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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 27 May 2022 2:50 pm With apologies to Moonlight Graham awaiting a lifetime for his first at-bat in Field of Dreams; Blue Moon Odom, mainstay of the dynastic 1970s Oakland A’s; Wally Moon’s “Moon shots” down the right field line when the Flatbush-abandoning Dodgers put down temporary stakes at the woefully misshapen L.A. Coliseum; and even Pete Alonso’s shall we say acting in his current commercial endorsement of CarShield (“it’s an absolute moonblast to the third deck”), when we think of the Moon in the context of baseball, we think of the 1969 Mets, who proved correct the cynical conventional wisdom that man would walk on the Moon before New York’s reliably laughable National League franchise ever won a pennant. The Mets planted their championship flag at Shea Stadium fewer than three months after Neil Armstrong took the stars and stripes to a new frontier, but technically, man did get to the Moon first. If you bet NASA and took the over, you cashed in.
But c’mon. The wonder of Apollo 11’s journey and its temporal proximity to the ’69 Mets conquering disbelief on this here rock was and remains too good a storyline to pass up. You can’t tell the tale of the Miracle Mets without inevitably pausing on July 20 to note the Mets were in Montreal, outlasting the Expos in ten and then enduring mechanical trouble with the aircraft intended to fly them home. Our astronauts could get where they were going, but our suddenly second-place Mets were stuck on the ground, waiting out their delay by witnessing Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the lunar surface via airport bar TV.
“I wondered what was more unusual,” that Sunday afternoon’s hero Bobby Pfeil told Wayne Coffey in 2019’s They Said It Couldn’t Be Done, “Man walking on the Moon or winning a game with a pinch-hit bunt single.” Ron Swoboda had similar thoughts as he looked back for Art Shamsky’s After The Miracle: “Everything was possible in ’69. The ‘man on the Moon’ was a part of that season we could never forget.” Although “We Cherish the Ground the Mets Walk On” was the winning entrant among 3,611 bedsheets and placards on Banner Day come the Sunday of Woodstock weekend August 17 — it encompassed actual grass (maybe not the kind abundant at Yasgur’s farm) — the one that lives on as indication of where fans’ heads were between July and October at Shea is one that pops up on the official 1969 highlight film. It reads…
1969
THE YEAR
THE METS
WILL PUT THE
PENNANT ON THE
MOON!
And so they did, Met-aphorically speaking, capturing the NL pennant on October 6 and earning the world championship banner ten days later. The Moon, as Robert Morse as Bert Cooper sang to Jon Hamm as Don Draper on July 21, 1969, may belong to everyone, but the Mets things in life are free to be associated with us.
 2023 is the year Lunar Codex will put the Mets on the Moon. This is why when I very recently noticed a news story on television involving a glimpse of the Mets wordmark and something about artwork going to the Moon, and it had nothing directly to do with the summer of ’69, I had to investigate further. In a sense, it was only tangentially related to the reality-altering events of fifty-three years ago, and then only if you wanted it to be. In another, how could I not see or hear something involving the Mets and the Moon and not discern the intragalactic connection?
Which is to say I wanted it to be.
My conduit to the Mets meeting the Moon anew was someone at least a little touched by the twinned entities at the center of our 1969 consciousness. Like me, Nanette Fluhr was a youngster in the age of Armstrong and Apollo. Her dad woke her up at their New Jersey home to watch Neil take his one small step/giant leap. And like me, Nanette grew up with an affinity for the Mets, though maybe not exactly like me. The Tom Seaver trade kind of turned her off from baseball for a while, she confesses, but she did cotton to the club as a kid, coming as she did from strong National League roots (Grandpa loved Dem Bums in Brooklyn) and raising a son who certainly adored the likes of Reyes and Wright. “And,” Nanette wanted me to know, “we all loved Mike Piazza.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we’re getting to what I saw on News 12 Long Island one lazy Saturday morning. It was a roundup show called On a Positive Note, sharing an array of good-vibes notes from around the Metropolitan Area. The segment in question focused on Nanette and the fact that a representative sampling of her portraiture — she’s a most accomplished painter — would soon be headed for the Moon on a mission that is admittedly of a lower profile than Apollo’s, but still something literally out of this world.
