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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Jason Fry on 9 June 2022 3:23 am Pete Alonso and Starling Marte are not on the IL, not apparently out for weeks or months, but day to day. And that was the good news from MetsWorld for Wednesday night.
Seriously, if you got the injury update and then went to bed, you were the smart one. Because the game was a disaster. Chris Bassitt, who started the season looking like Max Scherzer‘s icy lieutenant, got mauled by the Padres, with Jurickson Profar a particular offender. Bassitt’s on a lousy run, the kind pitchers get stuck in now and then — lets assume it’s nothing more than that. The Mets lost by 11 runs, had five hits — compared with three errors — and the only suspense was whether J.D. Davis would wind up pitching. (He did not.) Oh, and Khalil Lee made his season debut, which I guess was something.
Anyway, it was a lousy night, and I hope for your sake it unfolded while you were asleep or elsewhere. Day off tomorrow. They could use it; so could we.
by Greg Prince on 8 June 2022 2:10 pm On August 8, 1963, the day after Jim Hickman hit for the first cycle in Mets history, the Mets won again, 3-2, with first baseman Duke Carmel (one of two Dukes to play for the Mets that day at the Polo Grounds) hitting the deciding home run in the eighth inning. Between Carmel’s big blow and Al Jackson’s five-hitter, we’re gonna call that Day After Cycle a good day, especially since the 1963 Mets won only 51 games — and really especially because on the day after the Day After Cycle, Hickman hit a walkoff grand slam to beat the Cubs and provide the margin necessary to break Roger Craig’s eighteen-game losing streak. Weeks didn’t get a whole lot better when the baby Metsies were learning to crawl.
On July 7, 1970, the day after Tommie Agee hit for the second cycle in Mets history, the Mets won again, 4-3, though it was a win that nearly got away. Up one in the top of the ninth, rookie reliever Rich Folkers gave up a game-tying single to Cardinal Jose Cardenal, but then got Joe Torre to ground into a double play to send things to the bottom of the ninth at Shea with no further damage. Sal Campisi, pitching in relief of Bob Gibson, was no Bob Gibson…not that anybody else besides Bob Gibson was. Campisi loaded the bases and Ron Swoboda unloaded them by drawing a walk. It may not have been monumental, but it was effective. It was also the fifth Met win in a row amid a streak that would reach seven. We’ll call that a good Day After Cycle.
On June 26, 1976, the day after Mike Phillips hit for the third cycle in Mets history, the Mets maintained their winning ways, laying six runs on the Cubs in the third inning at Wrigley Field and cruising to a 10-2 victory. Sluggers John Milner and Dave Kingman each homered. So did the guy who cycled the day before. Phillips now had two homers on the year (and the week) and the Mets had won three in a row. Seven games later, the skein would be up to ten. Yes, a very good Day After Cycle.
On July 5, 1985, the day after Keith Hernandez hit for the fourth cycle in Mets history, the Mets rubbed the sleep out of their eyes — Keith’s big night unfolded during the famous nineteen-inning affair at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium — and rolled over the Braves once more, 6-1 (the Braves were sleepy, too). Rick Aguilera, who was not among the seven pitchers Davey Johnson used the night/morning before, went the distance. Wally Backman whacked his lone home run of the year. The Mets extended their nascent winning streak to four games; not only would it go to nine, but the 1985 Mets were about to stir to life in a big way, racking up 30 wins in 37 games by mid-August. You couldn’t ask for a much better Day After Cycle or, really month-plus.
On August 2, 1989, the day after Kevin McReynolds hit for the fifth cycle in Mets history, the Mets showed off a gem even rarer than one player collecting a single, double, triple and home run. They started Long Island’s Own Frank Viola, the previous season’s American League Cy Young Award winner. The Mets acquired Viola at the trade deadline fewer than 48 hours earlier. In that two-day span, they clobbered he Cardinals in St. Louis on McReynolds’s cycle and Sid Fernandez’s shutout and unveiled Viola. Frankie from East Meadow gave the Mets eight strong innings before getting pinch-hit for in the ninth, trailing, 2-1. His new teammates did him a solid, scoring three times on his behalf, furnishing a 4-2 lead for closer Randy Myers. Myers gave up one run, but not two, so the Mets and Viola could claim a 4-3 victory, part of a 15-4 spurt that catapulted the Mets back into serious NL East contention (at least for a while). We’ll certainly call that a sweet Day After Cycle.
On July 4, 1996, the day after Alex Ochoa hit for the sixth cycle in Mets history, the Mets moved on from Philadelphia — where you’d think you’d want to spend Independence Day — and set down in Montreal. The change of countries did not change the Mets’ fortunes, as Ochoa’s team continued the competence they’d demonstrated at the Vet. Inside the Big O on this most American of holidays, Robert Person and Dave Mlicki combined on a six-hit, 4-0 blanking of Les ’Spos. Todd Hundley blasted his 21st homer of the season to help secure the second W in a four-game winning streak. Ochoa went hitless, but was still considered to have five tools. A fine, international Day After Cycle.
On September 12, 1997, the day after John Olerud hit for the seventh cycle in Mets history, Met historical luck ran out, if not without a fight. Barely hanging on in their unlikely Wild Card bid, the Mets bowed to Montreal at Shea, 3-2, in fifteen innings, the last miserable out registering on Luis Lopez’s grounder that stranded the potential tying and winning runs. Perhaps the shock of watching Olerud sprint to third base the night before took something out of the home team. We can’t label this a good Day After Cycle, but we’re happy to report it was only a hiccup. The day after the Day After Cycle was the Carl Everett Game, a.k.a. the Saturday the Mets were down, 6-0, in the ninth, yet pulled into a tie on Everett’s grand slam and won in the eleventh on Bernard Gilkey’s three-run shot. The day after the day after the Day After Cycle, Luis Lopez redeemed his weekend by launching his first Met homer for the only run of a Met win on Keith Hernandez Mets Hall of Fame Day, and did we mention Lopez, like Hernandez, wore 17, back when 17 wasn’t slated for retirement? So let’s nudge this one toward collective positive cycle aftermath.
