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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 30 April 2022 1:03 pm No-hitters can leave you speechless in the moment but have you saying all kinds of things you hadn’t previously uttered in the days, weeks, months and years that follow. As Mets fans, we found ourselves speaking both excitedly and differently after June 1, 2012. When your focus turns from “when are we gonna get one of these?” to “we got one of these,” your thought processes and speech patterns will inexorably alter.
Much as we had phrases like “Nohan,” “134 pitches” and “Mike Baxter” infiltrate our lexicon ten years ago, we have one overwhelmingly beautiful word to bandy about now: since.
The Mets have their first no-hitter since 2012.
The Mets have their first no-hitter since Johan Santana’s.
We are celebrating a no-hitter for the first time since the first one.
Which is to say we have two, which is twice as good. And it wasn’t the Friday Night Game of the Week on Apple TV+, which is even better.
If No-Hitter I unfolded in operatic fashion — an umpire pleasing the gods by committing a narrative-altering faux pas; a left fielder writhing in agony as he preserves the integrity of the libretto; a manager practically rending his garments in the shadows, mentally tortured by the twist of fate that has fallen into his lap; the heroic figure at the center of the action who shall give his left shoulder to reach the destiny his people wished for him and themselves; plus some wind and rain for atmosphere — I found No-Hitter II, with its five arms to hold it, akin to an irresistible remix engineered to get the club up on its feet. A quintet of the hottest producers in the business went into the studio and added an array of bells, whistles and pulsations to a familiar number. The sum of hits per nine innings was still zero. The end result simply sounded different from what we’d come to expect.
When Arthur Baker deconstructed and reconstructed Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” into its Blaster Mix form in the summer of ’84, every rock guy I knew raced to call it “fun,” but more to rationalize it than celebrate it, as if AOR talking points had been distributed nationwide. Baker had turned a Springsteen song that was already the toast of (heaven forefend) pop radio into what five years earlier might have been referred to as a disco record. By 1984, of course, disco was dead in name, yet rock guys couldn’t stand to be reminded it ever thrived, let alone continued under other guises. When one of their own — The Boss! — signed off on the reimagining of one of his compositions as something with a good beat you could dance to…don’t worry, they assured one another. It’s fun.
 Who doesn’t love a pulsating remix? A combined no-hitter is fun, too, as we’ve already established. It’s unapologetically happy and peppy and bursting with love. The weight of the world doesn’t have to sit squarely on the surgically repaired anterior capsule of a single decorated southpaw enlisted in a futility-battered quest grimly passed down through generations that had wasted their summers praying in vain for a savior to rise from these streets, or perhaps a trade for an ace from Minnesota, for a hitless outing to resonate. Opera, Dick Clark suggested to his WZAZ listeners in the episode of The Odd Couple where Felix and Oscar win a car, is “music with a lot of killing”. Indeed, Johan slew all those no no-hitters ghosts that had haunted us from 1962 forward. We shook that world off our shoulders in 2012.
 Who doesn’t love appetizing combinations? Ten years later, a merry band of men in black — Tylor Megill, Drew Smith, Joely Rodriguez, Seth Lugo and Edwin Diaz — animated our spirits. Who doesn’t love a no-hitter? Who doesn’t prefer to smile rather than stress? Who doesn’t love the teamwork when it has a chance to make the dream work, even if few of us entered Friday night dreaming this specific dream? Once it was clear Tylor wasn’t going to be permitted to compete beyond the first five frames (88 pitches, short Spring Training, chilly April evening, comparatively slight track record of career innings notched, no argument), everything else was a matter of deciding how badly we wanted to consume this particular combo meal. A side of Drew…a dab of Joely…a large Seth (easy on the ice)…and pour some Sugar on it. It may not have gone down quite like a prime cut of Santana, but it grew more and more appetizing as the night wore on.
 Who doesn’t love teamwork? If the Mets somehow didn’t get the order exactly right, there’d still be some fries in the bag, there’d still be a win over the Phillies, and there’d still be that pristine Nohan safely encased in glass. The combined no-hitter would go nicely next to it, but obtaining it wasn’t the matter of life or death that getting that first one felt like for more than half-a-century. Turns out we got a little extra life.
A no-hitter every ten years. A fan could get used to this.
National League Town commemorated The Second No-Hitter in New York Mets History with a twelve-minute spasm of audio giddiness. You and four of your Circle of Trust colleagues can listen here.
by Jason Fry on 30 April 2022 1:47 am Back in the endless days of weird frustration before Johan Santana, before IT HAD HAPPENED, I had a thought that would sneak into my head — despite my earnest attempts to shoo it away — when a Mets pitcher was in doomed pursuit of the franchise’s seemingly unobtainable first no-hitter.
Please don’t let our first no-hitter be a combined one. Because that would be lame.
That felt snobby and entitled — as a diehard fan of a franchise that was pitching rich yet inexplicably no-hitter poor, who was I to be choosy? And if that’s the way things had unfolded, I bet I would have made it work. I would have been leaping up and down and stalking around and repeating little rituals, the way I did that night in June 2012 when I found myself in an ESPN Zone at Disney World, somehow the only person in the place who knew what was on the line as Santana stared down the Cardinals.
Still, I’m glad the Mets put only one name in the record books when their time finally came. Because as young baseball fans, that’s what we’re trained to expect a no-hitter to be — a grueling contest in which one man has to stare down nine others at least three times, increasingly tired and essentially alone. Close your eyes and tell me what you see. Maybe it’s the starter sitting in the dugout as his teammates bat before he faces the final three hitters, his expression cycling between weariness and determination and perhaps now and again a flare of impatience. He’s alone, superstition having thrown up a force field around him that no teammate is allowed to violate.
