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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Jason Fry on 20 August 2021 1:33 am After a one-day respite, the Mets were back to doing nothing in particular, this time against the Dodgers. They showed little discipline at the plate, ran the bases poorly, and generally played the role of GENERIC OPPONENT, standing around looking poleaxed while the Dodgers bunched hits and played solid defense and loped off with the victory without breaking much of a sweat. The final score was just 4-1, but having been stupid enough to watch and/or listen to the whole thing, I can report that it felt like the Dodgers’ side of the equation was missing a zero, or possibly two.
If you can still bear to keep track, the Mets’ 13-game ride through Baseball Hell has started off 1-6. So if you’d like a silver lining, here it is: The stretch that will end the Mets’ season is more than half over. They’ll be beaten some more in L.A., fly across the country, have a guaranteed loss-free Monday (sucker — it’s an off-day!), and then be beaten by the Giants. After that, things will matter even less than they do now, and then it will be winter and a season that looked promising for a while, or at least diverting, will have curdled into another one you’re glad is over.
* * *
In times like this I turn for comfort to baseball cards, which have long sustained me when … wait, I’ve just been handed a report.
Oh. Oh no.
Baseball is parting ways with Topps after 2025 to strike an exclusive deal with Fanatics. Yeah, they’re giving the boot to the company that’s been synonymous with baseball cards, and with baseball, since the freaking Truman administration.
When I became a baseball fan in 1976, it was Topps cards that supercharged my fandom: Each of those little cardboard rectangles was a miniature baseball history lesson, filled with stats and personal information and intriguing facts about long-gone players and years and ballclubs. Now, all that will be gone — or at least it’s pretty seriously endangered right now. The best outcome might be hoping Fanatics buys whatever’s left of Topps and keeps the brand alive as a loss leader for retro fans like me. That thin sliver of hope — the scenario in which you’re thrown a bone by twentysomething MBAs who took a seminar in reputational capital — is the closest one can get to being a Pollyanna in these benighted days.
Here’s a strange, slightly ironic postscript: In 1976 Topps assigned the Mets the colors maize and sky blue, a palette more suitable to the University of Michigan than any outfit that played in Flushing. I knew those colors were inaccurate, but as a newcomer to baseball and baseball cards, they still imprinted themselves on my brain. Decades later, that color scheme yells out “Mets!” to me as loudly as the team’s actual one does.
Since then the flagship Topps set has become slick and shiny and crowned with foil instead of stained by gum, but Topps also honors its past with a nostalgic line. Topps Heritage began in 2001, with a look and feel that mimicked the 1952 design, and it’s advanced in sync with the company’s past ever since. That means this year’s Heritage cards channel the gleeful, faintly psychedelic Pop Art of the 1972 cards; next year the design will snap back to the staid, almost deliberately dull whiteness of ’73. When I read the Topps announcement, I did the math and needed a moment: 2025’s Heritage set, presumably the finale, will revisit the design from 1976. Barring some kind of corporate intervention, Topps will go out with a collector’s set mimicking the design from the year that I arrived and became a fan.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about that. Which is pretty much the way I feel about being a Mets fan these days.
by Greg Prince on 19 August 2021 1:46 am For eight innings, the highlight of the Mets’ Wednesday matinee in San Francisco was that I got to watch it as it began. That may sound like a lowlight from the perspective of the Mets’ five previous games/losses, but understand where I was coming from or at least where I was. I had taken my wife to the eye doctor for a followup examination related to a successful procedure she underwent recently. “The eye doctor” is actually an enormous ophthalmological practice wherein patients and those who drove them there are shuttled from waiting area to waiting area, with occasional brief intervals inside examination rooms. Visits to this enterprise remind me of what I once read about the NFL, that in a three-hour telecast there are maybe twelve minutes of actual football action.
In one waiting (and waiting) area, there was a television tuned to HGTV. I assume it’s a law that televisions in doctors’ offices are tuned to the most anodyne programming possible. Patients are on edge enough, as is the staff that treats them. Here, stare at these noncontroversial images of homes and gardens. The doctor will be with you shortly.
Apparently when you’re 92 years old, you may not stand for being told to sit tight and contemplate rose bushes. A 92-year-old lady whose age I knew because she had announced it out of bewilderment when she was told to check in for her appointment at a computer terminal (“I’m 92 years old! I don’t know how to use this!”) did not think much of HGTV. “This is so stupid!” she declared when a medical technician wandered by. “Put on something else! Put on cartoons!”
Better yet, “Put on the Mets game!”
That helpful suggestion was voiced by Stephanie, offering a common-sense solution to everybody’s waiting room blues. You’d think that would be me calling out, but I was honestly content to listen to the word picture on my phone. When I was younger, I might have been bumptious enough to request if not demand an available Mets game fill the nearest television screen. Should I make it to 92, I’ll probably be so again. But here in the latter portion of middle age that has made me accept certain realities, like doctor’s office waiting room TVs’ channels never change, I tend to roll with punches that don’t sock me in the face.
