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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 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.
by Greg Prince on 1 August 2021 4:59 am Jon Matlack believes we know what we’re talking about. I know that’s what he believes because I asked him and that’s what he told me. And who’s not gonna believe Jon Matlack, essential starting pitcher for the 1973 National League Champion New York Mets?
At the press conference preceding Saturday night’s Mets Hall of Fame ceremonies, which I covered as “media” (and what is a blog if not a medium?), I asked Matlack, along with his HOF classmates Ron Darling and Edgardo Alfonzo, what stood out from all those seasons of performing in front of Mets fans.
“I think they’re fair and knowledgeable,” the silver southpaw said. “I found that as long as they thought you put a good effort forth, you weren’t necessarily in a position where you had to win all the time. As long as you weren’t slighting the job, you were treated fairly, and I respect that tremendously. I do think the knowledgeable fan is here in New York more so than in some other places. There were people telling me statistics I had to look up to remember, and they knew ’em off the top of their head, so it was pretty incredible.”
On behalf of Mets fans, Jon, I say a) thank you; and b) right backatcha, because you, sir, showed some genuine foresight about a game from 2021 as you recalled a game from 1973 in answer to another reporter’s question regarding the immortal You Gotta Believe pennant rush.
“It all started for me,” Matlack recounted, “when we were playing Pittsburgh one night, and the ball got hit to left field that didn’t go out. It hit on the corner of the fence and came back in. We made a play at the plate, threw a guy out, turned that game around, we started playing better — no matter what happened from there on, seemed like somebody was equal to the task, they were gonna do whatever it took to put us in the right spot to win. We weren’t supposed to get past the Reds…”
You don’t have to be a certified Metsologist to know Jon was referring to the signature play of the 1973 stretch drive, wherein, with Richie Zisk on first base in the top of the thirteenth inning of a 3-3 duel, Dave Augustine at bat, and the Pirates nursing a dwindling divisional lead in the penultimate week of the season, Augustine indeed hit a ball that was clearly going over Shea Stadium’s left field wall. Instead, it struck the very top of the fence, bounced directly back to Cleon Jones, and Jones fired it instantly to shortstop Wayne Garrett. Garrett wasted no time in relaying the ball to Ron Hodges, and the rookie catcher indeed made a play at the plate. That 7-6-2 thing of beauty ended one half-inning and set the stage for the next half-inning, when Hodges drove in the run that beat the Pirates and cut the rampaging Mets’ deficit to a half-game.
Jon Matlack, it should be noted, didn’t pitch in that game, but he cherishes it nonetheless. When a team is winning as those Mets were, it doesn’t matter who’s the hero. Everybody’s the hero.
 Matlack, Darling, Alfonzo: Mets greats meet the press, get their due. As for that bit about the Mets not having been supposed to get past the Reds, you know darn well that in 1973 the 82-79 Mets absolutely weren’t favored to overcome the 99-63 Reds in the National League Championship Series, yet they did. In Game Two, a young Met lefty from Pennsylvania gummed up the Big Red Machine so effectively that Cincinnati’s vaunted manufacturing apparatus could spew out only two hits. That part was Matlack’s doing, with some help from some teammates who drove in some runs for him and made some plays behind him, because, again, everybody’s the hero in years like that.
Forty-eight years later, on the night of Matlack’s, Darling’s and Alfonzo’s overdue enshrinement — and the presentation of the franchise’s Hall of Fame Achievement Award to the family of the late Al Jackson — the Mets weren’t supposed to beat the Reds, either. Maybe not going in, but once you got kind of deep into Saturday’s game, it didn’t seem plausible that the Cincinnatians would return to their Manhattan hotel on anything less than a Red hot high.
True, the Mets briefly held a 1-0 lead, but that hard-earned third-inning edge — built on a Brandon Drury double, a Rich Hill sacrifice bunt (welcome back to real baseball, chief) and a Jonathan Villar single — was wiped out by a Eugenio Suarez three-run no-doubter. When the glorious on-field Hall of Fame ceremonies ended, I’d noticed Suarez embracing one of Alfonzo’s special guests, Carlos Baerga. I’d hate to think Baerga, a teammate of Fonzie’s from 1996 to 1998, gave Suarez a tip on how to hit Hill. While Baerga was spending his final year in the majors as a Washington National in 2005, Hill was breaking in as a rookie with the Cubs.
