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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 17 August 2021 3:51 pm “A long flight across the night? You know why late flights are good? Because we cease to be earthbound and burdened with practicality. Ask the important question. Talk about the idea nobody has thought about yet. Put it in a different way.”
That was Jed Bartlet aboard Air Force One, somewhere over America, sometime late at night, advocating for the benefits of a nocturnal journey. Of course Jed Bartlet is a fictional character. As president on The West Wing, he also had what amounted to his own plane, so staying up late didn’t inflict much personal discomfort. But Martin Sheen as President Bartlet (and Aaron Sorkin, who served as Bartlet’s real-life speechwriter) had a point. There is something freeing about the wee hours.
The Mets began their West Coast trip at the not quite godforsaken hour of a quarter to ten Eastern Daylight. There was no daylight left in the east, but if you were watching prime time television on a normal night, it wouldn’t seem that late. Start a baseball game as quadruple-digits are approaching, however, and it’s late. Most of our games start at 7:10. We form a routine. Night games from St. Louis or Milwaukee are discombobulating enough. Night games from California be crazy.
Crazy, but novel enough to be invigorating for at least a few innings following an unforeseen lengthy pause. The Mets hadn’t been to San Francisco since 2019. We came into 2021 packing a valise full of “haven’t been to since 2019” status updates. The televised setting I apparently missed most was that of the home park of the San Francisco Giants. I was really glad to see it despite understanding more Met doom likely awaited within. The home park of the San Francisco Giants has gone by four different names since its opening in 2000. The first three were purchased by phone companies, so I thought of the place as Phone Company Park. The current name is owned by a tech behemoth, so I think of it now as (Not) Phone Company Park. Its fungible handle notwithstanding, it always comes across as sumptuous on TV, especially at West Coast dusk. I love the outfield lawn in particular. No patterns mowed in. Just smooth, unfussy green grass. Throw a picnic blanket down on that field and hang out. Combine the grass with the Cove and the bricks and the general San Franciscan ambiance, and every encomium we experienced last week about corn fields in Iowa could be applied to the San Francisco treat. Baseball in a big beautiful city, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.
It’s swell for the Giants this year. When last we saw the Giants, two summers ago, they weren’t terribly imposing. After Madison Bumgarner and Conor Gillaspie conspired to end our 2016 postseason prematurely, the Giants disappeared from the competitive landscape. Why, they were worse than we were between 2017 and 2019, and their record wasn’t appreciably better than ours in 2020. But they quietly got good ahead of 2021 and here they are, with the best record in baseball. They won three world championships in the first half of the previous decade. All that once was good for them indeed is good again.
Our season once was good, but that’s part of our past, Ray. All we’ve done for weeks is lose series. Except to the Nationals, but the Nationals, champions from the last full-sized contested season, opted to accelerate their immersion into the ain’t-what-they-been-no-more club. The Giants wound up there organically in 2017. The Nationals sold off half their recognizable players a few weeks ago and gave up the charade of fringe contention. Maybe they’ll be back in a few years the way the Giants are. Just what we need.
We did sweep the Nationals last week, and the games definitely counted in the standings. For a literal minute on Friday night, after the Phillies lost and while neither the Mets nor Braves had completed their appointed rounds, we were in first place by a single percentage point. “Look who’s No. 1!” a friend tweeted in my direction a little before 10:30. It was his homage to the Shea scoreboard from the second the Mets first took first place on September 10, 1969, the Mets nosing ahead of the Cubs by .001. That transcendent tick of the clock from 52 years ago was only the beginning of a first-place stay that never ended. The dizzying interval achieved after the Nationals series ended with the Dodgers beating us once. By the time L.A. beat us thrice, first place was falling out of easy reach. The Giants (along with the Braves) have batted away it even further.