Son of a gun, however. A remote surfaced, my wife called out “Channel 60,” and — whoa — the Mets game was on at the doctor’s office! I was put in mind of the episode of The Office in which Kelly, the Mindy Kaling character, was given the opportunity to watch television at work for her birthday. Who gets to do that? Likewise, who gets to watch the Mets while enduring an interminable wait for his wife to see the doctor?
This guy! And everybody else in this particular waiting pod! The 92-year-old lady approved. Her companion lit up as well. “That’s right,” she remembered with admirable awareness of what matters in this world, “the Mets are in San Francisco.” The sound was muted, thus the game was easy for the agnostic to ignore, but I noticed several patients, particularly my elders, directed their optical attention to SNY with genuine game-watching purpose, no doubt strengthening their vision in the process. Older Americans (which I am close enough to being) understand that no matter how many things change, only a couple of things can genuinely be categorized under the heading National Pastime: baseball and being sure they’re gonna keep you waiting all day at the doctor’s office.
Mind you, what this unexpected video bounty allowed me to see was mainly J.D. Davis failing to run to first base on a two-out third strike that got away and Jonathan Villar getting picked off the same base an inning later. But, given the circumstances, it was vastly preferable to not seeing it.
Soon enough, the interminable waiting terminated; the actual business of the appointment was gotten on with; Stephanie’s eyes were deemed in suitable working order; and we were released into the cloudy Long Island day, listening to the game on our drive home and settling in eventually on our living room couch to take in the rest of it as we usually might. It hadn’t been much of a game from a Mets fan perspective, which also made it the usual. Tylor Megill had pitched well, no Met had crossed the plate, Steve Cohen hadn’t been proven wrong about the offense he owns, and a sixth consecutive loss doubtlessly loomed. At least it would end quickly and painlessly.
Ah, but just when you’re sure it’s safe to watch something else, the Mets run long. In the top of the ninth, trailing by the official score of futility (1-0), the Mets mounted a rally, which is to say Pete Alonso got plunked on the elbow. That’s a Met rally in the middle of August 2021. Fortunately, Alonso was wearing an elbow pad, and whatever stung didn’t slow him down when Michael Conforto singled and sent Pete to third. Davis then delivered a fly ball to deep right. It wasn’t necessarily extraordinary that the runner from third would come home on such a play, but it was almost shocking to realize Pete could trot in and tie the score. The Mets seemed less capable of registering a run than that doctor’s office TV seemed of being nudged from the home and garden channel.
But what are the Mets if not generators of miracles? We forget our heritage in the midst of a plunge from first place to third, crashing through .500 along the way. It wasn’t reasonable to assume they’d never win again, but it was instinctual. Yet here we were, with a whole new ballgame, and it would head to an extra inning.
That’s where we’d lose, right? That’s where instead of posting a quick run as teams chronically do when gifted a runner on second ahead of the tenth inning’s first pitch, the Mets protested. They didn’t file a protest, exactly. Instead, they had Patrick Mazeika attempt a bunt to move “free runner” Villar to third. Mazeika may as well have caught the pitch he was trying to bunt and jog it over to the third baseman so Villar could be more conveniently tagged out. That’s how well this bunt worked. It went into the scorecard as a 1-5 tag play, Jonathan out, Patrick on first. It came off more as a denunciation by the Mets of the “free runner” rule, which I endorsed in my heart, but didn’t care for in practical terms.
So the Mets didn’t score in the top of the tenth. Glory be, however. Edwin Diaz, in his (gasp!) second inning of work, prevented the Giants from winning ASAP. Nobody’d won in the tenth, so it was on to the eleventh. This time, the Mets resigned themselves to the existence of the odious “free runner” rule and used it to their advantage, with Travis Blankenhorn moving Jeff McNeil to third on a grounder and Conforto doubling McNeil home. Beaten down by recent events, I assumed the lead wouldn’t last long enough to make us winners, and sure enough, the Giants tied the game immediately in the bottom of the eleventh.
Yet they didn’t win it. Go figure. The Mets were still alive as a twelfth inning commenced. Hell, a twelfth inning commenced. That hardly ever happens in these get-it-over-with days. But on this day, as afternoon out west became nighttime back east, we kept going. Villar led off the dozenth frame with an RBI double down the left field line…for about a minute, until video replay confirmed, nope, it was a foul ball. Villar, already out from standing near first base and sliding into third base, proceeded to turn his presumed two-bagger into just another K. Typical Mets.
Atypical Mets: Mazeika the inadequate bunter singled Dom Smith to third, and Kevin Pillar, folk hero of months gone by if wholly ineffective at bat deep into summer, whacked a three-run homer to left. It went out of the park and everything! Mackerel was holy! The Mets were up, 5-2! And, for fun, McNeil doubled and Chance Sisco, a Triple-A name that hadn’t crept into our consciousness until the contingency backup catcher’s emergency backup was activated from the taxi squad, doubled on the first pitch he saw as a Met to make it 6-2. Ready to take a Chance again, indeed!
Have you noticed the epidemic of exclamation points in this essay? They’ve been stockpiled in storage, as we haven’t had much opportunity to get excited about our team until now (we use a different set of exclamation points to express disgust). Wednesday we had occasion for excitement. Conforto came through. Pillar came through. Mazeika came through. Sisco came through. At the very end, Jake Reed came through to record the final three outs that preserved the 6-2 victory. It was a breath of familiar air, provided by a burst of the veritable-stranger energy that informed the exultation that defined the 2021 season before we arrived at the point of quite rationally giving up.