Step right up, then, and meet the Lunar Codex, an ambitious, artistic project curated by distinguished futurist Samuel Peralta in which three time capsules will be launched moonward. All the details are here, but the upshot of these moonshots is digitized versions representing some of the beauty we as a people are capable of creating back on Earth are being transferred to a flash drive in anticipation of launching and landing in the next couple of years. Included within this mission will be highlights from Nanette’s portfolio.
That News 12 piece showed a montage of her splendid work, without specifying exactly which paintings were chosen for the Moon. This made me curious because one of the paintings shown was of a pre-adolescent boy wearing a Mets cap and a Mets jersey, staring in from the mound for his catcher’s signal with an expression that could best be described as determination. As you may know if you’re a regular here, I’m on constant vigil for instances of the Mets infiltrating the popular culture. Every December, I endeavor to capture what I’ve seen in the preceding twelve months in an annual feature we call the Oscar’s Caps, named for the Mets cap Oscar Madison wore regularly on The Odd Couple. These sightings usually involve TV shows or movies or perhaps passages from novels. Fine arts, however, rarely come up. And the Moon? When the Mets hit your eye like a big pizza pie in a story about a lunar expedition, that’s amore.
It’s certainly curiosity. Thus, I set out to contact Nanette Fluhr; explain my purpose in bugging her; and ask if that portrait in which the word METS, accompanied by the familiar NY, was visible on television would be heading for the sky.
Before I asked, the answer was nope.
But — get this — because I asked, the answer became yup.
 Sign of a quality Bar Metsvah. The Mets are going to the Moon! More specifically, “Lonny” is going to the Moon. Lonny, you see, is Nanette’s son. In 2012, he was nearing Bar Mitzvah age and, having a talented mom, Lonny thought it would be neat to greet his guests not with a standard sign-in poster at the Mets-themed party he was planning but with an appropriate portrait conveniently painted by his in-house artist, who is only an all-star in her professional circles. It’s not like Nanette had nothing else to do (she was due at an exhibition in Beijing) and it’s not like circumstances didn’t conspire against her a bit (maybe you’ve heard of Superstorm Sandy), but how often does your son’s Bar Mitzvah come along? Working off a photograph of her Mets fan son in his preferred garb, she created a portrait that was not only the hit of his coming-of-age celebration, but wound up on display at the Long Island Children’s Museum. It captures a boy on the cusp of manhood taking seriously the one thing we can all relate to taking seriously: baseball.
“He was happy-go-lucky in all his other pictures” from the photo shoot Lonny participated in as prelude to his mother choosing something perfect to paint, Nanette recalls. “But he was so serious” once he got into his Mets-tinged headspace. Initially, she referred to the portrait as “Determination,” though she now simply calls it “Lonny”. It stands today as a reflection of another time. Lonny is 22 today, but Nanette is grateful to have such compelling evidence that he was once 12 going on 13.
When it came time to answer Dr. Peralta’s initial call regarding what works of hers she’d like to see make the Gallerist Collection of “itinerant art, photographs and poetry” and make their way to the Lunar South Pole in 2023, “Lonny” did not make the cut. Not because she didn’t cherish it. If anything, it was because she cherished it too much. Part of the deal in choosing Moonbound art was, for the most part, it had to be art that was out in public, up for sale. A portrait of her son on the eve of his Bar Mitzvah, was not something a proud and sentimental mother had any intention of selling.
But what are deals without loopholes? Once your correspondent got in touch with Nanette to find out if “Lonny” was going to make that big trip, the query moved her to ask Dr. Peralta if an exception could be made to whatever rule prevented her from adding “Lonny” to her selections. “Let’s get ‘Lonny’ on board,” was his response.
