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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 30 July 2022 11:25 am Through seven innings Friday night, the Mets-Marlins contest could have gone either way. It’s not unusual that the identities of a given game’s winner and loser are yet to be determined with two regulation innings to go, but this brand of uncertainty gnawed a bit deeper. Lose this game to the Marlins, and it’s a kick in the gills. Win this game from the Marlins, and we are swimming speedily toward our goals.
We won. The water is fine.
Crappy losses to the Marlins in Miami are as much a part of trips to the Sunshine State as tolls on the Florida Turnpike. Sooner or later, legend and precedent have it, you’re gonna pay. In our last visit to Whatever It’s Called Park, we couldn’t escape until a walkoff home run was given up. It’s the cost of doing business where visible sacks of Soilmaster and episodes of last-pitch heartbreak each amount to coin of the realm. We’d been charged once already in 2022. It leaves you thinking gates will be down and hands will be out every time you show up.
A couple of things, though. One, this is 2022. It may not be easy to admit against all mental defense mechanisms you’ve erected for your perceived well-being that 2022 is a season different from the stacks that preceded it in a positive sense. It is. Check the record. Check the standings. Check the highlights. Woe is Mets is some other year’s suitable refrain. Two, the Marlins aren’t as singular in their terror-striking ability as we insist on believing. Early in Friday night’s telecast, and not for the first time in recent weeks, Keith Hernandez said the Marlins always give the Mets fits. Define “fits,” Keith. The Marlins take the field competing to win and sometimes do is about all I can come up with. The Brewers do that. The Dodgers do that. This applies to everybody on the schedule from what I can deduce. When the Marlins do pull one out, it does tend to annoy, probably because it’s usually somebody we never heard of doing something we didn’t expect, possibly because we inherently believe that unlike the Brewers or Dodgers or every other National League opponent, they are unworthy of ever winning a baseball game, let alone a baseball game against the Mets. How dare a franchise whose ownership and operations are in a perpetual state of shambles somehow assemble nine to ten players capable of occasionally prevailing?
The Marlins are in their thirtieth season. If you’re not used to them by now, I don’t know what to tell you. If you think they have some specific black-magical hold over the Mets, I do know I can tell you the Mets are 39-31 since the onset of summer 2014 (a.k.a. the dawn of deGrom) when playing in Miami and 88-61 overall versus the Fish in that span. The fits are aberrations. The wins are the norm. Tell your “but they always find a way to lose to the Marlins” old wives’ tales to shut up.
Admittedly, I didn’t comfort myself with such sharp statistical confirmation after seven innings, for I’m as susceptible to Dark Ages thinking as any Mets fan when the Marlins are biting. I certainly didn’t tell myself that it was likely everything was going to turn out swell after one inning, the bottom of which was soiled by Marlin runs — three, to be precise. Met starters rarely give up three runs at all. To have them piled on in introductory fashion, with the none of the hits leading to them particularly resounding, was unnerving. Goodness knows Chris Bassitt appeared unnerved in the dugout following that first inning, apparently barking about infield shifts that did not work to his advantage.
Chris never quite looked himself over six innings — if this were an Afterschool Special, we’d discover some shady kid slipped a suspicious substance into his sack lunch — or perhaps the essence of Chris Bassitt slips out now and then. Sometimes it’s to betray impatience with his catcher. Sometimes it’s a case of starting-pitcheritis wherein if everything around him isn’t perfect, then nothing is remotely adequate. Each artist is permitted his idiosyncrasies, especially when he’s holding the ball in the center of the action. Chris admitted afterward that pitching with too much rest following the All-Star break and assorted other off days contributed to his feeling “too good,” something noted pitching coach Fernando, as portrayed by Billy Crystal, warned against when he advised, “It’s better to look good than to feel good.”
Bassitt didn’t look too good in the early going, and it wasn’t mahvelous. Fortunately, he is surrounded by Mets capable of picking their starting pitcher up. Usually it’s the starters who do the heavy lifting, but talented rosters can be versatile. The top of the second saw the Mets even matters against a quality starter — Sandy Alcantara — for whom three runs usually provides a brick wall. Alcantara could be the NL’s Cy Young, but a certain team is prone to giving him fits in his own backyard. The Mets nicked him for four runs in seven innings at Miami in June, and they didn’t wait long to overcome his budding résumé Friday. With one out in the second, Mark Canha belted a big double; with two out, Tomás Nido walked; Brandon Nimmo belted a bigger double (Canha scored; Nido should have but spectated a little between first and second); and Starling Marte belted the biggest of triples (everybody on base scored). In this Friday night fight, the belt was very much up for grabs.
Alcantara wasn’t impenetrable and Bassitt wasn’t in a hole. Well, Chris did stumble one more time, in the bottom of the second, on a walk and a single, but a run-scoring double play more or less rescued him. The Marlins were ahead again, 4-3, but they would be halted in their tracks immediately thereafter. Bassitt wasn’t smooth (four walks), but he was doggedly efficient, grinding six and putting up only zeroes through his final four.
Marte maintained his initial pace, and that was for the best. The triple from the second, which followed a single in the first, was complemented by a solo homer in the fourth. All of it was off Alcantara. All of it was on the heels of game-winner from Wednesday night. The entirety of 2022 has shown Marte’s forte for production. As right fielders imported by Mets teams aspiring to seriously improve, Starling Marte this year is the veritable reincarnation of Rusty Staub fifty years ago.
If you’ve looked at Marte this season and then try to reckon it with your image of Staub the last time he played, don’t stop at the 1985 pinch-hitter deluxe version. Rewind in your mind to 1972 if you can, or find yourself some footage. Le Grand Orange was a full-fledged, all-around ballplayer in his prime, and we got to enjoy two fruitful months of vintage Rusty, right up until Atlanta reliever George Stone — yeah, that George Stone — hit him in the hand on June 3. The first quarter of Staub’s season had his OPS over .900 and the Mets lapping the East. Then Rusty gets hit, he tries to play through the pain; he slumps; he sits; he comes back too soon; and 1972 goes to hell.
Rusty would eventually return in good shape and do great Rusty things over the remainder of his first Met tenure, but the Staub we got in 1972 was a template for what we’re getting from Starling in 2022. Impact. Dynamism. Intelligence. Rusty lacked speed, but he knew how to run the bases. Starling is blessed with every tool and uses them wisely and regularly. He’s also gotten a break in that his two bouts with leg problems came and went without obvious long-term implications. He’s out there every night, he’s slashing .305/.353/.482, and he’s a primary reason 2022 is heading in the opposite direction of where 1972 went.
Help is all around him. Though he didn’t figure into the scoring, Daniel Vogelbach continued to show he might have been worth the price of Colin Holderman (currently a Triple-A reliever in the Pirate system), reaching base once via walk and twice via doubles. On one of his two-base hits, he swung so hard that it loosened the chain around his neck. Imagine how much faster he’d be if not weighed down by jewelry.
Attaining jewelry is the main goal of this organization, whether through drawing new cards — welcome, Tyler Naquin (trade from the Reds); see ya, Travis Jankowski (DFA’d to clear space) — or by relying on the cards you’ve been nursing the whole time. Until merry prankster Jacob deGrom comes back Tuesday, Brandon Nimmo can claim Met seniority on the active roster. Old Man Brandon goes back to June 26, 2016. It only felt as if he hadn’t gotten a hit since then entering Friday night. The Nimmo who was on-basing so effectively that the last time he was in Miami wags were retrofitting classic pop lyrics to meet his moment had been in an offensive funk. Had been. We noticed a double in the first. We were overwhelmed by a homer in the eighth. Brandon, you’re still a fine Met.
As indicated, the score had been 4-4 as of the fourth and it stayed 4-4 until the eighth. Also as indicated, there was a Leon Russell “Tight Rope” sense to the evening. One side’s hate and one is hope. It’s always glorious to win, but it would really rule to reel this Marlin battle safely aboard the boat. It always sucks to lose, but it would really suck to lose this game, considering their three-run first, their nosing ahead anew in the second and the settling down Bassitt did to hold them at bay. We’d overcome so much tsuris yet we were never more than tied. We’d gotten, too, an inning of professional relief from Adam Ottavino in the bottom of the seventh, which led a viewer to wonder who’d pitch the bottom of the eighth, though first the viewer wondered what the picture would be by then.
There’d be garlands of glory and a paucity of gloom. Eduardo Escobar, pinch-hitting for Luis Guillorme, beat out an infield single (note to Don Mattingly: quit challenging calls). Nido bunted Escobar to second, which is something Buck Showalter seems to enjoy asking Tomás to do lately. And then came Nimmo. He came prepared for whatever Steven Okert would offer him. He’d make short work and a long flight out of it.
The Mets were up, 6-4, on Brandon’s bolt from the blue. We were definitely on the sunny side of the tight rope. Could eighth-inning specialist du nuit Trevor Williams keep us leaning toward life rather than the funeral pyre? Drew Smith was on the IL. Seth Lugo gave more than inning of himself in the last Subway Series thriller. Ottavino gave his all in the seventh. Holderman’s in Indianapolis. Williams? Why not?
Eleven pitches. Three outs. Good call.
All that was left to determine was how clean Edwin Diaz’s 23rd save would be in the ninth. I mean, yeah, there always the possibility of a bloop and a blast, or balls squirting past infielders, or some combination of error, balk and wild pitch adding up to disaster. Any of it would neatly echo the teal-tinged black Marlin magic that lingers in our heads. But, nah, not this time. Not with this closer.