That’s the model. But if you watch enough baseball you learn it’s not always quite like that.
After he left the Mets, Tom Seaver threw a no-hitter wearing a Reds uniform, and watching the aftermath on This Week in Baseball I thought something seemed strange about it — the famously stoic Franchise looked oddly giddy, his air less that of a man who’d achieved some degree of immortality than that of a man who’d found a winning lottery ticket in the wastebasket. Which was pretty much what had happened: Seaver cheerfully admitted he’d had basically nothing and improvised, passing up strikeouts he couldn’t get (he only had three in the game) in favor of coaxing grounders from the Cardinals. The man who’d been frustrated by Jimmy Qualls and Leron Lee and Joe Wallis on nights when he had his entire arsenal working had somehow pitched a no-hitter when those weapons were missing.
That was an early lesson that baseball could be really weird. A couple of years after Seaver’s no-hitter, Len Barker pitched the 10th perfect game in big-league history. I knew my baseball cards, so I was dumbfounded: Len Barker? What was he doing pitching a perfect game? (That game also produced one of my favorite baseball stories: When Barker called his grandmother to explain that he’d faced 27 batters and retired them all, she said “that’s wonderful, Lenny — I hope you do even better next time.”)
I finally saw a no-hitter a couple of months after Barker’s perfect game — Nolan Ryan no-hit the Dodgers in a game of the week on national TV, the fifth of his career. I was thrilled — and let myself daydream about what it would be like to see one in person one day. Eventually I got my chance — though not exactly how I’d dreamed of it. In 2015 the Mets were on the short end of no-hitters twice, and Emily and I were at Citi Field both times: first for Chris Heston of the Giants, and then for Max Scherzer of the Nats. Scherzer finishing the job wasn’t a surprise, as he had ungodly stuff and the Mets looked shell-shocked the entire game, but Heston doing so was — the Mets played patty cake with the Giants infielders all night, which generally yields at least an excuse-me-single somewhere along the line. But by then I knew this could happen: I’d read about Seaver on his off-night, and Barker’s perfecto, and later ham-and-eggers whom the baseball gods had made golden for a night. (Looking at you, Philip Humber!)
By the time the Heston-Scherzer double down rolled around, the Mets had their no-no at last, which meant I was a bit more sanguine about such things. Their weird asterisk had been removed, so I figured I could let go of years’ worth of agony — Kiss my ass, Kit Pellow! Suck on this, Paul Hoover! — and wait with relative equanimity for destiny to come calling again.
Which is pretty much what happened.
Now that I’ve seen a second Mets no-hitter — and a combined one at that — I can report that it’s pretty fun, and surprisingly low-stress. If Joely Rodriguez or Seth Lugo or Edwin Diaz had yielded a little parachute over the infield I think I would have said, “well, that’s too bad” and gotten back to wishing we’d put up more runs, because the Phillies are a terrifying mix of hitters who destroy everybody and hitters who specifically destroy us. Instead, we got the weird combo platter of Tylor Megill, Drew Smith, Rodriguez, Lugo and Diaz, horse-whispered across the line by James McCann, and it was wonderful. Wonderful, and full of the ironies and echoes and grace notes that baseball specializes in.
Like Megill not looking particularly sharp in comparison with his other 2022 starts. His location was off and the Phillies kept grinding through long at-bats, driving his pitch count up and leaving me convinced that outcomes were about to revert to the mean in unpleasant ways, except they never did, because baseball is weird.
His successors pitched solidly, and by the time Lugo arrived I was obeying superstition, making sure I said “C’mon, [name of pitcher] — c’mon baby” before every pitch, adding a heartfelt “hit it to anybody” once there were two outs. That’s an overlay on my every-game ritual of noting “24 to go” after a scoreless first and then updating by threes as long as there’s reason to. Back in 2012 I had a minor jolt of existential panic when Santana reached the ninth: Should I break form and say “two to go” and “one to go,” or would the baseball gods notice that and smite Johan for my crime? I solved that by following my usual ninth-inning ritual — one finger raised and displayed to my fellow outfielders (who don’t exist), then the forefinger/pinkie combo to indicate two outs, and then it doesn’t matter what you do. In 2012 the baseball gods decided that was the correct form, obviously. (You’re welcome.)
This time around my biggest worry was Diaz, whom I do not trust for reasons fair and un-. In the eighth, I all but pleaded with the Mets to push another run across, so that Diaz wouldn’t have two things to fuck up (as I put it honestly if unkindly on Twitter). They didn’t and so Diaz came on to the sound of trumpets to face Bryce Harper and Nick Castellanos and J.T. Realmuto, which is about as tough an assignment as it gets. I could easily imagine, say, Harper walking and Castellanos rapping a ball between two dismayed infielders and the crowd moaning and then reluctantly cheering and then lapsing into shocked silence as Realmuto slammed a ball into the bullpen, followed by sackcloth and ashes and a blood-red moon and witches and bats wheeling overhead in place of the planes heading for La Guardia.
Except Diaz was pretty goddamn close to immaculate, striking out all three Phillies, with Realmuto dispatched on a trio of unhittable sliders. Sometimes it’s not just OK but wonderful to be wrong.