 Coming to a Moon near you. Thus, “Lonny” is going to the Moon — and the real-life Lonny is over the moon about it. Turns out Nanette’s son is “an astronomy nut…obsessed with the vastness of the universe” who was a little disappointed that his likeness wasn’t originally ticketed for liftoff. But now that he, and by extension, the Mets are part of the Lunar Codex, everybody’s happy. I’m thrilled because by watching TV and getting curious, I’ve apparently played some small role in getting the Mets to the Moon, just like that banner in 1969 suggested was franchise destiny. Nanette is delighted not only because she could do this for her son, but because she’s earned an Oscar’s Cap. No kidding. Not that she knew what an Oscar’s Cap was before I told her about them, but she played the one and only cigar-loving Oscar Madison in a junior high sketch, so how perfect is all of this? “Serendipity” is the word Nanette uses to describe this sequence of events. Amazin’ fits the bill, too.
by Greg Prince on 25 May 2022 9:56 pm To paraphrase the late, great Roger Angell (for neither the first nor last time in this space), specifically what he said about his presence in Boston during Game Six of the 1986 NLCS while the Mets were cheating death in Houston and baseball had “burst its seams and was wild in the streets” in New York, what I missed by not being awake for the Mets’ stunning comeback and subsequent backslide amid the wee, small hours of Tuesday night may have been less than what I gained from having absolutely no idea of what transpired at Oracle Park as I sawed wood. Drifting off with SNY on across the living room is nothing new, particularly when a continent separates us from our home team. But the 8-2 trailing of the Giants, combined with an overwhelming desire to visit dreamland, compelled me to smash the “off” button on the remote control, something I almost never do, regardless of hour, when the Mets are in progress. Zs sometimes win out, just as the Mets occasionally appear destined to take an L. “I just hope this” — Chris Bassitt’s 11.32 ERA in two starts versus San Francisco in 2022 — “isn’t a thing if we see these guys in the playoffs,” was my last waking baseball thought as I reluctantly silenced Gary and Keith.
Less than six hours later, I stirred to tentative life on the same couch where I conked out in the fifth. I discerned the time from the clock that has sat atop the Princes’ sturdy standard-definition TV since 2004, deduced that the game I slept on must be over by now, then reached for my modern phone in search of the final score. There was a notification of a text greeting me. Chances were it was either a marginally helpful automatic reminder (a prescription is ready, a payment is due) or it was Kevin. Some Metsian correspondents reliably email me. Some choose to DM or IM their LGMs. If this wasn’t a utility or a pharmacy — and it wasn’t — the medium was going to be the message. I instinctively knew the text was Kevin’s; Met-related; and potentially momentous. Kevin wouldn’t be texting me during a late night West Coast game on a whim.
“Holy shit,” is what Kevin needed to let me know at 12:42 AM. Three minutes after, he added, “It was 11-8 at the end of the 10 run 8th in 2000.”
YOU MEAN WE WON? That wasn’t my response via text. That was what I thought, because who invokes The Ten-Run Inning and all it implies on spec? Kevin, especially; he doesn’t mess around when it comes to Mike Piazza. It wasn’t yet 5:30, so I wasn’t fully unfuzzed from sleep. I needed further confirmation that sleep was a bad choice. I made my way to the MLB app. It would tell me what I needed to know — if not what I wanted to read.
The Giants, as you know by now, won, 13-12. There was indeed an 11-8 Mets lead, which didn’t jibe with the 8-2 deficit I shut my eyes on, but these Mets are regularly unimpressed with other teams’ advantages. It still looked too weird to be true. I picked up my iPad and hoped Baseball-Reference’s late city final had been delivered to my digital doorstep.
It had. The full box score with its line-by-line play-by-play was hot off the presses. The Mets had hopped from 8-2 to 8-4 on a Lindor homer in the seventh, BB-Ref explained, and then leapt the leap of a thousand Endys by scoring seven runs in the eighth. Seven-run innings have become to the 2022 New York Mets what portraits were to Felix Unger, commercial photographer: a specialty.
Mets magic greeted me in data detail. The bold type indicating run-scoring plays. The multiple Rs indicating multiple runs driven in. The pleasingly steep column of Met at-bats. A three-run triple from Lindor (six RBIs in all) catapulting the Mets above the apparently undaunting hills of San Francisco. The lead taken on a sac fly by Pete Alonso. Ohmigod, it really was 11-8, Mets.