What — did you think Rich Hill was born old?
Kyle Farmer added to the Red advantage in the fifth with a solo homer. A 4-1 lead shouldn’t have seemed insurmountable, but after the two previous games, in which the Mets scored not enough, then hardly at all, it was easy to get the feeling the Mets weren’t supposed to beat the Reds. Or, for that matter, an egg.
We develop certain senses for what’s going to go wrong from having rooted for the Mets for so long. Mind you, I wasn’t outwardly rooting for the Mets on Saturday because of press box decorum — no cheering there — but in my notebook and sotto voce to the spiritual co-conspirator who sat to my right and joined me in donning a mask of indifference, I came up with many reasons why this game was not going to go the Mets’ way. One of them was that Javier Baez was going to have a massively disappointing debut. I based this on expectations being raised by a crowd that couldn’t get enough of his first at-bat until it ended in a routine out. He’s gonna get pumped up by the volume, he’s gonna press, he’s gonna strike out, it’s such a Mets thing to happen — just like Hideo Nomo in 1998, never mind that he was a pitcher. My mind does a lot of this.
All that experience we have garnered from watching the Mets. All that knowledge we Mets fans have accumulated. Meanwhile, Baez, who had been a Met for about five minutes and had presumably never slipped into his school library to check out Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? knew better. Or knew enough to not know better. Or wasn’t susceptible to incubating hunches that he wasn’t gonna come through because that’s not how a talent of his caliber rolls. What I’m trying to tell you is in the bottom of the sixth, with two out (one of them notched after Villar had been picked off second), Baez absolutely walloped a two-run homer.
So maybe a lack of familiarity with supposed Met ways is the best knowledge a new Met can display. However you explain it, the imported superstar shortstop had just cut the Reds’ lead to 4-3 and responded to his rapturous public with a curtain call. How could we lose now?
The answer, one guessed, was on a Joey Votto home run in the eighth inning. How poetic that would be, right? Votto had homered in seven consecutive games. Eight would tie the major league record. And, lookie there: with Farmer on first and nobody out, Votto lined a ball to very deep right off Seth Lugo. Oh, that baby is going, going…I haven’t been as sure of a ball leaving our park since a Thursday night in September of 1973 when Dave Augustine connected off Ray Sadecki.
Attention literalists: I’m using poetic license here. I’ve been plenty sure of plenty of home runs since September 20, 1973, but so much about Votto is poetic, just allow me my parallel, OK? Better yet, give me the wall this ball couldn’t quite clear. It went to right rather than left, and was hit inside of Citi Field rather than Shea Stadium, and it didn’t so much bounce off the very apex of the fence as hit a couple of inches below it, but it was close enough to going out without going out to make a prophet out of Jon Matlack.
“It hit on the corner of the fence and came back in.”
Sure did then. Sure did again. Votto had himself a long single (played expertly by Drury) and the Reds had him on first and Farmer on third and still nobody out. All the good vibes of Baez’s homer and the Augustinean echo of an enemy fly ball falling short of four bases notwithstanding, the Reds were still poised to extend their lead. The Mets, it should be noted, remained stuck on three runs and the Reds were one hit from having five, one extra-base hit from maybe having six. In a situation of that nature, who’s supposed to win?
Yet a situation like that isn’t fully formed until it fully plays out. Jeremy Hefner paid Lugo a visit, imparted words of wisdom à la Baerga to Suarez (albeit in my imagination) and Seth got back to being Seth. He struck out Tyler Naquin. He struck out the previously powerful Suarez. Then he departed in favor of Aaron Loup, the lefty who wears No. 32 as an obvious tribute to Matlack (albeit also in my imagination).
The pinch-hitter called on by Reds manager David Bell was Tyler Stephenson. What would Stephenson do with runners on first and third and two out versus Loup? Damned if I know. Damned if anybody knows. Votto, you see, was picked off first base, which got Farmer taking off from third base. Farmer, quite obviously, was the priority. Hence, after Loup threw to Pete Alonso, Alonso deduced the potential calamity unfolding across the diamond and threw to Villar at third. Villar threw to James McCann, who tagged out Farmer. Score it 1-3-5-2 (they announce that sort of thing in the press box so I make a point of jotting it down). Somehow, the Reds did not push any more runs across.
