The blog for Mets fans
who like to read
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.
Got something to say? Leave a comment, or email us at faithandfear@gmail.com. (Sorry, but we have no interest in ads, sponsored content or guest posts.)
Need our RSS feed? It's here.
Visit our Facebook page, or drop by the personal pages for Greg and Jason.
Or follow us on Twitter: Here's Greg, and here's Jason.
|
by Greg Prince on 22 May 2022 1:17 am Unlike those Let’s Make a Deal-type distractions they run between innings on CitiVision, a day/night doubleheader is not a “double or nothing” proposition. The Mets didn’t risk their Saturday afternoon prize by opting to play again a few hours later. Hence, they get to keep their 5-1 win despite being saddled with the 11-3 loss that awaited them in the Colorado darkness. That’s a relief…even if “that’s a relief” is not a phrase you heard yourself thinking as Adonis Medina and Chasen Shreve went about permitting seven runs in the bottom of the sixth.
I’m surprised MLB’s engagement with gambling consortiums hasn’t led to a “risk it all” element to spice up twinbills. I mean for the standings, not the gambler. Win twice, get four Ws. Lose the nightcap, slide down behind the Nationals.
Enough giving Manfred’s marketing marauders dangerous notions. Although Daylight Savings Time is already in progress, what say we set our Met clocks ahead to 3:10 PM New York time, direct Brandon Nimmo to the on-deck circle (as if he’s not already there practicing taking) and get on with the first pitch of Sunday’s game, all the better to forget Saturday night’s affair?
What Saturday night affair? See, it’s already forgotten!
by Greg Prince on 21 May 2022 6:57 pm The Mets needed lengthy starting pitching in their Saturday afternoon makeup of Friday night’s snowout, since it was to be followed by a regularly scheduled Saturday night game, and they pretty much got it. Carlos Carrasco, in his first Coors Field start (and probably the first game he’s pitched on May 21 that was postponed by snow on May 20), went five-and-a-third and held the Rockies to one run. That’ll take some pressure off your bullpen.
The Mets needed dependable relief pitching Saturday afternoon. They need dependable relief pitching every morning, noon and night, but when you find yourself with two games in one day and another game the next day, you’d prefer to not blow out your bullpen before the second game of your series. Adam Ottavino got the Mets through the two-thirds of the sixth that remained after Carrasco left. Drew Smith was back to his solid self with a solid seventh. And classic Six-Out Seth Lugo reappeared from late frames past, pitching the eighth and the ninth, which was big both because you want six outs with minimal fuss and you want your usual closing option, Edwin Diaz, available for the night game. All told, Carrasco, Ottavino, Smith and Lugo teamed to hold the Rockies to fewer than two runs, something no opposition pitching staff had done at Coors Field for 84 consecutive games. It was a National League record. It still is, but it’s now over as an active streak.
The Mets needed more than one run if that’s all they were going to give up to the Rockies. They got it two batters into the game. Brandon Nimmo from nearby Wyoming — Rocky Mountain geography is different from yours and mine — reached on an infield single and Starling Marte deposited the first pitch he saw beyond the reach of the outfield. One swing after time on the bereavement list for Starling, two runs scored. The Mets needed Starling Marte.
The Mets needed Patrick Mazeika to catch at least one of these games not to mention all of those pitchers. Mazeika did that and hit, too. In the second, Dom Smith was on second, Luis Guillorme was on first and Patrick was at bat. The catcher who’d be at Syracuse had James McCann’s hamate bone not required repair stepped up and doubled both runners home. By the time Cookie was back on the mound for the bottom of the second, he was staked to a 4-0 lead.
You can never have too many runs at Coors Field, it is said, yet the Mets had enough. They went on to win, 5-1, and, unlike stray dollops of snow in the sights of the Coors Field grounds crew, didn’t have to worry about being swept on Saturday. The Mets have won at least one game in every doubleheader they’ve played this year and last, nineteen thus far. They also won that unofficial doubleheader at the end of August, the one that commenced by continuing a suspended game that had barely begun in April. So although we as fans tend to approach two games at once with a degree of trepidation, the Mets evince no fear, no matter how few degrees are in the air in Colorado on a given weekend in late May.
We’re fans. We worry about everything. On to worrying about Saturday night.
by Jason Fry on 21 May 2022 9:30 am Roger Angell died yesterday at 101. Greg offered his tribute here last night, shortly before the Mets and the Rockies spent the night staring out the window waiting for it to at least resemble spring. There will be many other such tributes, as there should be.
To that avalanche of grief let me add my own couple of rocks.
I was a child and a relatively newly minted baseball fan when someone gave me a paperback copy of The Summer Game, which I remember inspecting with a certain trepidation: It was very long, the print was very small, and it was filled with names of bygone baseball players I didn’t know. But after reading that book, I felt like I did know them — my baseball education came from trivia and factoids on the backs of 1970s Topps cards and from Angell, who brought Willie Mays and Stan Musial and Sandy Koufax to life for me. As it turned out, the only problem with The Summer Game was that it wasn’t long enough, which is the nicest thing a reader can say about a book. (Happy sequel: I quickly discovered there were other Angell collections.)
But Angell also perfected the formula for what we do, and he did it before we were born.
He became a baseball writer in ’62 — fortuitous timing, as a foraging trip for the New Yorker brought him into contact with the newborn Mets, who became one of if not the team closest to his heart. (I remember clapping with glee when Angell, at the end of the epic ’86 chronicle “Not So, Boston,” declared he’d interrogated his divided loyalties from that World Series and realized he was above all else a Mets fan.) A lot of wonderful writing would emerge from that trip, but so did something else. Angell, inspired primarily by Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” wrote with no walls between the professional and the personal. He was an excellent reporter, bringing players to life not just as extraordinary athletes but as people, but he didn’t shy from making himself part of that story. That was verboten in sportswriting, and its double vision was largely ignored as a New Yorker oddity, but decades after Angell pioneered the form it became the template for a certain slice of sports blogs.