When it was over the Mets didn’t seem quite sure what to do, settling for a minor to moderate hugging scrum that was gleeful but not quite on the level of a hard-fought walkoff, followed by the usual postgame hijinks. Pete Alonso and Brandon Nimmo dumped a barrel of energy drink on Megill, perhaps after doing the math and concluding it was too complicated to throw 5/9ths of the barrel on Megill and 4/27ths of it on Smith and then … oh screw it where’s Tylor? There was an endearing interview with Buck Showalter, who noted that Jim Abbott was on the verge of being dropped from the Yankees’ rotation when he threw a no-hitter on his watch (there’s that weirdness again) and then declared that the scribes didn’t really want to talk to him and vamoosed. The hurler quintet and McCann sat for questions, a session notable mostly for revealing that Megill and Smith hadn’t realized what was happening (or at least they claimed not to — I wonder if that’s some weird pitcher omerta) and for McCann’s musings that a combined no-hitter is different because you’re changing your approach to the hitters multiple times.
And of course there were those echoes and grace notes. Like the Mets throwing a no-hitter wearing their black uniforms, the same combination worn by Santana that night. a familiar sight in Santana’s day. Or the fact that it was Gary Cohen’s birthday, which he’d dismiss as unimportant despite none of us agreeing.
In a few months or years, what stories will we spin out of this in discussing the 2022 Mets or the pitchers involved? I have no idea, because how could I? But I’ll let myself daydream.
Remember how they lost that testy game in St. Louis with everybody getting thrown out taking extra bases and there was the near-fight and then they went home and no-hit the Phillies? Boy, that was an indication this was going to be a special year.
Tylor Megill smothering the Phils on that cold night at the end of April was a sign — he showed us he could win without his best stuff, that he was really learning to pitch.
Wow, that was the night we really started to trust Smith and Rodriguez. And just look at them now!
What I remember is that was when I decided I’d been unfair to Diaz. A week later I was calling him Sugar, and a week after that I meant it.
OK, maybe not that last one. And maybe not any of them. Baseball’s weird, after all. Weird, but often also a lot of fun — like when five guys team up to blitz a slugging lineup and you clap your hands and beam at all the silly postgame stuff and try out saying “combined no-hitter” and decide it’s not lame at all, but pretty wonderful.
by Greg Prince on 28 April 2022 8:45 am Yoan Lopez came up and in on Nolan Arenado in the eighth inning of Wednesday afternoon’s almost incidental Mets loss to the Cardinals. Like what Shawn Estes threw in the greater geographic vicinity of Roger Clemens’s backside twenty years ago, Lopez’s pitch didn’t touch the batter he was facing. Unlike with Estes, Lopez’s pitch did what it was supposed to. It transmitted a message. We’ll see if anybody receives it.
Before the 10-5 downer to end an otherwise successful road trip was in the books — Carlos Carrasco wasn’t Cookie-crisp; England Dan and Sean Reid-Foley wasn’t the answer; Long Island’s Own Steven Matz withstood one shaky frame in four; and the lofty baserunning ambitions of Mark Canha and Luis Guillorme refused to be fully realized (each man was thrown out going for an extra ninety feet in the sixth while the Mets trailed sizably) — Lopez did what every baseball fan intrinsically understands to be the right thing. He brushed back the other team’s usual third baseman after the Mets’ third baseman, J.D. Davis, had been struck where his left ankle meets his left foot. Davis had a full count on him at the time. As Ron Darling asked regarding Genesis Cabrera’s errant delivery, “How can you miss that badly on a three-two pitch — honestly?”
Honestly, after nineteen instances of one pitcher or another missing badly and instead hitting Mets over the season’s first twenty games, Buck Showalter was no longer interested in rationales. Instead, through whatever wink, nod or direct instruction was necessary, the manager let it be known to Lopez, who’d never pitched for the Mets before but surely rates a warm greeting at Citi Field if he’s not optioned to Syracuse by Friday, to do a little something about the HBP epidemic that’s been on the Mets’ minds and bodies all season long.
Thus, the pitch up and in on Arenado, who it should be noted isn’t a pitcher. The pitcher doesn’t bat in the National League anymore. By the bottom of the eighth of a 10-5 game, no pitcher was going to bat even if the NL had retained real baseball rules in 2022. Perhaps it’s poetic justice that Arenado, payback target du jour, was serving as designated hitter. More likely, it was a matter of Arenado leading off to start the home half of the inning. He was the first guy the Mets had a chance to move off the plate, which is what a pitcher is supposed to do in that situation.
Personally, I’d prefer some variation on the demented lunch-period game we’d play in high school. It was called asses-up handball. If you were the first combatant out, you faced the wall and somebody got a shot at your buttocks. It was stupid then, but at least it was direct. Like Roger Clemens at Shea in the early (if not early enough) 2000s, it should have been Genesis Cabrera putting himself in the box and on the line. Arenado didn’t throw at Davis. I’m not sure Cabrera threw “at” Davis. We can be certain too many pitches have gotten away from too many pitchers. Somebody has to face the wall and the music.
Arenado, to be clear, wasn’t hit. He didn’t have to limp away as Davis did minutes prior. He didn’t have to be tested for a concussion as Pete Alonso had the night before. He didn’t have to handle his rib cage with care as Starling Marte did that same night. Nolan Arenado was simply the proxy for the rest of the league. This one’s a warning, fellas. We’re winning most of our games, but we are rapidly losing patience.