On July 30, 2004, the day after Eric Valent hit for the eighth cycle in Mets history, the Mets thought they had a chance to win, both in the near and medium term. Valent added his name to the cyclical annals by daringly lighting out for third on a ball down the right field line at Olympic Stadium because he had a single, double and homer already and when is Eric Valent gonna have another opportunity to cycle? Valent was safe at third. The Mets, however, were stuck in fourth. They’d made a nice lunge at first earlier in July, but were now six games out. They could either take stock of their progress and position themselves to grow from their modicum of midsummer success down the road, or they could do try to do something even more dramatic than attempt to stretch a double into a triple. Their front office chose the latter on July 30, trading 2002 top draft pick Scott Kazmir to Tampa Bay for veteran starter Victor Zambrano, hoping Zambrano could be the missing piece to a challenger struggling to remain in contention. Short version: It didn’t work out. Also, the Mets lost their game at Turner Field on July 30 and proceeded to get swept in their series versus Atlanta, effectively ending their pennant race aspirations. Kazmir went on to a very solid career. Zambrano didn’t. Maybe not the best Day After Cycle.
On June 22, 2006, the day after Jose Reyes hit for the ninth cycle in Mets history, we can’t say the Mets won again, because the Mets actually lost the game in which Reyes cycled, which seemed unfathomable, given that the Mets were running away with the National League East and Reyes was running away with Shea’s hearts. When he singled to secure his cycle in the bottom of the eighth, the crowd broke into Jose!-Jose!-Jose! en masse, making it a serenade that would follow Jose for the rest of his Met days. Alas, Billy Wagner drowned out the enthusiasm and blew the Mets’ 5-4 lead over Cincinnati in the top of the ninth and turned it into a 6-5 loss, and let’s say the closer took some of the steam out of what had been an incandescent evening. But the Day After Cycle would have its day in the sun. I can confirm that it was a glorious matinee, with Pedro Martinez buckling down (three swinging strikeouts to end his gritty six innings), David Wright going deep (two two-run homers) and Jose!-Jose! still running the Redlegs ragged (two stolen bases). Someone other than Billy Wagner — Chad Bradford — came on to nail down the save in the 6-2 win. All told, a brilliant Day After Cycle.
On April 28, 2012, the day after Scott Hairston hit for the tenth cycle in Mets history, the Mets were again tasked with not losing a second game in a row. Hairston’s heroics were obscured in an 18-9 creaming at Colorado, yet the Mets had enough gumption to recover in their next game, 7-5, continuing to pound the ball at Coors Field (thirteen hits) yet not forgetting how to pitch just well enough to win at elevated heights. So not only was this a redemptive Day After Cycle, it put a nice bow on the Mets’ 50th Anniversary Conference, which concluded at Hofstra University the very same day. We can always use more Met history.
On June 7, 2022, the day after Eduardo Escobar hit for the eleventh cycle in Mets history, the first Mets cycle in ten years and the first Mets cycle in a winning cause in eighteen years, it occurred to me the last thing I wanted to do was write about the 7-0 loss at Petco Park that followed the 11-5 win in which Escobar starred. So instead of dwelling on worrisome injuries to Pete Alonso (hand) and Starling Marte (quad) or discerning if anything beyond a bad outing is to be gleaned from Taijuan Walker’s subpar start versus the Padres (though Walker did recover to go six after a rough first two) or moping over the measly two hits the Mets managed to collect off Yu Darvish and Adrian Morejon, I remembered we can always use more Met history, especially the day after a not so great Day After Cycle.
by Jason Fry on 7 June 2022 1:34 am “Grind you till you break” is Chris Bassitt‘s phrase, first uttered after his debut in blue and orange and the Mets having come back from being knocked down by sundry Nationals to win by doing terrible things to pitchers, spoken of earlier on this trip, and of course immortalized as part of that equal parts stirring and strange ad in which various Mets … hang around outside a bodega.
Here’s what he said back then:
There’s a lot of guys — a lot of teams — that it’s all or nothing. But this team is not that. We might hit some homers, but we’re just going to grind you until you break. That’s the mentality we’ve been preaching since Day One — we have the pitching staff to hold it down until that happens.
Monday night’s game against the Padres — not quite the Dodgers but a pretty good outfit — was a perfect encapsulation of that philosophy, with the Mets getting the program started early against Blake Snell. Brandon Nimmo saw eight pitches and grounded out. Starling Marte smacked Snell’s second pitch over the infield for a single. Francisco Lindor saw six pitches, fanning on a 3-2 slider in the dirt, and lingered by the on-deck circle to give Mark Canha a report on what he’d seen.
The Mets had a runner on second but two out — a spot of bother for Snell but nothing too ominous. But then Pete Alonso refused to be baited and walked on five pitches. Canha, in an 0-2 hole, stubbornly resisted expanding the strike zone and walked on six pitches. J.D. Davis — not renowned as the most patient of hitters — also fell into an 0-2 hole, with the second strike coming on the high fastball that is his kryptonite. But Davis reined in his aggression and worked out a nine-pitch walk, bringing in a run. Three pitches into his own at-bat, a rejuvenated-looking Eduardo Escobar slashed an outside changeup to right and the Mets had a 3-0 lead. When the first inning was finally over Snell had faced eight Met hitters and needed 43 pitches to do so.
There was the grinding — but there’s another part of the equation that’s easy to miss. In the fourth, with Snell tired and trying to squeeze more pitches out of his arm than might have been there, the Mets pounced early, starting with an Escobar double. (He’d add a bomb of a home run and a two-run triple later, hitting for the cycle and demonstrating reports of his professional demise were clearly exaggerated — Escobar’s mile-wide smile after his feat has to be in every season highlight film.)
That pouncing is the second part of the formula, the part where the opponents break. Make a starting pitcher show you his entire arsenal, pick it apart, drive up his pitch count, and then seize opportunities.