Certainly it was the form we followed. Combining Mets’ wins and losses with the experience of observing them? Angell did that long before we did. The tightrope walk between being clear-eyed about team business and hopelessly besotted by wanting said team to prevail? He showed us how to navigate that too. I see Angell in every simile and metaphor I throw into the air and hope comes down in a way that makes a reader nod, or at least smile. He taught me all of that when I was 11 or 12 — the only thing missing was an outlet for it.
And he made being a fan so much richer. Every late fall or early winter brought a clear-my-calendar evening when Emily told me Angell had chronicled the now-concluded baseball season. When that night arrived in 2006, I was not only a grown-up (at least chronologically) but had also blogged the better part of two baseball seasons. For the second season, Greg and I had chronicled the Mets and their giddy, never-in-doubt division title, their joyous pummeling of the Dodgers in the NLDS, and their exhausting, ultimately futile heavyweight bout with the Cardinals. It was an experience I figured had armored me and imparted a certain emotional distance. But then I read Angell’s account of it, which he ended like this:
I have studied the very last pitch — as delivered by the Cards’ very tall, right-handed closer Adam Wainwright — in replays and then over my own IF ONLY mental video, and have watched it repeatedly plummet past Beltran’s gaze like a bat in an elevator shaft. Time to go home. Instead, just lately, I’ve gone back to Jose Reyes’s shot to right center, and now see him catching a fraction more of the ball with his slashing bat, and the ball, this time, taking a course that carries it a yard or two more toward right and lands it there, in for a double. Noises rise, the score is tied, with one out, and Lo Duca is just coming up.
When I read that in November 2006 and saw the little New Yorker diamond that meant it was the end of the article, my brain slipped its track for a moment. And then, to my astonishment, I began to cry. Not a little chest hitch ahead of a moment one could hand-wave as allergies or a bit of dust in the eye, but a child’s dissolve into shocked misery.
That paragraph is everything we’ve ever tried to do at Faith and Fear, only perfected. The dispassionate observation of the scene, leavened with details personal and piercing. The intriguing but slightly lampshade-on-the-head simile. The exquisitely chosen detail — “with his slashing bat” is concentrate from which Jose Reyes is instantly reconstituted. The wistfulness for what might have been — that offset “this time” is doing a lot of work — and the way it rope-a-dopes you into the last sentence’s glimpse into a better world that never was. That’s the emotional KO, the part that leaves you on the mat looking up and wondering what just happened.
It was perfect now and it’s perfect then. Thank you, Roger. For everything.
by Greg Prince on 20 May 2022 4:56 pm “The Mets — ah, the Mets! Superlatives do not quite fit them, but now, just as in 1969, the name alone is enough to bring back that rare inner smile that so many of us wore as summer ended.”
Summer, in a sense, has ended with the news that Roger Angell, who wrote the above sentence in the aftermath of the New York National League pennant push of 1973, has died at 101. Sixty years ago, Angell, already an accomplished editor with the New Yorker, carved out a branch to his oak of a career, becoming his esteemed publication’s baseball writer. Before Angell, perhaps it would have sounded odd to think of the New Yorker as having a baseball writer. Because of Angell, millions of baseball fans consider the New Yorker a baseball magazine.
Angell grew up a Giants fan in Manhattan, but in Spring Training 1962, he was drawn to the Mets, and weren’t we the beneficiaries? Roger couldn’t resist St. Petersburg, “the old folks behind home” or, of course, Casey Stengel. He couldn’t resist following us back north, where he defined us before summer began. Angell wrote of the scene at the Polo Grounds when the joint jumped to support the baby Metsies as they endured the return of the powerful Dodgers to the five boroughs, documenting the first “full, furious happy shout of ‘Let’s go, Mets! Let’s go, Mets!’” And that was with the Mets losing by about a million runs. He was humming along to our tune from the Let’s-go get-go, and he wrote the lyrics to our biggest numbers on and off for the next six decades.
Roger Angell was one of us. He was a Mets fan more often than not. When he was, he was a Mets carer of the first order. And, in the realm of what you read in this space, he was the Mets chronicler who inspired us. I’m not doing this blog without Roger Angell setting the bar out of the reach of mere mortals and neither is Jason. We grew up and older reading his books, his articles, his every word about baseball. We smiled that inner smile every December that the issue of the New Yorker containing his postseason essay appeared on newsstands. We listened whenever we were lucky enough to tune into the documentary that was smart enough to book him as the talking head who’d seen so much that you’d almost thought he’d seen it all. Roger Angell was born in 1920, so, yeah, pretty close.
“One more thing,” Angell added to his many observations regarding the National Pastime in the early 1990s. “American men don’t think about baseball as much as they used to, but such thoughts once went deep.” In the case of Roger Angell, that’s where our affection for the summer game, as brought to us through his eyes, resides. Well over the 410 mark, and still going.
by Greg Prince on 20 May 2022 11:37 am The withstanding has begun. The Mets are 1-0 in the What The Hell Are We Going To Do Now? era. It will last anywhere from six weeks to eight weeks to whenever it actually ends. When you see Max Scherzer glaring from a mound near you, you’ll know it’s over.
For a spell on Thursday, it was hard to feel good about a team in first place by a healthy margin playing a close game because what did it matter what 25 other players did if the most significant among them — certainly in the top tier — wasn’t going to be available for his next start or the start after that or several to many starts after that? The original plan was to supplement Jacob deGrom with Max Scherzer. Then the plan was to cope without Jacob deGrom because we had Max Scherzer. The next plan won’t be nearly so glamorous. Scapulas. Obliques. The body parts pile up. The multiple Cy Young winners don’t.