Mostly giving up, that is. Not entirely. Not so fast. Not every pitch, at any rate. You don’t gotta believe, but it’s not gonna kill you if you revel in the good innings you manage to see for yourself.
by Jason Fry on 18 August 2021 12:12 am …fuck it, let’s do an actual Mad Lib.
The Mets lost again, continuing their painful slide, and what, really, is there to say?
There were some mildly encouraging moments, such as ______________ and the moment where ______________. And at least _______________ showed a little fight.
But it wasn’t enough. It hasn’t been enough for a long time. There was the usual offensive brownout, a record of failure that has gone from frustrating to inexplicable to just the way things are. There was the seemingly nightly misstep, in this case ____________. Of course there was some bad luck, such as the moment when ________, and now we all have to worry if __________ is hurt too. And hey, give the other guys some credit — how about when __________? That’s the kind of things good teams do, and the Mets don’t do nearly enough. All of the above was plenty, but of course as a bonus there was also Luis Rojas’s curious decision to _____________.
The Mets now have a record of ______, which seems incredible given where they were just a couple of weeks ago. Every night they have to look up a little further to see the ______ and the ______, while the ______ are a little closer to them in the standings.
When will it end? Well, the last game of the season is October 3, so after that the disappointments will be more abstract. Between then and now? You’re watching these basically identical games just like I am. You tell me what you think will change and why.
by Greg Prince on 17 August 2021 3:51 pm “A long flight across the night? You know why late flights are good? Because we cease to be earthbound and burdened with practicality. Ask the important question. Talk about the idea nobody has thought about yet. Put it in a different way.”
That was Jed Bartlet aboard Air Force One, somewhere over America, sometime late at night, advocating for the benefits of a nocturnal journey. Of course Jed Bartlet is a fictional character. As president on The West Wing, he also had what amounted to his own plane, so staying up late didn’t inflict much personal discomfort. But Martin Sheen as President Bartlet (and Aaron Sorkin, who served as Bartlet’s real-life speechwriter) had a point. There is something freeing about the wee hours.
The Mets began their West Coast trip at the not quite godforsaken hour of a quarter to ten Eastern Daylight. There was no daylight left in the east, but if you were watching prime time television on a normal night, it wouldn’t seem that late. Start a baseball game as quadruple-digits are approaching, however, and it’s late. Most of our games start at 7:10. We form a routine. Night games from St. Louis or Milwaukee are discombobulating enough. Night games from California be crazy.
Crazy, but novel enough to be invigorating for at least a few innings following an unforeseen lengthy pause. The Mets hadn’t been to San Francisco since 2019. We came into 2021 packing a valise full of “haven’t been to since 2019” status updates. The televised setting I apparently missed most was that of the home park of the San Francisco Giants. I was really glad to see it despite understanding more Met doom likely awaited within. The home park of the San Francisco Giants has gone by four different names since its opening in 2000. The first three were purchased by phone companies, so I thought of the place as Phone Company Park. The current name is owned by a tech behemoth, so I think of it now as (Not) Phone Company Park. Its fungible handle notwithstanding, it always comes across as sumptuous on TV, especially at West Coast dusk. I love the outfield lawn in particular. No patterns mowed in. Just smooth, unfussy green grass. Throw a picnic blanket down on that field and hang out. Combine the grass with the Cove and the bricks and the general San Franciscan ambiance, and every encomium we experienced last week about corn fields in Iowa could be applied to the San Francisco treat. Baseball in a big beautiful city, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.
It’s swell for the Giants this year. When last we saw the Giants, two summers ago, they weren’t terribly imposing. After Madison Bumgarner and Conor Gillaspie conspired to end our 2016 postseason prematurely, the Giants disappeared from the competitive landscape. Why, they were worse than we were between 2017 and 2019, and their record wasn’t appreciably better than ours in 2020. But they quietly got good ahead of 2021 and here they are, with the best record in baseball. They won three world championships in the first half of the previous decade. All that once was good for them indeed is good again.
Our season once was good, but that’s part of our past, Ray. All we’ve done for weeks is lose series. Except to the Nationals, but the Nationals, champions from the last full-sized contested season, opted to accelerate their immersion into the ain’t-what-they-been-no-more club. The Giants wound up there organically in 2017. The Nationals sold off half their recognizable players a few weeks ago and gave up the charade of fringe contention. Maybe they’ll be back in a few years the way the Giants are. Just what we need.
We did sweep the Nationals last week, and the games definitely counted in the standings. For a literal minute on Friday night, after the Phillies lost and while neither the Mets nor Braves had completed their appointed rounds, we were in first place by a single percentage point. “Look who’s No. 1!” a friend tweeted in my direction a little before 10:30. It was his homage to the Shea scoreboard from the second the Mets first took first place on September 10, 1969, the Mets nosing ahead of the Cubs by .001. That transcendent tick of the clock from 52 years ago was only the beginning of a first-place stay that never ended. The dizzying interval achieved after the Nationals series ended with the Dodgers beating us once. By the time L.A. beat us thrice, first place was falling out of easy reach. The Giants (along with the Braves) have batted away it even further.