Carlos Carrasco, meanwhile, continues to have the kind of season that as Mets fans we’ve come to assume we don’t get to see. Carrasco’s maiden voyage in New York was a disaster, derailed by injuries to half his limbs, and he arrived in spring training with the usual talk about good health and starting over. But it was hard to hear it: If you’ll forgive some confirmation bias, that kind of thing never seems to work out for us, does it?
Except sometimes it does. Carrasco has been healthy and has started over, and he’s been wonderful — on Monday he befuddled the Padres with mid-90s gas that perfectly set up his slider and change, striking out 10 and even high-fiving a not particularly attentive baby in Mets garb. (Mom looked happy about it, though.)
It got messy late, as Joely Rodriguez and Drew Smith got knocked around before Escobar rode to … well, not the rescue exactly but the moment where you can put your phone away because it’s going to be OK. The Mets have work to do in the bullpen, absolutely. But every team has some work to do. As long as the Mets stay with the approach Bassitt’s made famous, they’ll be OK. And probably a lot better than that.
by Greg Prince on 6 June 2022 12:47 pm Why shouldn’t Adonis Medina have been depended upon in the clutchest of spots to deliver for the 2022 Mets? For the same reason the likes of Patrick Mazeika, Nick Plummer and Colin Holderman, to name three previously little-known quantities, shouldn’t have — no reason whatsoever.
You may have noticed no Bench Mob sobriquets or t-shirts have been bandied about this season. Neither would fit despite the contributions of heretofore less-proven players to the first-place Mets’ cause. In 2021, guys of whom you’d barely thought or heard were the story when the story was at its best. Sadly, that was a short story. In 2022, the corps of new and sudden reliables are dotting i’s and crossing t’s across a grander narrative. They’re punctuating the sentences to paragraphs that relentlessly get written. On Sunday, a pitcher named Adonis Medina provided the period to a stirring text created by one teammate after another. Who was more famous going in didn’t matter. Together, they came out of Los Angeles as the team not to be beat.
Adonis Medina, righthanded reliever who wears No. 68 for New York, was last seen coming or perhaps going. He’s the man with the options, the man riding the taxi squad, the man who is counted as 27th where day-night doubleheaders and other unforeseen circumstances are concerned. In the bottom of the tenth of a 5-4 game on Sunday, when the Mets had the five but no longer access to Edwin Diaz (a perfect eighth) nor a preference for Seth Lugo (a tired ninth that necessitated the tenth), and the Dodgers had the four, along with their three most threatening hitters due up — Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and Trea Turner — with an automatic runner on second, Adonis Medina was simply the man.
So was most every Met leading up to that moment all afternoon, commencing with Trevor Williams and his five innings of competent starting (a two-run homer allowed to T. Turner in the first, then nothing for the next four) and continuing through a couple of middle-ish relievers you tend to forget about when they’re not on the mound (Stephen Nogosek, Adam Ottavino); the right fielder who fought the sun all day and didn’t succumb (Starling Marte); the right fielder who halved an early deficit with a third-inning shot toward the San Gabriel mountains (Marte again, off Julio Urias); and the center fielder who took a licking and kept on ticking (Brandon Nimmo with a heckuva catch at the wall and the grit to stay in after yet another HBP). The Mets did enough very well to stay within one going to the eighth.
Then they did the eighth like it was the time of their life.
Francisco Lindor opened the entrance — please don’t call it a door — with a sinking liner to deepest right that eluded Betts and bounced into the crowd for a double. Pete Alonso, staying earthbound for a change, socked one into the opposite corner, easily scoring Francisco to tie the game at two. J.D. Davis then delivered one of those ground balls to the right side that makes a baseball fan warm and tingly because if you were gonna make an out, that was the out to make. It put Pete on third, positioning the Polar Bear to wait as patiently as Eduardo Escobar did after Mark Canha absorbed his own hit-by-pitch, and while Brusdar Graterol battled and battled…and lost to Escobar’s professionalism and savvy. On the tenth pitch of a no-surrender plate appearance, Eduardo lofted a fly ball plenty deep enough to right so that Alonso couldn’t be thrown out once Betts caught it. The Mets took the lead, 3-2. After the Dodgers switched pitchers, Luis Guillorme did something characteristically helpful (a walk in this case, pushing Canha to second) and Tomás Nido, whose bat has snuck its way into secret-weapon status, lined an Alex Vesia fastball into center. Mark raced home with the Mets’ fourth run.
Who would protect this 4-2 lead one inning before the ninth? Diaz was Buck Showalter’s call, a refreshing choice in that the Dodger eighth featured the glittering Hollywood trio of Betts, Freeman and Turner (Trea, not Justin, though neither’s a stroll down Sunset). No walk of fame for those stars, as Diaz took them down in order. All that remained to take care of was the ninth. Showalter looked into his crystal ball and saw another game Monday night, in San Diego, so he preserved Edwin’s arm after fifteen pitches. A debatable tack, perhaps, but everything had been coming up aces most of the day, so why not trust the save opportunity at hand to usually trusty Seth Lugo?
Maybe because Lugo threw the ninth the night before when he expended fifteen pitches closing out a five-run led. Saturday required a lot of staff relief, too. Ottavino had pitched both days and excelled. Lugo didn’t. Will Smith slapped Seth’s third pitch into the bleachers and, after two infield outs, Chris Taylor and Eddy Alvarez teamed up for the double-single combo that tied the affair at four.
The Mets had come too far to not win this game, though that was a very real possibility because, well, baseball doesn’t care how beautifully tense the preceding eight innings have been if it feels like tipping over your apple cart in the ninth. Fortunately, Seth had enough to finish his frame with no further incident. At least as fortunately, the Mets got to Craig Kimbrel a little in the tenth. Kimbrel, pitching his second inning, already had Alonso on second because Rob Manfred put him there. I imagined how much better the Mets’ odds (also brought to you by Rob Manfred) would have been had Buck been able to pinch-run Travis Jankowski for Pete. Pete does so much well on offense. Run the bases is not one of them. But oft-deployed Jankowski, nine times a pinch-runner already this season, is on the IL and benches are shallow as is.