Yet there were the Mets, facing down the Cardinals in a matinee that gripped your attention beyond the IL bulletins. It had everything you could want unless all you want out of every game is a stomping of the opposition (not an unreasonable desire). It had the Mets in front, the Mets tied, the Mets back out in front, the Mets holding on for dear life, the Mets having dear life all but slip from their fingers, the Mets behind and the Mets winning on one of the biggest swings you’ll see in any year. It had legends leaving our midst in Albert Pujols, playing first base like a real National Leaguer and nearly hitting one to the Marina before it politely declined to exit the park, and Yadier Molina, called into action as an injury replacement and unleashing one final mind’s eye glance of the ghost of Aaron Heilman (2022 postseason pending, because it’s not crazy to speculate a rematch of 2006 might be in the Cards). It had underappreciated superstar Paul Goldschmidt on fire, with a homer, three hits and four RBI. It had a new nettlesome Redbird, Juan Yepez, delivering three hits and the notion that the Cardinals never go away.
And those were just the visitors. The home team held its own and then some. It had Jeff McNeil, making like Bobby Ewing, discovered as alive and well and taking a shower by wife Pam on Dallas. Bobby was assumed to be dead for an entire season, but it was all a dream. That prime time soap opera’s jawdropping plot device serves a template for 2020 and 2021 where Squirrel’s resurrected career is concerned. The McNeil we see now is the McNeil of 2018 and 2019, and don’t we want to keep tuning in? Jeff drove in three runs, spread left field leather and has updated his status to essential Citi worker. Francisco Lindor was on base a bunch, too, and kept the ball in the infield while on defense. And, oh yeah, the Polar Bear roared, especially on that final crack of the bat, the two-run homer that rescued the Mets from a tenth-inning deficit with a ball that traveled two or three galaxies, or far enough to seal a 7-6 win with a two-run homer. The Mets’ rally began when MLB put Lindor on second to start the inning, eerily similar to how the Cards’ push in the top of the tenth began. I wish they wouldn’t do that. The Mets and Cardinals solved a 25-inning game once up on a time, a 20-inning game another time and an 18-inning game in fairly recent memory. Extra innings should be allowed to breathe.
As long as Pete Alonso is allowed to swing.
Chris Bassitt, the new ace of the Mets’ rotation, gritted per usual into the seventh. Neither Drew Smith nor Edwin Diaz was leakproof. Winning pitcher Colin Holderman got as much of the job done as he needed to. He came in with an unearned runner on second. Can’t blame him for that. The Cardinals scored their go-ahead run on a weak infield hit that moved said ghostly figure to third and Pujols grounding into a DP, which for much of Pujols’s career would have been an optimal outcome. Man, Pujols. After Pete treated his helmet like a basketball and shot it into a crowd of his teammates surrounding home plate — nobody got hurt — an SNY camera found Prince Albert heading down the tunnel for the final New York time. There goes greatness, I thought. When Albert retires, that’s basically it for that sense, unless Miguel Cabrera comes by next year. Otherwise, Albert is it from my perspective.
There are other superb active players of tenure who’ve built long, superb careers still in progress, but I haven’t experienced them quite the same way. Nobody whose National League bona fides go back quite long enough to seem like they didn’t commence “a few years ago”. Nobody who I don’t sort of see as a “youngster,” even if they’ve reached an advanced baseball age. Albert Pujols was the best hitter/player in the National League twenty years ago, right there with Barry Bonds. He endured at the top of the game for a decade. Then he departed St. Louis and continued to ply his craft out west in the junior circuit. The bottom line numbers increased even if his pace fell off drastically. The aura wasn’t what it once was once it was transplanted to Anaheim. I continually read that his presence had morphed into a liability. I didn’t want to hear it. To me, Albert Pujols was Albert Pujols in the way that Willie Mays was Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron was Hank Aaron, and Roberto Clemente was Roberto Clemente, and Frank Robinson was Frank Robinson when I was a kid. You get older, hardly any opponent resonates with you like that.
Pujols did. I didn’t want him to beat the Mets on Thursday. I never particularly welcomed any of the 93 career hits out of his total of 3,314 and counting that were registered at the Mets’ expense. I was just happy to see him out there in Flushing one more time, playing first, still at it as he might have been at Shea, where Mays as a Giant and Aaron as a Brave and Clemente as a Buc and Robinson before he was an Oriole all excelled and could be applauded for what they’d done and who they were. When that ball Pujols hit off Smith to end the seventh somehow fell into McNeil’s glove at the track in left, keeping the Mets ahead by one…well, I surely didn’t want it to go out with the game on the line. Yet I wouldn’t have begrudged the man. Cursed a little, perhaps. But not begrudged.
Priorities are priorities. The Maxless Mets had to win yesterday. Had to. With no Scherzer joining no Megill, never mind no deGrom, you can’t squander a Bassitt start. The starters who are staples — grinding Chris, along with Taijuan Walker and Carlos Carrasco, have to give us competitive outings and we have to back them up with ample support when they do. When we’re into David Peterson and Trevor Williams territory, we might need the bullpen to crank up a little sooner. Players need to emerge from slumps sooner. It was good to see Eduardo Escobar stinging the ball. It’s wasn’t so good to see him having trouble picking it up, but that’ll happen. What’s really good is everybody picking each other up. Yesterday was a had-to win because if we’re gonna be staring a bit into the abyss, giving it a glance with a seven-game lead as we are currently is about as ideal as we could imagine. Same for this just-completed homestand: three one-run losses that didn’t stop us from securing four wins and climbing twelve games above .500.
Let’s not gloss over where we are, even as we ask, “What the hell are we going to do now?” The Mets are seven games in front after forty games. Not impenetrable (we were memorably seven games in front after 145 games in 2007). But this is a solid lead constructed by a solid team right when it’s most needed. It may be hard to reckon good news within the context of doom Scherzer’s diagnosis wrought, but if a seven-game lead doesn’t seem encouraging, then you may need to reread the standings. Having built a seven-game lead is a damn sight better than being seven games behind. Building the lead to eight games, then nine, then more, would be optimal. If that becomes too tall an order, then withstand as you did on Thursday. The Mets closed out the first quarter of the season on a high note on the field. The more you win in the first quarter, the less damaging a given loss in the next three quarters will be. Pete Alonso, pretending to play hoops after going yard, obviously knows about first quarters and fourth quarters and the quarters in between. Winning on Thursday felt more gargantuan than simply taking one out of 162. Losing one on Thursday would have loomed even larger in the wrong direction. Losing No. 21 was bad enough.