Ten pitches. All strikes. Three outs. All strikeouts. Not immaculate. Close enough.
Diaz had his save. The Mets had their desired result. The game was in the win column, where it belonged. As fits go, it was perfect.
by Greg Prince on 28 July 2022 12:12 pm Max Scherzer pitched seven innings of shutout ball on his 38th birthday. Of course he did. He was born to put up zeroes on the night of July 27 in the borough of Queens before a sold-out house in attendance to cheer on a first-place team. It was foretold when he first drew breath and presumably glared a pea-sized hole through the forehead of his mother’s obstetrician.
July 27, 1984, wasn’t just any date in New York Mets history. It was a double-dip. We’d someday dip into Steve Cohen’s discretionary funds and sign the best pitcher ever born on said date, but that was a bunch of decades off. In the moment, as the Scherzers were mulling what to name their newborn in St. Louis (likely paying scant attention to the fifth-place Cardinals pulling out a tenth-inning victory over the sixth-place Pirates in Pittsburgh), Met fortunes were situated in the right palm of a pitcher roughly half the age of what Max would turn on July 27, 2022.
Dwight Gooden was pitching at Shea Stadium on a Friday night. That alone says so much, but on July 27, 1984, Dwight Gooden was pitching at Shea Stadium on a Friday night against the Chicago Cubs. That says even more. The New York Mets were in first place for the first time at such a late juncture in a season since 1973. Dwight was eight then. He was 19 now. The Mets had been nowhere as the kid from Tampa finished elementary school, junior high and high school. The Mets were so nowhere that they were able to draft Dwight Gooden, then 17, with the fifth overall pick in 1982. The Mets stayed nowhere until 1984, which not coincidentally is when we met young Dwight.
We called him Doc, as in Doctor K. You remember the unofficial last name. If you needed a reminder, you could glance up above left field at Shea. All the strikeouts Doctor K recorded were dutifully documented by fans who couldn’t wait until the next morning’s box score to know the total.
“In the left field upper deck, ‘the K Korner’ is open for business,” Joey Johnston wrote in Gooden’s hometown Tampa Tribune when the local product was tabbed to pitch in the All-Star Game. “Dennis Scalzitti and Leo Avolio, lifelong Mets fans from New Jersey, hang ‘K’ posters on the railing each time Gooden whiffs an opponent.” At two strikes, Johnston elaborated, “They wave the ‘K’ above their heads, inspiring the crowd to stand and cheer, urging Gooden to finish the strikeout.”
He did that a lot as a rookie. The rookie professed no great concern with his strikeout volume, which would add up to 276 by season’s end. I don’t worry about the ‘K,’” he said in early July after inspiring Scalzitti and Avolio to hang a dozen of them. “My purpose is to win games and help the team.” The Mets benefited from that attitude and that talent. Gooden lit up the All-Star Game on July 10 and kept electrifying the National League en route to the July 27 showdown versus the Cubs. It’s no wonder attendance spiked every time Gooden pitched at Shea. It’s no wonder that every seat was spoken for this time Gooden was pitching at Shea. The Mets were 3½ games up on the Cubs after a midweek sweep of the Cardinals, presumably to the dismay of Brad Scherzer, an expectant dad whose home team had fallen precipitously since trading Keith Hernandez the year before. Keith thought he was going to baseball Siberia on June 15, 1983. He wouldn’t have guessed baseball Paradise would be under construction thirteen months later.
On July 27, 1984, Doctor K kept the K Korner engaged, if not overwhelmed. More importantly, he kept the Shea scoreboard operator on a consistent keel. Doc allowed 1 run in the top of the first inning to the Cubs. The Mets answered back with 1 in the bottom of the first. And then, starting with the second, the top line looked like this:
00 000 00Those were Doc’s zeroes. It wasn’t achieved as neatly as one might have forecast — Doc had a little trouble controlling his fastball and walked seven; “I was pumped before the game and had to calm myself down,” he admitted — but Gooden’s sense of purpose spoke for itself. He gave up only four hits while striking out “only” eight. The Mets didn’t dent opposing starter Dick Ruthven decisively until the bottom of the seventh. Doc’s bat was in the middle of that rally, delivering a bunt that moved Rafael Santana to second and set up Wally Backman to drive him in. Doc protected the 2-1 lead he helped build before turning it over to Jesse Orosco. Orosco took care of the ninth for Gooden. Other teammates took care of his superlatives.
“That was the hardest I have seen him throw all year from start to finish,” said Hernandez, whose St. Louis affiliation belonged to a very distant past by July 27, 1984. “He didn’t have a curve at first and then it came to him. When it did, it was a hard curve. He had trouble keeping his fastball down at the start, but then he got it. That’s not a fastball he throws. Looking at it from first base, it’s a blazer. He’s like Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson,” the latter the all-time favorite pitcher of Brad Scherzer. “He gets better as the game goes along.”
Backman agreed. “He keeps us in the game,” the second baseman said. “Dwight had a little trouble at the beginning but he started to go through them like so many high school players later on with his fastball and curve.”
Gooden won the game and helped his team. The Mets were 59-37, the most they’d been above .500 all year, the most they’d been above .500 since the end of 1969. They were 4½ ahead of the Cubs, another high water mark through 96 games. The National League East might as well have been made up of Hillsborough High School’s opponents back in Tampa. Doc indeed made everybody look like an amateur by comparison.
July 27, 1984. The date has stayed with me for 38 years. It would never get any better for the 1984 Mets after that night. They’d never be as many as 22 games above .500 the rest of the way. They wouldn’t lead the Cubs by as many as 4½ again. Soon they wouldn’t lead them at all. Yet 1984 gets a pass in the mind’s eye. It was the year the club came into its own, the year Doc burst on the scene (Rookie of the Year winner, Cy Young runner-up), the year Keith settled in (second in MVP voting). Keith remembered it well on July 9, 2022, when the Mets retired his number at Citi Field. The flag that flies over the right field porch says 1986. The great leap forward was 1985. But 1984…you never forget when the chronic losing stops and winning becomes habit-forming and hope is a legitimate instinct.
“When I went to Spring Training in ’84,” Keith recounted, “and I saw the group of talented athletes, all young, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, lookin’ up at me, I knew we had something special. And we did. […] All these young guys — Darryl, Doc, Ron, Walt, Ed, Mookie, Roger, Fitzy and Jesse — they rejuvenated my career.” They rejuvenated us, too. No, you don’t forget that.
***When the Mets acquire a player, I look up his birthdate. If he was born in baseball season, I look up what the Mets did the day he was born. When the Mets signed Max Scherzer, and I saw when he was born, I didn’t have to cross-reference the Mets’ result from July 27, 1984. He was born the day Doc beat the Cubs. Doc beat the Cubs like a drum virtually every chance he got, actually — 27-4 as a Met — but I didn’t require delineation. So when July 27, 2022, came into view and it appeared Max Scherzer would start against the Yankees on that particular Wednesday, his 38th birthday, I knew in advance what would happen.
Max Scherzer would live up to his purpose and help the Mets win the game. It was the game he was born to wrap his mitts around. At least until his next start.
Max threw six pitches in the first inning at a sold-out Citi Field. He registered three flyouts, retiring DJ LeMahieu, Aaron Judge and Anthony Rizzo in order. You look at those names and a run has already crossed the plate most nights. But then you look at Max Scherzer’s name.
 On the day that Max was born, the K cards came together… Pete Alonso’s name and swing were good for a leadoff homer against Domingo Germán in the second. Francisco Lindor, who plays as if he circles the Subway Series in his day planner every January 1, provided a second run by driving in Tomás Nido from second in the third. Nido’s purpose was catching Scherzer. Anything he does with a bat is a bonus. A second run is a bonus sometimes when the Mets decide their ace pitcher can do it all. Two translated as twenty the way Max was going. He wasn’t dominant along the lines of 19-year-old Gooden. He was dominant along the lines of 38-year-old Scherzer. Two walks, five hits, a “mere” six strikeouts in the eyes of whoever will never be able to watch an all-time strikeout artist and not think of the K Korner, especially when the pitcher is Scherzer and the whiffer is Judge (indeed, three of those Ks were foist upon Hammerin’ Yank Aaron). Most importantly:
000 000 0Seven innings for Max, seven zeroes. One run fewer than Doc allowed over eight the night Max was born. Also one fewer inning pitched. Even when Doc was 19, men were men and all that. Gooden was from what was left of that breed that expected to go nine. It was well after Koufax and Gibson, but not far removed from Seaver and Carlton. “Hold on, big boy,” Davey Johnson said he had to tell his phenom when he reached the decision to pull him in favor of Orosco once Cubs manager Jim Frey sent up lefty pinch-hitter Thad Bosley to lead off the ninth. “You’re coming with me.” Gooden batted. Gooden strode to the mound nine times. I don’t know if men were men, but my goodness, pitchers like Gooden were everything.
I was pretty certain Max Scherzer wasn’t going to get anywhere near the mound in the ninth inning on July 27, 2022, because that hardly ever happens anymore, no matter that your name is Max Scherzer and your credentials are Max Scherzer’s. But after revisiting the events of July 27, 1984, in advance of Scherzer’s start, and as I considered the more than one inning apiece pitched by Adam Ottavino and Edwin Diaz on July 26, 2022, I sorely wished Buck Showalter would give Max the slightest nod toward the field after the Mets batted in the seventh. Scherzer wouldn’t need more than a hint. Hell, Buck wouldn’t have to finish his nod before Max would be throwing to Nido.