So how did we lose, 13-12? I rode up and down the Baseball-Reference rollercoaster to piece together however many of the three hours and fifty minutes of highs and lows I missed in my misguided fit of drowsiness. Why do I keep seeing Joc Pederson’s name? And wait…we gave up the lead, got it back, and lost anyway? The penultimate Met lead was surrendered by Drew Smith, huh? All right, but what about Edwin Diaz?
Oh. Or, more accurately, oh, Edwin. For Diaz’s first three seasons in Queens, that would have been snarled. Here, it was offered with empathy. I felt bad for the closer who’d mostly slammed doors since April. Surely he’d done his best. They all had. They would have been forgiven by dawn’s early light for throwing in the towel as I had. It’s been too beautiful a season to date for serious recriminations. That they held that towel in abeyance with as much grip as they could manage instantly placed my gut reaction to this game in a special cupboard I keep for losses that are too gratifying in their feistiness to festoon with anger.
There was the third-ever Subway Series game, June 18, 1997, two days after Dave Mlicki pitched The Dave Mlicki Game. David Cone was no-hitting the Mets until the seventh. Trailing by one in the eighth, pinch-runner Steve Bieser, at third, teased a balk from the intermittently perturbable Cone and earned a free trip home to tie the game. That we lost it in ten almost didn’t bother me. We’d taken the first game, lost the second and spiritually rated a draw in the finale versus the big deal defending world champions across town. We’d done good, I told myself. It’s been too beautiful a season to be mad at coming close and falling short. We’re on our way up.
There was Game Six, the 1999 NLCS, Braves 10 Mets 9 in 11 innings, except it had been Braves 5 Mets 0 in the top of the first, and everything thereafter filled me with shock and pride (give or take a few balls out of the left hand of Kenny Rogers). That the pennant was lost that night at Turner Field is no small detail, but I can never really rile up over how the Mets ultimately fell. They were practically squashed from the outset yet somehow they almost won, almost forced Game Seven, almost went to the World Series and hypothetically almost won it all. We’d done good, I told myself again. It was too beautiful a season to be mad at coming close and falling short. We glimpsed the mountaintop.
That’s what Giants 13 Mets 12 felt like, especially since I didn’t live through its crushing conclusion in the conscious sense. On the iPad, via the team-friendly Mets.com highlight montage and in the string of quotes testifying to the benefits of clean living and staunch determination — “Remarkable to watch them compete every night”; “The whole team did well”; “We came from behind, and they came back in the eighth”; “I’m super proud of everybody here” — the near-miss was a triumph in the soul if not the line score.
I love the feel of perspective in the morning. It feels like victory.
***
Cribbing Angell again, this time from his regretting wasting Memorial Day weekend in the country while the 1969 Mets found their footing at Shea…
MAY 25: Giants take third game of series while I stay awake for entire affair. Bad planning.
This one goes down as The Thomas Szapucki Game, a far cry from what it meant to be Mlicki a quarter-century ago. We last met Szapucki on a steamy night somewhere on the outskirts of Atlanta at the end of last June. The final then was 20-2. The final Wednesday afternoon was only 9-3. Neither could be processed as any kind of win, not for the Mets (who broke their heartening streak of wins following losses and finally dropped a series to a National League foe), not for the youngster whom we have to stop meeting like this. In 2021, Szapucki was one of a seasonlong long parade of relief cameoists. This time he was plucked from the bottom of the Mets’ starting pitching depth chart to fill an unforeseen hole in the schedule. Once you got past March’s projected rotation — it used to include Jacob deGrom — then the injuries that have occurred since (Megill, Scherzer), then dealt with the icy fallout from last Friday’s Denver snowfall, after which no starter on staff reached Wednesday with ample rest, you found yourself relying on your No. 9 option.
