The blog for Mets fans
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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 12 August 2021 8:28 am After 45 years as a baseball fan, I’m pretty much fully formed: I have my habits as a fan, a few rituals (for instance, if you’re at the stadium, you get food or hit the john while the Mets are up, not while they’re in the field), and I’m set.
But I’m not completely formed. For instance, in recent years I’ve allowed myself an indulgence that would once have been unthinkable: When I’m truly disgusted with the Mets, I can walk away from them.
Not forever — that would hurt me a lot more than them. But for a day, or a series, or even a week? Sure.
These walkabouts are reserved for dire circumstances — if they look a little flat, I’ll be tuning in to see if they unflatten. Same with a run of bad luck, disastrous relief, and other maladies that can trip up a team. And I have to have other plans to contemplate a brief divorce — a vacation, a long weekend with friends, a work trip, something like that.
It’s a combination that doesn’t happen too often. But starting last weekend it did: The Mets came apart like a street-corner watch while I was up here in Maine with my old college friends and their wives for our annual summer get-together. I watched the disasters against the Phillies on my phone or on Gameday, grimacing and occasionally swearing but not otherwise particularly engaged. By Tuesday my family and I had moved on to our own vacation at my folks’ summer house up the coast, and so the first game against the Nats was glimpsed briefly via score updates.
Which weren’t exactly encouraging after the horrors that had come in Miami and Philadelphia: My first glance showed me the Mets were somehow down 3-0 after a bare handful of pitches; my next one delivered the news that they’d cut that deficit to 3-1 but further hostilities would be held in abeyance because of bad weather down in New York. It wasn’t my recap anyway, so I got on with vacationing.
Wednesday’s duty was mine, though — instead of the originally scheduled evening game, I’d drawn the afternoon conclusion of that suspended game and one of baseball’s curtailed specials (do we have a name for these yet?) as a nightcap.
To which I said, No thanks.
I’d rather go to the botanical gardens down by Boothbay, or to the outlets in Freeport, or to one of approximately 50,000 lobster docks to watch Emily and Joshua chow down. (I’m allergic to shellfish so it’s fish-n-chips or grilled cheese for me.) Or, given the state of the 2021 Mets, perhaps I’d clean out more gutters, cut down the saplings that sprung up last year when COVID kept us all home, or take a scythe to a new part of the now overgrown bit of hilltop meadow in front of the house.
I had a lot of things I could do that sounded a lot more appealing than spending two hours being pissed off at a baseball team. I thought about it for about two seconds and decided, fuck them. I’d be derelict in my duty and recap the evening game.
And you know what? It felt great.
Cell service is spotty in Freeport, but I did get periodic updates, because divorce doesn’t preclude occasional check-ins, particularly if you’re using them to remind yourself why you’re boycotting the whole relationship. I saw that the Mets were now down 4-1, registered mild surprise when the game was somehow 4-4, then registered an utter lack of surprise when the game was almost immediately 6-4 again.
(My reaction, to steal the bit from the Coen brothers’ marvelous Hail, Caesar!, was best described as a mirthless chuckle. Jace, on the street in Freeport: Haw!)
We got done with our trying-on and shopping and bag-schlepping and escaped the famed Freeport cellular dead zone to discover that the Mets were down in the eighth, but it was 7-6. Well, I am still a Mets fan, so up came the radio feed on MLB.
J.D. Davis welcomed me back with a double into the corner, at which point I became irrationally angry.
“No, Mets! Fuck you! Fuck every last one of you! You are full of shit and I am not falling for this! FUCK YOU!”
My kid thought I was having some kind of fit, which I suppose I was, and for which I wasn’t inclined to apologize. It’s the kind of fit you have at a team that hasn’t led for a goddamn week; that has looked like a parachute-less base jumper in tumbling out of first place and second place too; that has played baseball lifelessly or ineptly or both; and that now has the unmitigated fucking gall to be standing at your door with one of those convenience-store bunches of daisies dyed a color not found in nature, a wan expression and a promise that they can change.
Fuck you, Mets. I am not falling for this.
Jonathan Villar bunted, not my favorite play in that situation but an understandable adaptation to the general horrors of the last week. Some imported National named Mason Thompson alligator-armed the throw, sending the ball down the right-field line and allowing J.D. to trundle home with the tying run. James McCann grounded out but Villar was able to advance to third. Brandon Drury stepped in and worked the count, finally hitting a little ducksnort that might or might not be over the drawn-in infield.
It was — barely — and the Mets improbably if not impossibly had the lead.
At which point a contractor called from Brooklyn, and the game went away, and there was a fascinating conversation in a gas-station parking lot about circuit breakers and 220 lines while I tried not to think about Edwin Diaz pitching to Juan Soto and two of his friends.
The fascinating conversation about household electricity ended and I fumbled with my phone’s controls, only to have Joshua speak up from the back seat: “They won.”
Really? With Diaz at the helm and Soto at bat and a host of horrors ready to be unleashed? Really.
The nightcap was washed away by another round of rain, so that was it — an actual Met win. Which was followed by the Dodgers mauling the Phillies and a Braves win, leaving the Mets a game behind their two rivals.
It’s a one-game deficit. The smart thing would be to erase the last week or so mentally and try to think of the Mets as a plucky band that’s just a game off the division lead with 50 games to go and two seriously flawed competitors in their sights. Because that would sound exciting and even hopeful.
And that’s probably what I’ll do, because I am a Mets fan, which is to say I am a sucker. The kind of guy who keeps buying unseen swampland and wiring money to Nigeria and stretching out a finger to report that ow that stove is hot and ow that stove is hot and ow that stove is hot and ow that stove is hot.
But I’m a sucker with a memory, and seeing these Mets back at my door doesn’t inspire selective amnesia, let alone forgiveness. Those electric-blue daisies, really? That crooked collar? The pathetic knot in that tie? And all the other promises I’ve heard that this time things will change?