Again, however, that’s not how it works. Nor are two runs that look so mighty when Max is on the mound, even against the Yankees, look like much when it’s anybody who isn’t Ottavino or Diaz facing them in relief. Sure enough, the so-crazy-it-might-work experiment of handing David Peterson the eighth inning imploded on contact, first figuratively via a four-pitch walk to Anthony Rizzo, then on the fifth pitch of the inning, a two-run gopher ball to Gleyber Torres. All that Gooden-Scherzer symmetry was suddenly relegated to footnote status unless Showalter was hiding somewhere within his windbreaker a rested reliever who could avoid any further mess.
Son of a Buck, the manager had an answer. After Peterson recovered just enough to strike out Matt Carpenter, Showalter called on Seth Lugo, who used to inspire all the bullpen confidence circa 2019, when the question wasn’t why Seth Lugo? but why Seth Lugo for only one inning? Vintage Six-Out Seth Lugo returned to form of yore by getting Josh Donaldson looking and Aaron Hicks swinging. Then, after the Mets continued to honor their pact of non-aggression where scoring was concerned in the bottom of the eighth, Lugo continued to pitch, bringing his returned form with him. Two outs at the bottom of the order, a single to LeMahieu and, oh joy, Judge up as the potential destroyer of worlds.
Except Lugo grounded Judge to short, forcing LeMaiheu, and if the Yankees couldn’t take advantage of a ninth inning in which Diaz’s trumpets didn’t blare, maybe we wouldn’t have to see extra innings. Maybe, instead, we’d watch Eduardo Escobar see his offensive shadow for a change and belt a double to deep left; Nido unearth the ancient art of the sacrifice bunt to put Eduardo on third with less than two out; Brandon Nimmo not do exactly what we wanted but not do anything detrimental (he reached on a comebacker that Wandy Peralta couldn’t quite tame); and Starling Marte do exactly what we wanted.
It took two pitches for Marte to send a single into left and Escobar home from third. A tense Wednesday night tie became a jubilant Subway Series sweep. Just like that, the Mets were 3-2 winners and possessors of a record of 61-37, the second time in 2022 they’ve been as many as 24 games above .500. Coming into the two-game intracity set, they were 59-37, the exact same mark the 1984 Mets had on July 27, 1984. As noted, the Mets fell from 59-37, taking our division championship dreams with them, at least until that December when Walt was traded to Detroit for Howard Johnson, and Fitzy was part of a package going to Montreal for Gary Carter, and we got back to dreaming suitably big mid-1980s dreams.
These first-place New York Mets keep building on what they’ve accomplished. They’ve been doing it from Day One of this season. They’re still doing it. They have to keep doing it, not only because the second-place Atlanta Braves, currently three games behind us, are as formidable an opponent as the 1984 Cubs or 2022 Yankees, but because there’s little chance somebody will stand before a throng of Mets fans 38 years from now and wax rhapsodically about the 2022 Mets who showed what a group of talented athletes — some if not all young, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed — they were unless there’s a payoff in October.
We don’t need to wait until 2060 for history’s judgment. To be remembered as something special, this team can’t peak in late July. This year hasn’t emerged as the start of something big. It is something big. A helluva spring and summer isn’t gonna cut it without a fall to match. Not after last year’s transitory occupancy of first place diminished for many among us the meaningfulness of leading the NL East prior to the completion of 162 games. Not after so many years since 1984, 1985 and 1986 when, honestly, there haven’t been many years like 1984, 1985 and 1986. A few good ones here and there. None presented in quite so satisfying a sequence. Maybe you can catch the rising stars only once in a lifetime.
Right now, you’ll never forget what it was like for Max Scherzer, Pete Alonso, Francisco Lindor, Seth Lugo, Eduardo Escobar, Tomás Nido and Starling Marte to have gathered their forces and beaten the Yankees in dramatic fashion. Whether you’ll more than dimly remember it a year or ten from now depends mostly on the next series in Miami; the series after that in Washington; what happens by next week’s trade deadline; the respective recoveries of James McCann, Trevor May and, oh yeah, Jacob deGrom; the five-game series at home against Atlanta; and then everything after that. It’s 38 years since 1984, light years beyond taking sentimental solace in the nicest of tries.
In a way, that’s too bad. In another way, that’s baseball like it oughta be.
A new episode of National League Town, pretending it knew all along the Mets would sweep the Yankees, is out now. Listen to it. It’s fun.
by Jason Fry on 26 July 2022 11:49 pm Look, I’d be happier never playing the Yankees.
First off, I don’t like interleague play and wish they’d do away with it. But there’s having to play, say, the Angels and there’s having to play the Yankees. And with the latter, there’s just too much stress. One’s living room feels like a psychiatrist’s office; being at the stadium feels like being cooked in a cauldron.
I know baseball games can be stressful. Hell, that’s part of the fun. But the Subway Series is like dropping a chunk of the playoffs into July — and I like my October anxieties to stay in October. Even a barn-burner of a regular-season game against the Braves or Phillies has some fun involved in it, but playing the Yankees is no fun at all. The losses make you want to go outside and lie in the road. The wins feel less like victories than surviving. A lopsided defeat feels like a hanging; a laugher feels like a karmic IOU that will come due at the most devastating time.
(I’m aware all of the above is peak Old Man Yelling at Cloud. I know interleague play is here to stay and about to get supercharged and Mets-Yankees games will be red-letter events on the regular-season calendar forevermore. I know, but I don’t care. I’m 53, which isn’t quite old-man territory but sure isn’t the first flush of youth. And have you looked closely at the clouds? Because some of them are real assholes and could use a good talking to.)
Joe Torre, of all people, came the closest to how I feel about the Subway Series. It was Torre who famously remarked that “when we lose I can’t sleep at night. When we win I can’t sleep at night. But when we win I wake up feeling better.”
(I’m pretty sure he said that while managing the Yankees, but since he did manage both New York clubs, let’s claim it for his tenure with us.)
The beginning of Tuesday night’s game found Emily, Joshua and me in a loud, crowded pub in Portland, Maine. There were no Mets or Yankees on the TV — this is Red Sox country, after all — so we fired up MLB.tv on my phone and propped it on the table, only to watch Aaron Judge take Taijuan Walker over the fence for a first-inning homer, followed by Anthony Rizzo sending the very next pitch to the same fate.
Not exactly ideal — it looked to me like Walker was (understandably) overamped, which caused him to overthrow and deliver pitches that flattened out. But a baseball truism is that you never know how the other guy is going to look coming out of the gate, and Jordan Montgomery had immediate problems.
Those problems started with Brandon Nimmo, who harried Montgomery through a pesky nine-pitch at-bat — one that ended with an out, but forced Montgomery to dip into his reserves and show most of his arsenal to the Mets hitters. Starling Marte hit a line-drive homer to cut the deficit in half. Francisco Lindor doubled and Pete Alonso slapped a changeup at the bottom of the zone up the gap for another double, tying the game. Two batters later, Eduardo Escobar connected and the Mets were up — improbably and marvelously — were up 4-2.
They were up 5-2 after some Yankee misadventures in the field, with Walker in constant trouble but somehow surviving, while the Mets failed to break through against a parade of apparently untouchable Yankee relievers I’d never heard of. (Probably not news, but that’s a really good team over there.) We left the pub and got in our rental car as Rizzo batted with the bases loaded and the Yankees within two. Wayne Randazzo’s radio call sounded like doom until the second the ball nestled safely into Nimmo’s glove at the fence — and when I finally saw the replay, I held my breath all over again.
Walker settled in to give the Mets some length, and then Adam Ottavino got through the seventh in large part thanks to Tomas Nido throwing out Rizzo on the back half of a double steal. (Rizzo was somehow in pretty much every pivotal moment of the game.) Ottavino yielded to Edwin Diaz with two outs in the eighth and the tying run at the plate — feast-or-famine pinch-hitter Joey Gallo, whose presence had the Yankee fans at Citi Field muttering even before Diaz struck him out. Jeff McNeil chipped in a desperately needed insurance run to bring Diaz back on stage with a three-run lead; Diaz survived an infield hit and his own error before blowing away potential tying runs Rizzo and Gleyber Torres for the win.
The Mets won. I survived. And tomorrow we … have to do this all over again? I won’t sleep, but at least I’ll wake up feeling better.
by Greg Prince on 25 July 2022 2:24 pm It’s Sunday night. The Mets haven’t won in more than a week. As if that’s not enough of a shame, our greatest miracle has been celebrated anew, and this is how our team responds in the present? What we could really use is a nice offensive explosion while everything is looking listless and limp, maybe a five-run inning leading to an 8-5 slumpbusting win.
Eerie how history can rhyme sometime.
The parameters of the lede paragraph were all in place on this most recent Sunday night, but it was also the situation a little over three years ago. On June 30, 2019, the day after the Mets celebrated the 50th anniversary of the 1969 world championship, they were aching for a win following a loss in Chicago; four in Philadelphia; and two more at home to Atlanta. (They’d also inadvertently killed off two members of their first champions in a flub-flecked In Memoriam reel and had to walk back Jason Vargas’s threat of physical harm to a reporter.) The abyss-tumbling even started at Wrigley, just as it had this summer, though then there wasn’t an All-Star break to consume the middle portions of those 2019 doldrums. ESPN came calling, anyway, somehow thinking that those Mets were national-audienceworthy. The Mets, as if to make it up to their inconvenienced fans, handed out replica 1969 World Series rings to their earliest arrivers.