All this worrying was for naught, as leadoff hitter Davis stroked a Kimbrel fastball to left, where Taylor couldn’t cleanly corral it. Pete could practically jog home on the two-bagger it became. The Mets were in front, 5-4. Jankowski would have really come in handy running for Davis (J.D. found himself doubled off on an Escobar lineout to end the inning), but the lack of a pinch-runner isn’t what weighed heavy as the game turned to the bottom of the tenth. The Mets already used their closer Diaz and weren’t bringing back their alternate closer Lugo.
Thus, Medina. And why not? When we first saw Medina, he was striking out every Arizona Diamondback in sight. When we’d seen him since, in between the comings and the goings, he hadn’t done anything to infuse us with pre-emptive regret. The first-place New York Mets have 26 players, 27 when there’s a makeup doubleheader. Showalter would be the first to tell you every one of them has something to offer, something to accomplish. So, yes, why not trust the unproven Adonis?
Gavin Lux was on second the way somebody’s always on second to start extra half-innings (they really need to stop doing that). Mookie Betts could have killed the Mets immediately. Instead, Medina worked him and worked him and ultimately won the nine-pitch at-bat by flying Mookie to Starling in right. One down. Freeman, far from where we’re used to being spooked by him, grounded out as effectively as one could ground out, to the right side, moving Lux to third. Now Adonis had to deal with a runner ninety feet from tying things again, with the daunting task of Trea Turner awaiting him. Seriously, how do the Dodgers ever lose?
This way: Nido’s mitt makes contact with Turner’s bat, resulting in catchers’ interference, which Dave Roberts argues for when it’s not immediately called. It peskily places the potential winning run on first, but also takes the bat out of Trea’s hands, which is the one place the Mets didn’t want to see it anyway. Turner takes off for second. Nobody minds that Nido doesn’t throw through. The task at hand is getting out Smith, he who homered to begin the eighth. Is it only the tenth? It feels like this game and this series have both been going on for a week or more. Maybe it’s the time difference.
Medina didn’t check his watch. He listened for his PitchCom signal from his catcher — how modern — and brought his sinker to bear on one-and-two, striking out Smith. That made it three outs and the save of a 5-4 win that was always in grasp yet loomed as elusive. Coming into this weekend, the Dodgers were the standard, the aspirational bar you wished the Mets to reach. An early June series had never felt quite so essential to not lose for a team leading its division by a veritable ton. We lost Thursday. We lost Friday. We didn’t have deGrom. Scherzer’s dog bit his pitching hand. Lindor and that door. The little voice in your head was clearing its throat, grumbling something about how it’s one thing to have stomped the Nats who no longer have Trea Turner, it’s another thing to go down to these Dodgers. Were we gonna survive the mini-gauntlet in our minds let alone the rest of the trip for real?
Apparently we were. We stormed back Saturday and held tight Sunday. The finale was almost four hours of hell leavened by a few concentrated minutes of whatever’s the opposite of hell. Perhaps it’s the 2022 Mets.
by Jason Fry on 5 June 2022 12:33 pm The first two games of the much-anticipated Mets-Dodgers series showed the Mets in an unfamiliar light: They looked like a good team up against a better one, with that better team riding dominant pitching and waiting for its opponent to make a mistake, then taking full advantage.
And in the early going, Saturday night’s game looked like more of the same. Yes, Francisco Lindor served a home run off Walker Buehler in the first — something that presumably couldn’t be done with a finger too damaged for duty — but that only made the score 1-0, and when Pete Alonso made a poor throw in the bottom of the second the Dodgers stormed through the breach, and as quickly as you could say “oh God Mookie Betts is up” it was 4-1 L.A.
But this time other factors were at work, perhaps starting with the fact that the Dodgers’ City Connect unis made them look like oversized blueberries, as if 26 Violet Beauregardes had been sent out to play. Buehler had an off-night, quarreling with the home-plate umpire but mostly with his own location, and in the top of third Alonso more than made up for his earlier misdeed, capping a rally by spanking a two-run homer on a slider he somehow pulled into the left-field stands. (Analysis: Man strong.)
David Peterson would have his own discontents before all was done: He was woefully inefficient, needing 90 pitches to not quite complete the fourth inning. His last pitch was a curve that didn’t live up to its name, turned into a projectile by Betts and landing just foul in the stands — a fractional recalibration by Betts and the game would have been tied.
Buck Showalter didn’t like what had just transpired, and decided to excuse Peterson further duty, removing him and handing his 0-1 count over to Colin Holderman. Would it be a reach to say it was a bit of Gil Hodges managerial tactics on the night the Dodgers retired No. 14 for Hodges? Probably — it’s not like Hodges invented the intra-AB pitching change or it was put it mothballs after his untimely death — but I think it’s a forgivable one given the circumstances. (Points to the ever-sterling SNY booth for being ready with Hodges pulling Gary Gentry in the NLCS playoffs and handing his count to Nolan Ryan.) No one’s likely to confuse Holderman with Ryan, but he got Betts looking to get the Mets safely through the fourth, just as long ago Ryan got Rico Carty. (Speaking of efficiency, Holderman wound up with a win for five pitches’ worth of work.) Peterson was pretty obviously enraged at being removed, stalking off the mound and doing violence to his glove and sundry equipment in the dugout, and it was fairly entertaining to watch his postgame press conference: Asked if he’d been upset, he went full Sad Affleck before gathering himself to offer bromides about it being a good win and note that he’s been working on things.
