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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Jason Fry on 16 June 2021 11:40 am One of the many fun things so far about 2021 is the Mets winning games that in a lot of previous years you’d expect them to lose.
On Tuesday night I was nervous after the Mets took a 3-2 lead and stubbornly refused to extend that to a safe distance, because I was all too aware that those Cubs in the rearview mirror were closer than they appeared. One errant pitch by a scintillating Taijuan Walker, one bit of misfortune for Seth Lugo, and the game would be tied (or worse) before you could say, “Holy Paul Wilson!” The specter of a stabbed-in-the-guts loss was there and I couldn’t muster enough good vibes to exorcise it. Only the Mets could do that.
Which, somehow, they did.
Walker was brilliant, using his two-seamer, slider and sinker to deadly effect against the Cubs, particularly the left-handed hitters, who pulled back from pitch after pitch that seemed aimed at their hips only to buzz into the strike zone. He struck out 12, a career high, and seemed to get better as the game went on, punching out Anthony Rizzo, Willson Contreras and Ian Happ on seven pitches in the sixth (hard to do when you strike out two) and needing just 11 to put down Jason Heyward, Sergio Alcantara and Rafael Ortega in the seventh. He had help behind him, too — birthday boy Dom Smith played a superb left field, making an acrobatic catch with a foot scoring the fence and a couple of terrific plays and strong throws to hold Cubs to singles, and Jonathan Villar chipped in a gorgeous play in the fifth, robbing Joc Pederson with a lunging snag of a grounder and on-target throw across the diamond.
Walker now sports a tidy 2.12 ERA and is overshadowed only by the otherworldly Jacob deGrom in the rotation, not bad for a guy whose only contract offer came from the Mets after they came up empty on Jake Odorizzi. Walker’s only 28 but has lived a number of baseball lives already: phenom, Tommy John patient, prospect turned suspect, prodigal son returned on a flier, and finally misfit toy stuck looking for a contract during spring training. To quote Indiana Jones, “It’s not the years, honey — it’s the mileage.” This year it’s all come together: health, talent, hard work, motivation, coaching, and it’s been a joy to watch him pitching with both fire and flare.
Pete Alonso chipped in all three of the Mets’ runs, just missing a grand slam in supplying that third one, but the score somehow felt tighter than a lone skinny run could feel. With Edwin Diaz unavailable, Lugo navigated the eighth with no worries but began to labor in the ninth, surrendering a one-out single to Contreras, who gave way to old friend Jake Marisnick as pinch-runner. Lugo’s ordeal felt like a terrible repeat of watching a tired Jeurys Familia against the Padres; absent a thoroughly unexpected trade for Fernando Tatis Jr., pinch-hitter Eric Sogard was about the last guy I wanted to see there — an unflashy, professional veteran pinch-hitter who’d hunt his pitch and refuse to help Lugo. And, indeed, Sogard spanked a 2-2 fastball up the gap in right-center.
Which is where you could see the shadows of all those alternative-universe losses darkening our skies.
The Mets of recent vintage paid scant attention to defense, routinely playing guys out of position, concocting outfields seemingly by lottery, saddling ground-ball pitchers with flyball infields, and failing to outhit their mistakes in the field. This year seemed no different, with J.D. Davis assigned to third and Smith likely to get far too much playing time in left. But the Mets have overhauled their defensive philosophy, Davis’s injury has allowed Villar to emerge as a capable third baseman, the various fill-ins at second have performed admirably, and Smith has put in the hard work to make himself far less of a liability than he once was.
Still, it’s the Mets — the franchise that not so long ago lost its chance to claw back into a World Series because an enemy baserunner made a suicidal dash for home, trusting scouting reports that all but promised the Mets would fuck things up, which they did. Sogard’s ball touched grass and bounded towards the wall and I writhed on the couch saying terrible things.
Except Lugo had diligently thrown over to first multiple times, denying Marisnick an extra step or two.
Except Kevin Pillar cut the ball off and threw it on target to the cutoff man.
Except that cutoff man was Luis Guillorme, who has some of the best instincts I’ve ever seen in an infielder.