Winning on a walkoff home run is a favorite thing for any fan, but there are others. National League Town explores a few more of them here or wherever your 447-foot blasts take you.
by Jason Fry on 19 May 2022 2:28 am Can the Mets win by seven and have that feel like an afterthought?
It turns out they can — if the takeaway from the game isn’t a blast of a homer by Pete Alonso or a hustling triple by happily hale and hearty Brandon Nimmo or a host of hitting to break the second half of the evening’s entertainment wide open.
Nope, the lasting image will be from the sixth, when Max Scherzer threw a slider to Albert Pujols and immediately signaled to the dugout that his night was finished — a very un-Scherzer thing to do, one that left a fanbase’s season flashing before its eyes.
It’s an annoying tic of being a Mets fan that we immediately assume not just the worst but the apocalyptic — we are the franchise of the Miracle Mets, the ball off the wall, Ya Gotta Believe and the unlikely series of events that culminated with a little roller behind the bag that got through Buckner, so there’s been some good fortune along the way. And yet it’s what we do, a habit that for most of us long ago went from superstitious to reflexive. About two hours before Scherzer’s unexpected walk, I was at a work function and conversation came around to how the Mets looked awfully sound. I agreed they did, but couldn’t resist remarking that as a Met fan, when things are going well I look over my shoulder like, ‘Oh God what’s that?’ ”
Which became the question of the minute, hour and possibly campaign not so long after that — what had happened to Scherzer? My kid, at the game with a friend, texted me immediately for updates I didn’t have. Like everybody else, I turned frantically to Twitter’s army of lip readers. Was Jeremy Hefner saying it was bad? Did Scherzer say he felt something pop? I watched that last slider like it was the Zapruder film, and thought I’d spotted Scherzer pulling his elbow into his side, trying to protect that critical little stretch of ligament from something that can’t be guarded against.
The culprit, according to Scherzer, wasn’t his precious UCL but his left side, which went from tight to problematic on that one pitch to Pujols, after which Max opted for caution and departure, never mind the optics or the glass case of emotion in which the viewing audience was trapped until the postgame show.
So now Scherzer will probably head for the confines of an MRI tube, and we’ll wait for updates. Which might well be bad: oblique injuries and other maladies can linger, cause a pitcher to unwittingly change his delivery, or otherwise be the first stone in an avalanche. But the side isn’t the arm. It isn’t the arm, and so we wait, and try to remind ourselves that even the Mets get a good outcome every now and again.
by Greg Prince on 18 May 2022 2:38 am Did I want a pencil, the fella who sold me my program/scorecard asked me. Since the pencil was free and the paper bag with handles was a nickel, of course I said yes to the pencil with no eraser and not even NEW YORK METS written across it. Rule No. 1 of ballpark retail customer etiquette is never turn down even the most useless trinket, no matter how useless, not if it’s free. The pencil could have been useful if I’d planned to keep score; was too nervous to use my pen; yet was confident I would make no erasable mistakes.
Because I did not keep score, I didn’t total up the LOB the Mets accumulated in their Tuesday doubleheader. My impression is that over 18 innings they left 54 runners on base. That’s just my impression, though. I know that’s incorrect because a) they didn’t bat in the bottom of the ninth of the opener, so it’s only 17 innings and therefore only a possible 51 LOB and b) I like to exaggerate for effect.
As long as I’m doing that, let me tell you there’s nothing better than a 3:10 start for a baseball game. Nothing. Move over ice cream and intimacy — you’ve been topped! Honestly, I couldn’t say every 3:10 start clicks as the one in Game One did, but I’ve rarely enjoyed an almost empty ballpark more than I did when the Mets got their makeup doubleheader underway. Citi Field wasn’t comically empty as it or any facility can be when something previously unscheduled suddenly springs into action, but the population was pretty sparse. It turned out to be a great way to make my 2022 debut. I’ve avoided April in Flushing since 2017 because fighting the crowds on Opening Day and the chill the rest of the month leaves me cold. Then there was the little matter of no baseball in the early part of 2020 and reduced capacity as 2021 found its footing. Witnessing the first weeks of the season in person is a habit I’ve lost.
Sooner or later, though, ya yearn to get back on that horse. Tuesday afternoon, with its acres of empty seats and pastures of plentiful tickets priced to move brought me to Promenade, just about the same spot where I took in the final home game of last year. It was really cold that night. It was really cold this night, too, but that came later, well after three o’clock. Don’t blame my precious 3:10 start for the sun going down several hours after.
 I’m gonna wait ’til the three o’clock hour… In the three o’clock hour, Citi Field was scrumptious in its solitude and quietude. You could take in a baseball game and all the post-Wilpon aesthetic upgrades (a better out-of-town scoreboard and a sharper ribbonboard presentation) without the PA blaring at you. It’s like they know enough to not bother anybody who just wants to revel in what amounts to secret innings. A little before three o’clock, the premises had something to recommend them as well: a tranquil Mets Plaza and a chance to get to properly greet Big Tom. I’d only seen the Seaver statue on TV, just as I had the 2022 Mets. I couldn’t wait to meet him, imperfect 4 in his rear 41 and all. Sure enough, he was right where I’d suspected he’d be, just across the way from the good old Apple. The Mets have two monuments, one to exquisite pitching, the other to fruitful offense. If only their ideals could have been replicated all afternoon and evening within the park.