As it turned out, that was the Dodgers’ shot and for once they’d missed it. In the seventh, Alonso hit a three-run homer, this one an opposite-field shot off a 99 MPH sinker from Brusdar Graterol, whose expression of disbelief was entertaining to see. (I don’t know how he did that either, Brusdar.) In the eighth, an attempted Blueberry Revolution was put down by the soft hands and speedy release of Luis Guillorme. But before concluding, we should stop to admire Pete’s numbers at this still-early stage of the season: 16 HRs and 53 RBIs. His own home-run record is probably safe, but on the RBI front Mike Piazza and David Wright may be looking over their statistical shoulders.
It was something of a messy game, to be honest: subpar starting pitchers giving way to bullpen parades, about a billion pitches needed to yield an outcome, and that’s without mentioning the 12-minute farce that followed Dave Roberts trying to finish up with a position player in ignorance of one of many tickey-tack new rules inflicted on the game by the genius of Rob Manfred. But better to wind up on top of the mess than on the bottom of an elegant affair that also brings defeat. That’s a baseball truth Showalter would attest to, and that a certain Mr. Hodges knew as well.
by Greg Prince on 4 June 2022 10:21 am Chris Bassitt nailed the ethic of the 2022 New York Mets so well so early that his comments following the third game of the season became the club’s credo, not to mention the soundtrack for commercials shown roughly every half-inning on SNY: “I don’t care who you are, I’m comin’ after you […] we’re just gonna grind you until you break.” It’s fitting ’cause it’s true. The Mets have come for every opponent regardless of caliber and they’ve gained so much ground from grinding that they’ve been able to construct a castle atop the standings.
Very recently, however, they may have come up against a foe that will not give ground: the schedule. The schedule grinds more relentlessly than the most determined of baristas. The schedule ratchets up the quality of competition without pausing to let a team adjust its sights. The schedule vaults you through time zones and doesn’t necessarily give you an extra night to get a feel for your body clock. The schedule demands you maintain vigilance at all hours.
That last part refers to what the grind does to a fan in late night New York trying to stay awake for prime time games in Los Angeles. Man, it’s a grind just to keep one’s eyes open to watch our first-place club. When the Mets’ offense grinds to a halt against another first-place club and the Mets’ starter finds that offense coming after him, well, it’s a long evening and a reminder that it’s a long season.
On Friday night, between the quick winks I gathered in a recliner until suddenly Gary Apple and Todd Zeile had replaced Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling as my all-hours companions, Chris could not confound enough of the Dodgers enough of the time. He grinded for six innings and struck out eight, but two Los Angeleno lefties, Cody Bellinger and Zach McKinstry, reached Bassitt for fly balls that carried beyond the right field fence, each with a baserunner attached. That’s two two-run homers that amounted to too much to overcome for either side of the Mets’ attack.
While Bassitt tried to tailor his complex assortment of pitches to meet the challenge of southpaw swingers clearly coming for him, lefthanded Tyler Anderson went virtually untouched for six innings, yielding three singles and no runs. Pete Alonso lit up the SoCal sky with a blast off righty Yancy Almonte to start the seventh, but even a presence as massive as Pete connecting as mightily as he can — his homer traveled 433 feet — can’t drive in more than one run if no one is on base to trot ahead of him. No other Met did anything more than slightly inconvenience any other Dodger reliever and a sleepy 6-1 loss resulted.
The reliably crisp Mets have looked flat for two games, especially this game. Francisco Lindor was back in the lineup after he put a finger between a door and a jamb. He threw without incident but didn’t hit to any effect. Wrist-rested Brandon Nimmo has returned to everyday play but his form hasn’t followed (0-for-12, though he did sprint without complaint to first after taking an Anderson pitch off his back). Starling Marte’s 0-for-L.A. thus far. Jeff McNeil has squirreled away but a single in the first two games of this series. We in our comfy chairs are the ones who are supposed to be appear inert, but then again, we’re not the ones taking on the daunting Dodgers across the country.
It’s only two games for everybody in a Mets uniform at the front end of a trip that will extend through next weekend. In the bigger picture, the Mets have won nearly two-thirds of their games with a third of a season complete. That means there are two-thirds of a season to go against all comers. The grind will continue.
When the Mets of the 1990s spent an entire decade trying to make the playoffs, it took a Deep Bench to get them there at last. Revisit the fin de siècle’s masters of versatility in the latest episode of National League Town, which you can listen to here and any time you like, rather than needing to stay up until 10:10 PM for first pitch.
by Jason Fry on 3 June 2022 1:27 am The Mets are really good, but playing against competition several ticks above the last week’s slate of opponents will remind you that other teams are good too. Like the Dodgers — who now have 34 wins to the Mets’ 35 but are also 17 games over .500, standing with them, the Yankees and the Astros as baseball’s beasts so far.
It’s easy to be disappointed when your team gets shut out on just three hits, but superb pitching will do that to you, and the Dodgers have that. That and much more — they have solid defense, a tough bench and a deep lineup that added Freddie Freeman to what was already a fairly murderous row, which just seems mean. Granted, the Mets now have to face Freeman fewer times a year than when he was an Atlanta Brave, but I would have preferred not facing him at all. Same goes for Trea Turner, another relocated destroyer of dreams.
The Mets didn’t do much to support a solid start by Taijuan Walker — the highlight was a coolly executed rundown, which was absolutely the kind of play previous incarnations of this team would have turned into a shotgun aimed at their own feet. I’m sure a cross-country flight without an off-day didn’t help. Nor did the absence of Francisco Lindor, undone by a hotel-room door that developed a taste for shortstop finger. (I can neither confirm or deny that Buck Showalter was spotted standing in the hall glowering at said door once it had done its nefarious business.) And of course facing Tony Gonsolin helped least of all — sometimes it’s not so much what your own guys failed to do as it is what the guys in the other colors managed to do.