It was therefore getting a little 1973 up in here, microcosmically speaking. Just a little, though, because in the bottom of the eighth, three Mets did nothing. But in the top of the ninth, three Reds also did nothing. In the bottom of the ninth, the Mets doing something — anything — was paramount.
Jeff McNeil walked. That was something.
And Luis Guillorme pinch-ran for him. That could be something if something else happened.
A wild pitch happened! Guillorme was on second. He was a tying run just waiting to happen.
Javier Baez could happen for a second time in his first Met night. We’d seen him happen just a few innings earlier. Though my press box companion and I agreed Javy has the potential to be one of the all-time free swingers in Mets history (eat your heart out, Shawon Dunston), Baez worked the count versus Heath Hembree to three-and-oh. That’s a hitter’s count. Three pitches later, the hitter had struck out. James McCann immediately did the same.
Still waiting on the happening. It was gonna take some kind of divine intervention.
It was gonna take Sean Doolittle. Yes, Sean Doolittle! The same Sean Doolittle who gave up a game-tying three-run homer to Todd Frazier and the game-winning (or –losing, depending on your perspective) single to Michael Conforto almost two years ago at Citi Field, the last time I sat in the press box pretending not to care who won or lost. I try not to assume that because something happened once before that it’s guaranteed to happen again. Except there were two outs in the bottom of the ninth, we were losing by one, and precedent is the last refuge of the desperate fan masquerading as disinterested observer.
Dom Smith, whom Bell brought in Doolittle to face in an attempt at lefty-lefty alchemy, continued to be disinterested in labels. The lefty hit the lefty, singling to center to bring home Guillorme and knot the score at four. We were en route to an extra inning.
Jonathan India was on second base when the tenth started. Don’t ask me how he got there. I don’t even remember him batting. Crazy, huh? However he came to be standing on second, he zipped to third on an Edwin Diaz wild pitch.
Oh, that’s right, Diaz was pitching with a runner on second, nobody out and no save situation in sight. Feeling cocky yet?
Edwin walked Jesse Winker, then received one of those inspiring mound visits from Hefner. What worked on Lugo worked, too, on Diaz. Our closer morphed into Sammy Slam, as in the door. Struck out Farmer. Struck out Votto (sorry, pal, no eighth homer). Got Naquin to line out directly to Kevin Pillar.
Next thing I knew, Pillar was on second base when the tenth continued. Don’t ask me how he got there. I don’t even remember him batting. Still crazy, huh? However he came to be standing on second, however, he didn’t stay long.
Drury the Magnificent was the first batter in the bottom of the tenth. The pitcher was Luis Cessa, best known to us as the “other” pitcher we gave Detroit to obtain Yoenis Cespedes six years ago. We gave the Tigers Michael Fulmer and Cessa, the Tigers gave us the bat we needed to dislodge John Mayberry, Jr., from the middle of our lineup. Fulmer won the AL Rookie of the Year Award in 2016, which we were OK with because Cespedes won us the National League East in 2015. Cessa was agate type in the retelling.
But who doesn’t love a good, knowledge-driven detail? Thus, on the sixth anniversary of the day of the legendary Yoenis Cespedes deal — a day capped by Wilmer Flores’s even more legendary walkoff home run versus Washington two days after Wilmer Flores shed equally legendary tears — and on the very night that Jon Matlack invoked images of another pennant-winning year (and Javier Baez made like Yo homerwise), Luis Cessa gave up a walkoff single to Brandon Drury, and the everybody’s-the-hero Mets defeated the Reds, 5-4. Mets fans, I can report with accuracy, went nuts with appreciation. It didn’t appear we were “supposed” to win, but what was Brandon Drury supposed to do other than record yet another humongous hit? After all, Drury’s OPS in July was infinity.
I could look up the real number, but I’m a Mets fan. I know pretty incredible statistics off the top of my head.
by Greg Prince on 31 July 2021 11:40 am The Mets went out at the trade deadline and did something about the hole they considered perilous in their middle infield, acquiring somebody with both a stellar defensive background and a world championship pedigree, a player with a fairly unique offensive profile. He has only a couple of months left on his existing contract, so it’s not a huge commitment. The question is whether this deal will be enough to counteract the moves the Braves and the Phillies made as the Mets attempt to fend off their closest pursuers for the division lead.