 From last Friday night’s hot “Look Who’s No. 1!” minute. We may never pass this way again. Upon reflection, last week’s goofy sweep of the Nationals — with a suspended game, a resumed game, another rainout and two truncated Manfred Specials — was not a glimmer of 1969. It was a reminder of 2002. That was nineteen years ago, meaning it may not be vivid in the mind’s eye. Hence, in case you’ve forgotten, the 2002 Mets were supposed to be a legitimate contender. For four months they played not quite like it, but they managed to remain viable for the Wild Card, hovering four games above .500 and sitting 4½ behind the Dodgers as July wound down. The defending world champion Arizona Diamondbacks came to town to kick off August. If we didn’t love the Arizona Diamondbacks in the heat of a playoff chase, we should have appreciated what they had done for us the previous November, putting a sudden and glorious end to overall Yankee hegemony. I’d waited two-thirds of a season to show up at Shea and give the 2001 world champs an enormous round of applause.
I drew short-memoried glares for sporting a Diamondbacks cap (a November ’01 wedding anniversary gift from my wife because then as now she’s the best) with a Mets t-shirt and clapping heartily as their batting order was announced. Judgmental looks be damned; they’d earned my embrace. Anybody who pulls the plug on an undesirable dynasty deserves that much. I stopped appreciating the Diamondbacks at first pitch, however. I really didn’t appreciate the way they swept the Mets in the four-game series that followed. The first game of the rain-necessitated Saturday doubleheader set the tone. Future New York Mets Hall of Famer Edgardo Alfonzo whacked a two-run homer to stake the Mets to an eighth-inning lead, a very Fonzie move. All Armando Benitez had to do in the ninth was…oh, like you don’t know or at least sense that Armando didn’t do what he needed to do. Craig Counsell homered to tie the game in the ninth and Erubiel Durazo homered to put the Diamondbacks way ahead in the tenth. We lost the opener, we’d be swept in the nightcap, we’d be swept all four, and we’d fall below .500.
But then we hit the road, for a Central Time Zone jaunt through Milwaukee and St. Louis, and recovered a sliver of our Mojo. The Brewers weren’t any good that year and we took advantage, grabbing two of three. The Cardinals were good, but Al Leiter was too, going seven strong in a Friday night victory at Busch (Benitez posted his 27th save that night because Benitez really wasn’t total dreck). Mere days after the Diamondback debacle, the Mets had risen back above .500, were still in range of the Wild Card and getting those of us amenable to the sunny side of the standings thinking, well, if we can just…oh, like you don’t know or at least sense that we didn’t. The Mets lost their next two games in St. Louis, came home, lost six more, and continued their losing streak until it reached a dozen. Before the Mets won again, it was pounded into even the most optimistic of heads that 2002 wasn’t going to be our year.
That it has occurred to me that last week’s Nationals reprieve was the contemporary equivalent of the brief Midwestern bounce that imbued the Mets with the slightest touch of life nearly two decades ago tells you where my head is at amid this current winless stretch. We’re still not so far out of first place that it’s unimaginable that the Mets could make up a 3½-game deficit between now and the end of the year. But that’s basically what I said yesterday when the deficit was 2½ games and the current winless stretch wasn’t quite as long as it’s become.
In the interim, we’ve got another late-night start from San Francisco, another convincing of the inner owl that 9:45 isn’t so late, another 11:00 PM pep talk that c’mon we’re just getting cooking here! Big talk for the afternoon edition here. My Monday night bright-eyed, bushy-tailedness wore off as Aaron Loup was unjamming Jeurys Familia to get out of the sixth and keep the Mets down by no more than 4-3. When I next stirred, it was the bottom of the eighth and the score was 7-5, Giants. Trevor May had given up three runs. Jonathan Villar had gotten two of them back. I missed all of them, but I did make it to the less than thrilling conclusion.
Still, nice to see San Francisco on TV again and the way the Mets’ road grays pop against the home team creams. Would be nicer to see it wide awake and from the side of the handshake line. I may have to settle for groggy glimpses of the green grass and whatever crosses my mind as I drift off.
by Jason Fry on 17 August 2021 1:08 am It’s good to be the Giants.
The 2021 Giants are what happens when everything breaks right — when veterans thought to be on the back end of the career curve have career years, role players step up, and the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. And you know what? Good for them and for their fans. Charmed seasons are good for the game and a lot of fun.
The Mets … well, they’re the opposite story these days, and not much fun at all. Injuries, subpar performances, buzzards’ luck. You’re probably thinking you read this same rant on Sunday … or was it the day before that, or the day before that? Does it matter? The Mets have become the same old story, day after numbing day, with the only difference a handful of minor details by way of bric-a-brac.
