolph indicated with his finger to his lips at the end, nobody wake up this team. Nobody rouse David Wright to express their admiration of his march into the elite precincts of the National League. Nobody stop to discuss how much they're enjoying Jose Reyes's wild abandon, sudden power and continuing education in pitch selection. Nobody have a heart-to-heart with Ramon Castro about if he'll soon have more RBIs than hits. Nobody — this means you, Ed Coleman — suggest to young Mike Jacobs that he's Roy Hobbs. Nobody ask Jae Seo how he learned to channel Bob Gibson. Nobody tell Kaz Matsui that hey, we've missed you. And nobody wake anybody else up to marvel that we're clubbing with practically no contributions from Beltran or Floyd. Everybody just keep on rolling. Don't think, Meat, just throw. And hit. And field. And cheer, or boo, or sleep, or whatever it is you're doing at home. On the flipside, I imagine the Diamondbacks' part of the blogosphere ain't exactly a happy place right now. If any D-Backs bloggers stuck around for the whole thing, in fact, my hat's off. (And hey, we know the feeling.) That second inning was the worst frame of defensive baseball I can remember in years: It included a wild pitch, the right fielder stumbling and turning a fly ball into a double, the center fielder breaking the wrong way and allowing a bloop single, and then — as if that weren't enough for a week of muttering — Jackson and Clayton somehow allowing two runs to score on an inning-ending double play. Two runs! I've never seen that. It never occurred to me that I might see that. Nor did I ever imagine going to a seventh inning with three different guys in the lineup missing one hit for the cycle. Baseball being baseball, of course, Reyes didn't get his double and neither Wright nor Jacobs got their triple. 18-4 demolitions being 18-4 demolitions, Wright and Jacobs hit home runs instead. I guess it would have been silly to stop at third and refuse to go any farther. The only fly in the ointment was whatever the hell it was Victor Diaz thought he was doing tagging up from second in a 17-0 game. An inexcusable move, and I held my breath at the thought of all the self-destructive macho dominoes that could have started falling there, and I suppose still might. Here's hoping Willie gives Victor a thorough dressing-down, and/or sends Pedro, Ice or one of the vets to discuss not showing up the opposition, letting sleeping dogs lie, and all the other cliches Victor should know by now. I'm kind of a fan of brawls, but here's hoping Pedro doesn't feel the need to defend Met honor (even though poor Kaz hardly deserved being the plunkee, on the best night he's had in an age). The possible consequences range from suspensions to brawl-related injuries, and we can't afford either. Victor was in the wrong; it shouldn't have been Kaz that got hit, but for the sake of the team and what we're trying to accomplish, best to walk away. Besides, when you score 18 runs on 20 hits, your honor's pretty unassailable. P.S. Kudos to MSG for some very nice TV work tonight, from Pedro showing Zambrano the circle change (Victor! Listen to this man!) to spying on Willie's attempts to stay stone-faced to the footage of Mike Lowell catching Luis Terrero with the hidden-ball trick to the late shot of the D-Backs president sitting by himself looking rumpled and mournful. Excellent work all around. First off, very important… BOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!! YOU SUCK, METS! WHY DIDN'TCHA WIN BY MORE THAN 14-1? HEY ZAMBRANO — NEXT TIME GO NINE! WHAT'SA MATTER CASTRO? ONLY FIVE RBI? WILLIE, YOU LACK PRESCIENCE NOT INSTALLING MIKE JACOBS AT FIRST FOUR-AND-A-HALF MONTHS AGO! WRIGHT AND REYES, THERE'S NO GUARANTEE THAT THE AMAZING PROGRESS YOU'RE MAKING AND GENERAL EXCELLENCE YOU'RE DISPLAYING VIRTUALLY EVERY GAME WON'T OCCASIONALLY BE INTERRUPTED FOR MISTAKES THAT WILL EVENTUALLY LEAD TO GROWTH, “EVENTUALLY” BEING A CONCEPT THAT I AS A METS FAN CAN'T UNDERSTAND BECAUSE I WANT MORE, MORE, MORE NOW, NOW, NOW!!! GRAVES! KOO! HEREDIA FOR THAT MATTER! WHERE ARE YOU SO I CAN BLAME YOU FOR SOMETHING! MY OVERREACTION REQUIRES AN IMMEDIATE OUTLET! BOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!! YOU SUCK, METS! YOUR SEASON-HIGH FIVE-GAMES-OVER MILESTONE SHOULD HAVE COME SOONER! Actually, I totally mean the last one, but the important thing remains helping the Mets feel at home when they're on the road. Therefore we must continue to heap unreasonable amounts of irrational abuse on them. I've now begun two away games by booing the first pitch (to my favorite player, no less, a bit of shared sacrifice to reinforce that we're all in this