Instead of stepping out, glaring briefly, and getting on with his at-bat, Arenado disrupted the kabuki. The batter used his outdoor voice and then some. Next thing you know, all the St. Louis Cardinals and all the New York Mets are on the field, sorta, kinda going at it. Most every man fancied himself a peacemaker. Maybe not Cardinal first base coach Stubby Clapp, who went after Alonso (just what Pete needs: a case of the Clapp). Coach Stubby was ejected. Arenado was ejected. Everybody fumed. We hated the Cardinals again. I mean more than we already did for 1985, 1987 and 2006. Some grudges are simply dormant until reignited.
 Timeless advice. (Courtesy of the Gary Nusbaum archives.) In situations such as these, we reflexively become Romans rooting for the lions, which is more rewarding than what people in Detroit doing the same thing get for their troubles every fall. “GET ‘EM!” is a perfectly valid reaction from the sidelines. Nineteen passes to first or not, it stings to watch the guys you root for take nineteen for the team. I don’t blame Buck for telling Yoan to experience the briefest of control issues. It was a ball, by the way, not a hit by pitch. Gotta keep saying that. Nolan, who has been known to field splendidly in his time, mishandled his reaction to the pitch that got him snarling. His rookie manager, Oli Marmol, clutched his own pearls a little too tightly, too: “When you come up top like that and jeopardize someone’s career and life, yeah, I take exception to that.”
Showalter, veteran of a few rodeos, sounded more serene and sane. “I’ll let them handle their players,” Buck said about St. Louis’s protestations. “I know our player [Alonso] got hit in the head and went to first base.” While everybody else is playing checkers, Showalter is managing baseball.
Lopez’s unremarkable role in the ongoing 2022 subplot of these Mets being hit and not enjoying it couldn’t help but bring to mind Shawn Estes’s wayward payback pitch at one of the all-time villains in Met lore. In 2002, when Estes, after missing Roger Clemens’s humongous ass, whacked his two-run homer off the man who’d thrown a ball and a bat at his current batterymate Mike Piazza in 2000, it may have been the only instance in the history of baseball where your pitcher takes their pitcher — both a despised opponent and one of the best the game had ever seen — over the wall and it registers as a consolation prize. Never mind that Estes wasn’t a 2000 Met (he was one of the Giants the Mets defeated in the NLDS on their way to meet Clemens in the World Series). Yoan Lopez had been a Met for an inning and change when he was assigned the task of clearing his new ballclub’s collective throat over being hit nineteen times. Yoan said, with one pitch and so many words, “AHEM” and “OK.”
That’s how you do it, the fan who’s been watching baseball longer than Buck Showalter’s been managing baseball says from the proverbial cheap seats. It’s easy to dismiss Arenado’s flared temper when it’s not a 94-MPH fastball coming near us. But it’s also what we do. Sort of like detesting the Cardinals.
Hot Rod Kanehl and Miguel Cabrera get together in this week’s National League Town. Go up and in to your favorite podcast platform or listen here.
by Greg Prince on 27 April 2022 8:57 am Word to the National League: stop hitting the Mets. It’s not helping your cause. You’re getting them angry. And you’re getting yourselves beat.
The Mets have taken pitches to the body more than any other NL team. The Mets have also piled up more wins than any other NL team. Perhaps there’s a connection. If you’re trying to impede the Mets’ winning ways by hitting them before they can achieve another victory, it’s not working.
Even if this is all one big non-conspiratorial coincidence, you’re only making the Mets more determined to do damage to you.
On Tuesday night in St. Louis, Cardinal pitchers let three get away, including one toward the face of Pete Alonso, fortunately deflected by his helmet’s C-Flap, and one into the ribs of Starling Marte. Marte’s came with the bases loaded, automatically driving in a run. Obviously not intentional, we assume.
Both times, the Met batter in question took exception, as did the Met manager and those populating the Met dugout. The Mets are fuming at being dinged. They occasionally emerge onto the field to make their feelings known. They express themselves best on the scoreboard.
The Cardinals riled the Mets twice? The Mets defeated the Cardinals a second night in a row, 3-0. Chris Bassitt shut out the Redbirds for six innings, three relievers took care of the rest of business. Two runs were driven in by conventional methods of bat hitting ball, not ball hitting body. Throwing near if not necessarily at Mets isn’t working for the opposition. The Mets might be stopped by better pitching, better hitting, better deployment of traditional tools. They’re not being stopped by HBPs. A little bruised, not at all battered. Competitively, they’re splendid. Physically, they’re fine. But baseballs thrown at high speeds are not benign projectiles.
Somebody needs to determine if there’s something about the balls used when the Mets are hitting that lets them go so askew. Meanwhile, get a grip, pitchers in other uniforms. Figure out why your throws are so errant. Work with your catchers on direction. We don’t mind your putting Mets on base. We have a problem with how you’ve done it a few too many instances. As do the Mets, apparently.
Nineteen games in, the Mets are 14-5. No, hitting them isn’t working. Try something else if you dare.
by Jason Fry on 26 April 2022 12:35 am Pitchers’ duels are one of the earliest tests of budding baseball fandom — dull to the casual observer who wants action and doesn’t get why those around him are oohing and aahing over hitters swinging and missing or just looking flustered at balls zipping from hurlers’ hands to places they weren’t expected to wind up. It takes a certain amount of time watching the game to understand that there’s a whole lot of something underpinning what looks like nothing — a labor demanding incredible physical skill as well as tactical cunning and laser focus.
And when both starting pitchers are operating at that level, it’s something special. One of my fondest baseball memories is standing in a bar on a beautiful May night in Rockaway Beach watching Pedro Martinez and Roger Clemens battle it out at Yankee Stadium — a pitchers’ duel so riveting that diehards and casual fans alike instinctively arranged themselves into perfect rows, as if the bar had become baseball church and we’d assigned ourselves to invisible pews.