 From last Friday night’s hot “Look Who’s No. 1!” minute. We may never pass this way again. Upon reflection, last week’s goofy sweep of the Nationals — with a suspended game, a resumed game, another rainout and two truncated Manfred Specials — was not a glimmer of 1969. It was a reminder of 2002. That was nineteen years ago, meaning it may not be vivid in the mind’s eye. Hence, in case you’ve forgotten, the 2002 Mets were supposed to be a legitimate contender. For four months they played not quite like it, but they managed to remain viable for the Wild Card, hovering four games above .500 and sitting 4½ behind the Dodgers as July wound down. The defending world champion Arizona Diamondbacks came to town to kick off August. If we didn’t love the Arizona Diamondbacks in the heat of a playoff chase, we should have appreciated what they had done for us the previous November, putting a sudden and glorious end to overall Yankee hegemony. I’d waited two-thirds of a season to show up at Shea and give the 2001 world champs an enormous round of applause.
I drew short-memoried glares for sporting a Diamondbacks cap (a November ’01 wedding anniversary gift from my wife because then as now she’s the best) with a Mets t-shirt and clapping heartily as their batting order was announced. Judgmental looks be damned; they’d earned my embrace. Anybody who pulls the plug on an undesirable dynasty deserves that much. I stopped appreciating the Diamondbacks at first pitch, however. I really didn’t appreciate the way they swept the Mets in the four-game series that followed. The first game of the rain-necessitated Saturday doubleheader set the tone. Future New York Mets Hall of Famer Edgardo Alfonzo whacked a two-run homer to stake the Mets to an eighth-inning lead, a very Fonzie move. All Armando Benitez had to do in the ninth was…oh, like you don’t know or at least sense that Armando didn’t do what he needed to do. Craig Counsell homered to tie the game in the ninth and Erubiel Durazo homered to put the Diamondbacks way ahead in the tenth. We lost the opener, we’d be swept in the nightcap, we’d be swept all four, and we’d fall below .500.
But then we hit the road, for a Central Time Zone jaunt through Milwaukee and St. Louis, and recovered a sliver of our Mojo. The Brewers weren’t any good that year and we took advantage, grabbing two of three. The Cardinals were good, but Al Leiter was too, going seven strong in a Friday night victory at Busch (Benitez posted his 27th save that night because Benitez really wasn’t total dreck). Mere days after the Diamondback debacle, the Mets had risen back above .500, were still in range of the Wild Card and getting those of us amenable to the sunny side of the standings thinking, well, if we can just…oh, like you don’t know or at least sense that we didn’t. The Mets lost their next two games in St. Louis, came home, lost six more, and continued their losing streak until it reached a dozen. Before the Mets won again, it was pounded into even the most optimistic of heads that 2002 wasn’t going to be our year.
That it has occurred to me that last week’s Nationals reprieve was the contemporary equivalent of the brief Midwestern bounce that imbued the Mets with the slightest touch of life nearly two decades ago tells you where my head is at amid this current winless stretch. We’re still not so far out of first place that it’s unimaginable that the Mets could make up a 3½-game deficit between now and the end of the year. But that’s basically what I said yesterday when the deficit was 2½ games and the current winless stretch wasn’t quite as long as it’s become.
In the interim, we’ve got another late-night start from San Francisco, another convincing of the inner owl that 9:45 isn’t so late, another 11:00 PM pep talk that c’mon we’re just getting cooking here! Big talk for the afternoon edition here. My Monday night bright-eyed, bushy-tailedness wore off as Aaron Loup was unjamming Jeurys Familia to get out of the sixth and keep the Mets down by no more than 4-3. When I next stirred, it was the bottom of the eighth and the score was 7-5, Giants. Trevor May had given up three runs. Jonathan Villar had gotten two of them back. I missed all of them, but I did make it to the less than thrilling conclusion.
Still, nice to see San Francisco on TV again and the way the Mets’ road grays pop against the home team creams. Would be nicer to see it wide awake and from the side of the handshake line. I may have to settle for groggy glimpses of the green grass and whatever crosses my mind as I drift off.
by Jason Fry on 17 August 2021 1:08 am It’s good to be the Giants.
The 2021 Giants are what happens when everything breaks right — when veterans thought to be on the back end of the career curve have career years, role players step up, and the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. And you know what? Good for them and for their fans. Charmed seasons are good for the game and a lot of fun.
The Mets … well, they’re the opposite story these days, and not much fun at all. Injuries, subpar performances, buzzards’ luck. You’re probably thinking you read this same rant on Sunday … or was it the day before that, or the day before that? Does it matter? The Mets have become the same old story, day after numbing day, with the only difference a handful of minor details by way of bric-a-brac.
On Monday night, the Mets showed some admirable fight after getting screwed by ESPN and MLB, playing a Sunday night game in New York and then flying all night to face the best team in baseball at home in San Francisco. They even briefly led in the fifth, courtesy of a two-run triple by Pete Alonso, of all people.