If you can’t get a few decent innings out of a pitcher you deem competent at Triple-A, you may want to drop him into double-digits as you rank future possibilities for a stray spot start. Young Thomas, bereft of command, rhythm and savvy, gave the Mets one-and-a-third frames of the most dreadful sort. Joc Pederson was still scalding the ball, as if rock ‘n’ rolling all night allowed him to party every day. Evan Longoria was at least as hot. Mike Yastrzemski warmed to Szapucki’s stuff, too. The San Francisco trio homered four times among them. Wilmer Flores doubled twice before Buck Showalter realized Szapucki shouldn’t be there for us. It was 9-0 and the second wasn’t done. Four relievers proceeded to hold San Fran at bay the rest of the way, but by the point Szapucki’s short stint served to instigate a full employment act for Williams, Holderman, Shreve and Lugo, the game was irredeemably all wet. Three Met runs crossed the plate between the third and the eighth, and we now cling semi-seriously to the notion that we’ve got them right where we want them whenever we’re way behind, yet there was no hint of the kind of comeback that roared while some of us slept. The spirit can only will so much in a single 24-hour period.
This week’s episode of National League Town pays its respects to both Roger Angell and Joe Pignatano, two figures who immeasurably enhanced the Mets-loving experience from 1962 forward. You can listen listen here or wherever you seek your podcast pleasures.
by Jason Fry on 25 May 2022 2:03 am Once upon a time the Mets were down six runs in the seventh and with my eyes on bedtime I composed a minor recap I knew wasn’t a classic but thought did its duty well enough, particularly grading on the curve for West Coast night-owl duty. It was called “Ten Commandments for a West Coast Loss,” and it was mildly melancholy and warmly philosophical and other things you can probably guess.
And then all hell broke loose and the backspace key and I spent some quality time together.
In the eighth the Mets scored seven runs on eight singles and a triple, sending 12 men to the plate yet somehow only seeing 38 pitches. They didn’t need to work deep counts because slapstick reliably ensued — fielding miscues, balls sneaking through holes and pretty much any other form of mayhem one might imagine. When the dust settled some time later — 40 minutes? a week? — that 8-2 deficit had become an 11-8 lead, Stephen Nogosek was in line for his first career win after doing yeoman work in a seemingly lost cause, and the entire dugout was exchanged dazed grins.
Ah, but innings feature two halves. Drew Smith retired the first two Giants and it looked like San Francisco would slink off to think about what they’d collectively done, but then Smith allowed a single and a walk and Joc Pederson hit his third home run of the game, a cruise missile that came down in McCovey Cove. The Giants settled for sending nine guys to the plate, collecting four singles and that homer on 36 pitches, and the game was tied.
So of course Dom Smith tripled to lead off the ninth and of course he scored and somewhere in there I told my kid, “Pederson is totally coming to the plate as the potential last out.”
And of course Edwin Diaz came out and looked shaky and got a double play and walked a guy and allowed a single and holy cats there was Pederson again, with a muse singing of his rage. Would he hit a fourth home run? No, but a bolt of a single up the middle was enough to tie the game (and give Pederson an eighth RBI) and before anyone could get done being mad at Diaz Brandon Crawford had spanked a single to left and there was going to be a play at the plate on Darin Ruf, recently seen caught in the netting like a crew member doing pre-viz for The Hobbit, and I allowed myself a brief bump of hope before realizing that the throw was coming in a half-second too late, which was correct and the Mets had lost.
I mean, that was madness. It was bonkers. You could have had both teams play in zero gravity and do Whip-Its before each pitch and it wouldn’t have been much nuttier. And somehow these two teams will be expected to play tomorrow, instead of sleeping for three days and then starting therapy.
Yes, tomorrow. Which, for those of you who aren’t lunatics, means today. Late-afternoon matinee New York time, Thomas Szapucki reporting for circus duty. As I now don’t need to tell you, anything could happen and probably will.
by Greg Prince on 24 May 2022 2:41 pm Joe Pignatano was the bullpen coach. He was the bullpen coach when I got here. He was the bullpen coach forever. I’m using past tense only on a technicality. Forever is a mighty long time.