No chance loomed that the 2019 Mets would be enlisting jewelers to manufacture real things based on how the club kept playing through the middle of the eighth, trailing the dreaded Braves, 5-3. Yet there the Mets were, on the field, unaware their season was essentially over. And in the bottom of the eighth, there was a home run, a couple of other big hits, a three-run lead and, in the ninth, Edwin Diaz on to record three necessary outs.
On July 24, 2022, history chuckled at its rhyme. Well, I did. I was at that game three years ago, when, with the Mets mired in a seven-game losing streak and courting embarrassment everywhere they stepped, they snapped out of it. Todd Frazier led off that eighth with the precedent-setting homer and newly minted All-Stars Jeff McNeil and Pete Alonso delivered impactful blows themselves, each driving in a pair of runs. It was cathartic — because I could swear the Mets were never going to win again — and it was respectful. You don’t get swept by the Braves when you’re remembering 1969.
We couldn’t help but remember 1969 this Sunday three years later, not with Gil Hodges’s induction going final on the road in Cooperstown. You didn’t need to follow the out-of-town scoreboard to know it had happened. Thanks to ESPN’s machinations, the Mets’ first pitch was pushed to 7:08 PM, plenty of time to watch the immortality festivities. Usually I’d gripe at being subject to the indignities of Sunday Night Baseball. On this occasion, I was grateful for the lack of channel-changing. I could focus on Gil and every other honoree in the afternoon. I could worry about the Mets later.
 Finally. When Gil was elected in December, I literally shed tears of joy. Then, when it was announced Buck O’Neil would be joining him, the parade of precipitation from my eyes intensified. No tarp was necessary. Let it rain. Baseball had waited too long to make things right. The wrongful drought was over. The eternity those who cared for Hodges, O’Neil and, for that matter, Minnie Miñoso, ended. Winter after winter, their families and fans searched for any clue that some committee would sign off on what so many baseball-lovers knew in their hearts, that these men were as worthy of recognition as any with whom they’d crossed paths or were denied access to competing against. The waits for Gil and Buck and Minnie made the Mets’ three-game losing streak versus the Cubs and Padres appear mighty inconsequential.
Not that losing three in a row (five, if you wish to punish yourself with the results of the Home Run Derby and All-Star Game) is a breeze. Nobody likes having to endure a staggering eight days between Met victories while the Mets sit mired in first place. Oh, the humanity. It was cause for dismay, perhaps discomfort, maybe a cue to press the silent alarm that sets off the panic button, but did you really think 2022 was all but over with more than two months remaining in the Triple Wild Card Era?
Don’t answer that question. I doubt I want to know.
Thank goodness that long, Metropolitan nightmare ended Sunday evening, mostly when the Mets poured five runs on the board in the sixth after doing nothing for the first five. Carlos Carrasco pitched credibly (he gave up nothing before exiting in favor of loosening Drew Smith’s arm) and Brandon Nimmo fielded wonderfully (he saved at least one run after Eric Hosmer unleashed his trademark awfulness on Smith in the form of an RBI double), but Met batting was merely for show. Not much of a show, either.
In the sixth, when I was ready to join the hordes believing the Mets would neither score nor win ever again, the 2022 team reminded us that they’re not too bad. Versus Joe Musgrove, Starling Marte walked, Francisco Lindor singled and that Alonso kid from three years ago blasted a home run that could have given Juan Soto a run for his Derby money, or any money awaiting Soto. Suddenly, the Mets had a 3-1 lead. Suddenly, a Met had gotten a big hit with runners on base. To quote Ben Fong-Torres in Almost Famous, “Crazy.”
Crazier, still, hustling Daniel Vogelbach crossed the plate for the first time as New York’s own, when a two-out Luis Guillorme fly ball to shallow left fell in front of a tentative Jurickson Profar. Vogelbach had walked, advanced to second on a friendly Mark Canha (possibly pronounced CAHN-ya) grounder and rumbled 180 feet as fast as he possibly could, presumably as fast as he grabbed the first flight out of spiritually eliminated Pittsburgh to join a pennant race. Then, as long as miracles were in the air, Tomás Nido, he of the perfectly reasonable “whaddaya mean Buck didn’t pinch-hit for Nido?” carping roughly 24 hours earlier, doubled home Guillorme.
It was 5-1 en route to 8-1 en route to 8-5 after the Mets had spent the week either trailing or idling. It was enough to allow for a bead of sweat to be dabbed from the forehead, even as the relievers meant to mop up spilled their soapy-water buckets. Newly assigned David Peterson gave up a run in the eighth and Joely Rodriguez…well, let’s just say he hasn’t been a Joely good fellow of late. In the ninth, the lefty less-than-specialist allowed four Padres to reach base and two of them to score without recording an out. Rodriguez wouldn’t see a fifth Padre. Instead, we’d see Diaz, and Diaz would see to the end of things, no discernible harm done.
Dab your forehead again. The Mets not only didn’t lose, but they increased their lead on the Braves back to a game-and-a-half, although you’re already sure the team that’s led the division without pause since the second week of April courts doom every instance it swings and misses. I’m susceptible to Last Thing I Saw Syndrome, too, and as I hadn’t seen a Mets win in two Saturdays by Sunday night, I was ready to surrender to my bleaker instincts when it was Padres 1 Mets 0 in the middle of the sixth, never believing it could be Mets More, Padres Less by the end of the ninth.
I wonder how I would have handled July heading into August of 1969 with that kind of attitude. I’d like to think my manager wouldn’t have allowed me to start thinking the worst.
The Mets of 53 summers ago actually sagged in the middle. Their dip amidst miraculous doings is usually handled in a lone anecdote. They were getting their posteriors whupped by the Houston Astros in a doubleheader at Shea on July 30; Cleon Jones looked slower than Daniel Vogelbach going after a ball; and Gil Hodges sternly walked to left field to simultaneously remove Cleon and send a message to his teammates. Soon after that, the Mets more or less took off toward their destiny. With their manager guiding them to a better attitude, nothing could stop them from reaching highest altitude.
Which sounds great, though from the doubleheader of July 30 up to Woodstock weekend, there came no sun for the Mets. It took the expansion Padres coming into town while Richie Havens and everybody else got playing in Bethel to lift the Mets from the mud. We were 9½ out as late as August 14; we concluded regular-season proceedings 8 up on October 2. And that was just the Miraculous appetizer.
But let’s not forget that sag. As my late friend Dana Brand put it in Mets Fan, following his reliving and reveling in the second-place Mets’ unlikely July triumphs over Leo Durocher’s first-place Cubs, “Then it all collapsed. It had to. How could it possibly have happened? How could we have dared to hope for this? By mid-August, after a rough month [… t]hey were in third place, as the Cardinals had finally woken up. And the Pirates were gaining. We would probably finish fourth. It was okay. This season had been more fun than any Mets season had ever been. I was crushed. I was only 14, but I knew something about how the world worked.”
I didn’t. I was 6. I was only waking up to the Mets that summer. I place the opening of my eyes as somewhere between Woodstock overwhelming the New York State Thruway and the LOOK WHO’S NO. 1 shoulder-tap on Shea’s massive scoreboard. I don’t remember anything specific before the Mets chasing down and passing the Cubs as first grade was starting. I didn’t know that the Mets had never won many games let alone any pennants before 1969. I just knew they were winning a bunch now; and everybody said it was “Amazin’” without irony; and I wanted to be a part of it; and that I never stopped being a part of it.
Somewhere in those first weeks of awareness, I came to know the name of the man who was steering the ship. It was Gil Hodges. I didn’t know about his platooning or his quiet leadership or his willingness to tell his best hitter, in so many words, maybe you ought not be out in the field if you can’t chase after a ball properly without making more of a scene out of it than he had to. I certainly didn’t know about the playing career that preceded his becoming manager of the Mets, or that it took place in Brooklyn, where my family lived before I was born, and that he and his team in that borough were glorious and that everybody revered Gil Hodges. The reverence I’d figure out by 1970. I was only 7, but I knew something about how the world worked.
Fast-forward, as one will, to the present, and there was Gil Hodges being inducted into the Hall of Fame. It had been talked about since he was still alive, which was a mighty long time ago. Gil began appearing on Hall of Fame ballots in the winter of 1969, before the season that would define him and the Mets and this Mets fan here. He didn’t make it the first time he appeared. Or the second time. Or the third time. There was enough time then for his young daughter Irene to ask her dad if he thought he’d ever go into the Hall of Fame.
“No. Never,” was Irene’s father’s emphatic reply. She asked why. “Those are all great players in there. I’m not even close,” was his humble explanation.
Forgive the heresy, but Gil Hodges was wrong. A lot of people continued to think he was wrong, and now there’s a plaque definitively refuting his self-assessment. Irene and her siblings were in Cooperstown Sunday to shepherd the plaque to its final station, in the Hall of Fame gallery. The daughter gave such a wonderful speech in honor of her father. As the son of a Brooklyn schoolgirl, I could hear the Brooklyn schoolgirl in Ms. Hodges throughout her presentation. She’d been assigned this report months ago by the Golden Era Committee’s vote, in her heart most of a lifetime ago, it is safe to infer. Just before she spoke, Tom Verducci on MLB Network explained how it came to be that Irene rather than brother Gil Jr. or sister Cindy gave the official address. Gil Jr. told Tom that Irene said, “Mine,” and that settled it.