together), and the Mets have won them both. Seeing as how this is the first two-game winning streak the Mets have put together west of the Mississippi all season (7-14 out yonder), I do insist that making our boys feel as if they are at Shea — where they are cheerlessly chastised despite posting an outstanding winning percentage — is what's doing the trick. Couldn't be that they were good enough to do this all along and just needed a little boost from the likes of Jacobs and Castro and a refreshed Victor Diaz. Nah, that would be too easy, giving them the credit. Maybe the BOB has more Shealike qualities than one could infer from watching it on TV or even visiting it. Well, Shea is next to an airport and Bank One Ballpark has been likened to an airplane hangar, but that's all I can come up with. I was lucky enough to visit the BOB in its second season, 1999, back when Joel Lugo was basking in the Valley of the Sun and gracious enough to host several of his East Coast buddies for a Mets-Diamondbacks NLDS preview. What I remember about the facility was that it was very chilly (or “brisk” as noted Mets fan Dr. Fred Bunz aptly put it). Phoenix itself was like a thousand degrees, a fact that baked one and all the second they tore the roof off the sucker after the game. But inside, they kept it Colorado-cool. Howie and Gary reported Tuesday night that they've installed new grass in there since the Showalter days and have maintained a warmer temperature to assure its long-term health. Warm enough for the Mets, apparently: two out, no longer alone in last and, finally, five games over .500 for the first time since gas was a dollar a gallon, The Captain & Tennille were on the charts and James K. Polk was in the White House. Or so it seems. Speaking of grass, occasionally it's browner on the other side of the fence no matter how arid you believe it to be in your yard. Channeling Chauncey Gardner? No, Gotham Baseball. You seek wisdom in silly bumper-sticker things like that when you're beginning something big and hugely important that's gonna take a while and has to be done right each step of the way, even though you're desperate to know how it all turns out and want to hurry along. Like, say, a seven-game road trip to Arizona and then to California, the time zone where so many Met dreams have died. I sensed as early as this afternoon that the scorecard for this one would have a few WWs on it, and indeed had no sooner put the kid to bed than I faceplanted onto my own pillow, pretty sure I was going to miss some or all of the game but helpless to prevent it. Woke up through sheer will to find it was sometime after 10:30 and dragged myself upstairs to turn on the set. It's an odd feeling flipping on the TV knowing it'll be the third or fourth — there's always that moment in which you're desperately processing information. Is that a “2” for us? Is that a “0” for them? So 2 is more than zero, so we're ahead! Yes! I did a worse job than usual, seeing how I was only vaguely awake — it took me two or three innings to grasp that Mike Jacobs was playing first (guess Jose Offerman needed an extra coat of shellac to hide his continuing decomposition), that Kaz was in the starting lineup, that that was DiFelice and finally not Castro and all the other things one would normally have taken care of by the time first pitch rolled around. I heard Heath Bell was up and never did figure out who was down. Still, I was awake enough to grasp that Tom Glavine threw a terrific game and that Braden Looper redeemed himself, though I almost assaulted the television when Looper walked Tony Clark when it wouldn't have particularly mattered if Clark had hit one to Saturn. I think the best part of that ninth was how the double play unfolded: Wright didn't retreat on the ball, Matsui moved quickly and fearlessly on the pivot, and Jacobs made a nice stretch and held the bag. Not so long ago Wright might well have backed up and risked losing the double play or maybe the chance to get even one out, and/or Offerman/Woodward/Cairo/Anderson would have dropped the ball or let it skip past. Progress! At the risk of jinxing the whole thing, I think we've collectively come around on Glavine. At least I have. His superb numbers since the break help, of course — good stats are always the best personality trait — but it's also that he finally yielded to the reality that the old Glavine formula wasn't working and became receptive to finding a new way. That option now looks like a lock, and to my surprise I find myself wondering if I'm not kinda sorta glad to have him. At the very least I'm willing to retire the TMB nickname in favor of something else. So. Meet Tom