But pitchers’ duels are premised on the promise that one of the combatants will yield, cruelly but inevitably. Someone will tire or make a lone inexplicable mistake or be done in by bad luck — two pitchers deserve to win, but only one can. That’s the classic template, but sometimes the game doesn’t cooperate.
Sometimes it’s a draw, which means the duel ends without a resolution, giving way to the anticlimax of middle relievers alternating to see who’ll draw the black spot. Which can be entertaining baseball but is lousy storytelling: Picture a showdown on a dusty western street where the guy in the white hat and the guy in the black hat stagger away, wounded but alive, allowing a parade of drunks to take turns blasting away at nothing in particular. Or a battle of the bands where the headliners never return for encores, leaving the opening acts to come on and say they guess they’ll play a few songs you’ve never heard of.
And sometimes the script gets torn up into little pieces and you get insanity.
Max Scherzer — he of the chewing-up-glass intensity, terminal hat head and relentless dugout pacing — simply annihilated the Cardinals’ tough lineup, trotting up his ungodly array of pitches and looking like he could do whatever he wanted with them. His counterpart, Miles Mikolas, might not have been as flashy but was every bit as good, befuddling a tough Mets lineup. (I felt vaguely bad for knowing almost nothing about Mikolas, and a little better when I realized his track record against us consists of a single start two years ago — he won — and a lone inning long before that as a baby Padre.)
Both Mikolas and Scherzer were done after seven, meaning it was time for reliever roulette. The Cards’ Genesis Cabrera — whose name I now know isn’t pronounced like the start of something — passed his test while Trevor May did not, giving up a leadoff single to perpetual nemesis Yadier Molina and another to lavishly locked Harrison Bader. May is the Mets’ most Jekyll-and-Hyde reliever and this was one of his unfortunate transformations — the Mets scratched and clawed through various defensive and pitching strategies but to no avail, as May left an offspeed pitch in the middle of the plate for Tyler O’Neill to whack into the outfield for a two-run single.
That looked fatal, particularly after Robinson Cano flied out as the tying run in the ninth — perhaps when the team doctors get done poring over Jacob deGrom‘s MRI they can evaluate Cano and what sure looks to me like a case of utensil-spinal impingement.
Mark Canha was the Mets’ final chance against Giovanny Gallegos, whose pace on the mound makes one want to give Rob Manfred permission to institute the pitch clock a year early. Canha has been an intriguing player so far, an Olerud-like professional hitter with a calm demeanor and a sneakily ironic sensibility. (This bit of MVP deadpan is from an interview as a A’s rookie.) He fell behind against two Gallegos sliders, refused to bite at three out of the strike zone, and then slapped Gallegos’s seventh pitch up the third-base line. That looked like a solid AB with an unfortunate outcome — it was a tough play for many third basemen, but not typically for Nolan Arenado.
Arenado, though, couldn’t get the handle. He took extra steps searching for the grip, ran out of time and uncorked a high throw to first, making the score 2-1 and leaving the Mets still alive. Travis Jankowski took over for Canha at first and took off when Jeff McNeil laced a pitch down the right-field line. Jankowski flew around second and steamed into the neighborhood of third, the precinct of the so far famously aggressive Joey Cora. Cora held him — which made me gasp in dismay, though the replay showed that to have been a good decision. And so the game would come down to Dom Smith, who’s been saying all the right things or rather not saying any of the wrong things despite finding playing time hard to come by.
Smith smacked a Gallegos fastball up the right-field line, where it was smothered behind the bag by one of the Cardinals’ many annoying Gold Glovers, in this case Paul Goldschmidt. But Gallegos had been caught spectating. Dom hustled to first as Gallegos tried to close ground and then dove in safely — the one time in approximately 5,000 where diving into first is indeed the right play. Gallegos belatedly looked home, just in time to see McNeil diving across the plate in Jankowski’s wake as the go-ahead run.
That was it for Gallegos but not for the Mets; SNY wasn’t quite back from break when Brandon Nimmo slammed T.J. McFarland‘s first offering into the right-field stands for a two-run homer. The Mets led 5-2, and while the much-ballyhooed best fans in baseball weren’t booing, it was only because they were as shocked as everyone else. Edwin Diaz navigated the bottom of the ninth with only minor fuss and they’d won somehow — I mean, just look at this record scratch of a win-probability chart.
If the Mets make something of this season, we’ll tell Just So stories about this game and throw around words like fire and grit and heart. And even if they don’t, that was the kind of game that keeps you in your seat for dozens and dozens of grindingly dull non-comebacks, waiting for the karmic wheel to come back to that giddy, gleeful space that makes all the misfires worthwhile.
by Jason Fry on 24 April 2022 10:05 pm We’ve been where the Diamondbacks are now — a team with hope for the future that’s trying to remind itself that future can’t be hurried. The guys who could be a part of it need to get there at their own pace, with all the growing pains implied; the caretaker players are important as teachers and public faces but will be gone by the time that day arrives. If it arrives, baseball being unpredictable in many ways but cruelly reliable in its ability to spill ink on blueprints.
We’ve been there, but mercy isn’t part of the equation. And so the Mets did what we hoped they would, not getting in Arizona’s way as the D-Backs made a whole bunch of mistakes that essentially handed the visitors a 6-2 win. So far the Mets have won five season series and lost none, and while I don’t claim to be a statistical savant, I suspect if they do that all year we’ll all wind up happy.