On Monday night, the Mets showed some admirable fight after getting screwed by ESPN and MLB, playing a Sunday night game in New York and then flying all night to face the best team in baseball at home in San Francisco. They even briefly led in the fifth, courtesy of a two-run triple by Pete Alonso, of all people.
But it wasn’t enough. It rarely is these days. Rich Hill pitched well into the fourth before imploding in a flurry of enemy hits; Miguel Castro made the Mets’ lead the stuff of mayfly lives by giving up a homer to Kris Bryant (the guy the Mets should have acquired at the deadline, but whatever); Mets hitters short-circuited a two-on, nobody-out situation in the sixth; Trevor May got mauled in the seventh to leave the game out of reach.
The last two paragraphs are the mad lib stuff, the set dressing to be stapled up after the carpenters have finished following the blueprints. The Mets have started their 13-game journey through the ringer of California teams 0-4, and if you have optimism about the remaining nine — or the remaining 44, for that matter — well, bless your heart.
The Mets are now officially a .500 team, which may still strike you as a disappointment but is a far kinder verdict than what they’ve been for the last two months, and what they’ll likely be by year’s end. Games like Monday’s demonstrated why — and if you missed that one, well, tune in Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Or most any day. They’re all increasingly the same in the dregs of 2021.
by Greg Prince on 16 August 2021 3:57 pm Trying to fall asleep between the Dodgers’ dispiriting sweep at Citi Field and the results to come from the impending West Coast trip, I thought about what the Mets need to do in the ensuing seven games. I rarely project beyond “gotta go 1-0 tonight,” but since the season is likely at an inflection point, I went there.
I didn’t consider the Mets going 7-0, 6-1 or 5-2. At all. I will be delightfully surprised if such heights are scaled. I’m not counting on it…though ruling out five to seven very good “1-0 tonight” situations in advance is self-defeating. This is why I almost never take these games more than one at a time.
I decided 4-3 would be great and that 3-4 would be, in the context of the competition and the team attempting to compete with the competition, minimally acceptable. Unless the Braves or Phillies run and hide while we’re in California, we’d keep within contact of first place through the magic of not altogether sucking. As long as we can continue to convince ourselves these games “mean” something, we will derive all the meaning we can from them. The latter half of August with at least the hint of marching into hell for a heavenly cause beats not being able to even dream the impossible dream and resigning ourselves to the dreaded spate of “here’s who’s available in the offseason” articles. No, not yet. It may not seem like it after this past weekend and the weekend before it, but we are only 2½ out with 45 to go.
I contemplated 2-5 in the context of “acceptable,” and didn’t believe it would be acceptable if our goal is to remain plausible in our pursuit of a playoff spot, which in our 2½ out with 45 to go world seems to be the point of worrying about a given week’s outcomes.
But then I contemplated the concept of “unacceptable”.
What, I’m not going to “accept” the Mets if they fly home having lost five of seven in San Francisco and Los Angeles?
What, I’m going to turn my backs on them for the remainder of 2021?
What, I’m going to swap out my Mets wardrobe and take down my Mets pennants and assume a non-Mets identity?
“I dost not accept thou, Mets! Thou hast not secureth thine minimal complement of victories and therefore I denounceth thou and all for which thou standeth!”
Nah. That’s not fandom. Fandom is hanging in during the worst of times so when the best of times come back around we can say, “I was paying rapt attention when they got swept by the Dodgers at Citi Field and then I stayed up late to see what was going to become of them next as they went off to play the team with the best record in baseball before a rematch with the powerhouse team with the second-best record in baseball, the one that just swept them.” Among other joys, hanging in gives me the right to credibly kvetch and moan while the best of times is circling the lot looking for parking. Fandom is deep down knowing you’ll accept almost anything. Acceptance, like a retweet, is not necessarily an endorsement. But your team is your team. They’ll still be your team whether they play beyond earliest October or not. Might as well keep them company until then. We’ll have plenty of time to not watch them come the rest of fall and the lot of winter.
I didn’t consider the Mets going 1-6 or 0-7. At all. A fan’s gotta have limits.