But enough about the Mets getting Luis Castillo on July 30, 2007. This is about the Mets getting Javier Baez on July 30, 2021.
History isn’t exactly repeating itself despite some passing resemblance between the Mets’ decision to land second baseman Castillo — who earned a World Series ring with the 2003 Marlins; was voted three Gold Gloves; and led the National League in stolen bases twice — and Baez, essential keystone component for the champion 2016 Cubs, NL RBI king in 2018 and someone who’s the darling of the Defensive Runs Saved set. They’re actually substantially different players, but the circumstances that bring us the high-profile personality from Puerto Rico by way of Chicago aren’t wholly dissimilar from what was going on in these parts fourteen summers ago and how it led to the introverted Dominican infielder who’d been stranded in Minnesota coming to Flushing.
Castillo was a rental, grabbed at the ’07 deadline to fill the gap at second base left by an injury to Jose Valentin. His defense, despite a certain later notorious incident that occurred in a borough that shall remain nameless, remained airtight. Somewhere out there is a clip of Luis and Jose Reyes turning one of the sweetest double plays in creation in the middle of that August, when Castillo was still settling into the idea of playing in New York let alone next to a firecracker like Reyes. Despite the counterintuitive Big Apple casting, Castillo filled his role in the pennant race production reasonably adequately, hitting .296 and stealing 10 bases in 50 games while generally picking up ground balls and nobody noticing how many hands he used on popups. He didn’t show much power, but that was never his forte.
It wasn’t particularly Castillo’s fault the Mets didn’t fend off the Phillies, who’d fortified themselves at the 2007 deadline with starting pitcher Kyle Lohse. Shaking hands and saying goodbye to 32-year-old Luis might have been the best course of action following that star-collapsed September, but Omar Minaya truly enjoyed securing the services of veteran second basemen beyond the most useful portions of their careers (re-signing 37-year-old Valentin following 2006 speaks to that inclination). Castillo received a four-year contract that covered 2008 through 2011. The final year was bought out by Minaya’s successor.
Anyway, the Mets went out and grabbed Javy Baez from the Cubs right before the deadline on Friday. They sort of needed him because they’ve been vamping at shortstop ever since Francisco Lindor went down with an oblique injury following the All-Star break. Lindor’s injury is still an issue. That’s how obliques work. We keep seeing clips of Francisco furiously working out hours before home games, but it doesn’t bring him any closer to activation. “Week-to-week” is how Luis Rojas has termed his status, technically seven times longer than day-to-day.
Hence, Javier Baez, unquestionably the best available middle infielder on the market as the trade deadline burned fast and furious, is a Met. The Cubs, no longer contenders and therefore no longer interested in harboring stars who can walk away at season’s end, couldn’t detach themselves from their players swiftly enough. Javy fell from the North Side and into our laps, alongside righty Trevor Williams, in exchange for our top 2020 draft choice Pete Crow-Armstrong. Young Pete never got to play much minor league ball, first because there was no minor league ball in 2020 and then because he hurt his shoulder in 2021. I’d looked forward to his development based on whatever charisma he displayed the night he was selected. The attachment, however, never grew beyond the larval stage.
I saw Williams pitch well against the Mets once, in 2019, and somebody I trust told me he’s a good guy, so I was probably a little more excited that we’d gained an additional arm ancillary to Baez. Then I looked at his ERA (5.06 this year; 6.18 last year; 5.38 the year I saw him pitch well against the Mets once) and understood why he’s been initially assigned to Syracuse. Still, good guy, I’m told.
Baez is an exciting proposition. How can he not be? Any non-Met who’s succeeded wildly elsewhere shimmers with possibility. We only see them hit big homers — he’s belted as many as 34 round-trippers in a season and is up to 22 already this year — and make great catches and executive produce incredible highlights. Baez also has shallow spots in his skill set; try not to dwell on his paucity of walks or his surfeit of strikeouts if you wish to maintain your enthusiasm. Also, try to forget that he’s not a reliable starting pitcher, which was something that would have been nice to have added when we thought we’d be without Jacob deGrom a little longer and seemed a lot more imperative to have added when we learned we’ll be without Jacob deGrom more than a little longer. Our ace’s recovery has been paused for a couple of weeks due to forearm inflammation, and our August will thus be Jakeless.