For those who haven’t had the pleasure of approaching Big Tom, there’s a lengthy inscription on the plaque that adorns his granite mound. Here’s what it says about GEORGE THOMAS SEAVER:
Tom Seaver arrived in Queens and turned around the fortunes of the New York Mets, leading to the nickname “The Franchise.” Named the 1967 National League Rookie of the Year, Seaver led the Miracle Mets to the club’s first World Series championship in 1969. One of the most dominant pitchers in major league history, Seaver was a three-time Cy Young Award winner and a member of the exclusive 300-win club, finishing his career with 311 wins. He set franchise records for wins (198), strikeouts (2,541) and complete games (171) and was honored by the Mets in 1988 with his induction to the Mets Hall of Fame and the retirement of his uniform number 41. Seaver was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1992.
Try writing all that down with an eraserless pencil…a short eraserless pencil, at that. I took a picture.
The statue had me in a good mood. The start time had me in a good mood. The view from 518 was solid. Did I mention the ticket was a bargain? The first-place Mets and the nationally recognized Cardinals could be had for three digits, two of which followed a decimal point. I couldn’t resist. I found a spot at my LIRR station (not easy in the afternoon). The commute was smooth. My opened bottle of water eluded security. This year’s yearbook and program are now in my baseball library. A 60th Anniversary pennant graces my office wall.
 Terrific from every angle. Oh, and two t-shirts! Not t-shirts I bought but t-shirts I caught from the Citi Perks Patrol. This was the benefit of planting oneself in 518 on a day and night when not that many did, though I didn’t plan it with shirts in mind. In the sixth inning of the first game, a Patrolperson came up with a bag of shirts and asked, in so many words, who wants one…REALLY wants one? Checking just enough of my dignity at the Rotunda door, I waved heartily. She tossed me a shirt. My lucky day! As if being at a ballgame and practically having a section to myself wasn’t lucky enough.
Fast-forward into the darkness and the stiff breeze it brought. It’s the sixth inning of the nightcap. More people are in 518, but not that many more. A different Patrolperson shows up. He also has a bag of shirts. He also wants to know who wants one…REALLY wants one? I haven’t gotten any prouder in the interim. Sure, I figure, I’ll communicate my desire to have another free shirt that won’t fit (they never do). The gentleman tossed me his first shirt. I was so surprised it was happening — aren’t there other sections? — that I dropped it into the row in front of me. The row was unoccupied, making my retrieval of it a foregone conclusion.
Two shirts to go with two games for less than ten bucks. What more could one ask?
Two wins, of course. We were halfway home after the lidlifter, a 3-1 success that felt in peril intermittently but never fell away. Trevor Williams upended my recently stated lack of faith by giving the Mets four shutout innings. Jake Reed walked a tightrope in the fifth, but somehow maintained a zero-laden toegrip. The Mets’ three runs, gathered in the second and third, held up. Nolan Arenado, villain from the Battle of Busch, was booed a lot. Yadier Molina was booed by me. I attempted to give him a “nice career, guy” round of applause as his retirement finally looms, but I still can’t stand him for 2006. I was prepared to stand and ovate in acknowledgement of Albert Pujols at twilight, but he must’ve been warming up in the bullpen the whole time.
Like Pujols to the plate, the second Met win never came. Just lots of runners left on base. It only seemed like 27. The actual number was 9. The Cardinals stranded more, but if you win, 4-3, nobody much cares you outLOB’d the competition, 12-9. The Mets were undermanned in the nightcap, having used their prime relievers Lugo, Smith and Diaz to seal Game One. The absence of bereavement-listed Starling Marte resonated and losing Brandon Nimmo temporarily (we hope) to a ball he batted off his right quad in the seventh further hollowed out our depth. Nimmo’s mishap apparently looked worse than it actually was. It looked bad.
 You can’t have two of everything. Yet the Mets tied the game in the eighth and had two on in the ninth after giving up the tie in the top of the inning. By then the breeze had become full-blown wind, the meditative spirit of the opener had dissipated into frustration with not being able to put away the Cardinals and I mostly wanted to take my shirts and make my train. A second win would’ve been nice. I’d have taken it over a second shirt. You don’t necessarily get offered that perk in Promenade.
by Greg Prince on 16 May 2022 10:31 am Pete Alonso just swung by to remind us that not every Met ending that oughta be happy winds up that way, nor do even the most promising of post-1986 Mets teams always play baseball like it oughta be. Or maybe Pete Alonso just swung — again. Last we saw him, he couldn’t help himself.
It was the bottom of the ninth inning. The bases were loaded. Two were out. The score was Mariners 8 Mets 7. The score had been Mariners 8 Mets 5. The score had also been, at various intervals, Mets 1 Mariners 0; Mariners 4 Mets 1; and Mets 5 Mariners 4. Once it grew to Mariners 8 Mets 5, I was resigned to a soft loss landing. The first series defeat of 2022 was on approach, but it was going to be to the Mariners. Our undefeated series streak (not really a thing) was still intact versus National League opponents. Same for not having lost a series to a team I could possibly give less of a damn about. Sooner or later we were gonna lose two out of three to somebody. Strangers from a strange land would do.
Except for Paul Sewald. Acquired by Jerry Dipoto, he’s the new Jerry Dipoto in my personal frame of reference. In August of 1997, after so much had been going right for the Mets for months, we pulled into Colorado and got swept by the nothing-special Rockies, whose closer was former futile Met Jerry Dipoto. It’s one of those curses of a lengthy and detail-laden memory to maintain simmering grudges against middle relievers who ruined games for you ages ago and then got in your way when they materialized in another uniform. Dipoto mostly sucked as a Met in 1995 and 1996. The Mets sucked as a whole most of Dipoto’s tenure, so the grudge against future GM Jerry shouldn’t be any more sizable or enduring than it is against similarly bad news bullpenmates Doug Henry or Blas Minor, to name two arms from the distant past I hadn’t planned on invoking this week. But then Dipoto goes west, finds himself, and cuts us down in three consecutive games. I had high hopes for those 1997 Mets. That series at Coors Field was the first signal I processed as nope, this won’t be our year.