Eventually I fell asleep. I need my rest for this trip.
by Jason Fry on 16 August 2021 1:05 am After two nights of at least looking competitive against the Dodgers, AKA the quarter-billion-dollar baseball death machine, the Mets got macerated. Lacerated. Defenestrated. Eviscerated.
Whatever word you choose, it wasn’t pretty. They were out of it essentially from the jump, as Carlos Carrasco showed he’s still working his way back into regular-season form — a plan the Mets had to embrace because they’ve burned through every other conceivable one, but was pretty much guaranteed to yield nights like this one. They made a little noise, but it amounted to faint squeaks amid the roar of the Dodgers at full steam, and it ended with not one but two position players — Brandon Drury and Kevin Pillar — called upon to take the mound.
I’ve never found position players on the mound particularly amusing, because it means the guys paid to play or oversee play know my team is beaten, which forces me to wonder why I didn’t reach the same conclusion and find something better to do with my time. And when position players are on the mound because my team’s about to lose three in a row and its season looks lost, it’s not funny in the least.
As I type this the Mets are somewhere over Pennsylvania or maybe Ohio, flying all night to take on the Giants in San Francisco tomorrow — an MLB/ESPN screw job that ought to make both them and the similarly scheduled Dodgers very, very angry. That makes Monday night’s Mets game about as close to a gimme loss as one can imagine in baseball. And remember that after that, they’ll still have nine straight games to go against the Giants or Dodgers.
The team that comes back from that hellish stretch will be thinking about 2022. And in time that will seem kinder than thinking about 2021, and dwelling on all the injuries, and the subpar performances, and the baffling lack of urgency at the trade deadline, and the weird in-game moves that had to be debated way too often. (Sunday’s head-scratcher was Luis Rojas sending Carrasco up to hit with the Mets down six, two on and one out in the second, then replacing him on the mound for the top of the third anyway. Asked about that one, Carrasco replied, “I don’t know, man. I really don’t.”)
We can argue about the manager and the front office and the players who got hurt and the ones who didn’t perform, but the Mets’ failure owes something to all of those factors, and the real problem is they were never that good to begin with. They bumped along as the least-worst team in a bad division and we saw that not for what it was but for what we wanted it to be — that they had pluck and moxie and all the other pixie-dust qualities we sprinkle on teams that are in the slot we like in the standings. Eventually the injuries and the bad luck and bad years and the baffling decisions got to be too much and the Mets were revealed for what they really were. The crash has been ugly, but it hasn’t been a miscarriage of justice — more like a moment of realization. Now, the best we and they can hope for is not to be thoroughly embarrassed before it’s over.
by Greg Prince on 15 August 2021 10:34 am Taijuan Walker was magnificent until the seventh inning. That was a monumental up. Michael Conforto cracked a go-ahead homer in the fourth. That was an invigorating up. Aaron Loup, Miguel Castro and Seth Lugo were each mighty effective, and those were unqualified ups, until we learned Lugo being up and pitching in the top of the ninth of a tie game that stayed tied in the bottom of the ninth meant that he’d sat down in between, which I wouldn’t have guessed was necessarily a problem.
But it was. Too many “up-downs” means a pitcher who you’d think can give you a second inning can’t…apparently. It wasn’t so much the up-down of Saturday night that precluded Seth’s pitching the tenth. It was that he’d had two up-downs on Thursday, according to his manager.
Oh.
Lugo sat for good after his one inning. Luis Rojas via Dave Jauss went to Yennsy Diaz to start the tenth of a 1-1 must-win game versus the Los Angeles Dodgers, with a runner automatically on second because that’s how Rob Manfred likes it. This Diaz hasn’t pitched enough in tight situations to make us nervous. This Diaz not having pitched all that much in tight situations is what made us nervous. No offense, Yennsy, but we know Seth Lugo. He’s not infallible, but we carry forth images of Six-Out Seth Lugo having gotten us through second innings with aplomb. We only knew in the tenth that Diaz wasn’t Lugo, and that it wouldn’t take much to score the Manfred on second.