Except Guillorme took the ball, spun smoothly and fired it to the plate on a single hop.
Except the catcher waiting for the throw wasn’t Wilson Ramos, who could have subbed for Marv Throneberry in an update of Casey Stengel‘s birthday-cake line, but the surehanded James McCann.
McCann secured the throw, spun on his knees and tagged Marisnick out.
It only seemed like a bad gamble by Cubs third-base coach Willie Harris (who haunted us plenty in his previous life as a player, then did precious little in a brief stint as a Met) because the defensive parts meshed together so perfectly that Marisnick was out by a good four feet. Marisnick’s jump, Pillar’s route, Pillar’s throw, Guillorme’s spin, Guillorme’s throw, McCann’s grab — downgrade any two of those a little bit and Marisnick beats the tag, with the Cubs tying the game and a hit away from taking the lead. How many previous Mets clubs from the last few years would have come up short? All of them? Lots of them?
Well, not this one. And in this universe, that’s all that matters.
by Greg Prince on 15 June 2021 11:51 am The word that keeps getting repeated by Mets and people around the Mets is “electric”. Citi Field, they say, is electric. They’re not referring to how the stadium lights are lit or how its loudspeakers are amplified. They’re describing the atmosphere with fans filling seats with their anatomies and the air with their exclamations. Capacity was meaningfully expanded over this past weekend with the Padres’ visit, and with it the essence of Mets fandom returned to the ballpark. That welcome sound has bled through the television and radio broadcasts. We’re there in spirit and reality.
With the Cubs in town, so has a reminder of what it was like when Citi Field was unplugged. Playing center and batting fifth for Chicago in the series opener was Jake Marisnick, formerly of the New York Mets. You might remember Marisnick played briefly for the briefly playing 2020 Mets. You don’t remember going to a game to see Marisnick play for the 2020 Mets. You couldn’t.
Marisnick is part of a unique cohort in the history of the New York Mets. He is part of what we’ll call the Silent Generation. Jake joined the Mets, known provincially (and, we’d like to think, accurately) for having the Best Fans in Baseball. We’ve been some distinct combination of loud, supportive, discerning and critical since 1962. We’ve got a chant that never goes away. But how would have Jake Marisnick known it from the proper perspective to experience it? How can he answer questions from his current teammates who ask, “Hey, Marizz, what’s it like to play ball in New York?” He played once before Mets fans at Citi Field as a Marlin, three times before Mets fans as an Astro and then…nobody as a Met. No 2020 Met heard a genuine “LET’S GO METS!” No 2020 Met heard an organic thing at Citi Field. The stands were empty and silent. Jake Marisnick, who put in seven home games as a Met, played before a paid/complimentary attendance of zero. That was 2020 in action. That was necessary if you were gonna have any size season whatsoever. The 2020 season lasted 60 games. Jake, injured twice, played in only 16 of them total
With Monday night’s 5-2 Mets victory over Marisnick’s Cubs, we are up to 58 games in the 2021 season. We’ll soon pass 60, a fleetingly significant milestone because it’s one year later and we’re rubbing our collective eyes a little as we emerge from our mandatory social hibernation. Presenting baseball to us last summer was supposed to help us lurch toward normal. There was little normal about it and, honestly, it didn’t much help. One year later, it increasingly feels like the 2020 Mets season never happened.
For the 20 Mets who were new to the Mets in 2020, it kind of didn’t. The 2020 Mets who’d been here before knew what we were like. The 2020 Mets who’d arrived in Queens to encounter a pandemic could only hear the legend and imagine. Maybe they wondered. Maybe they had other things on their minds. The entire globe did. Nevertheless, it strikes me as a slight shade of sad that Jake Marisnick — like Guillermo Heredia, who came in with the Braves in May when the building was still keeping most of its seats intentionally empty; like childhood Mets fan Rick Porcello, who hasn’t signed on anywhere since leaving New York; like Andrés Giménez, whose wondrous potential was suddenly traded young — never had a Mets fan cheer for him as a Met during a Mets home game. Maybe some Mets fan at Citi Field Monday night gave Marisnick an audible pat on the back last night. It would’ve been the Metsian thing to do.