Except I don’t remember Dipoto cupping a hand over an ear after recording his saves as if to say, “Let’s hear it for your doubts about my abilities now, Mets/Mets fans.” No, Dipoto taunted us much, much later by taking a flier on Sewald and Sewald finding himself en route to his return to Citi Field. Sewald pitched in 125 games as a Met, winning one and losing fourteen. Won-lost records can be deceptive where relief pitchers are concerned. I don’t know that 1-14 meant Sewald sucked or was slowly growing into a big leaguer. Jerry Dipoto went 7-2 in 1996 and still sucked. I grew to disdain Dipoto (and Henry and Minor). Conversely, I never had it in for Sewald as a Met. I mostly experienced sadness when he entered a game between 2017 and 2020. Sadness for what Sewald’s presence indicated about the state of the Mets’ competitive aspirations. Sadness that he attracted Ls and repelled Ws. Sadness that he was, as often or not, bound for Las Vegas or Syracuse when a roster crunch required an option to chew up and spit out. That part was human empathy, which a fan can sometimes conjure for a person when not dismayed by a player. I got a glimpse of Sewald the person at the January 2020 FanFest and determined he seemed more 14-1 than 1-14 when it came to character.
The person who is a fan reserves the right to reverse impressions regarding people who are players. Paul Sewald succeeded at his craft Friday night in a one-run Mariners win over the Mets. That’s what he’s supposed to do. He indicated afterward how much satisfaction it gave him. That’s OK. He’s entitled to tell whoever runs the Mets now, in so many words, “no more shines.” Little Paulie, all grown up and doing the town. Whatevs. Congrats. We have different management ensconced since those who “gave up on me” saw enough of Sewald, but environs are environs and orange and blue mean something different to the reliever whose 125 outings in said colors weren’t enough to prove himself by his reckoning. Have your moment, Sewald.
Two is one too many, though. The cupping the hand over the ear, all “how ya like me now?” surpasses Winker in wankerdom. Jesse Winker as professional Citi Field heel is performance art. I’d almost admire his horsespit if in the mood to like anything at all about the Seattle Mariners other than their having defeated the Yankees in the 1995 ALDS.
The grist of the gripe with the Mariners isn’t the flourishes. It’s that they wouldn’t go away quietly after being absent without anybody noticing since their last Queens visit fourteen years earlier. That 1-0 lead, built on Francisco Lindor second-decking Robbie Ray in the first, was whisked away all too easily, as Carlos Carrasco entered Didn’t Have It territory. Ah, but in the fourth, the 2022 Mets showed their contemporary stuff, featuring a pair of triples that each plated a pair of runs, one from J.D. Davis, the other from Brandon Nimmo. That tandem of unicorniness (the Mets had never before produced two two-run triples in the same inning) vaulted the Mets into the 5-4 lead that was definitively More Like It. More Like It is far preferable to Didn’t Have It.
But More Like It didn’t last. Carrasco gave way to Chasen Shreve, whose general effectiveness this season surely had a YA GOTTA BE SHREVE t-shirt on some clever entrepreneur’s drawing board. The garments went on backorder once Julio Rodriguez went deep (torpedoing the A-CHASEN METS iteration as well). The next heretofore dependable arm to display fallibility was Drew Smith, who gave up a two-run homer to the capital of North Carolina, a.k.a. Cal Raleigh. Joely Rodriguez got in on the unrequested action a little later, permitting the eighth Mariner run. The only Met pitcher who escaped with a zero where it counted was the only Met pitcher we didn’t know would be in our sights when Sunday dawned. Colin Holderman, who planted himself on the organizational radar with a nifty Spring Training, replaced Tylor Megill on the roster when it was announced Megill was dealing with some right biceps inflammation, which is one of those maladies a fan repeats calmly while thinking, “WHAT?” An MRI showed Tylor is dealing with tendinitis. “WHAT?” also, but in the realm of all that could bother an arm, maybe it’s not so bad. Except for being without Tylor Megill in the interim.
Sewald clowned his way through the bottom of the eighth. Holderman held ’em in the top of the ninth, keeping the M’s from oozing any further ahead than 8-5. I didn’t want to lose to the Mariners (or anybody), but you gotta take the occasional lump in middling humor. Come the bottom of the ninth, I decided, the Mets would conduct the last of their dismal business for Sunday quickly, I’d shrug it off as I’ve shrugged off each intermittent Met loss this year, and then I could move on to my cooking — curried chicken, in case you’re wondering.
Except the Mets, after one out, had other ideas as they took on Drew Steckenrider. Eduardo Escobar awakened from his offensive slumber and tripled. I would’ve been delighted with a double. I was mortified he was going for three down three runs. The rule about not getting thrown at third as the first or third out also extends to the second out in the ninth. Y’know what? Just make it if you’re gonna go for it. Eduardo did. He was surely due. Jeff McNeil, who spent 2020 and 2021 due, continued to make up for lost time with a single to make it 8-6. Patrick Mazeika…
Listen, I love a feelgood story as much as the next Mets fan, but, oh brother, am I not confident in Patrick Mazeika. Did I learn nothing on Saturday night when his homer made all the difference? I did not. James McCann does not light the world on fire (unless his surfeit of double play grounders are soaked in gasoline and his bat is a Bic lighter), but a team losing its No. 1 catcher — even its 1A catcher in the prevailing McCann-Nido combo — is a team that’s asking for trouble. We’ve withstood the loss of deGrom. We’ve gotten by without May. Megill, we’ll see. But I have a really bad feeling about finessing however many weeks it will be without McCann. The Mets of the early 1970s were doomed whenever they were bereft of Jerry Grote. Duffy Dyer was the Tomás Nido of his day, but depth gets shallow fast behind the plate. And unless somebody’s gonna drop a Mike Piazza in our laps, don’t get me started on the 1998 Mets without Todd Hundley.