It didn’t. Cody Bellinger lined a ball down the right field line, scoring the unearned runner and pushing the Dodgers ahead, 2-1. That — in which “that” also encompasses Walker Buehler’s own seven sterling innings and Will Smith’s second heartbreak home run in as many nights — was pretty much that. Conforto’s long shot, a solo blast six innings earlier, hadn’t come close to being matched in any way, shape or form by any other Met batter. There had been briefly been something of a scoring threat in the bottom of the seventh (J.D. Davis singled off Buehler’s leg, Jonathan Villar walked) but it imploded (Tomás Nido was encouraged to attempt bunting without an ounce of acumen for the skill in question). The Mets’ only runner in the tenth was their Manfred. He never moved.
So despite Walker taking a no-hit bid into the seventh until Smith ruined it, and despite Conforto’s bat continuing its long-awaited journey back toward the land of the living, the Mets had nothing but another one-run, extra-inning loss to show for their ten innings of work against the Dodgers. Both nights’ postgame pressers included questions regarding how good it must’ve felt for the Mets to go “toe-to-toe” or some such digital equation with the world champs. I do believe a team that has spent many more days in first place in 2021 than its opponent (some of them as recently as barely more than a week ago) doesn’t require a pat on the head for losing by a run. At the moment, the Dodgers have a substantially better record than the Mets, but they’re both in the same league. One is closer to making the playoffs is all. The one that isn’t, you’d infer, might want to pull out additional stops to make strides toward securing a postseason berth. Like sanctioning Seth Lugo’s second up of the evening so he could pitch the tenth. Or, for that matter, using Aaron Loup instead of Jeurys Familia the night before in that toe-to-toe one-run, extra-inning loss.
I don’t question the Mets’ fight. Rojas has enough fight in him to bark about balls and strikes and occasionally get himself ejected. I do question the limited use of best-bet relief pitchers in mustish-win games (and what are all those gambling ads for if not to encourage the making of best bets?). True, there is always another game on the schedule to consider when it comes to bullpen usage, and Fleetwood Mac wasn’t kidding about not stopping thinking about tomorrow, but to make those remaining games count like hell, ya kinda gotta win the games you can in the present. Ya kinda gotta send your best bet our for a second inning if he’s conceivably available. If Lugo told Jauss and Jeremy Hefner, “can’t do it,” well, that’s one thing. If Lugo said, “I’m fine,” take that for what it’s worth and get him up on his feet and back to the mound.
“Up-down” may be a legitimate concern in the way pitching is managed today, but we need all the ups we can get at this juncture of the schedule. Downs we’ve got down pat.
by Jason Fry on 14 August 2021 9:17 am It’s one of the oldest questions for a baseball fan who lives and dies with his or her team: If said team is fated to lose, how would you prefer that fate to unfold? Meekly and with minimal fuss? Or loudly but with the same outcome?
The Dodgers are a quarter-billion-dollar baseball death machine. Their lineup is studded with hitters who grind enemy pitchers into a powder by controlling the strike zone, then hit mistakes to distant precincts; their rotation and bullpen is an assembly line of fireballing monsters. (And for all this, they’re still a second-place team — reminders, if you need them, that baseball is capricious and other teams get injured too.)
That quarter-billion-dollar baseball death machine ate away at Tylor Megill, scratching him for single runs in the first, third and fourth and elevating his pitch count to levels at which further duty seemed ill-advised. Meanwhile, the black-clad Mets were being inoffensive against Julio Urias, with their biggest accomplishment getting him out of the game after five — though that was actually the result of an odd mistake by the Dodgers, with pinch-hitter Matt Beaty standing in the on-deck circle as a decoy and heading to the plate without hearing his own dugout yelling for him to come back. (You really do see something new in baseball every day.)
Even the fiercest machine throws a rod now and then, though: In the seventh, the improbably named Brusdar Graterol allowed a two-out double to Michael Conforto and departed in favor of rookie left-hander Justin Bruihl. Dom Smith singled, Bruihl walked Brandon Nimmo, the Dodgers intentionally walked Pete Alonso, and Jeff McNeil hit a little parachute that found grass in center field. Enter Blake Treinen to face J.D. Davis, and here came a passed ball through catcher Will Smith. Alonso scored and the Mets had somehow tied the game.