Good a call as any if you saw it, and because the Mets didn’t play until Sunday night, you could see it live without conflicting interests. “Today,” Irene said as she wrapped up a review of her father’s career, life and the impact it had on others, “I am especially happy for my mother,” Joan Hodges, who was watching back home in Brooklyn because traveling is too much of a burden at her age. “When the call came from the Hall of Fame, and I heard, ‘this is Jane Forbes Clark, and it is my honor…’ I began sobbing probably as much as I did when I lost my father. I was so beyond happy for him, and even thrilled that my mom, at 95, and would be able to hear this news.” Irene was too much of a class act to note that had this decision been certified in a timelier fashion that her mom could have been in Cooperstown speaking herself. One assumes Irene had the value of grace instilled into her at an early age by both or her parents. Her father, after all, “would only do what he thought was the right thing. That was my dad.”
I thought it was telling that the four living 1969 Mets who made the not easy trip upstate to watch Irene Hodges accept on behalf of her dad were four Mets who could have spent the last fifty-plus years nursing grudges. Ed Kranepool lost playing time to Donn Clendenon after having been spotlighted as the Mets’ first homegrown star. Art Shamsky wasn’t the regular he looked forward to being when he was traded from Cincinnati. Ron Swoboda was prone to chafe at authority. And Cleon Jones was taken out of a game against Houston after not going hard after a batted ball, maybe because the Mets were getting blown out and it didn’t seem worth it or maybe, because Cleon says, his leg was bothering him and his manager recognized that. Yet each man won a championship by overcoming their initial differences with Gil Hodges and accepting the leadership Gil Hodges offered them and, literally to this day, each man will tell you the main reason they earned a ring that could be replicated as a promotional giveaway was mainly because of Gil Hodges. They have nothing to gain in 2022 by continuing to revere Gil Hodges. They do it because they think it’s the right thing.
In Flushing, in the aftermath of the Hall of Fame induction of the late Gil Hodges and six other worthy honorees (the late O’Neil, the late Miñoso, the late Bud Fowler, the advanced-aged Jim Kaat and Tony Oliva and the robust David Ortiz), the Mets gave out Gil Hodges bobbleheads to the first 25,000 through the gates at Citi Field. I imagine it complements the 1969 replica ring nicely for those who attended on both that Sunday night three years and this past Sunday night. In 1969, Gil called the likes of us who buy tickets and cheer our heads off “beautiful fans” for our support, given to his team that year all year, even in the middle of summer when they sagged.
I don’t know how beautiful we are on a given day in the midst of a given losing streak. I do know it’s beautiful that Gil is enshrined where he is enshrined.
by Jason Fry on 23 July 2022 11:31 pm The quickest way a team can demoralize its fanbase? OK, actually it’s to have an arsonist bullpen that routinely sets fire to victories so that they burn down into defeats.
But the second quickest way? It’s to routinely get great starting pitching and have it undone by an absolute lack of hitting. Which is something the Mets have offered us way too often of late.
Chris Bassitt was the latest victim, undone by a single bad pitch that led to a 2-0 Padres lead and a 2-1 Padres victory. Manny Machado‘s home run erased the fact that Bassitt struck out 11; ultimately, it also erased the Mets’ 1.5 game lead over the Terminator-like Atlanta Braves, now just half a game back after spanking the hapless Angels.
Half a game back as in could be half a game ahead tomorrow, but we’ll leave that bit of angst for a future post.
OK, I know what you’re wondering why I haven’t addressed yet. Yes, home-plate umpire Jim Wolf missed an 0-2 pitch on Machado that was clearly inside the strike zone. Instead of being out, Machado got another pitch — one he turned into a souvenir.
But these things happen. Bassitt missed his target by more than a foot, crossing up the umpire, and was philosophical about what had happened in postgame interviews: “It’s part of the game. It’s OK that he missed it, I just gotta make a much better pitch the pitch after that. That was a terrible pitch.”
The accountability is welcome, but more to the point, a guy who makes one bad pitch while fanning 11 shouldn’t be on the losing side of the equation. If that happens, the raised eyebrow shouldn’t be directed at the home-plate ump, or God, or anyone except his teammates — the ones apparently going to the plate holding their bats upside down.
The Mets put the leadoff runner aboard in six of nine innings, but said table-setting led to a run exactly once — a ninth-inning flurry that was more impotent pique than righteous uprising. It was a quietly infuriating night, emphasis on both qualifiers.
There have been too many of those double barrels — quiet bats, infuriating lack of results, great starting pitching gone by the boards.
All is not lost, of course. The Mets are still in first place, however tenuous their hold on said perch may have become. The team will almost certainly look different by Aug. 2, and in ways that involve more than importing various Pittsburgh Pirates. The players who remain after Aug. 2 will (presumably) revert to the mean and start putting up numbers more in keeping with what adorns the backs of their baseball cards.
But it would be nice if these things happened soonest. Because what’s happening now isn’t cutting it. It’s … well, quietly infuriating pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?
by Greg Prince on 23 July 2022 9:46 am In 1969, 1973, 2000 and 2015, the Mets qualified for the postseason without the benefit of capturing their first game after the All-Star break, thus if you need a little precedent to take the edge off the first game the 2022 Mets played in five days leaving you wondering if they thought Friday night was actually an optional workout, there you have it. Even the uppermost of top-notch Mets teams don’t automatically bolt from the second gate of the season.
Most first games of the alleged second half suffer from a touch of sluggishness. A retrospective glance at wins by eventual Met playoff teams indicates units that weren’t quite ready to get back to work.
• After six innings on July 17, 1986, the Mets had rustled up nothing against Old Friend Nolan Ryan in the Astrodome and trailed, 1-0. Then Nolie had flashbacks to his younger self, got wild and walked the bases loaded with two out in the top of the seventh. A two-run single, some shoddy defense and relief pitching that wasn’t the caliber of 1969 Nolan Ryan followed, blowing both the doors and drawers off Houston’s attempt at a fast second-half start. By the ninth, Craig Reynolds was on the mound for the home team. Reynolds was usually a shortstop. The Mets bunched all their runs in the final three frames for a 13-2 victory. Three losses would follow that weekend, not to mention four arrests after a trip to Cooter’s.
• An 8-3 lead in the middle of the fourth at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium on July 14, 1988, became an 8-8 tie after eight. These were the days when the Braves could be found in the National League West, specifically its basement. Yet the Mets let the bane of their future existence ooze into extra innings alongside them (Old Friend Charlie Puleo threw four innings of shutout relief). In the eleventh, the Mets remembered they were a ton better than the Braves and pushed the winning run across to prevail, 9-8.
• Armondologists point to the second-half opener of 1999 as the first hint that not every lead would be safe in the hands of the new New York closer. The Mets were in St. Petersburg, which could have been considered akin to continuing their break. Visiting the Devil Rays of 1999, as was the case versus the Braves of 1988, was tantamount to a soft relaunch. No sweat, right? They were the Devil Rays. Sure enough, the Mets carried a 7-3 lead into the bottom of the eighth. Tampa Bay scratched out a run off Turk Wendell and Dennis Cook, but no worries. A three-run lead was about to be handed off to Armando Benitez, who’d been so good as John Franco’s setup man prior to Franco’s finger injury that it seemed inevitable he’d take over closing duties. Early results had confirmed that sense. What could possibly go wrong with Armando finishing off the Devil Rays? Only a one-out walk to future Met Miguel Cairo that preceded a double to Old Friend Aaron Ledesma and a rally that culminated in a game-tying single to Bubba Trammell, the next year’s playoff-berth insurance. Benitez got his three swinging strikeouts; he was good for a rate of nearly 15 Ks per nine innings. But it was the in-betweens that could kill him. In between striking out the side in the ninth inning on July 15, 1999, Benitez allowed three runs and the scored to be tied, 7-7. The preternaturally resilient Mets of that year grabbed the lead back in the top of the tenth, and Armando, with Bobby Valentine’s confidence unshaken, stuck around to quash the Devil Rays in order, “earning” his first win as a Met, 8-7. You were grateful for the W, but you started to wonder, just a little bit, if this hard thrower from Baltimore could be trusted in all tight situations. Cripes, he nearly blew a game to the Devil Rays.
• The 2006 Mets overcame a rare first-inning deficit and the opposition of a surefire Hall of Famer to keep their first-half ball rolling. Trailing the godawful Cubs, 2-1, and sitting Jose Reyes out of an abundance of caution, the Mets put four on the board in the top of the fourth versus forty-year-old Greg Maddux at Wrigley Field. Reyes’s substitute in the leadoff slot, Jose Valentin, produced three hits. Reyes’s substitute at shortstop, Chris Woodward, tripled. It became a 6-3 win on July 14, a Friday back when most teams returned to action on Thursday. Perhaps the extra day of rest did the first-place Mets good.
• The 2016 Mets restarted their engines with a familiar leadoff hitter at Citizens Bank Park. Familiar for 2006. Jose Reyes, off the Flushing grid since 2011, was back in a Mets uniform, though not back at shortstop. Jose was the Mets’ new third baseman in the July of his second coming. It was a long story, but the summation of it on July 15 was with Jose Reyes playing third and batting first, the Mets downed the Phillies, 5-3. They were up, 4-0, in the sixth until the Phillies — yet another marshmallow the baseball gods gave them to find their footing — chased Bartolo Colon. Reyes drove in an insurance run in the seventh, and Jeurys Familia, fresh from Terry Collins not using him nor any other Met in the All-Star Game (gads, that still irks me), made the ninth inning a non-event, notching his 32nd save of a season when he’d go on to total a team record 51.