It’s easy to be disappointed, but what a welcome change to be disappointed by losing a two-run game to a team as well-constructed as any in the sport. We’ve come a long way in a short time, haven’t we?
by Greg Prince on 1 June 2022 10:53 pm The Mets soared over Citi Field this past week, swooping home between excursions west and scooping up a six-game winning streak, demolishing Philadelphia, destroying Washington and , from a distance, demoralizing Atlanta. On Wednesday afternoon, they completed their perfect Flushing stand by shutting out the Nationals, 5-0. Colombian Carlos Carrasco pitched in front of his father for the first time since Cookie made the majors, showing off shutout form for five innings before turning the blanks over to the bullpen for safe keeping. If that wasn’t heartwarming enough, there was Tomás Nido collecting four hits, Francisco Lindor extending his RBI streak to ten games, Luis Guillorme remaining fabulous and…what? What else do you need as your team nears the one-third stage of its soundest season of the century?
The Mets, as Jason noted after the winning streak reached five, are really good. They may be better collectively than they were in 2006, the last time we as Mets fans who like to write concluded by June that nobody was gonna get us. I went to Tuesday night’s game. I came as close as I have in ages to being certain before I took my seat that I was about to witness a Mets win. Win Certainty transcended Win Probability. The Mets scored two in the first, two in the third, four in the fifth, two in the sixth and gave up none in any of the nine. You can’t derive more Win Certainty from any analytical formula than you could from these Mets playing those Nats.
Certainty necessarily eludes the Mets as they fly to Los Angeles. Mets-Dodgers is a matchup a competitive continent removed from Mets-Nationals. That’s all right. That’s the schedule. Two first-place teams will show down. Both will emerge. This isn’t The Octagon. It’s a series in early June. We’ll caffeine up and watch until we can’t keep our eyes open. The Mets may be all the stimulant we need. The Dodgers may put a temporary sleeper hold on our streaking ways. It’s not out of the realm of probability. Whatever. They and we are each headed for baseball beyond the requisite 162. Their lead isn’t large enough to say for sure they’ll win the West, but it’s hard to imagine they’ll miss the postseason.
Us? We’re 10½ ahead of the pack in the East and not about to plummet through the floor of the Wild Card fallback. Look around this team, this organization. It knows what it’s doing on a day-to-day, series-to-series basis. The professionalism is inspiring. The only times the Mets have had a record as good as their current 35-17 mark after 52 games were 1986 and 1988, both years that had playoffs attached to them. Throw in 2006, and that’s three dominant division-title campaigns invoked with confidence and sans superstition. Maybe I shouldn’t rely too much on precedent here because there are too many Mets fans, I believe, who — even when the best of times are in progress — only want to point out all the times the Mets fell short of their goals and aspirations and lean on those times and those Mets to wallow in residual regret that never quite fades.
Those Mets weren’t these Mets. These Mets are something else. So is this season. It’s a season of winning and a season of healing. Let the therapeutic waters of these Mets wash over your soul. Your soul will thank you.
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Mets fan Dan Braun will thank you for checking out a story he’d like to share with you. Dan, who also cheers for the Red Sox, a dual loyalty permissible when it’s not October of 1986, has been in New England taking care of his ailing mother — she’s quite the “firecracker” in her own right (Ma Braun once chased George Steinbrenner off a Boston barstool) — while trying to get a new venture off the ground: a US version of the UK pub the Bootlegger, right here in New York.
There’s a lot going on in Dan’s life and he could use a hand, or at least an ear. He thanks you for any time and consideration you might lend him.
by Jason Fry on 1 June 2022 1:25 am I was in L.A. Thursday morning through Monday night attending Star Wars Celebration (and probably getting COVID, but we’ll see), and felt the usual guilt about abandoning my post. Though I didn’t, really — the Mets kept sneaking into the picture, as they have a way of doing.
There they were for the last couple of innings Friday night as I recuperated in my hotel room after a crazy day greeting authors and fans and the occasional dude dressed as a Wookiee. And there they were on Sunday in the hotel bar — I grabbed a seat where I could keep an eye on them, and was certain Drew Smith had torn his UCL after a glimpse of him walking off the mound. (Only a dislocated pinkie? Thank goodness!) Every time I saw them or checked in on the score, they were either mashing Phillies into a paste, ducking from balls that guys in maroon were flinging around unwisely, or doing unlikely heroic things when you really wanted them to. (Nick Plummer? Really?)
Monday, with the Nats come to call, I had no such luck — the Mets started playing after I got on an airplane and were done by the time I landed. So of course MLB was the first place I visited after my phone completed its post-airplane mode throat-clearing and hemming and hawing. That’s always a brief out of body experience: There’s a number next to the name of the antagonists and a number next to the name of the good guys, and it takes a moment to process them and make your brain identify the larger number and conclude that it’s good or bad. Five for them and 13 for us? That definitely qualified as good, and I was probably the happiest person enduring a long late-night wait for JFK’s AirTrain, because I was the one watching the highlights.
And then there was tonight, which was basically no contest once Starling Marte hit a missile into the center-field stands, to become a souvenir for a fan with a child in his other arm. (Good hands times two, my man!) The Mets poured it on from there, bedeviling Patrick Corbin and a parade of anonymous Nat relievers while Trevor Williams and a trio of Met bullpen dwellers were spotless — including the aforementioned Mr. Smith, whose digit is apparently no worse for wear and perhaps even slightly improved given recent history. By the end the Mets’ lineup was studded with numbers in all the right places and the scoreboard and standings were all shouting out glad tidings.
I was talking to my kid recently and said “the Mets are good,” which after a lifetime of being emotionally battered is rare for me to say and vanishingly rare for me to say in May. “The Mets are really good,” my kid replied, and while he has less baseball-related scar tissue encrusting his soul, he knows the game and he was right and we both knew it.
Back in 2006, the second year Greg and I pursued the lunatic idea of chronicling the Mets, they ran away from a weak division and hid, and I remember a) how Greg and I went from fingers-crossed pleased to unsteadily giddy to quietly certain and b) how I was surprised when Greg was the first one to say what were both thinking.
They’re not going to catch us, was the way I think he put it, earlier than I’d dared to say it but not before I’d dared to think it.