But it wasn’t enough. It rarely is these days. Rich Hill pitched well into the fourth before imploding in a flurry of enemy hits; Miguel Castro made the Mets’ lead the stuff of mayfly lives by giving up a homer to Kris Bryant (the guy the Mets should have acquired at the deadline, but whatever); Mets hitters short-circuited a two-on, nobody-out situation in the sixth; Trevor May got mauled in the seventh to leave the game out of reach.
The last two paragraphs are the mad lib stuff, the set dressing to be stapled up after the carpenters have finished following the blueprints. The Mets have started their 13-game journey through the ringer of California teams 0-4, and if you have optimism about the remaining nine — or the remaining 44, for that matter — well, bless your heart.
The Mets are now officially a .500 team, which may still strike you as a disappointment but is a far kinder verdict than what they’ve been for the last two months, and what they’ll likely be by year’s end. Games like Monday’s demonstrated why — and if you missed that one, well, tune in Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Or most any day. They’re all increasingly the same in the dregs of 2021.
by Greg Prince on 16 August 2021 3:57 pm Trying to fall asleep between the Dodgers’ dispiriting sweep at Citi Field and the results to come from the impending West Coast trip, I thought about what the Mets need to do in the ensuing seven games. I rarely project beyond “gotta go 1-0 tonight,” but since the season is likely at an inflection point, I went there.
I didn’t consider the Mets going 7-0, 6-1 or 5-2. At all. I will be delightfully surprised if such heights are scaled. I’m not counting on it…though ruling out five to seven very good “1-0 tonight” situations in advance is self-defeating. This is why I almost never take these games more than one at a time.
I decided 4-3 would be great and that 3-4 would be, in the context of the competition and the team attempting to compete with the competition, minimally acceptable. Unless the Braves or Phillies run and hide while we’re in California, we’d keep within contact of first place through the magic of not altogether sucking. As long as we can continue to convince ourselves these games “mean” something, we will derive all the meaning we can from them. The latter half of August with at least the hint of marching into hell for a heavenly cause beats not being able to even dream the impossible dream and resigning ourselves to the dreaded spate of “here’s who’s available in the offseason” articles. No, not yet. It may not seem like it after this past weekend and the weekend before it, but we are only 2½ out with 45 to go.
I contemplated 2-5 in the context of “acceptable,” and didn’t believe it would be acceptable if our goal is to remain plausible in our pursuit of a playoff spot, which in our 2½ out with 45 to go world seems to be the point of worrying about a given week’s outcomes.
But then I contemplated the concept of “unacceptable”.
What, I’m not going to “accept” the Mets if they fly home having lost five of seven in San Francisco and Los Angeles?
What, I’m going to turn my backs on them for the remainder of 2021?
What, I’m going to swap out my Mets wardrobe and take down my Mets pennants and assume a non-Mets identity?
“I dost not accept thou, Mets! Thou hast not secureth thine minimal complement of victories and therefore I denounceth thou and all for which thou standeth!”
Nah. That’s not fandom. Fandom is hanging in during the worst of times so when the best of times come back around we can say, “I was paying rapt attention when they got swept by the Dodgers at Citi Field and then I stayed up late to see what was going to become of them next as they went off to play the team with the best record in baseball before a rematch with the powerhouse team with the second-best record in baseball, the one that just swept them.” Among other joys, hanging in gives me the right to credibly kvetch and moan while the best of times is circling the lot looking for parking. Fandom is deep down knowing you’ll accept almost anything. Acceptance, like a retweet, is not necessarily an endorsement. But your team is your team. They’ll still be your team whether they play beyond earliest October or not. Might as well keep them company until then. We’ll have plenty of time to not watch them come the rest of fall and the lot of winter.
I didn’t consider the Mets going 1-6 or 0-7. At all. A fan’s gotta have limits.
Eventually I fell asleep. I need my rest for this trip.
by Jason Fry on 16 August 2021 1:05 am After two nights of at least looking competitive against the Dodgers, AKA the quarter-billion-dollar baseball death machine, the Mets got macerated. Lacerated. Defenestrated. Eviscerated.
Whatever word you choose, it wasn’t pretty. They were out of it essentially from the jump, as Carlos Carrasco showed he’s still working his way back into regular-season form — a plan the Mets had to embrace because they’ve burned through every other conceivable one, but was pretty much guaranteed to yield nights like this one. They made a little noise, but it amounted to faint squeaks amid the roar of the Dodgers at full steam, and it ended with not one but two position players — Brandon Drury and Kevin Pillar — called upon to take the mound.
I’ve never found position players on the mound particularly amusing, because it means the guys paid to play or oversee play know my team is beaten, which forces me to wonder why I didn’t reach the same conclusion and find something better to do with my time. And when position players are on the mound because my team’s about to lose three in a row and its season looks lost, it’s not funny in the least.
As I type this the Mets are somewhere over Pennsylvania or maybe Ohio, flying all night to take on the Giants in San Francisco tomorrow — an MLB/ESPN screw job that ought to make both them and the similarly scheduled Dodgers very, very angry. That makes Monday night’s Mets game about as close to a gimme loss as one can imagine in baseball. And remember that after that, they’ll still have nine straight games to go against the Giants or Dodgers.