They won’t, of course — I’ll step on the moment by reminding us that the 2018 Mets also won their first five series en route to winning a grand total of 77 games. If you go back into the Faith and Fear archives, you’ll find all sorts of giddy posts about 11-1 starts, 17-9 Aprils and Mickey Callaway‘s Midas touch.
(In other words, don’t go back into the archives.)
Still. 12-5 will work nicely, with the record backed up by the eye test. Tylor Megill would have been forgiven if he’d spent the winter resting up after a season that took his arm places it had never been; instead, he reinvented his delivery and his approach to pitching, with great results so far. (Megill still got beat on his second-best pitch for his final act of the day, but hey, Rome and building schedules etc.) Francisco Lindor got two hits and nobody particularly noticed, which is a sign of how different his year has been so far. J.D. Davis whacked a home run into the right-field stands, which is an excellent way for making himself a bigger part of the plan. There was nifty fielding by the tragically Samson’ed Luis Guillorme, an impromptu game of leap frog by Starling Marte, and no Edwin Diaz to make my stomach turn gymnast. Oh, and the Mets pulled off the routine 1-2-3 put-out, thanks to a terrific play by James McCann on a ball that caromed off Seth Lugo‘s foot and somehow shot straight back at his catcher.
With so much going right, seeing Buck Showalter‘s Resting Pissed Face in the dugout only added to the entertainment. Buck will never be able to match Dallas Green for Managerial Facial Expressions You Don’t Want to See — Dallas witnessed a lot of baseball slapstick inflicted by his charges on the paying customers, and his helpless, gape-mouthed incredulity in response was the only good part of a lot of bad nights. Buck has a much better club and a slower resting heartbeat, so you mostly get steely glares over tight lips — but seriously, doesn’t Jeremy Hefner look a bit nervous every time Buck starts melting laser-beam trails in the field with his eyes?
Anyway, on the Mets go to St. Louis, somehow finished for the year with all things related to the Diamondbacks, states that stay on rebel time out of some kind of weird cowboy-hangover surliness, Madison Bumgarner, Sedona red and other annoying colors that don’t belong on uniforms, D. Baxter the Bobcat and his adventures in the uncanny valley, and games in an ill-lit stadium that looks like someone roofed over a second-tier mall. (Seriously, if you ever go to a Diamondbacks game … it’s deeply weird.)
It will be interesting to see what the Diamondbacks have become by 2023, what with Nick Ahmed and Christian Walker and Pavin Smith and Seth Beer and Sergio Alcantara. Maybe they will have taken a step forward or maybe they will have gone sideways, in which case Torey Lovullo will have started exhibiting a few of Dallas Green’s expressions. We’ll find out then; for now, they’re other clubs’ problem. We’re on to St. Louis, successful formula in hand and fingers crossed.
by Greg Prince on 24 April 2022 1:18 pm On Saturday night in Phoenix, we learned the Mets’ starting pitching depth only goes so far. Because of injuries, we had seen our No. 1A through No. 7 starters acquit themselves brilliantly this season. We haven’t seen No. 1 — Jacob deGrom — but we can vouch for his brilliance. Everybody else, from Max Scherzer (we’re not calling him No. 2) on through Taijuan Walker for a couple of pre-IL innings, Chris Bassitt, the rejuvenated Carlos Carrasco and the so-called depth pieces Tylor Megill and David Peterson, has delivered in real time.
Alas, we may have to grope around a bit for an eighth starter.
Trevor Williams, at least based on one game’s evidence, may not be the optimal answer for when we have to dig deep to take a stopgap start in a week that involves a doubleheader. Williams has some legitimate credentials as a big league starter, with a fourteen-win season from 2018 the shining star of his portfolio, but he didn’t have a lot of work heading into Saturday at Chase Field. Perhaps it was rust showing or perhaps it was what you get when you have to go to your No. 8 starters. Williams wasn’t necessarily hit hard, but he was hit. In the first two innings of work in what was projected as a bullpen game anyway, Trevor allowed three runs on six hits. To begin the third, he surrendered a resounding double that later came around to score after Sean Reid-Foley replaced him on the mound.
And that was Trevor Williams’ first start of the season, all but assuring the Mets were on their way to a languid 5-2 loss. They were welcome to mount an effective comeback, but they declined. As we’ll remind ourselves, as long as the losses are the aberrations, that’ll happen once in a while.
What hadn’t happened before, meaning at all, is a Mets pitching career encompassing exactly one inning and three strikeouts. But it happened Saturday, via the enticing right arm of Adonis Medina, a pitcher making his sixth major league appearance and first as a Met. Medina was called up with the all-hands nature of the night in mind (Peterson was the numbers game victim to create space) and was assigned the bottom of the eighth to provisionally prove himself.
Can you prove anything in one inning of work, even provisionally? Medina proved one inning can be enough to make an impression. The kid the Mets purchased from Pittsburgh as Spring Training was morphing into Opening Day faced three batters: Geraldo Perdomo, Daulton Varsho and Ketel Marte. The kid also struck out three batters: Geraldo Perdomo, Daulton Varsho and Ketel Marte. No other Met ever has pitched only one inning and did nothing but strike out everybody he faced. Per Baseball-Reference, seventeen Mets have thrown exactly one inning in their tenure in orange and blue (and possibly black). Nine of them were position players. Eight have been pitchers by trade. Only Medina has pitched at a ratio of 27 strikeouts per nine innings, albeit over only one inning. Granted, most relievers who get an inning get another and eventually they’re gonna pop up a batter or produce a ground ball or, sadly, give up a walk or a hit. Nobody stays perfect forever.