I guess we’ll see.
by Greg Prince on 11 August 2021 12:47 am This Tuesday night in August was going to be part makeup game, part resumption. The makeup portion was for 2020 when the Princes and the Chasins (that’s me and Stephanie, Ryder and his dad Rob) did not get out to Citi Field because nobody was getting out to Citi Field on any night in any month of 2020. The resumption was picking up on a tradition we never planned to interrupt. We started going to games together on a Tuesday night in August of 2010 and kept it up every year for the rest of the decade: ten in a row. One more would match the length of the longest winning streak in Mets history. Never mind that not every Prince-Chasin game was a Mets winner. The winning was in the planning together and meeting together and rooting together and being together.
I’ve decided where my personal Citi Field streaks are concerned, 2020 didn’t officially halt any of them. I was not eligible for entry into the ballpark, so it’s not as if I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain. Thus, Tuesday night, August 10, 2021, counted as the eleventh consecutive annual Prince-Chasin game. Apply an asterisk to any of those descriptors if you’re scoring at home. Last year we had our August Tuesday night via Zoom. It bridged the gap from 2019 to now. It counted in spirit.
But this one was gonna be for real. And it was, for one golden inning. Sure, Carlos Carrasco got hit around, but we agreed we were better off with Carrasco in the long run of the short run of what is left of 2021. Besides, these weren’t the rampaging Phillies we were playing. These were the give-up Nationals. The Nationals had three on the board? We could make some of that up in two swings. Pete Alonso nearly homered, but doubled. Dom Smith nearly homered, but also doubled. Between them, they created a run. Smith showed the Mets out of the inning by next getting caught in a rundown with a basepath that didn’t meet umpire standards, but that’s OK. We pulled to within 3-1 and had eight innings ahead of us.
Or so we thought. A little lightning showed itself in the distance. Maybe not so distant distance, but we’d all checked the forecast inside and out, backward and forward before departing for Flushing. Scattered thunderstorm. Isolated thunderstorm. Then little chance of either. We didn’t even bother with an umbrella. Whatever we’re seeing and hearing — a rumbling was audible — was probably going to pass us by to the north. A little sky show for between pitches was all it would be.
Except there’d be no pitches after the top of the second got underway. It didn’t get far underway and it didn’t much stay underway. Rain began to fall in earnest. The tarp began to roll out. Fortunately, the tickets Rob procured for us were nice and covered, in Excelsior. We didn’t have to skedaddle for shelter. We could sit and talk and talk some more. Ryder and I caught up on baseball, 2021 and prior. Ryder was kind enough to be born long after I was, allowing me to fill in any Met blanks he didn’t know he had in the course of gleefully rambling conversation. Rob and Stephanie probably talked about non-baseball things. They’re essentially the adults in our group. But we all chatted with one another. We’d have preferred baseball as our backdrop, but we settled for the tarp on the field and, on CitiVision, satellite feeds of games from elsewhere (one went into its own delay) and a retro video game in which the 1993 Mets stuck it to the 1993 Nationals, née Expos. You could tell it wasn’t real by the fact that the 1993 Mets prevailed.
As we rounded 9:30 (strangely the stadium clocks remained blank, like we were in Vegas and they didn’t want us to discern night from day) and neared two hours of delay, we were encouraged by the tarp appearing to absorb less and less rain. A security dude down below — one of the “yellow henchmen,” as Ryder referred to the gents in slickers — removed his protective gear. Surely the game would be resuming soon. Surely this was a handy interval to put a pin in our chit-chat and secure sustenance for the long night ahead. Off to the concessions we went. It was an extra snack we hadn’t anticipated investing in, but we didn’t think we were gonna be watching baseball past midnight, either.
We weren’t back at our seats more than a moment or two when the word went up on the scoreboard: SUSPENDED. The game, that is. Even though it had stopped raining. Even though we were ready to settle in for those eight unplayed innings. Even though our respective pretzel (the Princes’) and ice cream (the Chasins’) had many bites and licks left. No more baseball this Tuesday night in August. The Mets have lately lacked crisp play on the field, but they really have their timing down when it comes to convincing you to buy food and drink just ahead of pointing you to the exits.
We got our inning. We got our togetherness. We got our eleventh* in a row. Or twelfth* if you include 2020’s several-screen experience. Rob got a rain check. We can’t make it tomorrow for the 4:10 resumption. But, clear skies and who knows how many other factors willing, we’ll be back next August.
POSTSCRIPT: It’s a final: Mets 8 Nationals 7, about 24 hours after it began. The Princes and Chasins will take it as our own.
by Jason Fry on 8 August 2021 10:13 pm The Wilpons let Zack Wheeler walk as a free agent after the 2019 season, with zero negotiations and one knife in the back from Brodie Van Wagenen, who said that the Mets had helped Wheeler “parlay two good half-seasons over the last five into $118 million” with the Phillies.
That was the Wilpons in their red giant phase: a bad decision, borne of cheapness, executed gracelessly not by the principals but by some pathetic goon. Wheeler didn’t forget, and Sunday afternoon he gave the Mets a jab of his own: a two-hit shutout that completed the Phils’ three-game sweep of their supposed rivals. The Mets are now in third place, behind not only the Phillies but also the Braves. Should those two clubs be worried about being caught? Yeah right. More like the Nationals should be worried about getting brained by the plummeting club temporarily above them.
The Mets can’t hit, their pitchers fail to be perfect and therefore lose, and these days they barely register a pulse in making outs and losing games. After a day off Monday – hey, no chance of losing! – they have three games with the Nationals and then begin a two-week stretch that would be a brutal gauntlet even for a good team: thirteen games with the powerhouse Dodgers and Giants, including a West Coast trip. You never know with baseball, but I will be shocked if the Mets emerge from that stretch with any realistic hope of playing October baseball.