Glavine, a.k.a. TEM — The Eventual Met. I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell… The Mets have run the Howard Beale clip from Network on DiamondVision for, I think, the last eight seasons. I don't have a handle on the success rate in terms of rallies and runs that stem from its still-clever-if-tired segue into the LET'S GO METS! chant, but it seems to get the fans going. Peter Finch's contextless rant from almost 30 years ago is as good a limb as any on which to hang the Mets' marvelous home record. Even with Sunday's flopfest, they're 40-25 at Shea. That's a 100-win season if we could bribe Bud Selig to let us play all our games at home (and you know we probably could if we really tried). If it's not Network, maybe it's the landing pattern into LaGuardia or the mysterious wind swirls or the orange onslaught the opposition experiences from the unfilled field level seats. Whatever it is, we have a definite home-field advantage. And we are helpless on the road. I won't re-enumerate the examples of our terrible tourism except to say that the Mets are 23-35 away from Shea. That's a 64-win season if our enemies could bribe Bud Selig to make us play all our games on the road (and you know they probably could if they really tried). Obviously there's something missing from road games that is present at home games that is causing the Mets' performance to drop so dramatically when on a business trip. I don't think it's Howard Beale. I don't think it's the airplanes. I don't think it's the breeze or the colors or even the absence of friendly, feral cats. It's the fans. It's what Mets fans bring to Shea. It's what the most full-throated Mets fans do at Shea that apparently spurs the Mets on to greater heights. The love…the support…the educated and instinctive rushing to the aid of the home team… Nah, that's not it. It's the booing. It has to be. What is more constant at Shea Stadium than the chorus of Mets fans telling the Mets all they are doing wrong? I don't know what it says about our boys, but obviously they respond to abuse. 40-25 can't be an aberration. With the Mets in Arizona all week, it will take some doing. With San Francisco the next stop, it will take a little more. But I know we have it in us. So let's do this together, all of us. Inhale deeply. Concentrate. Get your lungs and your mind in a place where they can work in tandem and do the most good. Ready? All right, then. I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell… HEY METS! YOU SUCK! BOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!! GO BACK TO YOUR PREVIOUS TEAM OR TEAMS! YOUR FAILURE TO PRODUCE VICTORY AT EVERY POSSIBLE OPPORTUNITY RELECTS BADLY ON MY SENSE OF SELF! YOU PITCHERS SUCK FOR NOT RETIRING EACH BATTER IN AN EFFICIENT AND TIMELY FASHION! YOU HITTERS SUCK FOR NOT MOVING RUNNERS OVER, DRIVING THEM IN AND/OR DRIVING YOURSELF IN AT THE SAME TIME! YOU FIELDERS SUCK FOR NOT ACHIEVING A STATE OF INFALLIBILITY! HEY WILLIE — YOU USE YOUR PLAYERS IN IMPROPER COMBINATIONS AND NOT AT OPTIMAL FREQUENCY! YOUR SUCCESSES ARE NOT CONTINUOUS! YOU OFTEN ALTERNATE VICTORIES AND DEFEATS IN RATIOS THAT ARE UNPLEASING! I PREFER VICTORY AND ABHOR DEFEAT! GIVE ME WHAT I WANT! TRY YOUR BEST! IF THAT'S NOT GOOD ENOUGH, TRY HARDER! BE REPLACED BY OTHER, BETTER PLAYERS AT ONCE! BOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!! YOU SUCK, METS! There. Now that we've made the Mets feel at home while they're on the road, good things are sure to follow. I already spilt more pixels than one might expect on a sacrifice fly hit by a Single-A player four years ago, but if I waxed rhapsodic about Mike Jacobs' 6/25/01 game winner, it's because that season was such a giddy ride. The summer of 2001 was when lots of New Yorkers used to nothing but Shea and Yankee Stadium found out about the minor leagues. They got an intimate park full of touches that are standard operating procedure for the low minors but not the kind of thing you'd see in the Big Leagues — dizzy-bat races, kids running hell-for-leather around the bases as if the mascot might actually dare to catch them, scads of errors cheerfully called hits. The big leagues are a daily soap opera that will tie you by turns into knots of expectation, anxiety, wild confidence, despair, joy and anger, but even the most committed fan can't approach the New York-Penn League that way — not with players washing in and out with the organizational tide, and certainly not with the on-field product so raw. What you can do, if you've got it in you, is just relax into baseball, into the green grass and the sound of the bat and not knowing any of the players' names until 3/4 of the way through the