This year’s team isn’t there yet, but the calendar says June 1, the Mets are playing at the ’86 club’s clip, the Braves are 10 1/2 back, and Buck Showalter‘s team feels like a club that’s just rounding into form — Canha! Lindor! Marte! Pete! Guillorme! McNeil! — and has an excellent chance of calling on two Cy Young winners by way of reinforcements.
I won’t say they’re not going to catch us — the baseball gods are reliably cruel and a brutal second West Coast trip looms against tough competition — but every day off the calendar makes it harder to believe someone will.
by Greg Prince on 31 May 2022 1:21 pm Let’s be honest. Unless you were keeping close tabs on Casey Stengel’s bullpen between July 24 and September 18, 1962, you probably don’t have any idea what kind of pitcher Bob G. Miller was for the 17 appearances he made in a New York Mets uniform. But, to be fair to all concerned, you don’t really have to know what Bob G. Miller did in his twenty-and-a-third innings on the mound to have an idea of who Bob G. Miller was in the Original Mets’ narrative.
He was Bob Miller. Not that Bob Miller. The other Bob Miller. Or vice-versa.
Yeah, you know about Bob G. Miller, lefty complement to the righty known as Bob L. Miller (Bob L. Miller’s birth name was Gemeinweiser, but he changed it because “I couldn’t pronounce it myself”) in every mythic recapitulation of the goofiest season the 20th century ever yielded. Or would that be every goofy recapitulation of the most mythic season the 20th century ever yielded? Both apply. Both Bob Millers pitched for those Mets. Both slept in the same room on the road. It was easier that way. As traveling secretary Lou Niss explained (captured in Dave Bagdade’s authoritative, all-new revised edition of A Year in Mudville), “If somebody calls for Bob Miller, he’s bound to get the right one.”
Or the left one.
It’s easiest to simply have a good laugh when reminded that once Bob joined Bob, Casey couldn’t keep them straight. Then again, he probably didn’t devote a lot of energy to sorting Millers. Stengel started in professional baseball in 1910. He hadn’t reached his sixth decade in the game, achieving legend status in the process, by getting bogged down in details.
 From left to right,: Bob Miller (lefty), Bob Miller (righty). Not pictured: Lindsey Nelson. Thus, as the story goes, when Stengel wanted the righthander Bob Miller to come into a game, he sent instructions to the bullpen to get “Nelson” up. Why was Bob L. Miller “Nelson”? Wasn’t Nelson the fellow in the plaid sports coat in the broadcasting booth? However the thinking went, the system worked. Well, the Mets lost 120 games, but the right (or appropriate) arm sprang into action.
For Bob G. Miller, the lefty in case you’ve lost track, the arm produced two wins of the Mets’ forty, not bad considering this Bob was enjoying life as a Cincinnati Red, oblivious to the standards soon to be set for futility in Upper Manhattan. But the Mets wanted to unload Don Zimmer and found a taker in Cincy: Zim for Cliff Cook and Miller. Miller, whose major league bona fides went back to 1953, wasn’t necessarily looking to continue his career in New York. He had his eyes on going into business. But he was talked into sticking with his craft for service time purposes. Pitch a little longer, he’d pile up enough days to qualify for the pension. That made bottom line sense to the budding executive. Bob G. Miller reported to Syracuse and pitched himself back into National League shape.
One of Miller the portsider’s wins as a Met, on August 4 at the Polo Grounds, came in relief of Miller the starboarder. Righty Bob, with the club since April, was 0-7 at the time, having pitched in the only luck the 1962 Mets had in abundance: tough. He’d gone seven innings and given up two runs. It wasn’t enough to ensure victory. The game would wind on to a fourteenth inning. Its top was pitched scorelessly by Lefty Bob. Its bottom was capped by a Frank Thomas home run (Frank Thomas the 1962 Met, not Frank Thomas the 1990s White Sox superstar). Pitcher of record? Bob Miller. Not that one; that one. Righty Bob — who would live only until 1993, when he perished in a car accident at 54 — had been waiting since April for a W to fall into his lap and would have to wait until the final weekend of the season to raise his record to 1-12. If he couldn’t get it for himself, at least it went to a fella with whom he shared a name, a box score and accommodations.
Whereas Bob L. Miller’s career would continue through 1974 (concluding with a second stint as a Met), Bob G. Miller put in his Met time, logged his pair of wins, earned his pension, and retired from the game after 1962, making him one of nineteen players on that first-year roster whose big league career ended, whether by mutual or unilateral decision, prior to 1963. The lefty was ready to move on to endeavors that didn’t need to distinguish a person by dominant arm. Before he died this past week at 86, the ol’ southpaw could look back on his post-Mets life with pride. He succeeded in business, dedicated himself to philanthropy, served his community, and raised a loving family. He also found time to chair the Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association, making it his cause to help those players who weren’t able to put in the requisite time to qualify for a pension.
For being one of the two Bob Millers whose name we recognize with an inevitable gleam of mischief, we appreciate that Bob G. Miller stopped by for those couple of months.
***Another Met we recently lost is also more than a name, but it was his name that drew my attention when I first encountered it. As he made his way up the minor league chain, his name arose regularly in conversation as a possibility to achieve star status, but to me, it didn’t matter what the scouts said. The name was everything to me.
 The primary font on this book cover, as was the case on so many paperbacks and record albums of its era, was created by graphic artist David West. His name was David West. Like “Bob Miller,” it may sound unassuming to you, but you have to understand that David West is, at least on genealogical paper, my father-in-law. Not the David West in the Mets’ system, of course. David West the pitcher and I were roughly the same age. David West my father-in-law was born decades before. He also, quite sadly, died nearly a decade before I met his daughter. That David West was also essentially a name to me, but obviously so much more. That David West, I would learn, was a splendid graphic artist and a kind soul. I know about the first part from examining his portfolio. Chances are if you’ve ever picked up a few mass-market paperbacks or popular albums produced in the 1960s and 1970s, you saw the fonts David West created grace their covers. The kind soul part is vouched for by Stephanie, who certainly inherited that character trait, among others. My wife has quite the artistic bent. I know where she got it from.