Of course we did add a high-caliber pitcher on Friday in Carlos Carrasco. It’s the old “…like adding a piece at the deadline” equation that says if you’re bringing up somebody from the minors or getting somebody off the IL around the end of July, you don’t necessarily have to make a trade to fill a need. Carrasco certainly fills a need, but we probably needed more than just Carrasco to fill out the rotation, worst-case scenario vis-à-vis Jake or otherwise. We did get Rich Hill when nobody was looking like a week ago and we were blessed with Tylor Megill from out of the blue barely more than a month ago, but it doesn’t feel like enough. With starting pitching, it never feels like enough.
Still, Carrasco, almost forgotten for four months while his hamstring healed despite his having been Lindor’s significant trade companion in January’s blockbuster transaction, came out of the blue and into the black — sharp throwback jerseys and caps, provided they’re not worn to excess — on Friday night, taking the mound to face the Reds. His first pitch as a Met, to Jonathan India, landed somewhere on another subcontinent. Then Carlos settled in and gave up no more runs over four innings, a very encouraging sign. The Mets lineup seemed electrified in the bottom of the first from dressing as Mike Piazza once did. They were hitting, they were reaching base, they were scoring an entire run. Then they stopped. Black, sadly, is the new void, a hue the Mets can be as offensively futile in as they’ve too often been in orange, blue, what have you. The eventual final was Reds 6 Mets 2. Clad in any color, that’s not gonna get it done.
The good news, which can’t be counted on to replicate indefinitely, is the Phillies (3½ GB) and the Braves (4 GB) both lost, preserving the Mets’ distance from the NL East pack. The Phillies got themselves a solid starter at the deadline in Kyle Gibson, former Ranger. The Braves added, among others, Adam Duvall for their distressed outfield and Richard Rodriguez to shore up their already effective (based on what we experienced) bullpen. Why, it’s as if the first-place Mets haven’t clinched anything!
On Friday, Luis Guillorme at short and Jeff McNeil at second indicated middle-infield defense, even without Lindor around, isn’t much of a Met problem. But the best middle infielder available was within reach, ergo here arrives Baez, taking over shortstop in the interim and then shifting to second base when (hopefully not if) his very close friend Francisco comes back with full flexibility. McNeil and probably J.D. Davis will also have to show their own kind of flexibility by then. Javy has played both of his positions plenty and played them well. He says he’s more than willing to shift around if it means playing in the company of Lindor, and he comes off as very much a New York-ready guy. Despite the callback made above, getting Baez is a bigger deal than getting Castillo ever was. Two-time All-Star Baez might be nice to have on board after 2021 as well, but that’s a commitment that would also be a bigger deal than the one offered Castillo. Just as “too soon” might be your reaction to any mention of Luis Castillo in this space, “too soon” also applies to anything about Javy Baez for more than the short term.
Is Javier Baez going to help us stay in first and go far in October? I sincerely believe he couldn’t hurt.
by Greg Prince on 29 July 2021 9:50 pm The Mets are seven games over .500. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the Mets have been seven games over .500 on nineteen separate occasions over the — wait for it — past seven weeks. Seven games over .500 isn’t bad. Ask the Atlanta Braves, who haven’t been as much as one game over .500 all year. They’ve had to settle for four times being the team to pull the Mets back to seven games over .500 after the Mets had dared to scale the win-loss heights to eight games over .500.
Incrementalism is all the rage in the National League East, where .500 is the magnet that pulls the team above it back toward it and repels all team below it to keep their social distance. The Phillies are exactly .500. The Braves are a game below it. Imagine how good seven over looks from their perspective.
But, from our perspective, nine over would have looked even better Thursday afternoon in Flushing. Alas, Atlanta prevented our potential two-game winning streak from taking shape by beating the Mets, 6-3. It was, as losses to the Braves go, expectedly vexing and disturbingly routine. Austin Riley continued to pound New York pitching. Every Brave sooner or later reveals himself the most fiendish Met-killer since Chipper Jones. It’s Riley’s time to put us in the barrel. “Don’t pitch to Austin Riley,” we’ll tell one another, except we also won’t want to pitch to any of Austin Riley’s teammates.