So, no, I wasn’t all “Mazeika Magic!” when Patrick came up to continue the rally. And maybe the Nido-Mazeika platoon will run short on durability soon enough. But on Sunday afternoon in the ninth inning, the kid somehow did his thing, slapping a ball where no Mariner could effectively lay a glove on it, placing Jeff on second and himself on first. Brandon Nimmo was a different story in terms of inspiring confidence. Nimmo is in that Mookie zone right now, that “he does it all and he’s doing it again!” mode Mr. Wilson used to inhabit for significant stretches every season. Nimmo had already tripled and extended his on-base streak to 26 games. Brandon, I was convinced, was gonna do something good here.
Brandon doubled. McNeil raced home. Mazeika made it to third (catchers rarely race). Second and third! Eight-seven! No series has been lost yet! My man Starling Marte is up! I love Starling Marte!
I love Starling Marte a little less since I felt that emotion yesterday, for Starling gave us one of the two worst at-bats I’ve ever seen in my life. Three pitches from Steckenrider’s sudden replacement Diego Castillo (with the infield in) led to three of the dumbest strikes I can recall. My database for “I’ve ever seen” and “I can recall,” by the way, is not to be considered exhaustive. In the moment, however, it was accurate. WTF, Starling?
Ah, but that’s OK, because Lindor, he of the high and handsome home run, is coming up and he’s gonna…be walked intentionally? Just waved to first like Jesse Winker waves to his jeering section? I’m beginning to think there’s a reason the Mariners have missed the playoffs for 21 years. Not my problem. Seattle’s problem was more the matter. Their 8-5 lead was whittled to 8-7. Their none-too-reliable reliever had to pitch with the bases loaded. His manager, Scott Servais, told him to face Pete Alonso with nowhere to put him. And the game I’d been content to shrug off now sat heavily on my shoulders.
So it was my problem, too. I could’ve dealt with an 8-5 loss. An 8-7 loss is a different story. How can it not be? There’s nothing implicit in a score of 8-7 when you don’t have the “8” that isn’t aggravating. You gave up too many runs and scored not quite enough. It’s a one-run loss, but it’s hellishly different from 2-1, which is how we lost Friday night. When it’s 8-7 in the other team’s favor, you have to get it to 8-8 at the very least. Surpassing 8-8 is even better, but one antsy thought regarding outcomes that are completely out of your control at a time. My mind was operating like J.B. Smoove’s in one of those Caesars commercials, everything zipping around in a digital display.
Can we really come back like this again?
Is this almost too easy?
Is thinking it’s almost too easy going to make this even harder?
DON’T ASSUME THE BEST!
But don’t assume the worst.
Is 2022 our year of destiny?
Will Pete fuck this up?
If we don’t win today, are we somehow doomed?
Seriously, are we gonna get another catcher?
Who thought not having Tylor Megill might be a linchpin?
Have faith in Trevor Williams if he takes Megill’s start.
I have little faith in Trevor Williams.
Don’t even worry about that right now.
Don’t worry about the catching.
Just have faith in Pete.
Maybe there’ll be a wild pitch.
How did Pete swing at that?
“How did Pete swing at that?” was the most operative of thoughts, especially but not solely on three-and-two with the still unreliable Castillo tempting Alonso one final time to swing at a slider away. If Pete’s bat remains still, it’s ball four and we’ve got a tie game and all the momentum and all the magic and Canha coming up and what a year! Instead, Pete can’t help but swing, and though the first base umpire has to be consulted, it’s strike three. Diego Castillo didn’t do much well, but neither Marte nor Alonso was willing to let him beat himself. The two worst at-bats I’ve ever seen (don’t hold me to that) sandwiched an intentional walk, resulting in an 8-7 loss that sounds about as bad now as it was when it unfolded.
Not knowing what else do to, I grabbed the objects nearest to me and threw a couple of throw pillows to the ground, thus learning why they are called throw pillows. Then I grabbed a few paper napkins and threw those to the ground. Paper napkins don’t make for very emphatic throwing in disgust. I stalked around like Max Scherzer for a spell; fumed at every mention of how noble it was that the Mets didn’t quit (are they supposed to quit?); attempted to take succor from Buck Showalter’s reminder that the opponents are an assemblage of competent professionals or whatever he said; snarled at Sewald; rationalized that somehow a loss like this was healthy in the long run because ninth-inning comebacks can’t be wished into existence on an almost daily basis; realized anew that you can be having a splendid season yet a loss that sucks is a loss that sucks; catalogued several of society’s genuine ills for perspective; and eventually turned my attention to my cooking to take my mind off what I just saw, which was Pete Alonso swinging at fucking ball four with the bases loaded and two out and the Mets down by one in the bottom of the ninth and it would’ve been so much better had he taken a pitch there.
Sometimes you just have to grab a big knife and slice the hell out of some carrots.
by Jason Fry on 15 May 2022 1:15 am What a strange game.
The Mets and Mariners — those foes from so many past epics — met again under bottom-of-the-aquarium conditions, getting started late because of rain and squinting their way through the final innings because of fog. The meteorological strangeness was matched by plenty of the on-the-field variety, with Chris Bassitt looking frustrated with newly recalled backstop Patrick Mazeika and the Mariners looking frustrated with their own suddenly tenuous grasp on the fundamentals of fielding and baserunning.
Bassitt has quickly emerged as one of my favorite Mets: He’s got the same eat-broken-glass intensity as Max Scherzer but substitutes a cyborg-assassin death stare for Mad Max’s can’t-be-arsed hair from hell and dugout pacing, and behind the affect is the same sense of a smart, driven athlete engaged in an ongoing colloquy with his craft — how amazing would it be to play fly on the dugout wall while Bassitt and Scherzer are having one of their frequent conversations? (And imagine the added dimension when Jacob deGrom can join those sessions.)
Yet it was obvious from the jump that Bassitt and Mazeika were having trouble getting on the same page — a developing situation nipped in the bud in the first, when Eugenio Suarez inexplicably strayed too far from second and got himself picked off to short-circuit both a potential Seattle rally and a minor New York firestorm. But the respite was brief: Bassitt looked out of sorts all night, departing in the sixth after giving up just one run but having put in a lot more work than his stat line would suggest.