Rooting for David West the pitcher was second nature to me as he approached his debut in September 1988. At 6-foot-6, he was a big lefty, though hardly the only one preparing to impose his will on the National League East that month. Randy Johnson was called up to the Expos around the same time. Johnson was merely categorized as a big lefty, perhaps of the extra large variety (6’ 10”), but he was not yet the Big Unit. Randy fanned nearly a batter an inning in Triple-A in ’88. David recorded a 1.80 ERA in 23 starts at the same level. Big things were expected from each towering figure. They arrived on the scene almost simultaneously. According to Baseball-Reference, Johnson was the 15,571st major leaguer ever in terms of debuts. West was the 15,579th.
The Mets didn’t see Randy Johnson that September, so I didn’t worry about what Montreal had in their hurler. We didn’t see what the Mets had in David for a spell after his promotion as they were busy getting their division clinched and sticking with known quantities. On September 22, they made their fourth NL East title and second in three years official. On September 24, with nothing much at stake, Davey Johnson turned the keys over to the 24-year-old who’d shared Doubleday Player of the Year honors with batterymate Phil Lombardi at Tidewater, giving him a Saturday afternoon start in St. Louis.
David West indeed lived up to his notices in that he was very much a big lefty. He was also unpolished relative to those we’d been watching pitch all season. The 1988 Met staff posted a collective ERA below three. Their five main starters — Gooden, Cone, Darling, Fernandez and the suddenly unavailable Ojeda (the hedge clipper incident) — took the ball 158 times, going 77-44 as a pretty big unit themselves. Bobby O’s finger injury notwithstanding, Mel Stottlemyre didn’t exactly hang a neon HELP WANTED sign outside Shea that season. Even if West had overwhelmingly impressed in his initial start, it was too late to crash the postseason roster.
 Rookie pitcher David West certainly rated my attention. Young David was staked to a 3-0 lead in the top of the first; brushed off a Vince Coleman single and Ozzie Smith walk in his initial half-inning of work; and saw his edge extended to 6-0 in the top of the second. Kevin McReynolds, Tim Teufel and Mookie Wilson had each homered to provide him a comfortable cushion. That’ll calm a nervous rookie, and I definitely remember West appearing nervous, lacking command. Maybe he came across as tenuous by comparison to our poised corps of incumbent starters, or maybe it was because I was rooting a little extra hard for “David West,” but I worried for him. The line from his first outing indicates a rookie who acquitted himself just fine: five innings, five hits, two walks and only one run allowed. The Mets scored 14. David, who chipped in a single and double (“I got lucky”), was a 1-0 pitcher. What he didn’t show in terms of command he seemed to have going in terms of perspective: “I did OK,” he said. “I’m pleased. I wasn’t that sharp, and I can throw harder. But I’m happy. I wasn’t trying to make the team. I just wanted to do well.” Perhaps the Met prospect with the name I couldn’t resist embracing was going to be a part of this rotation for the long haul.
It didn’t work out that way. David never had a particularly wonderful outing, starting or relieving, as a Met again. But he was still a big lefty and enough of a prospect to entice other teams. The Minnesota Twins were looking to detach themselves from the contract they’d given their Cy Young winner Frank Viola. The Met rotation had a HELP WANTED sign blinking by the summer of 1989, flashing furiously once Doc went on the DL. A trade was made: West, Rick Aguilera, Kevin Tapani and a couple of minor leaguers who’d never made it to the Mets — Jack Savage and Tim Drummond — for Viola. It was a five-for-one blockbuster that indicated the scuffling contenders were serious about returning to the top of the East.
From a New York perspective, it became one of those trades that sort of worked out until it didn’t. Viola pitched well but with not enough support in star-crossed 1989, got off to a blazing start in not-quite 1990 en route to 20 wins (though he had a nagging habit of pitching just well enough to lose down the stretch), and ran out of effectiveness as his final season at Shea wound down in 1991, though the same could be said of the entire operation. Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, the Twins were gathering momentum and rolling toward a world championship, with lockdown closer Aguilera saving 42 games, reliable starter Tapani notching 16 wins and West each contributing to the cause. A trade worth making became a trade tinged with regret. Between 1991 and 1996, Met and regret rhymed a lot.
West wasn’t the only big lefty rookie traded out of the National League East in the midst of the 1989 season, just as Frank Viola wasn’t the only established lefty traded out of the American League West. Actually, Frankie V wasn’t the Mets’ initial target. Seattle had been looking to move Mark Langston. The Mets wanted him, but lost the Markstakes to Montreal, which parted with a trio of pitchers that included Randy Johnson. Sweet Music became the Mets’ fallback option, albeit a pretty damn good one. Langston, like Viola, pitched well enough in what became a losing cause in terms of winning a division. Johnson became Johnson. He became the Big Unit and all that would come to imply. His massive success wasn’t instantaneous, but it goes down as inevitable. Randy Johnson is in the Hall of Fame today.
David West never came close. He had a fairly lengthy career, pitching in the majors until 1998. He went back to the World Series with the Phillies in 1993. There was nothing to not respect from his big league tenure, even if it didn’t near the plane of a Randy Johnson or didn’t quite live up to whatever winning a Doubleday Award was supposed to imply. He was still David West, a name that still means something in my heart.
My future father-in-law died before he turned 50. The pitcher with the same name, who endured a battle with brain cancer, didn’t make it to 60. Neither did Phil Lombardi, come to think of it. Lombardi, who caught for the Mets in 1989, was born in 1963 and died in 2021. West of the Mets, Twins, Phillies and Red Sox was born in 1964 and died in 2022. I was born in 1962, so I may be a little sensitive to passings in certain demographic circles.
Randy Johnson retired in 2009 with 303 wins. David West was done more than a decade earlier, having won barely more than a tenth of that total. Yet when I think of that David West, I think of the David West who, without ever knowing me, gave me the biggest win I’d ever have. So I gotta say, when you combine the records of the two David Wests, they did OK by me.
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