This has been a startlingly fast fall that’s left us scratching our heads about the team we’re stuck rooting for, as Greg discussed on Saturday. To a certain extent that fall it was masked by factors that let us fool ourselves: the team’s pluck in overcoming a rash of injuries, a flukey statistical run/admirable knack for clutch situations from bench players and fill-ins (call that Rorschach however you see it), and most of all the basic lousiness of the competition.
Now the illusions have been dispelled. The injuries continue, the flukey statistical runs/pluckiness belong to the other guys, and the Mets have sunk below whatever Mendoza line denotes basic lousiness. The sentence has been pronounced and the execution appears imminent.
Which has been frustrating and aggravating and maddening but mostly just made me sad. I thought my team was good and they were writing a story that might lead somewhere joyous; they turned out to be not so good and writing a forgettable story I’ve read too many times before. There are a fair number of pages left in this volume, but I don’t think I want to know what’s next.
by Greg Prince on 8 August 2021 2:36 am Our club’s in jeopardy of disappearing from the divisional race they led for months on end, so perhaps the appropriate way to sum them up is through a smidgen of Jeopardy.
THEY WERE NEVER
REALLY THAT GREAT,
BUT NEITHER CAN
THEY POSSIBLY BE
QUITE THIS BAD
Who are the 2021 New York Mets?
Correct. Uncertainty has the board.
The Mets of the moment are easy to figure out because at this moment, they are a hopeless case. They pitch just well enough to not win. They field just poorly enough to be of little help to their pitching. They hit not at all, or at least until they put themselves in a position where an impressive power display leaves no impression whatsoever.
For eight innings on Saturday in Philadelphia, the second-place Mets presented no challenge to the first-place Phillies. They also presented no challenge to gravity, as they continued to fall through the floor of plausibility. It’s not that we couldn’t imagine them winning the NL East or the game at hand. Basically, there was no fathoming how they were permitted through a Major League Baseball facility’s players’ entrance.
Then, for the span of three batters to begin the top of the ninth inning — Michael Conforto, Jonathan Villar and James McCann — they tantalized us with not one, not two, but three consecutive home runs. Had they not been trailing by five runs at the outset of the ninth, it would have been an extraordinarily exciting turn of events. Even trailing by four, then three, then two, it was tempting to get excited. The Mets have pulled off the neat trick in recent days of playing games whose scores are close yet whose outcome rarely feels in doubt. Their last five losses have been by three, one, two, two and two runs, including Saturday’s too-little/too-lateathon. Those three solo homers set the stage for essentially nothing. With Philly’s lead whittled to two, two more Met batters reached base around a foulout, so conceivably the next men up, one of them a certified Home Run Derby champion, were poised to complete an epic comeback.
But that was only if you hadn’t been watching the Mets much. If you had, you couldn’t conceive of the runners on base being driven in when it mattered most. Not by Pete Alonso, not by J.D. Davis, not by whoever might have substituted for them in gray pants and a blue top. And had some Met somehow gotten that elusive big hit, it was equally difficult to conceive of the next Met reliever holding a tie or a lead.
Which is no way to approach the potential inflection point of a baseball game as a fan, but we have been watching the Mets much, probably too much. Too much not to know better. Too much not to sense that catching up to 5-3 from 5-0 wasn’t going to be a launching pad for anything else.
They were never that great, except that they won a decent amount of games more than they’d lost when nobody else in their neighborhood could claim something similar. For a while, that’s all it took. If it didn’t make them great, we thought we could count on them being good. Good rarely enters the conversation now.
This bad, though? Every team that seems incapable of winning comes off as the worst and most hopeless accumulation of non-talent ever assembled. Losing six of their last seven and eight of their last ten has left the Mets looking out of their element. Baseball? Try Skee-Ball maybe. Still, teams have been known to snap out of funks. The 1999 Mets, to name one extreme example, lost eight in a row about a third of the way through their season and lost seven in a row during the final two weeks of their campaign. After the latter losing streak reached six, John Franco told reporters the Mets were going to make the playoffs anyway. Gads, that me angry, especially since Johnny’s boys had blown a Wild Card with a five-game losing streak the year before. Don’t toy with my emotions, Franco. Don’t lie to me like that.
You know what happened. Mojo rose. The Mets made the playoffs. The most exciting time this franchise has known since 1986 unfurled. Of course it did. Those Mets had Piazza and Alfonzo and Leiter and Ventura and Olerud and so on. We weren’t in the mood to take stock of the trees when the forest was in flames, but had we stepped back from our angsty abyss, we might have been compelled to admit, yeah, maybe we don’t suck. Sometimes that’s the hardest thing for a fan to admit about his, her or their team. When they suck, as the Mets do right now or the Mets did for harrowing spurts in 1999, we don’t want to be suckered into letting them off the hook.
I’m thinking a little about 1999 not because this 2021 squad is reminiscent of its predecessors from 22 years ago, but because during Saturday’s game, I came across an obituary for Patricia Kennealy-Morrison. The name jumped off the page. Though it was mentioned nowhere in the article, I remembered this woman as an integral part of the Mojo carpet ride that 1999 had been until we hit the wall of late September. The Morrison in Kennealy-Morrison is from Patricia’s relationship with Jim Morrison. Robin Ventura had adopted “Mojo Risin’” as the Mets’ rallying cry after going to see the second Austin Powers movie. Patricia, keeper of her late soulmate’s legacy, found out; was quite charmed; and gave Robin and the Mets her blessing to blast “L.A. Woman” and its “Mis-ter MO JO RIIISE IN” refrain to their heart’s content. The Mets still went out and lost seven in a row, but like Bobby Valentine’s dugout disguise and the Mercury Mets motif, the brief opening of the clubhouse Doors to a little rock ‘n’ roll mysticism contributed to too good a legend to let wither.