Tied it, but wouldn’t be the ones to untie it, despite the Dodgers’ odd streak of having lost 11 straight extra-inning games. In the tenth, Jeurys Familia (in there despite a heavy recent workload and Aaron Loup as an alternative) gave up the still-ridiculous two-run lead-off homer to Smith thanks to the ghost runner. Against Kenley Jansen, the Mets cashed their ghost runner but no more, with Tomas Nido flying out to end the game. Was 6-5 in 10 better than 4-0 in a conventional nine? I’ll leave that one to you.
I said not so long ago that I figured this stretch of 13 against the big bad Dodgers and the somehow bigger and badder Giants would result in the effective end of the Mets’ season, and I won’t be surprised if that’s true. But the factor I’d forgotten about was the weakness of the competition: The Phillies and Braves have their own gauntlets to run, and I doubt any rooter for those flawed/battered clubs has a lot of confidence in their ability to do so. So if the Mets can stagger out of the California wringer with a record no worse than, say, 5-8 or even 4-9, perhaps they can outlast their underwhelming rivals, get healthy in time for October and try to surprise a few folks, starting with us.
Ya Gotta Survive! Not a rallying cry to launch a thousand t-shirt printers, perhaps. But when facing off against death machines it might be good advice.
by Greg Prince on 13 August 2021 9:07 am You can’t, as the saying goes, script baseball. You can’t necessarily script baseball players, either. If you could, I would have tried last Sunday when, at the conclusion of the Mets’ moribund weekend in Philadelphia, Pete Alonso met the press to attempt to explain what the hell was going wrong. Pete, I might have advised with all the communications consultant credibility I could muster, maybe try something like, “We got beat, I gotta do better, we all gotta do better, but we’re not giving up.” Such sentiments delivered by the slumping slugger on behalf of his spiraling squad, I believed, would have been accepted by the lot of us in solidarity with the team and with empathy for the players. It would have come across as honest.
Except Pete Alonso harbors his own truth, and he delivers it as Pete Alonso does. After bemoaning the fates that had hard-hit balls turning into outs, our Polar Bear concluded his darkest-before-the-dawn remarks by reassuring us, “We got this. Just smile and know that we got this.”
At that moment, what we had was a four-game losing streak and the sense that first place had been nothing but a summer rental. All was going wrong, and no amount of Florida sunshine, whether authentically sourced or fabricated by the Tampa native, was going to make us feel better about our straits. “We’re all in this together,” Alonso insisted as he directly addressed Mets fans, but if he really felt what we were feeling, he would have known he’d swung and missed. Together, we were in misery. Can you at least wallow urgently with us for a minute before climbing back into the cage?
By comparison, Zack Scott’s Tuesday appraisal that “we’ve played very mediocre baseball for most of the year” and that “this recent stretch has been much worse than mediocre [and] unacceptably bad” was a breath of front office fresh air. Though the first baseman acknowledged that the current situation was “frustrating,” his dismissal of a potentially season-slaying skid — we were 2-9 since July 29; 21-30 since June 17; and oh-for-deGrom until further notice — didn’t buck us up. It pissed us off. The back page of the Daily News summed it up in classic tabloid style:
Instead of wasting
time with happy
talk, free-falling
Mets gotta say:
LET’S
FINALLY
GET
MAD
Funny thing, though. Ever since the OG LFGMer countered crisis with his customary dose of New Agey positivity, the Mets have gone undefeated. Granted, it’s only three games, and they were against the gone fishin’ for the foreseeable future Nationals, but three wins are three wins, especially the third win…which was won on a walkoff homer by relentlessly upbeat Pete Alonso.
Upon reflection, why shouldn’t he be relentlessly upbeat? He’s got his own comic book!
Thursday afternoon’s temperatures theoretically sweltered too heavily for someone whose chosen persona invokes Arctic climes, but Pete doesn’t shrivel from heat. He doesn’t always respond as we wish (at the plate or at the mic), but he does take his cuts. Ironically, had the Mets stayed warm to their very recent form, he wouldn’t have to have swung one final and ultimately dramatic time.
A seven-inning game had already been played and won without a surfeit of drama, ursine or otherwise, before the day became mostly about Pete. Marcus Stroman had to battle dehydration — he revealed he gets too nervous to ingest requisite amounts of fluids on days he pitches — but otherwise easily dispatched Nat batters to the shade of their dugout for five-and-a-third silky smooth innings in the opener of the rain-arranged twinbill. Brandon Nimmo drove in four runs (three on one mighty swing, one of them carried by Stroman after the pitcher reached on a two-out bunt), Aaron Loup and Edwin Diaz finished up, and a 4-1 victory was put sedately in the books.