Riley went 2-for-4 with a homer and three RBIs, which sounds like his standing order at Leo’s Latticini in Corona. The usual, Mr. R? Others in his ranks Chippered in as well, yet the Mets actually outhit the Braves, 12 to 7. Get the scoreboard columns to switch identities as they might in an absolutely hilarious ’80s comedy co-starring Judge Reinhold — “wait, I’M hits and YOU’RE runs???” — and we’d be cooking nine above tonight.
It doesn’t work that way. Instead it works once in a while that we get a dozen hits and it doesn’t do us a bit of good. According to Baseball-Reference’s Stathead tool, the Mets have played 62 nine-inning games in their 60-season history in which they’ve totaled at least a dozen hits yet haven’t scored more than a trio of runs. It’s not a formula for good fortune. After Thursday’s loss to the four Brave relievers who succeeded a shaky Drew Smyly, the Mets are a lifetime 13-49 when they fail to convert such a windfall of hits into more than a slight breeze’s worth of runs during regulation. (This isn’t counting weirdo extra-inning many-a-hit, barely-a-run marathons, which constitute their own form of bizarreness; gosh, I sort of miss them.)
There were some numbers to like beyond the main number of seven over .500 when nobody else in the division can accomplish that much. For example, Brandon Drury added a 2-for-2 to his previous 6-for-6 and had an 8-for-8 in progress (math rocks!) before finally making an out, leaving him one shy of tying Jose Vizcaino and John Olerud for the franchise record of nine hits in nine consecutive at-bats. Viz and Oly were regulars. Drury strung his perfection together in intermittent appearances. That’s worth eight pats on the back, even if on Thursday Drury’s characteristic lack of dreariness didn’t result in the building of or knocking in any runs.
Pete Alonso, meanwhile, hit a ball 453 feet. It landed in the fair portion of the left field Promenade Boxes, where only Yoenis Cespedes among Mets and Aaron Judge among utterly unwelcome visitors had previously deposited baseballs. Because one runner was on base, the Polar Bear’s Arctic blast counted for two runs. Given how far it traveled, it should have earned quadruple points. Pity the fine home run print doesn’t allow for bonus miles.
For three innings, Taijuan Walker looked as if he could have taken one run and hid. He’d given up neither a run nor a hit. Then he turned flawed to the point of futile. The look on his face as the fourth and fifth got away from him — five runs on a walk and six hits, including homers to Riley and Abraham Almonte — was reminiscent of Nuke LaLoosh during his nearly naked panic dream in Bull Durham. You could see Taijuan knew something was plaguing his pitches but also understood the cure wouldn’t be as simple as borrowing an undergarment from Annie Savoy.
For the silver lining-lovers out there, Miguel Castro continued on his journey back to sharpness with a scoreless sixth; Aaron Loup threw an ale of an eighth; and, making his major league debut, righty Akeem Bostick kept the Braves from inflicting superfluous ninth-inning damage. My scouting report on Akeem Bostick consisted of me learning after I got home from Wednesday night’s game that Akeem Bostick had been situated in the bullpen during Wednesday night’s game, having replaced Jerad Eickhoff on the active roster. Previous Mets to have replaced Jerad Eickhoff on the active roster in 2021 were Thomas Szapucki and Robert Stock. Have you seen Szapucki or Stock lately?
Hopefully Bostick won’t be disappeared to wherever it is pitchers who dare to occupy the flip side of Eickhoff’s DFAs. wind up. He was obviously a happy young man when he tweeted, postgame, “I can FINALLY say ‘I’M A BIG LEAGUER!’” Akeem should indeed shout his newly earned status to the heavens. It’s a very special designation to have earned, even among Mets, a team that has habitually enlisted Jerad Eickhoff to start baseball games.
In 2021, everybody, seemingly, has been a Met. Seriously, check your texts. You, too, may have been called up from Syracuse.
Akeem Bostick is the 35th new Met of the season, tying the “and you are…?” standard set in 1967. He’s the 56th Met to have seen action thus far this season, which matches the total from 2018, and we had to get to the end of September and David Wright’s physically tortured return from spinal stenosis to reach that traffic milestone. And he’s the 1,146th Met overall. For perspective, if you go back about four chronological years, to the final week of July in 2017, the all-time Met roster from 1962 forward weighed in at 1,032 players, or 114 fewer than the current composite number.