The team that comes back from that hellish stretch will be thinking about 2022. And in time that will seem kinder than thinking about 2021, and dwelling on all the injuries, and the subpar performances, and the baffling lack of urgency at the trade deadline, and the weird in-game moves that had to be debated way too often. (Sunday’s head-scratcher was Luis Rojas sending Carrasco up to hit with the Mets down six, two on and one out in the second, then replacing him on the mound for the top of the third anyway. Asked about that one, Carrasco replied, “I don’t know, man. I really don’t.”)
We can argue about the manager and the front office and the players who got hurt and the ones who didn’t perform, but the Mets’ failure owes something to all of those factors, and the real problem is they were never that good to begin with. They bumped along as the least-worst team in a bad division and we saw that not for what it was but for what we wanted it to be — that they had pluck and moxie and all the other pixie-dust qualities we sprinkle on teams that are in the slot we like in the standings. Eventually the injuries and the bad luck and bad years and the baffling decisions got to be too much and the Mets were revealed for what they really were. The crash has been ugly, but it hasn’t been a miscarriage of justice — more like a moment of realization. Now, the best we and they can hope for is not to be thoroughly embarrassed before it’s over.
by Greg Prince on 15 August 2021 10:34 am Taijuan Walker was magnificent until the seventh inning. That was a monumental up. Michael Conforto cracked a go-ahead homer in the fourth. That was an invigorating up. Aaron Loup, Miguel Castro and Seth Lugo were each mighty effective, and those were unqualified ups, until we learned Lugo being up and pitching in the top of the ninth of a tie game that stayed tied in the bottom of the ninth meant that he’d sat down in between, which I wouldn’t have guessed was necessarily a problem.
But it was. Too many “up-downs” means a pitcher who you’d think can give you a second inning can’t…apparently. It wasn’t so much the up-down of Saturday night that precluded Seth’s pitching the tenth. It was that he’d had two up-downs on Thursday, according to his manager.
Oh.
Lugo sat for good after his one inning. Luis Rojas via Dave Jauss went to Yennsy Diaz to start the tenth of a 1-1 must-win game versus the Los Angeles Dodgers, with a runner automatically on second because that’s how Rob Manfred likes it. This Diaz hasn’t pitched enough in tight situations to make us nervous. This Diaz not having pitched all that much in tight situations is what made us nervous. No offense, Yennsy, but we know Seth Lugo. He’s not infallible, but we carry forth images of Six-Out Seth Lugo having gotten us through second innings with aplomb. We only knew in the tenth that Diaz wasn’t Lugo, and that it wouldn’t take much to score the Manfred on second.
It didn’t. Cody Bellinger lined a ball down the right field line, scoring the unearned runner and pushing the Dodgers ahead, 2-1. That — in which “that” also encompasses Walker Buehler’s own seven sterling innings and Will Smith’s second heartbreak home run in as many nights — was pretty much that. Conforto’s long shot, a solo blast six innings earlier, hadn’t come close to being matched in any way, shape or form by any other Met batter. There had been briefly been something of a scoring threat in the bottom of the seventh (J.D. Davis singled off Buehler’s leg, Jonathan Villar walked) but it imploded (Tomás Nido was encouraged to attempt bunting without an ounce of acumen for the skill in question). The Mets’ only runner in the tenth was their Manfred. He never moved.
So despite Walker taking a no-hit bid into the seventh until Smith ruined it, and despite Conforto’s bat continuing its long-awaited journey back toward the land of the living, the Mets had nothing but another one-run, extra-inning loss to show for their ten innings of work against the Dodgers. Both nights’ postgame pressers included questions regarding how good it must’ve felt for the Mets to go “toe-to-toe” or some such digital equation with the world champs. I do believe a team that has spent many more days in first place in 2021 than its opponent (some of them as recently as barely more than a week ago) doesn’t require a pat on the head for losing by a run. At the moment, the Dodgers have a substantially better record than the Mets, but they’re both in the same league. One is closer to making the playoffs is all. The one that isn’t, you’d infer, might want to pull out additional stops to make strides toward securing a postseason berth. Like sanctioning Seth Lugo’s second up of the evening so he could pitch the tenth. Or, for that matter, using Aaron Loup instead of Jeurys Familia the night before in that toe-to-toe one-run, extra-inning loss.
I don’t question the Mets’ fight. Rojas has enough fight in him to bark about balls and strikes and occasionally get himself ejected. I do question the limited use of best-bet relief pitchers in mustish-win games (and what are all those gambling ads for if not to encourage the making of best bets?). True, there is always another game on the schedule to consider when it comes to bullpen usage, and Fleetwood Mac wasn’t kidding about not stopping thinking about tomorrow, but to make those remaining games count like hell, ya kinda gotta win the games you can in the present. Ya kinda gotta send your best bet our for a second inning if he’s conceivably available. If Lugo told Jauss and Jeremy Hefner, “can’t do it,” well, that’s one thing. If Lugo said, “I’m fine,” take that for what it’s worth and get him up on his feet and back to the mound.