A couple of hours later, the exact same set of numbers loomed for our ledger via a 4-1 lead after six innings, a.k.a. eight Manfreds. Trevor Williams, in the role of 27th Man, neutralized the Nats with little problem for the first few frames. You have to congratulate a 27th Man just for getting into whichever end of a doubleheader he is added to the roster for. Usually the 27th Man is a spare reliever who doesn’t see action. But at least he gets to see a game. On Wednesday, the Mets designated reliever Geoff Hartlieb as their 27th Man for the regularly scheduled contest that was to follow the completion of the suspended game left over from Tuesday. Except a tarp was spread on the field while it wasn’t raining and the game was called before Citi Field got appreciably wet, thus necessitating Thursday’s doubleheader. Williams got the nod to start the nightcap. Hartlieb got a ticket back to the taxi squad.
Geoff Hartlieb being activated as the extra player for a shortened game whose start was delayed by rain when it wasn’t raining before getting rained out and then being optioned before the next day’s pair of shortened games began may go down as the quintessential 2021 Mets transaction.
Trevor Williams, the 59th Met of this season and the 1,149th Met ever, wasn’t just activated. He was inserted and he was effective, allowing only a run over four-and-a-third and temporarily recasting the deadline deal that brought Javy Baez to New York from Chicago with much fanfare as the Trevor Williams Trade. Seth Lugo continued to keep the Nats at bay while Jonathan Villar extended an existing Met lead with a two-run homer. Two 4-1 wins would have been terrific for a team whose sleeves feature a 41 patch.
Alas, the yeoman bullpen work that had provided the spine for this series since Rich Hill took over for Carlos Carrasco in the resumption portion of the suspended game carried an expiration date. Met relief went sour in the seventh inning of the nightcap, when neither Trevor May nor Jeurys Familia could shut the stubbornly ajar door on the suddenly pesky Nats (literal storm clouds looming conjured images of Familia at his Uptonian worst). The visitors notched three runs in the top of the seventh, the third of them when an awkwardly positioned Jeff McNeil couldn’t flag down an Andrew Stevenson grounder that moseyed into right field and brought home Gerardo Parra. Washington did all its damage before Juan Soto came to the plate. That Familia clotted the bleeding from there — intentionally passing the prodigy, then striking out ancient Ryan Zimmerman — represented a small victory unto itself. A very small, perhaps transitory victory.
McNeil led off the bottom of the ninthish seventh with a chance to erase the Stevenson affair from our memory. No such luck was in evidence, though, as Jeff grounded out. Alonso, however, came to bat next carrying a big stick and a new script. He got hold of a Kyle Finnegan pitch and sent it high into the air, so high that it took a beat to discern if it was going to carry the requisite distance to send everybody off into the air conditioning.
It did, just over the left field fence. It was the second walkoff home run of Pete Alonso’s still young career, the first he’s hit in front of fans. There weren’t a ton of them in the stands after nearly six hours of baseball, but the Mets put on their usual show of mutual appreciation for a game-ending RBI, tearing away the jersey of the hitter who brought them victory. The bare-chested Polar Bear, as he had promised as spokesdude for his team days earlier, had this. We had a 5-4 victory, our double and series sweeps and revived viability in a divisional race we were ready to all but give up on after Philadelphia. We’re a half-game out now, nestled between the Phillies and the Braves. The Dodgers are coming to town with the potential to blacken our skies once again and the big, bad (as in very good) Giants await ominously on the Coast. Yet the Mets have forgotten to go away or, for that matter, let us off the hook. We still apparently root for a contender. Attention, therefore, must be paid.
“To be able to stick to the same approach and to be stubborn enough to stick to a good game plan and approach,” Alonso said of his homer, “that’s the key.” Hopefully Pete and pals will remind us of the perks of staying true to the orange and blue this weekend when we’re taking on the defending world champs and next week when we’re fighting sleep and the NL West leaders. Besides sticking to the same approach and being stubborn.
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.
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