Meanwhile, the Mets put three runs on the board against young George Kirby and his substantial hometown rooting section, though that was less on Kirby than on the abysmal defense behind him. Kirby looks like a keeper on a Seattle staff that has no shortage of them, with excellent control and a precocious grasp of how to keep hitters befuddled — in that sense he reminded me of Marco Gonzales, Friday night’s starter, though with much better stuff.
Kirby’s early nerves and that porous defense sent him packing after four innings and the Mets handed a 4-1 lead to Seth Lugo, but a sense of creeping unease never left the proceedings. And indeed, Lugo allowed two of the first three Mariners to reach in the seventh, setting the stage for Chasen Shreve to surrender a long home run to Jesse Winker, whose trip around the bases would have been only slightly more theatrical if staged by the WWE. (Which didn’t particularly bother me aside from the effect on the scoreboard — baseball’s too much fun to be played like a slightly more aerobic version of Sunday Mass.)
But Winker was barely done flexing and mugging for the fans in left field in the bottom of the seventh when a considerably less likely hero entered the fray. That would be Mazeika, who somehow jerked a high 97 MPH fastball on the outside of the plate into the right-field stands to give the Mets back the lead. Fireballing M’s reliever Andres Munoz looked astonished, which made him a subset of everyone else — how, exactly, had Mazeika done that?
Whatever the secret, he had done it, and so the game rolled inevitably on to the ninth, ending with a perfect bit of theater: Former Mariner wunderkind Edwin Diaz facing Winker, the self-proclaimed antagonist, as the final out but also the tying run. Their mini-drama didn’t disappoint, with Diaz mixing sliders and fastballs and Winker refusing to fan on that evil slider as the two Mariners ahead of him had. But then Diaz came up in the zone with a fastball at 100 — his hardest pitch of the night — and Winker swung through it and the Mets had won. Won in unlikely fashion on a very strange night when everything felt vaguely upside down, but won nonetheless. And that will make up for a lot of resentments and oddities.
by Jason Fry on 14 May 2022 12:01 am The Mets have now played the Mariners 16 times in their history, but such a matchup will always feel a bit like a videogame showdown with a weird little cousin. “You want to be the Mariners? C’mon, really? It’s the AL West — I don’t know any of those names. Hell, half of them look made up.”
Still, a surprising (at least to me) 103 Mets have also been Mariners, going back to original M’s Leroy Stanton, Doc Medich and Tommy Moore. Robinson Cano and Edwin Diaz, inevitably, are the most famous members of Club M&M, though for fans of a certain age John Olerud will always the one who hurts the most. And some recent Met discards have had success out in Seattle, most notably Chris Flexen and Paul Sewald.
A bunch of Mariners possibly fictitious and apparently real showed up at Citi Field Friday night, minus former Met prospect Jarred Kelenic and his .140 batting average, to face Max Scherzer and the Mets. What followed was a taut, entertaining and ultimately frustrating game.
Scherzer put on what we’ve come to take for granted as his usual show — doing unspeakable things to hitters with his four top-flight pitches, stalking around in the dugout with his performatively terrible hair, and putting his team in position to win. He saved the best for last: After walking new Seattle import Mike Ford on a 3-2 changeup that sure looked like it dented the bottom of the strike zone, a more-infuriated-than-usual Scherzer went back to work with the bases loaded and one out against Steven Souza Jr., one of those Mariners I’m not sure wasn’t invented by a EA Sports intern. Scherzer’s final pitch of the night was a slider that Souza spanked to Eduardo Escobar who converted it into a tidy 5-4-3 double play.
That just meant the game was tied, though — the Mariners had broken through for a lone run against Scherzer in the fourth, when chaos avatar and outfield provocateur Jesse Winker slashed a cutter that got too much plate for an RBI single. Meanwhile, the Mets were stymied by Marco Gonzales, a soft-tossing lefty who kept changing the eye levels of their hitters, allowing him to throw 88 MPH fastballs past them up high. It was an impressive performance — Buck Showalter would probably call Gonzales a low-heart-beat guy — marred only by the fact that it came in service of the wrong team.
Drew Smith replaced Scherzer and hit his first bump of the season, losing the strike zone and then (it turned out) the game on an RBI single to Ty France. The guy on the long side of that score? None other than Paul Sewald, about whom my feelings are somehow complicated in a single direction. Sewald was ill-used as well as unlucky as a Met, forced to work against his strengths, and became immediately more effective under a different coaching regimen. Good for him. But still — that was Paul Sewald out there. Doughty but doomed Paul Sewald, Jonah of the RMS Bullpen, forever tricking you with stretches of mild competence until he hung another slider and reminded you who he was and apparently always would be.
Sewald didn’t hang a slider Tuesday night, but he did leave a fastball in the middle of the plate to Pete Alonso in the eighth. Alonso tattooed it. He demolished it. He vaporized it. The only problem was that the ball shed about 50 feet of expected trajectory in flight, somehow coming down in a Mariner glove on the warning track.
The same thing had happened to Jeff McNeil against Gonzales — a home run transmuted into a long out.
Now, a rational person would blame the fact that the Mets and Mariners were playing in conditions typically found at the bottom of an aquarium, with every ball leaving the bat with a wet blanket over it. But I am not at the moment a rational person — not after watching Paul Fucking Sewald, who lost his 14 first fucking decisions as a Met, pick up the fucking win in his debut as a Citi Field opponent. Of course he did, because baseball is relentlessly weird, but get in my way during this rant and I’ll go Full Scherzer on you.
No, I choose to blame the ball, which Rob Manfred has apparently dictated should now have a core of lead instead of springy stuff. Or perhaps Manfred has messed up the Earth’s very atmosphere as part of his endless quest to inflict additional problems on baseball while doing nothing to address its actual ones. I mean, I wouldn’t put it past him.
It’s also possible that the Mets just dropped a close game because stuff happens. But I’d rather blame Manfred.
|
|