season and the just-drafted kids actually turning to look when girls call to them and yelling like a fool when the ball goes up, because (as we've told many a pal brought to Keyspan by way of initiation) anything can happen in the New York-Penn League. It's just baseball, and just baseball is pretty neat: Pick a side, cheer like heck for 'em, and if they don't win, go to Nathan's and maybe hit the Wonder Wheel with the dark of the ocean on one side and the brilliance of the city on the other. What'd you do last night? Went to Coney Island, saw the Cyclones. It was great! Did they win? Um…yeah. Or wait, no. You know, I'm not sure. But it was a great night. So sorry to rattle on about Single-A doings, but when I heard Jacobs had got the call, it brought all that back. Sure, Danny Garcia had been an original Cyclone, but truth be told I couldn't really remember him. I remembered Jacobs — how could you not remember the guy who won the first home game in extra innings? Back then some visiting dignitary (I'm pretty sure it was Steve Phillips, though I'm clinging determinedly to a smidgen of a doubt) noted that if things went right, we might see one or two of those players in the bigs someday. I found that depressing even though I knew it was just realism. But then four years later it's someday, and one of those players turns out to be the guy who sent 'em home happy on that first night. Seeing him hanging on the dugout railing made me happy in a way far beyond the happiness of having a new member of the family to go record for posterity, get a card of and all the other geeky things I do. It made me happy because it transferred a little bit of Keyspan from when it was new and surprising and perfect to Shea, where I follow things far more avidly but also far more critically. There are bad nights a-plenty at Shea — which isn't a shot at the Mets, just an acknowledgment that that's the nature of the big-league beast — but few bad nights at Keyspan. (As long as the fricking mascot isn't being mean to my kid.) We headed out for Keyspan this afternoon with friends who'd come up from Philadelphia; David Wright struck out just as we passed Nathan's and I began my usual freakout about parking. I fumed for a while amidst the kiddie rides — Has Cliff ever looked worse during an at-bat? Is Ramon Castro going to play until he expires? What was wrong with Benson? What the heck happened to Victor's ability to play the outfield? — but then the game started and guys from Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge rode tricycles on the field and passing Aberdeen Ironbirds actually slapped hands with the little kids along the left-field line and Joshua and Ellis and Tyson gobbled down hot dogs and chicken and fries and ice cream and there was Mookie in the third-base box and I looked around and thought, “Man, I love this place.” And so Benson and Floyd and Victor and all of today's disappointment retreated — still there, but at a decent remove — and what was left was Mike Jacobs, who went from trying to catch his breath in the batter's box to mashing one into our bullpen (Hey, cool! He'll get the ball!) before you could say “Tricia's from Ditmas Park, and IT'S HER BIRTHDAY!” After the inning I grabbed the TiVo remote and bi-doop-bi-doop-bi-dooped my way back so I could watch Jacobs levitate around the bases again, then one more time because I'd enjoyed it so much the second time. So that was nine runs that I saw, meaning we won, what, 10-7? Why all the long faces? Oh, and with Joshua clapping and chanting “Let's go Cyclomes!” (close enough), Brooklyn came back from a 3-0 deficit with a four-run 7th, promptly gave up three more runs, then came back with a five-run 8th for a 9-6 win. Home runs from Jonel Pacheco and Caleb Stewart, doubles from Drew Butera and Mo Chavez. (By the way, Brooklyn's two games out of the wild card.) I looked up those four Cyclones names; all that really mattered was they were the guys in red and white. Went to Coney Island. Saw the Cyclones. Had Nathan's. Rode the Wonder Wheel. It was a great night. |
Piazza: Catcher, Slugger, Icon, Star by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers. 
Amazin' Again: How the 2015 New York Mets Brought the Magic Back to Queens by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers. 
Volume I of The Happiest Recap: 50+ Years of the New York Mets As Told in 500+ Amazin' Wins by Greg Prince is available in print and for Kindle on Amazon. 
Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History by Greg Prince (foreword by Jason Fry), is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers. |
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