Or so we can tell ourselves, knowing full well the 1999 Mets recovered their Mojo after that second losing streak.
Because of the passing of Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, Mojo and 1999 were kind of in the air when Conforto led off the ninth with the home run that got the Mets on the board after eight innings of deep void. A thought dared flitter across my mind. The Mets had also been losing without an ounce of resistance to the Phillies on Sunday afternoon, May 23, 1999 — 4-0 at Shea Stadium. Curt Schilling was cruising toward a complete game. There was no reason to believe he wouldn’t get his shutout. Except Mike Piazza singled to lead off the bottom of the ninth and Ventura homered to make it 4-2. Window dressing? Maybe. But maybe not. The 1999 Mets weren’t yet “the 1999 Mets,” but the pieces were in place. Long story short, Schilling stayed in (Phillie bullpen problems are not new) and the Mets scored three more runs, winning in what Gary Cohen rightly referred to as “a REMARKABLE finish!” From the moment Roger Cedeño slid home under Mike Lieberthal’s tag, punching the air as he was called safe, the 1999 Mets became “the 1999 Mets” as we’d forevermore know and love them.
Nah, I said Saturday when it got to 5-1 on Conforto’s homer. It’s not Ventura redux. It’s just a coincidence. But then Villar homered and McCann homered and, well, wouldn’t this be quite the parting gift from Ms. Kennealy-Morrison? Except how much Mojo can you ask of the same source in one lifetime or afterlife?
I didn’t really believe we were gonna come all the way back. I allowed myself a smidgen of credulity, however. That had more to do with the Mets of 22 years ago than it did the Mets of this moment. In this moment, I have no concrete idea who these Mets are. Other than that they are losers of six of seven, eight of ten and a once secure grip on first place. More than two-thirds of a season has gone by, with a nice up, a horrifying down and approximately seven-dozen roster adjustments, and I still don’t know who or what the 2021 Mets are.
I knew the 1999 Mets were something special. Two years ago, I was learning the 2019 Mets were something special. They hadn’t been for most of four months, but by early August, they were rampaging their way from depths much like those in which we’ve wallowed for weeks. The 2019 Mets had their own brand of Mojo, and once it began to rise, boy did it take off. The 2019 Mets won 15 of 16, barged into a playoff scramble previously inaccessible to them and had the damnedest barrel of fun while doing so.
I bring them up now because I think what the 2019 Mets did in late July and August redefined our expectations overall for the Mets to follow. It did mine. My default assessment of the 2021 Mets (and the 2020 Mets until last year’s empty stadia made everything too bleak to take to heart) is that we’re still on that roll or at least its residual momentum. Maybe not from a won-lost perspective, but as an identity. To me, if I don’t dissect too many moving parts, the contemporary Mets are still the shirt-ripping, death-defying, spit ‘n’ vinegar crew that recaptured our fancy after two-and-a-half years of stumbling in place. Lindor replaced Rosario, McCann replaced Ramos, and the pitching was in flux, but deep down we were still the team of Alonso and McNeil and Conforto and Smith and Davis and Nimmo.
I suppose that’s still true. Those fellas were all out there on Saturday at Citizens Bank. But it doesn’t feel like 2019. We have a record two games better after 110 games than we did two years ago, yet that feels temporary. The 2021 Mets are on a stretch of southbound highway with no exits and signs prohibiting U-turns. Maybe there’s an off ramp over the horizon. It’s hard to see at present.
Putting aside the declining fortunes of the 2021 Mets or even the chance that a reversal of form is within their skill set, I keep wondering who or what these Mets are exactly and whether the Mets of the youthful core I celebrated as a harbinger of an era to come not so long ago are extinct as a going entity. I thought Alonso and the rest were the future. The future seems to have whooshed by in the left lane. Maybe not getting a proper building year in 2020 hindered their progress beyond easy repair (though “my baseball team lost its momentum thanks to a global pandemic” seems a pretty petty complaint when one widens one’s contextual lens). Maybe the injuries that have sidelined everybody in this specific cohort this year except Dom Smith shouldn’t be dismissed casually. Maybe, like the Mets whose nucleus we thought they formed, these players weren’t that great to begin with. But I can’t believe they are this bad. Or, more precisely, this ineffectual.
What I really don’t know is where we and they go from here. What are the ceilings, individually and collectively? How quickly does youth become baseball middle age? Are we the Polar Bear Club for the foreseeable future? Do we remain eternally attached to Dom and Squirrel? Is J.D. utterly dispensable? Is Scooter worth more than a perfunctory qualifying offer? Can we do better for a leadoff hitter than smilin’ Brandon Nimmo? Are we now instead Francisco Lindor & The Mets, regardless that Lindor the Leader hasn’t hit much and won’t play for a while more? Eff the DH with my last NL breath (Tylor Megill, when not advised against swinging the bat, doubled Saturday), but how does the presumed-likely universality of product dilution impact personnel decisions? And does anything truly mean anything if Jacob deGrom isn’t pitching? Jake hasn’t pitched in more than a month, in case you’ve lost track.
This is more an existential survey of the Mets fan soul than a search for concrete solutions or a request for scouting reports out of Brooklyn or Binghamton. Answering in the form of a question is perfectly acceptable when the Mets are in jeopardy. Still, who are we exactly? And whoever we’ll be, will we be any good and will it be as much fun as it was there for a spell that now seems to be over?
by Greg Prince on 7 August 2021 10:40 am “Mick, what happened? I’m all woozy.”
“Ya got knocked down, kid. Flattened was more like it.”
“Again? I thought this time was supposed to be different.”