The Mets are 5-4 coming out of the All-Star break in years when they’ve been on their way to the postseason. One is tempted to pencil that record in, with the dull-pointed writing implemented they’ll include with your overpriced program, as 5-5 after Friday night’s second-half opening loss to the Padres. Except no matter how secure the Mets’ positioning as a playoff club appears — yes, only a game-and-a-half up on the Braves, but also 8½ in the clear for a Wild Card should it come to that — nothing’s over until in it’s ink. The team that began the second half at Citi Field looked not enough like the team stormed through the first half. Maybe it was symbolic that the storm that was predicted to pass over the ballpark, despite necessitating a 31-minute rain delay before first pitch, never showed up.
Yu Darvish, unfortunately, was right on time. Yu Darvish has been stymieing the Mets in too many places on too many nights for too long. Darvish is 5-0 in eight career starts against us. He had recent precedent going for him, having shut out the Mets on two hits for seven innings in early June, but on this Friday night at Citi Field, he put me in mind of another Friday night at Citi Field. On August 4, 2017, Darvish had just become a Dodger and was making his L.A. debut versus the Mets. It amounted to a tuneup two months ahead of the playoffs. The righty went seven innings, scattered three singles and won one of the most uncompetitive games to which I ever listened on a southbound Metro-North train (or any conveyance), 6-0. This was 2017. The Mets were the 1988 Braves, the 1999 Devil Rays of their day. I was used to the idea that they weren’t gonna hit good pitching. I wasn’t prepared for just how much they weren’t gonna hit Darvish.
Five years later, the Mets are generally awesome, except when they’re not hitting, which isn’t confined to games started by five-time All-Stars. The Mets, first-place residence notwithstanding, can not hit with the best of them. Or the worst of them. On Friday night, they turned in a typical for them performance against this particular nemesis: in seven innings, they managed three singles, a double and a walk, amounting to an entire run off Darvish. That alone was a victory. It was the only victory, however, as the Padres otherwise pinned a 4-1 loss on them. This pitcher and this opponent might be bad news in the postseason.
The implicit good news in that statement is the Mets are still plenty on track for the tenth postseason appearance of their lives. Yet stepping it up is advised. On Friday night, a number of principals did their job not quite well enough. Max Scherzer was only slightly touchable — a two-run homer to Eternal Enemy Eric Hosmer in the fourth served as the differencemaker — but his eight strikeouts over six innings were destined to serve as footnote. Tomás Nido received credit for catching all eight Ks (including the ones that catapulted Max past Curt Schilling and Bob Gibson on the all-time strikeout chart), but he also caught a contusion on the wrist when he and his pitcher got caught in a crossup in the second. Nido wasn’t expecting the fastball that that ultimately left him unable to swing a bat, necessitating his sixth-inning departure in favor of Patrick Mazeika.
Mazeika’s presence came into play on what could have been a sweet double play to escape the seventh. With one out and the bases loaded, Nomar Mazara grounded to Pete Alonso. Alonso made a nice grab and throw to effect a force at home. Mazeika proceeded to relay back to first en route to a potential 3-2-3 DP, and he definitely threw in the direction of Alonso’s mitt. But Pete was set up at first in such a way that the batter, Nomar Mazara, presented a baserunning obstacle. Mazeika’s throw hit the runner, and not even Buck Showalter could argue Mazara was out of the baseline. The ball skittered away and instead of getting out of the inning, another run scored to make it Padres Too Many, Mets Not Enough.
At least J.C. Martin was still safe.
The one Met figure who did his job Friday without the results of his efforts being evident was GM Billy Eppler, who traded Colin Holderman to Pittsburgh for Daniel Vogelbach. Not too many months ago I couldn’t have told you who Colin Holderman was. He came up in May and, before and after a stint on the injured list, was dependable enough out of the bullpen to tantalize us with visions of increased responsibility. In a season when nobody among the Mays, Lugos and Smiths has really put a stranglehold on non-Ottavino/pre-Diaz setup duty, you could imagine Holderman taking care of business. He’d inherited eight runners as a Met. None of them scored — and those were the innings somebody else started.
Every few years the Mets let some promising young reliever go and you gulp a little at the repercussions. Usually it winds up inconsequential to the big Met picture. In previously referenced miserable 2017, for example, I thought Chasen Bradford looked pretty good. The Mets put him through waivers and the Mariners grabbed him. On Friday, hours before Eppler traded Holderman, Bradford tweeted his retirement from professional baseball, not having pitched in the majors since 2019. He leaves the pros with a 7-0 lifetime MLB record. Holderman is currently 4-0. As with Bradford, I don’t explicitly wish him any defeats. I also wish to avoid reliever regret.
Having buried the lede this long, let us finally excavate it: the Mets went out and got themselves a hitter, specifically a lefty bopper who might have come in handy Friday night had the trade been consummated Friday morning rather than Friday afternoon. Vogelbach mashes righthanded pitching. No Met mashes Yu Darvish, but recalling and starting Travis Blankenorn as DH, as the Mets did Friday, was a little too transparent admission of it. Vogelbach might make enough of an impact that, if there’s enough relief on the market to replace the surprising Holderman (Eppler says he thinks there is), will make this trade a job well done. The Mets have scads of accomplished hitters in their lineup. They’re just not accomplishing much of late. Something had to be done. This was one step. The production out of the designated hitter position, shared primarily by currently IL’d Dom Smith and J.D. Davis, has a person yearning for the return of pitchers hitting. This person has never stopped yearning for the return of pitchers hitting, but that’s another story. The story right now is Vogelbach will be here and others, whoever they are, should follow.
One might be Jacob deGrom, which seems worth mentioning, if not for how good a hitting pitcher he is/was. Ah, Jake. In the grand sweep of Mets acedom, dating back at least to the not always grand days of Swan and Zachry, we’re always waiting for somebody to come back from injury or worse. In Doc Gooden’s case, it was from “worse” once (though also from injury later). We checked our watches for the imminent return of Martinez, of Santana, of Harvey, of Syndergaard, of Scherzer for a while. DeGrom has been off our clock, and our innings have been filled so ably in his absence, that it was easy to almost forget the second-best pitcher in franchise history is still under contract and working his scapula off to get back to competition. During the All-Star Game, another National League loss you’ve already forgotten, the Mets casually announced Jake’s simulated game would be pushed back a couple of days due to mild muscle soreness in his right shoulder. Fan consensus had it that deGrom was missing at least one arm and would a) never be heard from again and b) opt out of lucrative contract and sign a more lucrative contract with some Georgia-based entity despite his career obviously being over. You can’t keep fans of a team in first place from a scenario that’s worst case.
It could be my sentimental side showing, but I believe Jacob deGrom will be with us again soon. Buck says he’ll have one more rehab start (he did do his simulated rounds on Thursday, without any incident reported) and then they’ll figure out what’s next. Buck doesn’t reveal what he doesn’t have to. Maybe that’s why he wears a windbreaker all the time. I’m assuming Jake isn’t giving it his all in Syracuse and St. Lucie and wherever just to let us down. I’ve missed him without being cognizant of it. With four days to mull the state of the Mets over the break, I was thinking how much I really, really like this team yet am a little shy of feeling passionate about them. I was passionate in 1999. I was passionate in 2006. I grew passionate in 2015. Ninety-four games into 2022, these Mets strike me as a beautiful band of brothers succeeding almost to my heart’s content, yet I don’t feel 100% connected. I’m pretty sure it’s the lack of No. 48 in my life. I’m grateful for Scherzer and all the other pitchers, but we had Jacob deGrom being Jacob deGrom for so long. Then we didn’t. Last year his absence was more of a Met-killer than Yu Darvish. This year it hasn’t been, except deep in my ace-loving soul. Of course Scherzer is an ace. Of course Scherzer is a Met. He’s been as Met as he can be. But I’m also cognizant he’s a Met because Steve Cohen paid him handsomely to assume the identity. There’s no cosplay at work with Max. He’s assumed his Metsian persona sincerely and professionally without a drop of Gl@v!nesque reluctance to take the money and stay. If Showalter always covers up with a windbreaker, Gl@v!ne never didn’t think you were watching a frigging Brave on undercover assignment.
Mind you, every professional baseball player is where he is because money is involved, and good for them. Yet it’s different when it’s the guy who you’ve known as yours his entire career. Scherzer is the greatest. But so is deGrom. And deGrom has always been ours, regardless that ultimately he will be his own man at opt-out time. That critical juncture, however, is a half-season plus (we remain confident) a postseason away. There’s a whole second half to go. There’s a veritable lifetime to come in these approaching games, weeks and months. There’s a torrent of passion bubbling so close to the surface that I can almost feel it.
So let’s get it on, let’s get going and Let’s Go Mets.
Maybe you’d remember the All-Star Game better had it been part of a cohesive All-Star Week, the kind proposed on the current episode of National League Town.
by Greg Prince on 18 July 2022 1:26 am 3 out of 4
2 out of 3
2 out of 3
3 out of 4
2 out of 3
2 out of 3
2 out of 3
My muscle memory still works. I still remember, even from the lofty heights of first place, how to be disgusted with my team as if it hasn’t been living in first place practically every night of this season. It didn’t matter to me at the close of business Sunday that my team was 23 games over .500 or 2½ games ahead of its closest competitor (a game better than it had been a week earlier) or as secure as could be in putting a deposit down on a playoff position well before postseason berths are officially issued.