“Up-down” may be a legitimate concern in the way pitching is managed today, but we need all the ups we can get at this juncture of the schedule. Downs we’ve got down pat.
by Jason Fry on 14 August 2021 9:17 am It’s one of the oldest questions for a baseball fan who lives and dies with his or her team: If said team is fated to lose, how would you prefer that fate to unfold? Meekly and with minimal fuss? Or loudly but with the same outcome?
The Dodgers are a quarter-billion-dollar baseball death machine. Their lineup is studded with hitters who grind enemy pitchers into a powder by controlling the strike zone, then hit mistakes to distant precincts; their rotation and bullpen is an assembly line of fireballing monsters. (And for all this, they’re still a second-place team — reminders, if you need them, that baseball is capricious and other teams get injured too.)
That quarter-billion-dollar baseball death machine ate away at Tylor Megill, scratching him for single runs in the first, third and fourth and elevating his pitch count to levels at which further duty seemed ill-advised. Meanwhile, the black-clad Mets were being inoffensive against Julio Urias, with their biggest accomplishment getting him out of the game after five — though that was actually the result of an odd mistake by the Dodgers, with pinch-hitter Matt Beaty standing in the on-deck circle as a decoy and heading to the plate without hearing his own dugout yelling for him to come back. (You really do see something new in baseball every day.)
Even the fiercest machine throws a rod now and then, though: In the seventh, the improbably named Brusdar Graterol allowed a two-out double to Michael Conforto and departed in favor of rookie left-hander Justin Bruihl. Dom Smith singled, Bruihl walked Brandon Nimmo, the Dodgers intentionally walked Pete Alonso, and Jeff McNeil hit a little parachute that found grass in center field. Enter Blake Treinen to face J.D. Davis, and here came a passed ball through catcher Will Smith. Alonso scored and the Mets had somehow tied the game.
Tied it, but wouldn’t be the ones to untie it, despite the Dodgers’ odd streak of having lost 11 straight extra-inning games. In the tenth, Jeurys Familia (in there despite a heavy recent workload and Aaron Loup as an alternative) gave up the still-ridiculous two-run lead-off homer to Smith thanks to the ghost runner. Against Kenley Jansen, the Mets cashed their ghost runner but no more, with Tomas Nido flying out to end the game. Was 6-5 in 10 better than 4-0 in a conventional nine? I’ll leave that one to you.
I said not so long ago that I figured this stretch of 13 against the big bad Dodgers and the somehow bigger and badder Giants would result in the effective end of the Mets’ season, and I won’t be surprised if that’s true. But the factor I’d forgotten about was the weakness of the competition: The Phillies and Braves have their own gauntlets to run, and I doubt any rooter for those flawed/battered clubs has a lot of confidence in their ability to do so. So if the Mets can stagger out of the California wringer with a record no worse than, say, 5-8 or even 4-9, perhaps they can outlast their underwhelming rivals, get healthy in time for October and try to surprise a few folks, starting with us.
Ya Gotta Survive! Not a rallying cry to launch a thousand t-shirt printers, perhaps. But when facing off against death machines it might be good advice.
by Greg Prince on 13 August 2021 9:07 am You can’t, as the saying goes, script baseball. You can’t necessarily script baseball players, either. If you could, I would have tried last Sunday when, at the conclusion of the Mets’ moribund weekend in Philadelphia, Pete Alonso met the press to attempt to explain what the hell was going wrong. Pete, I might have advised with all the communications consultant credibility I could muster, maybe try something like, “We got beat, I gotta do better, we all gotta do better, but we’re not giving up.” Such sentiments delivered by the slumping slugger on behalf of his spiraling squad, I believed, would have been accepted by the lot of us in solidarity with the team and with empathy for the players. It would have come across as honest.
Except Pete Alonso harbors his own truth, and he delivers it as Pete Alonso does. After bemoaning the fates that had hard-hit balls turning into outs, our Polar Bear concluded his darkest-before-the-dawn remarks by reassuring us, “We got this. Just smile and know that we got this.”
At that moment, what we had was a four-game losing streak and the sense that first place had been nothing but a summer rental. All was going wrong, and no amount of Florida sunshine, whether authentically sourced or fabricated by the Tampa native, was going to make us feel better about our straits. “We’re all in this together,” Alonso insisted as he directly addressed Mets fans, but if he really felt what we were feeling, he would have known he’d swung and missed. Together, we were in misery. Can you at least wallow urgently with us for a minute before climbing back into the cage?
By comparison, Zack Scott’s Tuesday appraisal that “we’ve played very mediocre baseball for most of the year” and that “this recent stretch has been much worse than mediocre [and] unacceptably bad” was a breath of front office fresh air. Though the first baseman acknowledged that the current situation was “frustrating,” his dismissal of a potentially season-slaying skid — we were 2-9 since July 29; 21-30 since June 17; and oh-for-deGrom until further notice — didn’t buck us up. It pissed us off. The back page of the Daily News summed it up in classic tabloid style:
Instead of wasting
time with happy
talk, free-falling
Mets gotta say:
LET’S
FINALLY
GET
MAD
Funny thing, though. Ever since the OG LFGMer countered crisis with his customary dose of New Agey positivity, the Mets have gone undefeated. Granted, it’s only three games, and they were against the gone fishin’ for the foreseeable future Nationals, but three wins are three wins, especially the third win…which was won on a walkoff homer by relentlessly upbeat Pete Alonso.