“Yer not throwin’ any punches, kid! Ya got hit! Ya gotta hit back! Ya used to be a thing a’ beauty, I tell ya, what with yer resiliency an’ th’ way ya fought ’til th’ final bell. What happened to ya, kid?”
“I thought ya told me to stand still and take it.”
“I told ya ta take THREE pitches with th’ bases loaded an’ nobody out ’cause I didn’t have no faith in ya at that particular moment — but THEN ya had ta come out fightin’! Ya hit into a double play instead.”
“I’m confused, Mick. Where’s my belt?”
“What belt?”
“The belt I brought with me from up the Turnpike, yo, the belt I been carryin’ around with me for I think the last 90 days.”
“That was no belt, kid. That was a lead. Ya hadn’t won anything yet. Now ya ain’t leadin’, neither.”
“So what now, Mick?”
“Ya gotta get up! Ya gotta get yer timin’ back! Ya need t’ defend when th’ other pug comes at ya! Most of all, ya need The Eye Of The Tiger!”
“The Eye Of The Tiger?”
“The Eye Of The Tiger!”
“Mick, have I been traded to the American League?”
“Kid! Focus! Ya got another 53 rounds in this fight! Ya got two more this weekend alone! Ya gotta stop bein’ so friendly with th’ canvas!”
“Oh, I’m very friendly, Mick. I got great what they call chemistry. I even got a horse I keep at ringside sometimes. Don’t worry, it’s just what they call a plush toy. I wouldn’t bring no real horse to a regulation bout. I mean I ain’t no mental genius, but I’m not stupid, yo. I just like to act like I am for fun sometimes. Anyhows, I thought my chemistry and playfulness is why everybody’s been embracin’ me figuratively if not actually because, yo, I know ya can’t get too close to somebody without a mask or preferably an inoculating vaccine these days. I hear they’re very effective, and I oughta know, ’cause I been takin’ plenty of shots this week.”
“They’ll like ya when yer standin’ in th’ ring goin’ toe fer toe an’ punch fer punch when yer attacked! Right now even yer fans can’t stand ya!”
“They can’t? I gotta say that’s very disturbing, mentally speaking.”
“Ya look dead, kid! Dead as a doornail that fell outta th’ doorknob! Ya gotta get yerself undeaded NOW!”
“Yeah, OK, Mick. Just one thing, though.”
“What’s that?”
“If these next two rounds are in Philadelphia, who am I really in this scenario? I mean I appreciate the metaphorical symbolism an’ all, it’s very well extrapolated and executed, but are we just ignorin’ the identity of the stadium and the opposition to say nothin’ of the statue the locals erected to their hometown albeit fictional hero? I don’t think most of these people here are necessarily gonna be chantin’ my name out there even if I’m pretty sure I saw a lotta orange an’ blue in the crowd when I wasn’t seein’ all them stars, which by the way is very nice of so many of my fans to make that trip and I hate to let ’em down ’cause you know it’s a lotta bother and expense to come down the Turnpike or even take the train when ya gotta take it back late on a Friday night. Yo, I’m just sayin’.”
“KID! STOP ASKIN’ ME QUESTIONS I CAN’T ANSWER!! GET OUT THERE AN’ FIGHT LIKE YER TITLE DEPENDS ON IT!!!”
“What title? I thought you said I don’t got no title yet, Mick”
“Exactly, kid. Exactly.”
by Greg Prince on 5 August 2021 10:13 pm For the ninth time in franchise history, the New York Mets have completed 108 games, or two-thirds of a regulation schedule, with a playoff spot in hand. In six of the eight previous instances when they led either the NL East or the NL Wild Card race at this juncture (1986, 1988, 1999, 2000, 2006, 2015), they went on to the postseason. The two times they didn’t were 1985, when they could have used a future format, and 2007, when they could have used a rescue squad and trampoline.
I heard James McCann mention the other night that the season is 162 games long. It came up after a loss, a.k.a. only one game out of 162. Players on teams that have just won never mention the length of a season, probably because they’re not asked what’s wrong with the team. The Mets get asked a lot lately what’s wrong. Nobody has a really great answer, but they all have a helluva handle on how many games make up the schedule.
At the two-thirds mark of the current season, we can hope sweet precedent prevails, but project only that one-third of the season remains. We base that calculation on James McCann and mathematics. No matter how you wave your probabilities and your playoff odds, we can project nothing else at this time. The precincts that have reported — approximately 67% of them — tell us only what has happened to date. The 108 games that have been played aren’t necessarily an indicator of the 54 to come. Each component of that final third is so new that not a blessed thing has happened in them. Not a cursed thing, either. Steve Kornacki at the Big Board would be handy to have around here to counsel patience and urge us to wait for all the results to be counted.
Which is what I guess James McCann was doing when he invoked the magic 162. Right now, in the wake of another underwhelming defeat at the hands of the Marlins, all a Met or a Mets fan who wishes to walk around under something other than a cloud of doom can do is point out there are definitely games yet to be played. And that none of them has yet been lost.
The most recent game, however, has been lost, 4-2 at Miami on Thursday afternoon. It was lost on leaky defense, imperfect relief pitching (abetted by an iffy ball four call) and, most ostentatiously, invisible offense when the bats most needed to show themselves. The Mets put all the runners you could have wanted on base — 8 hits! 8 walks! 2 opposition errors! — and hardly any of them across the plate. When you counted up the tops of the innings and how each of them ended, fifteen Mets in toto lingered on base. For all we know, they’re still there.
Except for Javy Baez. He struck out five times and thus avoided all charges of loitering on first, second and/or third. He also engineered a spiffy 6-4-5-6 double play in the field, lest “STRUCK OUT FIVE TIMES” be the extent of the man’s Thursday epitaph for those tempted to bury him altogether not one week since his acquisition.