My mostly wonderful team lost to the Cubs, 3-2, in one of those games that was there for the taking for nine innings but got given away or left on the table in most of them. Bleh! Bleah! Bleech! Whichever sound you choose, I was making it between 5:30 and 6:00. It was a game that shouldn’t have been lost, yet it was lost. There were approximately a hundred and twenty-three (rough estimate) flyouts into the wind. There was a dumb decision to attempt to score from second on a single into short left field made by the same runner who cleverly evaded a tag that led to a run hours earlier. There was an error of commission by the third baseman who must have invested in pork belly futures Saturday because he’d saved his club’s bacon twice. There was relief that wasn’t on the heels of so much relief that was. And there was the other team figuring out how to accomplish the feat I enjoy least in a matchup against my team: beating them.
The manager of my team is always reminding me, through the media, that the other team, whoever it happens to be on a given day, is capable of winning a baseball game. That message has been absorbed by his players who repeat its essence after infrequent instances of non-wins on their part. The worst element of this alibi is it is largely true. Nobody should ever beat the first-place Mets, but occasionally somebody does.
It happens because not even the 2022 Mets can win them all.
2 out of 4
2 out of 3
2 out of 3
1 out of 3
3 out of 4
2 out of 3
1 out of 3
3 out of 3
3 out of 3
I needed a half-hour to decompress from Cubs 3 Mets 2; to rationalize that bad days happen to good teams and vice-versa; to remember that although my worldview is often susceptible to the last thing it saw — Lindor getting thrown out at home; Escobar fumbling a double play grounder; Smith’s arsenal being turned back on him in the form of sharp grounders finding holes — overwhelming the larger or more significant sample sizes of the things that preceded it. This is not just a day-to-day instinct. These Mets have four All-Star selectees among them. Three were Mets in recent years. When recent years did not go swimmingly, I was willing to toss each of these recently certified stellar Mets overboard.
Not that I have that authority, nor do I have the attention span to construct hypothetical trades (not even for Juan Soto). But these past two winters, I swear I wasn’t attached with epoxy to anybody who couldn’t help the mopey Mets of 2020 and 2021 turn the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and Seaver Way in 2022. If I could have been convinced a transformation could have been achieved without the contributions of Messrs. Alonso, McNeil and Diaz, let’s just say it wouldn’t have taken a whole lot of convincing. And I wasn’t holding onto budding star starter David Peterson (5 IP, 0 ER Sunday) with both hands, either.
Glad nobody listened to what I was thinking. Glad somebody thought to hire a manager who knows what he’s doing, even when we’re left to wonder (Saturday night’s one-bullet bullpen roulette) what the hell he’s doing. Buck Showalter comes along after his tactics work, as they somehow did when he stuck with Yoan Lopez, or after they don’t, explains himself, moves on, and I nod. He tells us maybe not what we want to hear, but what we need to hear. I imagine he addresses his charges similarly. A bigger wonder than “why didn’t you have anybody warming up to replace the 27th man who allowed the tying run and put additional runners on base?” is why we were left to sift through deviants and amateurs as managers when this guy was out there just waiting for another dugout to fill.
I don’t have faith in Buck Showalter’s Mets. I have confidence. It’s a world of difference.
2 out of 4
1 out of 3
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3 out of 4
0 out of 2
2 out of 3
0 out of 2
Crummy game Sunday. Aesthetically displeasing weekend. Where was that beautiful Wrigley Field to which we only get one exposure per season? Covered in clouds. It rained, it murked, it blew in. Whatever became of “a real Wrigley Field game,” one of those 12-10 jobs we’re conditioned to crave at the sight of Waveland Avenue? We got the other kind: 2-1; 4-3; 3-2. Yawn. I was hoping to depart the non-statistical first half on a high, not only sweeping the Cubs, but reveling in Wrigley for something beyond its cup-snake charmers. The Friendly Confines ain’t what they used to be. Then again, neither are the Cubs. I guess the latter is for the better.
We left behind the ivy taking three of four. We do a lot of that wherever we go, wherever we play. That’s how confidence is cultivated. The Mets won this series. They won the series before it, against a much more relevant rival in Atlanta. The Mets have played 29 series. They’ve lost five of them. They’ve tied three of them. They’ve won all the others. Rarely have they swept series, but they’ve methodically done all the taking they’ve needed to. Being methodical adds up. Boy, does it add up. The Mets’ record of 58-35 is their second-best ever after 93 games. It’s probably their second-best at the All-Star break, too, but since “the first half” is a malleable concept annually (the 1986 Mets played 84 games before the break; the 1999 Mets played 88 games; the 1980 Mets played 78 games), I’m not bothering to look it up.
2 out of 3
2 out of 3
2 out of 4
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3 out of 4
By six o’clock, I wasn’t any longer bothering to stress the Sunday loss to the Cubs. Susceptibility to the last thing I saw notwithstanding, it was easy enough to brush off. Rest up, fellas, I’d tell the players if they hadn’t already jetted to their vacation destinations. Tune up, I’d tell the front office (bullpen roulette can be chancy and another bat would be swell). Overall, everybody in orange and blue, keep doing what you’re doing in this year of years that thus far pales historically only in comparison to 1986. You’ve got my confidence. And my faith, in case you need it.
by Jason Fry on 17 July 2022 11:28 am None of that should have worked.
Presented to you is a short sentence in which “that” is carrying a heavy load, referring to two games played over more than nine hours, the first of them featuring an emphatically run-suppressing wind, and the Mets spending both games not so much stumbling as failing to deliver a knockout blow. And meanwhile the Cubs … well, let’s proceed delicately for now out of respect for a fellow fanbase’s bruised feelings.
The Mets should have lost the first game. Let’s start there.
In the bottom of the 10th, Nelson Velazquez was the Chicago ghost runner, substituting for Frank Schwindel. Velazquez promptly stole third against Adam Ottavino. Observing from first base was J.D. Davis, not anyone’s first choice to play that position (or honestly any position). Davis had entered the game in favor of Dom Smith, who’d rolled an ankle as the Mets’ ghost runner. (Seriously? Seriously.)
So there we were: The Cubs were 90 feet from victory with nobody out, Ottavino working a second inning and a Plan C or Plan D first baseman in the fray.
Ottavino started off Patrick Wisdom with a 2-0 count (ominous music intensifies) but struck him out on an evil slider just off the plate. He then fanned P.J. Higgins (seriously, who are these Cubs?) on three pitches that never prompted a bat to leave a shoulder. That brought speedy, capable rookie Christopher Morel to the plate. Ottavino left an 0-1 slider in the middle of the plate and Morel spanked it to the left of Eduardo Escobar at third.
Escobar speared it, but did so while stumbling in the dirt (oh my), scrambling on all fours for a moment (oh no) before finding his feet and firing the ball in the direction of Davis (oh God). The ball hit the dirt a few feet in front of Davis (oh Jeez) for a classic in-between hop. Davis lunged for it, glove coming up, and fell over like one of those parking-lot inflatables being removed from service. Fell over with the ball in his glove and Morel still short of first on his belly.
Somehow.
The Mets had survived, and then cashed a semi-deserved run behind a Francisco Lindor single and a Pete Alonso sacrifice fly, though they short-circuited their own inning when Lindor was thrown out trying to steal third with one out. With minimal margin for error, the Mets turned things over to Edwin Diaz just as your recapper and family drove deeper into a Maine peninsula where cell coverage is somewhere between spotty and a dream of the future.
We heard slices of events every 45 seconds or so, but they were the exact slices we would have picked: new hitter and ghost runner still on second, strikeout, grounder up the middle (another tough chance, as replay showed later), game over.
The Mets had no business winning that game, but they somehow did. Which was pretty much the capsule description of the nightcap, too — another extra-inning contest in which everything teetered on the avalanche point of going wrong but somehow didn’t.
In that one, Max Scherzer was more doughty trench fighter than vanquisher of foes, striking out 11 but allowing eight hits, with former National Yan Gomes leading the Chicago charge. The Mets fought back behind Escobar, whose numbers against Cubs starter Drew Smyly look like a misprint, but couldn’t break through against him or a resilient Chicago pen.
At least until the 10th, when they scored two runs on what Friend of Faith and Fear Dan Lewis accurately described as “the stupidest inning I’ve seen in my life”: infield single, stolen base, intentional walk, RBI HBP, GIDP, walk, run on ball heaved into center field, groundout.
(Minor observation before the sands of time obscure all: Mark Canha‘s GIDP was a case of a hitter doing exactly what he should do and being punished for it. Mychal Givens had just let the Mets score by ticking a ball off an elbow that Alonso had conspicuously refused to move aside, and was understandably agitated. Canha zeroed in on his first pitch and spanked it up the middle — right to Givens. It’s an unfair game.)
The Mets led by two runs, and during the bottom of the 10th the SNY cameras gave us a montage of Cubs fans watching a downtrodden tire fire of a team that was about to lose its ninth in a row, with what’s suddenly too much season still ahead of it — a striking succession of miniature pietas framed amid the suddenly gloomy confines of Wrigley Field.
But this day of unlikely baseball had a couple of twists left. The Mets were basically out of relievers, and so left Yoan Lopez — literally the 27th man courtesy of doubleheader rules — out there for a second inning of work, with no one behind him. Lopez struck out Velazquez, but severed his own net by allowing an RBI single to the pesky Morel, who then advanced to third on a single by Seiya Suzuki, leaving the Cubs 90 feet away from tying the game with the Mets essentially waving a bullpen white flag.