Piggy, as he was known also forever, has died at 92. The ballpark in whose bullpen he famously cultivated tomatoes preceded him in death, but like Joe, Shea is eternal. Picture an affable chaperone keeping loose tabs on a clowder of purring arms — firemen, long men, swingmen, journeymen, screwballers, forkballers, young fastballers seeking the zone, old junkballers fooling the years — and you see Joe Pignatano. Dad’s in the dugout. He can’t be everywhere. “Hey, Piggy,” he asks his next door neighbor, porch to porch. “Do me a favor and watch the kids while I’m working.”
 Piggy, preparing for another season. Sure thing, Gil. And Yogi. And Roy McMillan, Joe Frazier and Joe Torre. Piggy was on the staff of every Met manager from 1968 through 1981. He tended the bullpen’s vegetation and he raised relief pitchers. His garden proved plentiful.
Joe Pignatano, in case you hadn’t heard while he wore a Mets uniform, came out of Brooklyn. Of course he did. “He was a Brooklyn Italian,” his son told ESPN’s Elizabeth Merrill not long ago. “You give them a patch of dirt and they plant tomatoes.” Naturally enough, Piggy sprouted as a Brooklyn Dodger. He tagged along to Los Angeles when the Bums decided they needed to be glitzier and ritzier. The backup catcher to Johnny Roseboro stayed tight with certified Boy of Summer and future Hall of Famer Gil Hodges. The last miles of their active-player journeys crossed paths on the 1962 Mets — Piggy’s final batted ball resulted in a triple play in his team’s final loss among many — and joined forces anew in Washington mid-decade. Hodges managed the Senators. Pignatano became his trusted aide. Like fellow lieutenants Rube Walker and Eddie Yost, they followed the manager home to New York. With Gil, they grew a champion.
On April 2, 1972, as Spring Training ground to a striking halt, Gil golfed with his trusted coaches. Then he fell, never to rise. Pignatano was with him to his dying breath. Then, once there was a season, he stayed at Shea, assisting Yogi Berra as he would assist the men who succeeded Gil’s successor. Eventually Piggy took on first base coaching duties, but that, like the past tense, gets filed under technicalities. He was…is always our guy in the bullpen, always one of Gil’s guys, always as warm and funny like everybody says, always around to relive 1969 — and a Mets fan always finds time to relive 1969.
Go ahead. Pick up the dugout phone. Call down to the pen. Piggy will step around the vines, answer promptly and relay the proper instructions to the right lefty and the appropriate righty. The man knows his crops.
by Jason Fry on 24 May 2022 1:57 am What was going through Darin Ruf‘s mind as he lay on or perhaps in the netting in San Francisco while the ball he’d been pursuing bounced around somewhere nearby in an entire-world sense but entirely too far away in a make-a-baseball-play sense while a less-than-ideal quantity of Mets hustled around the bases?
Perhaps he was thinking that it might be a long night.
Or maybe he wasn’t thinking anything like that. Yes, two Mets scored on the play, but only two because the ball that had so rudely eluded Ruf did him a slight favor and hopped into the stands. There were two outs, it was only 2-2 and David Peterson hadn’t looked invulnerable out there, surrendering a home run to Brandon Crawford. And the Mets hadn’t so much pounded Alex Cobb as they had pecked at him with infield hits and little dunkers. And hey, slapstick is an occupational hazard when you’re a first baseman pressed into service in left field because a whole roster worth of outfielders are on the IL.
Maybe Darin Ruf is an optimist. I don’t know the man.
If he is, well, that was about to be tested. The next guy up for the Mets was Pete Alonso, and Cobb’s first pitch to him was a 12-3 curveball.
I know what you’re thinking. Jace, c’mon man. I know it’s late and West Coast recaps are tough, but for God’s sake you’re thinking of a “12-6 curveball.”
You’re right! That is what I was thinking of and presumably what Cobb had in mind too. But it wasn’t what he threw. The ball hung about midway down the center of that imaginary clock face, and at about 3 p.m. it encountered Alonso’s bat and then was last seen becoming a souvenir 391 feet away. It was 5-2 Mets, and that turn of events would make even an optimistic out-of-position first baseman feel a little down.