After nearly three months of unmitigated use of the delightful adjective “first-place,” we’ve received a notice that we may have to return it to the library. The Phillies apparently put their names on a waiting list and they may get to lay their philthy mitts on our favorite descriptor next. How convenient that we could get to drop it off in person this weekend. While the Mets were resisting the last-minute urge to put multiple runs on the board in South Florida — 3 LOB in the 9th, though it seemed like more — the Phillies burst from behind in Washington in their ninth inning to pull out a fifth straight victory and pull to within a half-game of us. I didn’t watch any postgame Zooms from Nationals Park, but I’m gonna assume nobody in the visitors’ clubhouse was helpfully stressing the presence of 162 games in a baseball season.
Our next three are indeed in Philadelphia; it’ll be an opportunity for somebody. Then three at home against the newly useless Nationals. Then thirteen completely outstanding precincts appear on our electoral map: games against the Dodgers and Giants, in New York and in California, versus (due respect to Milwaukee) the two best teams in the National League. Those baker’s dozen dates, August 13 through August 26, have been lurking all year long, with L.A. and San Fran having piled up wins after dark and us having gotten as far as we have without having to play them once. Well, we’ll soon play them a lot. A lot. In a row. Gosh, it would have been nice to have taken advantage of these four with the Marlins, just as it would have been swell to have made the most of those seven with the Pirates just before and after the All-Star break, which was right about when our stagnation commenced to devouring our momentum.
Ah, but those games were also outstanding precincts in their time, except they didn’t daunt so much as beckon. A lot of lip-licking went for naught. We didn’t know the Pirates weren’t going to be pushovers or that the Fish wouldn’t flop. We might have suspected, but the odds said we would roll up Ws more than we’d absorb Ls. Instead, we the first-place Mets lost seven of eleven to those last-place denizens, providing another modicum of proof that you don’t know what’s going to happen until you actually play the games.
Admittedly, “the Mets lost to lousy teams, therefore you can’t say for sure they’ll lose to better teams” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that we’re primed for a step up in class just as our guys have forgotten how to drive in or, for that matter, optimally prevent runs. But it does have counterintuitiveness going for it. At the moment, we don’t have a lot else to bank on, except that after going 21-27 in our last 48, and 2-6 in our last eight, we’re 0-0 in our next 54.
We haven’t lost the games we haven’t yet played. Somebody unfurl me a blank bed sheet and toss me a can of spray paint. That baby’s going up on a banner.
by Jason Fry on 5 August 2021 12:22 am You know you’re in a bad stretch because your team wins and you don’t feel good — just relieved, if you’re lucky. Or exhausted, if you’re not.
That was me after the Mets somehow beat the Marlins and their own demons by 5-3, a game that felt much closer than that. It was a strange, vaguely seasick affair, as the Mets jumped out to what seemed like a big lead for them given recent events, inevitably surrendered that lead, gained it back in pretty much the least efficient way possible, stubbornly refused to expand that lead, and then held it with a little help from a longtime nemesis.
Like I said, exhausted.
The magic was good at first — Javier Baez broke for home from third on a sharp grounder to first from Tomas Nido in the second and was going to be a dead duck, except as he slid home he somehow pulled his left hand back, used it as a brake to transfer his momentum to his right hand, and rolled over and onto the plate as a dumbfounded Alex Jackson regarded the space where the other hand had been. Even on replay, it still looks like a magic trick. Instead of 1-0 Mets and an inning short-circuited, it was 2-0 Mets and the discombobulated Marlins promptly handed the Mets a third run on an error. El Mago indeed.
Carlos Carrasco rode a very effective slider into the fifth, but the Mets refused to add on, leaving anyone who’s been paying attention with the grim feeling that three runs wasn’t nearly enough. Which proved correct: It was 3-2 heading into the sixth, when Jeurys Familia got ambushed by Jesus Aguilar, who slammed a ball into the left-field seats to erase the lead. The Mets flailed and failed and were generally annoying until Baez poked a leadoff homer into the right-field seats off an Anthony Bass slider that got too much plate, giving them back a lead it felt like they no longer deserved.
Bass kept throwing bad sliders in the eighth and the Mets kept missing them, mulishly refusing to score until a passed ball gave them no choice. With Edwin Diaz away on paternity leave, they handed a two-run lead and the ball to Trevor May, whose primary objective was not to walk the leadoff hitter.
So of course May walked the leadoff hitter, throwing a 3-2 fastball to Brian Anderson at the knees that missed the outside corner by a good three inches.
Angel Hernandez called it strike three.
I cannot believe I typed that and the world didn’t explode.
Hang on, I appear to be dreaming.
Angel Hernandez called it strike three.
Nope, still here. Huh.
Angel Hernandez, whom John Franco, Bobby Valentine and Mike Piazza would still gleefully jump in an alley for something that happened during the Clinton administration. An umpire who deserves a place on the Mets’ Mount Rushmore of misery alongside Chase Utley and Chipper Jones. Somewhere out there that little bastard Michael Tucker is gaping at his TV in amazement.
It wasn’t a strike. That wasn’t the shocking part, since Angel Hernandez is terrible at his job (he’s blown replay reviews, for God’s sake) and should be separated from that job for the good of the sport and to preserve the idea that fair arbitration of anything is still possible in this cruel, fallen world. No, the shocking part was that an Angel Hernandez mistake was to the Mets’ benefit. I couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d fallen out of bed and wound up mashed against the ceiling.
After that, well, there was tension because there’s always tension when your team can’t get out of its own way, but it wasn’t really tension, because the impossible had already happened and so what did anything mean? The Grim Reaper had wandered off to someone else’s village, Thanos’s snap had vaporized the other guys, and so with two more outs secured the Mets left the field, blinking and amazed, to figure out if they still knew what to do after a win.