Meaning? Meaning approximately 10% of all players who’ve ever been Mets have debuted as Mets in the just the past four years. It’s a revolving door whose spin won’t pause, either, because on Friday night, we will belatedly welcome January acquisition Carlos Carrasco to the Citi Field mound, where we anticipate he will be resplendent in home white pants and home black jersey. In donning said Black Friday ensemble, Carrasco will become the 1,147th Met overall. Also, by the time the man known as Cookie throws his first Met pitch (hopefully not a cookie), a little something called the trade deadline will have passed, so it is not out of the question — and may very well be in our best interests — that we will have found some more bodies to immediately don the black, white, orange and blue as we strive to get eight games over .500 without immediately slipping back to seven.
We’ll root for ’em all, whoever they are. And if they don’t get the job done, we’ll assume somebody will go out and get us some more.
by Greg Prince on 29 July 2021 3:51 am Two people at Citi Field were proven wrong Wednesday night in the ninth inning. There was Braves third base coach Ron Washington and there was me, perched in the first row of Excelsior on the right field side. We were both off in our projection of what was about to happen after Ehire Adrianza lined a single to right with Abraham Almonte taking off from second. Washington was certain Almonte was going to score and tie the game at two apiece. So was I. Washington, per Jerry Beach of the Associated Press, “emphatically waved home Almonte,” while I muttered to my friend Kevin with whom I annually watch the Mets scratch and claw with the Braves only to too often come away competitively gouged, “he’s gonna be safe.”
Not consulted by either Wash or me was Mets right fielder Michael Conforto. He returned Adrianza’s liner with a liner of his own — a clothesline of a throw upon which you could hang your unmentionables. Unmentionable were the thoughts one nurtured about Edwin Diaz for letting Almonte on base to lead off the ninth and now facilitating his crossing of the plate.
But not if Conforto had anything to throw about it. Oh, and he did. That clothesline…that Frankie Goes to Hollywood-level laser beam…that straight-on lightning bolt…insert your own metaphor of choice. It was a strike from Conforto to James McCann that didn’t waste time with grass or dirt. Instead, it landed square in the catcher’s mitt, just enough up the third side of the plate to enable a swift tag to the leg of Almonte. The throw beat the runner. The tag beat the runner. Video replay was called for by a desperate Brian Snitker, but all that accomplished was an entertaining interval for Kevin and me and the vast majority of fans who hadn’t believed our own eyes but were happy to believe the big screen.
He’s out from this angle.
He’s out from that angle.
He’s out from all angles.
Thanks for the highlight package, Snit!
The only other thing wrong regarding Conforto’s bullet from right, besides Ron Washington and I misreading the impending outcome, was that it was fired in service to the second out of the ninth inning. That’s a play at the plate designed to end a game that for three hours felt tighter than the trousers Tom Jones wriggled himself into a half-century ago.
Tylor Megill dueled Max Fried, zeroes at sixty-and-a-half paces. Jeff McNeil found a hole to push Megill across the dish for the game’s first run in the third. Tylor simply hummed along for the first five innings. He had a shutout, a hit, a run…some kind of 26th-birthday haul for the rookie. And how about the party favor McNeil brought when he unwrapped his fifteen-game hitting streak?
Kevin and I discussed and signed off on Tylor batting for himself in the fifth and going out to continue his budding masterpiece in the sixth. This sort of decision would have required no discussion in another era, say when Tom Jones references were, like Tom Seaver complete games, not unusual, but we were conscious of Megill’s pitch count, frequency through the order and generally slight (if extremely solid) track record. Two batters later, Austin Riley docked a Megill pitch at the World’s Fair Marina. Goodbye birthday boy. And eff you Austin Riley for ruining the party.
One of the many conversational detours Kevin and I took between innings, batters and breaths was whether there’s any Met on the current squad we distinctly dislike. Yes, I said, there’s one: whichever reliever is on the mound. I exaggerate, but only a little. But here we were, as we inevitably are, pacing about the waiting room hoping to be told the delivery of our bouncing, baby win is going to come through without complications. It’s out of our hands when it’s out of the starter’s hands. Technically, it’s never in our hands. We’re fans. At best we have a few pretzel nuggets in our hands (Kevin treated me to both a great seat in Excelsior and a new snack from its concession stands). But when our starter’s on the mound, especially if he’s throwing strikes and recording outs, we are one with him. We’ve been with him since the first inning, maybe since we found out he was going to start the game. When it’s a reliever, we’re inherently convinced control has been ripped from our fingers.