When Lopez’s next pitch was wide, Showalter opted to intentionally walk Nico Hoerner to have bring up Schwindel. Schwindel broke through last year as a 29-year-old, but as is so often the case, his post-breakthrough campaign has seen him look more like the journeyman he’s been than the late-to-ignite star he briefly seemed like he might be.
Nonetheless, Schwindel battled a tiring Lopez hard, refusing to chase bait sliders and smacking the close ones foul, until Lopez’s eighth pitch was — shades of Ottavino in Game 1 — one in the middle of the plate that he could handle. As in Game 1, this potentially fatal pitch went to Escobar — though this time it was to his right, a moderately tricky hop between him and the bag.
Escobar may not be a defensive wizard on Luis Guillorme‘s level (who is?), but his instincts are unerringly sound. He was already orienting his body towards third as his foot came down on third, and Schwindel is a lot slower than Morel. He was out by a good 15 feet as the ball thudded into Alonso’s glove, giving the Mets a doubleheader sweep and leaving Cubs fans wondering how two games that had been right there in their team’s grasp turned to dust just hours apart.
Bad seasons are like that — heck, we know all about them. And on the flip side of that cruel equation, seasons to remember have their own hallmarks — such as games you’re clearly destined to lose somehow winding up in your column.
Sometimes it even happens twice on the same day.
by Jason Fry on 14 July 2022 11:58 pm As a Met fan of a certain age, few things are as simple and satisfying as beating the Cubs by a healthy margin in a summer game at Wrigley Field.
I have nothing against Chicago — hell, I was just there and had a grand time. I love Wrigley Field’s essential simplicity, which still shines through more than a century of additions and supposed refinements. I’ve enjoyed talking baseball with Cubs fans in Wrigley’s seats and away from them. I’m not sent into a frothing rage by the mere existence of the Cubs, which happens when I spend too long considering the Yankees or the Marlins.
But still, they’re the Cubs.
I grew up on tales of the Cubs as our antagonists in the summer of 1969 — the black cat, Ron Santo clicking his heels, Leo Durocher shooting his mouth off, Randy Hundley‘s disbelieving leap, and all the rest. I was a babe in arms that summer, but I consumed the stories so many times as a child that pretty soon I knew them by heart. As a kid the Cubs were the team I hated in the NL East — and oh, how it stung when the Mets emerged from their years as baseball’s North Korea in 1984 only to have the Cubs throw them off the mountaintop at summer’s end.
All that’s long gone now — when I explained to my kid that I hate the Cubs and Cardinals and have to reminded to get worked up about the Braves, he was understandably nonplussed. I suppose childhood trauma leaves a mark deeper than anything that Bobby Cox or Chipper Jones could inflict on tougher adult skin. (Let’s agree to ignore the fact that Atlanta being in the NL West while Chicago and St. Louis were in the NL East never made a lick of sense.)
The Cubs are now in the Central and have dwindled into a curiosity, but when I see the Mets in road grays at Wrigley, with the fans right on top of them like spectators at a gladiatorial exhibition, my heart starts thumping just like it did when I was seven. And on summer nights when the Mets start ripping line drives into the ivy and depositing them into that quaint-looking basket, my heart grows at least seven sizes bigger.
The Mets did all of that Thursday night in what had been muttered about as a trap series after taking two of three in Atlanta but sure didn’t start that way. They strafed poor Keegan Thompson and vague relation Mark Leiter Jr., while Carlos Carrasco baffled the Chicago hitters en route to winning his 10th game of the year. I admit most of this year’s Cubs could be winners of a fan contest for all I recognized them, but that doesn’t matter — they’re still Cubs and that’s enough to leave my teeth bared and make me bay for their speedy demise.
(Can we note, by the way, that Carrasco is 10-4? Or that the Mets are now a season-high 22 games over .500? For all our screaming that the sky is falling, it seems to be up there intact and in fact quite a bit higher above our heads than we might have guessed.)
Anyway, the Mets beat the Cubs in pretty much every aspect of a baseball game and I enjoyed it thoroughly, though we’ll give the home team a point for the cup-snake tradition, spied upon by a bemused Gary and Ron and explored in Steve Gelbs’s wonderful interview with a young man named Jake. Jake was pretty much a certain slice of Chicago transmuted into human form: sweetly mindful of his family, dogged in pursuit of a questionable goal, well-served in a beverage capacity, not entirely factually engaged, and somehow completely charming. (Jake thought it was the eighth inning; gently informed by Gelbs that it was the seventh, he smoothly issued this blithe non-correction: “Basically the eighth, Steve.”)
It’s a great town. Doesn’t mean I want to beat its National League team any less. It’s been that way since I was seven and it’ll be that way when I’m 77.
by Greg Prince on 13 July 2022 5:19 pm I’ll take two wins in three games, even if the price is one loss in the middle. Not that that’s how series of baseball games work, exactly, but that is how the Mets-Braves to-do went down. We won Monday. They won Tuesday. We won Wednesday. That’s math as good as it gets when you don’t sweep.
Such simplicity in viewing the world of the National League East through this prism…it’s very relaxing. The Mets were in first place when they arrived in Atlanta; they’re still in first place; they’re in first place by a little more than they were 48 hours earlier. It’s a good three days’ work. It’s not a definitive statement. It may not even be a statement. It may just be three games. Better to have captured more of them rather than drop a majority of an admittedly small sample size.
The strong starting pitching that has been the club’s trademark since at least last week continued on through the finale at Truist Park. Chris Bassitt was mostly impenetrable for six innings. By the time he gave up a solo home run to Chipper Olson, the Mets had five on the board. The rotation is five starters deep at the moment. It’s a good moment to be in.
Whereas Met power has mostly flickered of late, it returned all bulbs flashing Wednesday. If you couldn’t for one day embrace Luis Guillorme batting cleanup, you have no soul (besides, he hit the Mets’ previous home run, on Monday night). Luis’s slump seems to be closing up along with the cut on his hand that none of us knew about because the Mets are pretty good about minimizing excuses. He didn’t homer off Charlie Morton on Wednesday, but his presence in the four-hole seemed to inspire several of his teammates. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Eduardo Escobar made like a groundhog and saw his power stroke’s shadow in the second. Francisco Lindor drove in runs the way the most productive RBI shortstop in the majors should (three-run shot). Mark Canha made like an orange and blue green giant and opened his own Canha taters. The power trio, accounting for the five runs that amply supported Bassitt, dined out on what Morton served up and nobody here protested. Later came Luis doubling home a sixth run and Lindor scoring on a balk, all of it in service to the eventual 7-3 victory.
Seven runs. Plenty for Bassitt plus Drew Smith (2 IP) and Tommy Hunter (1 IP). Granted, each reliever, like the starter, gave up a solo homer. The Braves are gonna go deep. They went deep off Scherzer and Peterson, too. Nice to see nobody on base when they did. Hunter was mopping up. As for Smith, I had a dream that he sent my wife and me a note of apology on a folded, horizontal, cream-colored card for having given up a two-run homer. He also included a drawing of some sort that I don’t remember. Isn’t it enough that I remember the color of the notecard?
Anyway, Smith giving up a solo home run with a large lead doesn’t concern me. The other Smith on the team, Dom, never homering is a more of an issue in my consciousness. I grew curious enough to search via Baseball-Reference’s Stathead tool to see where Dom Smith’s homerless drought ranks within franchise annals. Now that it’s reached 103 games (that’s games with one or more plate appearance(s) and no home runs hit), it is the 45th-longest in the 61-season history of the New York Mets; Luis Guillorme’s longest homerless streak was 89 games…broken on the day in 2021 that Smith last sent a baseball over a fence. Mind you, almost everybody ahead of Dom on this list is either a middle infielder who was in there every day for his glove — Buddy Harrelson holds the record, with 299 consecutive homerless games, and has six streaks of more than 100 homerless games — or an aging pinch-hitter or a backup catcher who played once or twice a week or a then-youngster still developing into an occasional home threat or a singles hitter you forgot didn’t hit many home runs.
There’s one genuine outlier. John Stearns went nearly 200 games without homering between 1979 and 1981, making his third All-Star team in between regardless. Stearns hit 46 home runs as a Met. His drought ended with a bang (he beat Steve Carlton on a night when Carlton struck out 15, an echo of Ron Swoboda a dozen years earlier). Dom Smith has hit 46 home runs as a Met. He wasn’t exactly a classic slugger when going yard wasn’t a novelty for him, but you didn’t find yourself counting games between his home runs. Dom nowadays usually plays a position that contains “hitter” in the title, so it’s more than a little concerning he’s neither hitting (.198) nor slugging (.294). On Wednesday, he came to bat four times. He walked once (.280 OBP). He didn’t homer (and hasn’t since July 21 of last year). Let’s hope Wrigley Field shakes the clout out of him.
Or, if it doesn’t, maybe somebody else will pick him up (and I don’t mean on waivers, wise guy). Twenty-six players compose the active roster. The Mets have won two out of three and 55 of 89 by getting something out of just about all of them when they really needed it. Keep that math going.
With the All-Star Game fast approaching, it’s time to remember how to root for players representing teams we usually can’t stand, because for one night those players will be teammates of Mets players we really do like. This week, then, join National League Town in a spasm of National League Solidarity. Warning: nice things will be said about opponents.
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