They’d won through some shake-your-head Baez magic and tried not to win because of some dysfunctional, all-too-Metsian antimagic and then won anyway because of whatever it is Angel Fricking Hernandez channels, and having witnessed all of that and survived it I find there are no words left.
by Jason Fry on 3 August 2021 10:28 pm As baseball fans, we react. Unable to actually alter the course of events transpiring down there on the field, we overreact. And trying to outguess baseball is a surefire way to look like a fool.
Still. It’s what we do. We react, we overreact, we turn dots into lines and fill in pictures. Like this one: The Mets are in trouble. Red alert trouble.
Trouble as in their lead in the thoroughly mediocre National League East is down to a game and a half. That’s two bad days for a team that’s had a lot of them recently.
Trouble as in they’re now only a couple of ticks above mediocre themselves — once 10 games over .500, now just four.
Trouble as in the starters are hurt, erratic or may have run out of gas; the relievers are a nightly game of roulette; the offense is missing in action; and now the defense has started looking shaky too.
Trouble as in one can no longer hope the cavalry will ride to the rescue, not with forearm tightness and slow-to-heal obliques and pitch counts that need to be ramped up. Most of the cavalry’s here already, and wondering who’s going to rescue them.
Trouble as they’re in playing the Marlins in Soilmaster Stadium, a haunted house that’s never as empty as you wish it were, because everything that goes bump in the night turns out not to be a pet or the wind or the house settling but some deathless necrotic evil spirit that rips your face off and then drags you to Hell.
Trouble as in balls that didn’t quite go out of the yard, plays up the middle that weren’t quite made, liners gone just foul, enemy broken-bat hits carrying ridiculously far, balky hamstrings turning long outs into long hits, frustrated managers getting ejected and frustrated newcomers looking for someone to blame.
The Mets are in trouble. Red alert trouble. Don’t remain calm. All is not well.
by Greg Prince on 3 August 2021 10:12 am It took until his eighth start for me to hear the name Tylor Megill and think of Tess McGill, which surprises me. We hadn’t had Javy Baez for five minutes last Friday before I had to remind myself he wasn’t to be conflated with late ’90s scourge Javy Lopez or early ’90s infielder Kevin Baez.
Whereas Javy Lopez actually caught for the Braves when Greg Maddux wasn’t starting and Kevin Baez actually logged bench time with the Mets, Tess McGill is fictional, if likely more famous outside of baseball than any of the above real-life characters. Tess was the title heroine of the 1988 smash hit comedy Working Girl, starring Melanie Griffith. Melanie Griffith has had a long career in film. To me (and, I’d guess, to most), however, she’ll always be Tess McGill.
Tylor Megill will always be…well, we’ll see. He’s had only eight starts to define himself, a total we can’t possibly call definitive. If his career were to end before his ninth, we’d remember him as that righty who came up out of nowhere and gave the 2021 Mets a boost when they were thin on starting pitching. We’d probably speak of him fondly and forget that his eighth start was his least effective, especially at its start. Tylor would live on in a cozy niche of guy from whom we’d never expected anything and, for the most part, got so much more. Knock wood, but I think we’ll see Tylor for a ninth start, a tenth and many more. The eighth start will hopefully be forgotten in the sweep of history yet to come.
Tess McGill got off to a rough start when we first met her. Maybe if she hadn’t aspired to ascend above her station as a Wall Street secretary, she would have been fine. But Tess wanted to rise through ranks that weren’t designed for the likes of her to be risen through. Our Tess had to overcome a lecherous so-called mentor (Kevin Spacey), a cheating boyfriend (Alec Baldwin), a craven boss (Sigourney Weaver) and, most of all, her circumstances. No one was going to take Tess from Staten Island seriously until she took herself seriously. Sure, as she put it in a valium-addled moment, she had “a bod for sin,” but she also demonstrated “a head for business”.
She had allies along the way, too. Wise HR director Olympia Dukakis, who gave her a foot in the door. Her sassy friend Joan Cusack. Dreamy Harrison Ford, who believed in her. But mostly herself. Tess used her gumption and her wits to make deals and a name for herself. Most impressive was how she crashed a big-time wedding the way Tylor recently crashed a big league rotation so she could get face time with mogul Oren Trask. See, Tess had this idea to put Trask together with radio…
The important thing is Tess (spoiler alert) worked at her goal and succeeded. We should all have our fates so directed by Mike Nichols.
Tylor had his own pile of adversity to overcome. In the bottom of the first in Miami Monday night, he gave up two singles, had his third batter reach on catcher’s interference, and then gave up a grand slam to Lewis Brinson. Four hitters faced, four runs on the board once all four Marlins’ bony asses crossed home plate. (Tess’s insult of choice, not mine.)
This was gonna take more than gumption and self-belief. This was also gonna take more than modest contributions from well-meaning allies like Baez, who played through pain in his ankle; Pete Alonso, who delivered his 24th homer; and Brandon Drury, who remained hot if not ridiculously so. It would take a whole squad of Mets coming through to rescue Tylor so he could rescue himself. He certainly did his part, throwing five innings after that grand slam, giving up only three more hits and one more run.
But this script had no exhilarating ending for Tylor, no Carly Simon soundtrack playing over a travelogue-worthy shot of Lower Manhattan. He left after five and the Mets couldn’t roar ahead from behind. Not even Drury could get the very big hit that was desperately needed when the Mets loaded the bases in the eighth. Not even a brief glimpse of the old Michael Conforto, with a pinch-double to begin the ninth, could generate a storybook comeback.