It was 5-2 and it would get worse, as Peterson settled in and the Giants’ bullpen surrendered some more infield hits and some of the outfield variety and two that went over the fence, with one hit by Jeff McNeil threatening to land in Alameda. Eventually they had outfielder Luis Gonzalez out there on the mound, and he put up a better line than Mauricio Llovera, who got whacked around enough to deserve at least two Ls.
Not a bad birthday for Buck Showalter. Not a bad start to the series in San Francisco. But when you win by 10, there’s not much bad to be found anywhere.
by Jason Fry on 23 May 2022 2:21 am The Mets have now played the Rockies for more than a baseball generation, but games in Denver will always seem bizarre — incredible shifts in temperature, snow-outs in late May, humidors and breaking balls (or the lack thereof), and the strange neither-here-nor-thereness of the team being far from home but not quite on a West Coast trip.
But the constant through it all has been that a five-run lead feels like a two-run lead, being ahead by three feels like a tie, and being up by one or two can even somehow feel like you’re behind. That was true from the jump, when the Mets helped the Rockies open Coors Field back in April 1995: The Mets came back from a 5-1 deficit when Todd Hundley connected for a sixth-inning grand slam, lost an 8-7 lead in extra innings (with nary a free runner in sight), took the lead again, and then got walked off by Dante Bichette. So was the template established: In Denver the other shoe is always about to drop, and when it does, the lack of air makes it land heavy. Succumb to a late-afternoon baseball nap and you can easily wake up to find home plate has been worn out by foot traffic and the score has gone from hectic to insane.
Very occasionally, though, you get a different kind of ballgame, one that resembles baseball on Earth. Back in 2010 the Mets won at Coors by a 5-0 margin behind Mike Pelfrey — the only time they’d shut the Rockies out in their home park. (Turns out I had recap that day and didn’t mention the feat, though for some reason I did include a still from Being John Malkovich. If you’re curious, the Mets have been shut out once at Coors Field, back in 2001.)
Then came Sunday.
Taijuan Walker may be the rare pitcher suited for arena baseball — Rockies hitters spent the better part of seven innings hammering his splitter into the ground, with only four outs recorded in the air. But the Mets didn’t have much luck against Austin Gomber, and the game was 0-0 in the sixth. Yes Virginia, at Coors Field. That was when the Rockies came apart, as Randal Grichuk turned a Brandon Nimmo single into a triple, followed by hits from Francisco Lindor and Jeff McNeil and an RBI groundout by Pete Alonso.
The Mets had a 2-0 lead, though this was Colorado, so it felt like they were actually behind — the first two Rockies singled, leaving Walker’s victory in danger of evaporating in the thin air. Walker coaxed a double-play grounder from Jose Iglesias, but pesky rookie Brian Serven slammed a ball past third.
Past third but not, it turned out, past Luis Guillorme.
Guillorme has been one of my favorites for years, with soft hands, a calm demeanor and flawless baseball instincts — he’s one of those players you can rely on to be in the right place and throw to the correct base without having to think things through. Severn’s hot shot knocked Guillorme backwards, but the ball stayed in his glove and he scrambled to his feet, completing the circle momentum had already begun, and fired a missile to Alonso at first, retiring Serven by two steps and getting Walker out of the inning. And he’s somehow hitting .338!
Of course, there were still six outs between the Mets and victory, which can be a hard road in Colorado — and the journey looked harder when Adam Ottavino sandwiched a pair of walks around a groundout. Ottavino rides his frisbee slider to great effect except when said frisbee starts sailing a little too far, in which case that slider can wind up riding him. It can be frustrating to watch, but Ottavino doesn’t scare, and he took apart the dangerous C.J. Cron on three pitches, then left in favor of Joely Rodriguez, after which Edwin Diaz secured the win.
Ho-hum — except a 2-0 win in Coors Field is anything but ho-hum. Here’s one to remember in another decade or so, when the Mets once again finish a game in Denver with that rarest of sights on the scoreboard — a zero.
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.
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