Upon reflection, why shouldn’t he be relentlessly upbeat? He’s got his own comic book!
Thursday afternoon’s temperatures theoretically sweltered too heavily for someone whose chosen persona invokes Arctic climes, but Pete doesn’t shrivel from heat. He doesn’t always respond as we wish (at the plate or at the mic), but he does take his cuts. Ironically, had the Mets stayed warm to their very recent form, he wouldn’t have to have swung one final and ultimately dramatic time.
A seven-inning game had already been played and won without a surfeit of drama, ursine or otherwise, before the day became mostly about Pete. Marcus Stroman had to battle dehydration — he revealed he gets too nervous to ingest requisite amounts of fluids on days he pitches — but otherwise easily dispatched Nat batters to the shade of their dugout for five-and-a-third silky smooth innings in the opener of the rain-arranged twinbill. Brandon Nimmo drove in four runs (three on one mighty swing, one of them carried by Stroman after the pitcher reached on a two-out bunt), Aaron Loup and Edwin Diaz finished up, and a 4-1 victory was put sedately in the books.
A couple of hours later, the exact same set of numbers loomed for our ledger via a 4-1 lead after six innings, a.k.a. eight Manfreds. Trevor Williams, in the role of 27th Man, neutralized the Nats with little problem for the first few frames. You have to congratulate a 27th Man just for getting into whichever end of a doubleheader he is added to the roster for. Usually the 27th Man is a spare reliever who doesn’t see action. But at least he gets to see a game. On Wednesday, the Mets designated reliever Geoff Hartlieb as their 27th Man for the regularly scheduled contest that was to follow the completion of the suspended game left over from Tuesday. Except a tarp was spread on the field while it wasn’t raining and the game was called before Citi Field got appreciably wet, thus necessitating Thursday’s doubleheader. Williams got the nod to start the nightcap. Hartlieb got a ticket back to the taxi squad.
Geoff Hartlieb being activated as the extra player for a shortened game whose start was delayed by rain when it wasn’t raining before getting rained out and then being optioned before the next day’s pair of shortened games began may go down as the quintessential 2021 Mets transaction.
Trevor Williams, the 59th Met of this season and the 1,149th Met ever, wasn’t just activated. He was inserted and he was effective, allowing only a run over four-and-a-third and temporarily recasting the deadline deal that brought Javy Baez to New York from Chicago with much fanfare as the Trevor Williams Trade. Seth Lugo continued to keep the Nats at bay while Jonathan Villar extended an existing Met lead with a two-run homer. Two 4-1 wins would have been terrific for a team whose sleeves feature a 41 patch.
Alas, the yeoman bullpen work that had provided the spine for this series since Rich Hill took over for Carlos Carrasco in the resumption portion of the suspended game carried an expiration date. Met relief went sour in the seventh inning of the nightcap, when neither Trevor May nor Jeurys Familia could shut the stubbornly ajar door on the suddenly pesky Nats (literal storm clouds looming conjured images of Familia at his Uptonian worst). The visitors notched three runs in the top of the seventh, the third of them when an awkwardly positioned Jeff McNeil couldn’t flag down an Andrew Stevenson grounder that moseyed into right field and brought home Gerardo Parra. Washington did all its damage before Juan Soto came to the plate. That Familia clotted the bleeding from there — intentionally passing the prodigy, then striking out ancient Ryan Zimmerman — represented a small victory unto itself. A very small, perhaps transitory victory.
McNeil led off the bottom of the ninthish seventh with a chance to erase the Stevenson affair from our memory. No such luck was in evidence, though, as Jeff grounded out. Alonso, however, came to bat next carrying a big stick and a new script. He got hold of a Kyle Finnegan pitch and sent it high into the air, so high that it took a beat to discern if it was going to carry the requisite distance to send everybody off into the air conditioning.
It did, just over the left field fence. It was the second walkoff home run of Pete Alonso’s still young career, the first he’s hit in front of fans. There weren’t a ton of them in the stands after nearly six hours of baseball, but the Mets put on their usual show of mutual appreciation for a game-ending RBI, tearing away the jersey of the hitter who brought them victory. The bare-chested Polar Bear, as he had promised as spokesdude for his team days earlier, had this. We had a 5-4 victory, our double and series sweeps and revived viability in a divisional race we were ready to all but give up on after Philadelphia. We’re a half-game out now, nestled between the Phillies and the Braves. The Dodgers are coming to town with the potential to blacken our skies once again and the big, bad (as in very good) Giants await ominously on the Coast. Yet the Mets have forgotten to go away or, for that matter, let us off the hook. We still apparently root for a contender. Attention, therefore, must be paid.
“To be able to stick to the same approach and to be stubborn enough to stick to a good game plan and approach,” Alonso said of his homer, “that’s the key.” Hopefully Pete and pals will remind us of the perks of staying true to the orange and blue this weekend when we’re taking on the defending world champs and next week when we’re fighting sleep and the NL West leaders. Besides sticking to the same approach and being stubborn.
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