The Mets lost the game, 6-3, as well as a length off their NL East lead, which now stands at 2½. Megill lost his first decision in the major leagues. I’m not worried about his future, though. He’s got a head for pitching and a bod for wins.
by Jason Fry on 1 August 2021 9:40 pm The Reds’ Joey Votto said something wonderful Saturday night, after just missing his bid for a record-tying home run in his eighth straight game. Here’s Votto on his streak, how it began, and how it ended:
I’m a bit of a StatCast nerd and it started with a .090 expected batting average home run on a 98-mph weak fly ball that carried into the first couple of rows into Cincinnati. And it ended on a 109, 110-mph line drive off the wall and that’s baseball.
If you love baseball, you should love Votto – because baseball’s maddening capriciousness has rarely been described so well, and to hear an actual player wade into the existential murk to describe it is rarer still. This isn’t to say ballplayers are dumb, though it is true that few of them are wordsmiths; rather, it’s to note that a philosophical bent can get in a player’s way, which is the last thing he needs when the game’s hard enough as it is. Ballplayers need to be able to instantly flush away the past and any doubts that might have accumulated with it, living in the present and possessing an unshakeable faith in themselves and the future that will entail. Votto is the rarest of breeds – a multi-WAR talent in the batter’s box and in considering what does and doesn’t happen within it.
Sunday’s game left me returning again and again to Votto’s quote, because it was pretty goddamn capricious game. Less than two weeks ago the Mets faced Vladimir Gutierrez and beat him up pretty thoroughly, with Pete Alonso, Jeff McNeil and Michael Conforto homering as the Mets hung six runs on Gutierrez in four innings. But if the Mets arrived at Citi Field licking their jobs about a rematch, they soon discovered they were the meal. Gutierrez flashed a terrific changeup, located his pitches well and throttled the Mets over seven outstanding innings. Meanwhile, Marcus Stroman hit a bump or two, which wouldn’t have been enough to derail him on a day when the offense was clicking, except the offense was decidedly not doing that, and the lack was enough for Stroman find himself behind Gutierrez on the scoreboard.
Votto was a spectator Sunday, spelled by the less-than-heralded Max Schrock – another matchup that looked like good news for the Mets but proved anything but. Schrock went 5-for-5, with the man he’d replaced for the day leading the cheers for him from the dugout. Add in the Mets’ bullpen imploding – Miguel Castro walked in a run by issuing four straight balls to Gutierrez, while Geoff Hartlieb chose a different but equally unsuccessful strategy by following three walks and a single with a two-run double to Tyler Naquin – and the Mets were doomed. The game was a logy slog, no fun to watch even before the scoreboard yielded its final verdict.
So it goes during this stop-start stretch of season: The Mets have gone 20-23 since being 10 games over .500 on June 16, with nearly every reliever springing a leak at some point and the run of injuries to starters and position players showing no signs of abating. Yet they’ve somehow lost just a game and a half off their lead in the National League East while doggy-paddling around haplessly, thanks to the division being a yearlong festival of mediocrity. Which is both kind of a miracle and the sort of thing you sense not to trust even a day longer than you can avoid it.
I can squint a little and see the Mets holding off the flawed, remade-on-the-fly Phillies and the injury-riddled Braves, finding themselves with reinforcements in time for September and then proving healthy and incredibly dangerous in October. But I can just as easily see them getting run down by the Phillies, Braves or both, undone by their chronic lack of offense, by fatigue and injuries dragging down the rotation even further, and by bad luck catching up to them.
Who knows? Baseball is capricious, after all. All you can do is hope that the dice wind up loaded in your favor – and promise that you’ll keep your sense of humor if they don’t.
* * *
The Mets seemed to have scored a coup with Vanderbilt’s Kumar Rocker fell to them as the 10th pick in the draft, and news that the two sides had agreed to a $6 million signing bonus came as another welcome indication that the Steve Cohen era would be nothing like the Wilpon years.
But then came reports that the Mets hadn’t liked something they saw during Rocker’s physical, rumblings that the team and Scott Boras weren’t talking, and then word that Sunday’s 5 pm deadline had passed without Rocker’s signature on a contract. He goes back into the draft and the Mets get a make-good 11th pick next year.
The next few days will probably deliver more details about what exactly the Mets might have seen, what Sandy Alderson and Boras and Cohen thought and said, and the rest of the ingredients for the mess. Maybe Rocker never has a pro career worth noting, undone by too much mileage as a college pitcher. But maybe the Mets let a shot at a premier talent go in a squabble over a relative modest outlay of money.
The reaction among Mets fans, myself included, was swift and brutal, with the lost pick pilloried as a slide back into skinflint Wilponism. And I get why we all thought that way. First off, it’s going to take a long time to recover from the grinding cheapness and serial dishonesty of the Wilpons and their goons; second, the fanbase is rattled by the team’s unsteady play and disappointment that the trading deadline failed to address the needs for credible starting depth and/or better options in middle relief. What’s a billionaire owner for, if not to throw money at problems?
But after a couple of hours of reading and reflecting on Rocker, I’m choosing to do something all too rare online, which is to say that my take is I don’t have a take, because I don’t know enough about what happened.
I don’t find it credible that the Mets were cheap or negotiated in bad faith. Not even the Wilpons would have engineered their draft around going $1.3 million over slot for a first pick as a clever ruse to save $6 million; in fact, drafting was the one thing the Mets were fairly good at even during the Wilpons’ red-giant phase. If you eliminate that conspiracy theory, whatever happened comes down to questions about Rocker’s health and the Mets’ cost-benefit analysis in deciding between the pitcher and whatever might be wrong with his arm and picking an unknown quantity 11th next year. Which turns the argument into asking whether the Mets did their due diligence on Rocker and/or assessing whatever player they draft next summer instead of him. I don’t know enough about the first point and nobody will know enough about the second point until around 2026. So I’m choosing to move on and save my gnashing and wailing for clear and present dangers to first place and a happy October. There isn’t exactly a lack of them.
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