For the moment, however, Adonis Medina of the New York Mets is perfect. As much as we learned we can never have enough dependable starters, we already knew we never have enough competent relievers. Until a hitter gets the best of Adonis, we will gaze longingly at his gorgeous stat line and swoon.
by Jason Fry on 23 April 2022 3:23 pm Jeff McNeil lay face down in the Arizona turf, the last out of a 6-5 Mets win safely in his glove. He wasn’t hurt; he just needed a minute.
At that point, we all did.
The Mets moved to 11-4 on the season, which I will use bleeding-edge analytics to categorize as pretty damn good. But it wasn’t exactly a stately march to victory: The game started as a tense affair, became seemingly comfortable, turned a lot less comfortable, descended into debacle territory, and then rose again to end as a triumph. That’s about a week’s worth of emotions packed into the back end of a Friday night and too much of a Saturday morning.
David Peterson was terrific, but Zac Gallen was pretty good himself in facing the Mets for the second time in a week. Pete Alonso was all over the early innings. He ended the first by smothering a ball down the first-base line, followed by a heave to Peterson at first made while lying on his back, but later let in a run with an overaggressive attempt to pursue a ball that should have been McNeil’s. Alonso plays baseball like a Labrador retriever who just lapped up several spilled coffees, and most of the time that’s charming, but on defense our roamin’ first baseman really needs to render unto second basemen those things that are second basemen’s. (Arizona first baseman Christian Walker would later retire Starling Marte on an essentially identical play, which seems weird but actually isn’t because baseball is so reliably weird.) Alonso also chipped in two RBIs in less-than-Olympian fashion: one on a 120-foot pop-up that plopped down in right and the other on a 75-foot chip shot in the direction of first. Not the stuff that inspires odes to Ruthian power, perhaps, but whatever works.
All looked well at stretch time, thanks to a home run by James McCann that traveled about as far as half a week’s worth of McCann groundouts, a redistribution that McCann ought to try more often. But Trevor May gave up a homer to Walker to bring the D’Backs within one, and with two out in the ninth Edwin Diaz did the kind of thing we’d like to believe he no longer does: He left a 1-0 slider in the middle of the plate for Daulton Varsho, who sent it over the right-field fence just beyond Marte’s glove for a tie game.
Like McNeil (sorry, spoilers), I’m going to need a minute here.
The metrics new of fangle and old of school both say Diaz is a pretty effective closer. And no sane fan of any team trusts their closer. Regardless of allegiance, we remember with piercing clarity the saves that get away even as the fuss-free conversions blur into anonymity. Has there ever been a Mets closer I trusted? Off the top of my head, I’d say Jesse Orosco and Randy Myers, but I guarantee if you got into a time machine and quizzed teenage me about either man, I’d fly into a rage about blown saves that older me has mercifully forgotten. I once booed the reliably infuriating Braden Looper so vociferously that I felt something give way in my throat and could only produce a rusty croak for a day and a half. I still wake up in a cold sweat thinking about various Armando Benitez misdeeds, John Franco had me braced for impact every time he took the mound, and Jeurys Familia quick-pitched us into what became October oblivion. Hell, even the sainted Tug McGraw‘s legend was created by overcoming a long stretch in which he’d proved thoroughly unreliable.
Closers exist to torment you, so it’s really on the entire fraternity that I distrust Diaz as completely as I do. Still: Diaz could convert his next 200 saves, give me a kidney and perfect the tokamak fusion reactor, thus ushering in a golden age of free and clean energy for humanity, and when he took the mound I’d still cross my fingers and mutter at him to please not fuck it up this time.
Diaz fucked it up this time, and so the Mets played on, under rules that would have been incomprehensible to young Jace muttering about Orosco or Myers.
McNeil was the Manfred man, moved to third on a (productive) groundout by McCann, but didn’t break on contact when Brandon Nimmo grounded to short. That left it up to Marte, who hit a grounder that Matt Davidson fielded on the long hop behind third. Davidson threw accurately to first and just nipped Marte, who immediately exhorted his employers to challenge. Such insistence is often based more on faith than evidence, but Marte was right: His toe had arrived a split-second before Davidson’s throw, and the Mets had new life and a one-run lead, which they entrusted to Seth Lugo.
Lugo is a frustrating commodity: a highly useful pitcher with a balky elbow that makes his appearances even more of a game of reliever roulette than the MLB baseline. Some nights Lugo reports for duty with hiss on his fastball and sharp break on his curve, and some nights those essentials are missing. This, mercifully, was the first kind of night: Lugo fanned the first two Diamondbacks and then induced a popup from Walker that looked harmless at first and then less harmless as it carried into the outfield and McNeil and sundry outfielders pursued. But McNeil secured it, fell on his face, and the Mets were down but the opposite of out.
There are no moral victories in baseball — if you play with valor and gallantry and tally fewer runs than opponents who conducted themselves like they replaced their baseball caps with KFC buckets, all you’ve done is lose. Similarly, though, there are no immoral victories — come out on the long side of the final score and there is no asterisk denoting crummy middle relief, overamped first basemen or closers’ trustworthiness.
Wins are wins — even the ones that call for a little postgame meditation among the blades of ersatz grass.
by Greg Prince on 21 April 2022 5:38 pm Now it’s getting serious, to the extent that anything can be serious after fourteen games. The Mets are off to a seriously good start and maybe then some. I’m not sure when a start just becomes the season, but fourteen games will do for our purposes. A seven-game road trip with five wins, a seven-game homestand with five wins.