That’s my theory, anyway. I was wrong about Almonte scoring, maybe I’m wrong about this. Either way, my new least favorite Met, once Megill exited, was — through no fault of his own — Seth Lugo. But Lugo somehow didn’t get beaten by the always sadistic Dansby Swanson nor the foreshadowy man from the foreshadowy planet Almonte.
Good news, Seth, you’re off the hook. I can go back to liking you.
In the seventh inning, Trevor May, in whom I currently invest zero faith, retired the Braves in order, including the preternaturally vengeful Guillermo Heredia. If you blinked, you missed Heredia’s seven-game Met tenure last September. Heredia remembers it, however, and he’s clearly pissed his unimpressed employers gave him the Eickhoff’s rush, DFA’ing him as winter wound down. I shall make them pay, he cackled demonically as he signed his contract with Atlanta. I shall make Ender Inciarte expendable and then I will BECOME Ender Inciarte!
Why else would Heredia bat approximately .864 against the Mets and basically nothing against everybody else? Again, another theory of mine. I’m full of them.
Brandon Drury came off the bench and homered to give the Mets the lead in the bottom of the seventh. I thought I’d say that casually. Brandon Drury casually gets hits off the bench. They’re often homers. Considering that this one was off Fried and gave the Mets the lead and that it soared very high and that it landed very far from whence he initially made contact, casual may not be the proper tone to take when it comes to Brandon Drury’s pinch-homer. Our reaction in Section 310 as the Mets went up, 2-1, was actually quite delirious.
We thought we had a chance to calm down in the eighth with the arrival of Busch Light spokesmodel Aaron Loup. Loup is the reigning exception to the Whichever Reliever is Pitching is My Least Favorite Met rule. It used to be Lugo. Maybe I’m doing this in reverse alphabetical order. More likely it’s based on Loup’s extraordinary effectiveness. I’m easy that way. Naturally, Loup didn’t make it easy. Two hard-hit singles from Joc Pederson and Ozzie Albies and a productive tapper from Freddie Freeman led to Braves on second and third with one out. Three batters meant a change could be made. To which about–to-be reviled reliever, though?
Jeurys Familia? I didn’t want to revile Familia. Familia has revived too much to be reviled. Kevin had earlier wondered if, generally speaking, a 1986-style Lee Mazzilli was in our future, somebody who’d come back to us from the mists of time and contribute memorably to championship drive. Kevin once thought that was a job for pre-retirement Daniel Murphy. I remembered that I predicted it would be the fate of a late-’90s Dave Magadan. Our respective scenarios never came to pass. But Kevin insightfully determined we were looking on the wrong side of the ball, for we were watching our modern-day Mazzilli trot in from the pen right this very instant.
It was Familia. Never mind that he’d made his return to the Mets in 2019 after being away for the equivalent of a semester abroad with Oakland. It’s the not the lack of recent recidivism that tells Familia’s comeback tale. It’s that he hadn’t looked anything like the Jeurys we remembered at his best from ’14 to ’18 in ’19 or ’20 or our first queasy sightings of him in ’21. Yet slowly, almost imperceptibly, he’s become a bona fide bullpen asset. True, now that I’ve said that, he will soon go the way of Lugo and Loup, commit the sin of imperfection, and force me to revile him.
We’ll put aside recriminations for another day. On Wednesday, we had to trust Familia to go after Riley and Swanson with runners on second and third with one out. And wouldn’t ya know it — Riley struck out and Swanson grounded out. It was a renaissance inning of the highest order, as if Mazzilli was sparking a rally against Boston while burning down the wilderness years he’d definitively left behind him.
Just as it would’ve been great had Conforto’s eventual “WHOA!” throw secured the final out of the ninth, it would’ve been great had Familia’s bacon-securing outing represented the save. You’d think Rob Manfred might have slipped in a rule about dramatic eighth innings precluding ninths. Nope, we still needed three more outs. Those would be on Diaz. He was hit hard — the Almonte ground-rule double that led off the ninth was no joke — but he gave up no runs and therefore was credited with a save as if the scoreless last half-inning was implicitly his doing. Edwin could thank his right fielder for throwing with better command than he had, but it’s a team game and this was a team win. The team was the Mets. That part is 100% correct.
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