What’s to complain about? That’s a rhetorical question. I’m not interested in a cataloguing of petty gripes, thanks. There are going to be lousy nights, because baseball is notorious for its lack of winning ’em all, but maybe we’ll learn to take the less rewarding of ’em in stride. We do in the abstract. Sitting through them is another matter.
Sitting through games like Thursday afternoon’s 6-2 Mets victory, on the other hand, is a genuine pleasure. Carlos Carrasco gave up a run in the second inning, and guess what — neither the world nor the game ended. The Carrasco who got clobbered by every team in every earliest frame last year like the first inning was the personification of Kyle Schwarber himself overcomes adversity this year. Not that he’s faced much adversity. The batters who face Carrasco would tell a different story from their perspective. Between that single run scoring in the second and the leadoff runner reaching in top of the eighth, eighteen consecutive Giants bit off more Cookie than they could swallow. Eighteen San Franciscans up, eighteen San Franciscans down…and you know how steep those hills in San Francisco can be.
Any particular magic to eighteen consecutive batters retired? No more so than ten wins in fourteen games. Except Carrasco of the 1.47 ERA filed away six perfect innings in a row before allowing a solo home run after seven-and-two-thirds, which is simply very sweet, and the Mets are the first team to reach double-digit victories in the majors. I know that latter statlike factoid because one of MLB’s media rights holders tweeted a big graphic that shouted 10 WINS on our ballclub’s behalf, which made me think that if you give the Mets 14 games, they’ll give us something special.
At the very least, they’ll give us 148 more games.
Hopefully, they will continue to hit like they did at various inflection points of Thursday’s homestand finale, with Eduardo Escobar going deep for the first time as a Met; Francisco Lindor going deep for the fifteenth time as a Met at Citi Field (he’s already in the Top Twenty in that particular category careerwise); and Mark Canha chipping in a clutch two-out, two-run single to extend the Mets’ lead to 5-1 in the third. From there, Carrasco could relax and we could practice breathing easily.
The Mets’ 10-4 record represents the fourth-best 14-game start in franchise history, tied with 1972, 2006 and 2007, trailing only 2018 (12-2) and 1986 and 2015 (both 11-3). Those seasons had loads more games, too, along with varying trajectories and endings. I don’t throw this data point onto the informational table to draw absolute conclusions in April. Just showing you that a start of 10-4, good buddies, doesn’t happen often. Might as well enjoy it until the first pitch of the fifteenth game.
To co-opt a phrase from the late, great C.W. McCall, let these Metsies roll!
Still standing tall outside Citi Field and therefore not a dream is that Tom Seaver statue, a miracle of Metsian sculpting reflected upon in the latest of episode of National League Town. Listen here or anywhere you choose…except maybe over 1010 WINS, whose all-news format makes it an iffy choice to hear Mets podcasts.
by Greg Prince on 21 April 2022 9:11 am The game was lost when balls off the bats of Giants fell in and the balls off the bats of Mets didn’t.
The game was lost was when the Mets pitcher who’d previously given up almost nothing gave up a bunch.
The game was lost when the only Belt in the game delivered the only belt of the game.
The game was lost when the Mets’ resident speedster turned greedster and tried to steal a base that would have been better off left alone.
The game was lost when the visiting third baseman for whom this ballpark used to be home, and for whom the home infield was more useful as a stage for human emotions than as a showcase for elite defense, stabbed a potential momentum-turner out of the air.
The game was lost when the Met dugout revealed three temporary managers rather than the one usual manager, which is to say the Mets had zero managers.
The game was lost coming out of halftime when the Nets couldn’t stop the Celtics…sorry, that was the other thrill of my winless Wednesday night.
The one you came here to join me in moping about was the 5-2 defeat the Mets endured at the hands of the Giants, a game that wound up close on the scoreboard but failed to get there in feel. San Francisco pulled ahead early and never yielded its advantage (the Nets could take a lesson). Carlos Rodón went largely untouched. Chris Bassitt didn’t, even if he lasted a long while because no manager anywhere any longer has to think about pinch-hitting for the pitcher — which was fine, because the Mets had no manager. Certified Leader of Men William Nathaniel “Buck” Showalter had to take care of something medical and left the store in the six nominally capable hands of three lieutenants: Eric “Chavy” Chavez, Dick “Dicky” Scott and Jeremy “Hef” Hefner. I would have preferred a single interim skipper, just on principle. Lot of first mates on Wednesday night, but not a single Jonas Grumby to take charge.
The crowd around the helm didn’t matter. The Mets’ mini-rallies didn’t matter. Bloops working to one team’s advantage more than the other didn’t matter. The Mets’ inability to match Brandon Belt in the power department didn’t matter. Starling Marte getting erased at second on a two-on, two-out stolen base try that probably shouldn’t have been attempted, given that DID I MENTION THERE WERE TWO OUT, could have mattered, but didn’t. The two-on, two-out line drive that never touched grass (via Dom Smith’s sweet swing, bitterly thwarted by the glove of Wilmer Flores, to name an unlikely leaping defender) mattered in the moment, but didn’t matter ultimately. Even the last-second reprieve derived from Marte’s redemptive sprint down the first base line earning a reversed call with two out in the bottom of the ninth didn’t matter. There were always two out when something seemed ready to happen but didn’t.
It all mattered until none of it mattered. The Mets weren’t going to find a way to not lose this game. Some nights are just like that.
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