Of the twenty players who debuted as Mets last year, only four are still in the organization, certifying 2020 as the disposable entity it registered as in real time. Franklyn Kilomé is in Syracuse. Dellin Betances went on the IL after one appearance in Philadelphia in April (and has recently begun a rehab assignment in St. Lucie). David Peterson is thus the only new-for-2020 Met besides stiff-necked Miguel Castro who has made it to Citi Field in 2021 as a Met. Monday night he heard the cheers for real. He earned them with six innings of shutout ball, muting the murmur that he needs to go work out his problems in Triple-A. The rotation that had three sure bets in deGrom, Stroman and Walker along with a churvish wild card beginning to come up aces in Lucchesi for the first time had the rest of its hand where it was supposed to be.
We gained some faith in Peterson last season when nobody was watching him in person. We switched to fear that it was all going to hell this year as his ineffective outings began to incorporate disturbingly fewer innings, home or away. Monday versus the Cubs was just a single start, and he has only just now made what amounts to his debut on something approximating the big stage — our big stage, that is — but somehow it feels like David Peterson is back.
Everybody else who contributed to the Mets win Monday night either had a taste of Citi Field pre-2020 in their background or is enjoying a fairly fresh Flushing honeymoon. Dom Smith homered, just like he did to close out 2019. Edwin Diaz notched the save, just as he did on occasion (if not often enough) two years ago. James McCann, Kevin Pillar, Brandon Drury and Aaron Loup all got here lately. They are 2021 Mets who’ve gotten to immerse themselves in the aura of Mets fandom practically from jump, the way Gary Carter did in 1985, Robin Ventura did in 1999, and R.A. Dickey did in 2010. Sometimes a little runway is required (ask the slowly settled-in Francisco Lindor). Sometimes there will be Best Fans in Baseball blowback (ask Trevor May following two moonshots surrendered). But everybody before and after 2020 got to know Mets fans face-to-faces. That’s always been part of the deal of becoming a Met
Most of the Silent Generation didn’t and probably won’t ever get their fair share of the full sensation of being a Met. David Peterson finally did, for real. We look forward to us seeing him again and him hearing from us, whatever it is we have to say.
NO CHEERS ALOUD: 2020 Home Games Played by 2020-Only Mets
Andrés Giménez 26
Chasen Shreve 10
Billy Hamilton 9
Jared Hughes 8
Jake Marisnick 7
Robinson Chirinos 6
Rick Porcello 6
Brian Dozier 4
Guillermo Heredia 3
Hunter Strickland 3
Michael Wacha 3
Eduardo Nuñez 2
Erasmo Ramirez 2
Ali Sanchez 2
Ryan Cordell 1
Franklyn Kilomé 1
Dellin Betances, who pitched at Citi Field four times in 2020, has played only one road game for the 2021 Mets; Franklyn Kilomé is with Triple-A Syracuse; Ariel Jurado played one road game for the 2020 Mets but no home games.
by Jason Fry on 14 June 2021 10:38 am Should it be your desire, I’m sure you can get one of those inspirational signs for your den/game room/what-have-you that proclaims BASEBALL IS LIFE, and while I might disagree with the chosen vehicle of expression, I’m with you on the message. But the fact is that sometimes life, or at least the non-baseball part of it, gets in the way.
I’m in Virginia visiting my mom, and yesterday we had a chance to sneak in an extra visit to my dad in his assisted-living home. So my mom, my son and I left the Mets and Joey Lucchesi trailing the Padres, 1-0, the one having come on a leadoff Tommy Pham home run.
That didn’t seem insurmountable, not with Lucchesi having settled down and pitched into the fourth with few other blemishes, so we decided to hope for the best. Off we went for our visit, returning to find … the Mets up 2-1! Joshua pulled up MLB.tv to divine the source of the good news — a Jose Peraza homer — while I furrowed my boy in mild concern at what was happening in front of me. The Mets led, but the Padres had runners on second and third and Jeurys Familia had thrown an awful lot of pitches.
Still, the first pitch I’d seen was an evil slider just below the bottom of the zone, one that Profar had swung over to bring the count to 1-2. If Familia could coax one more swing like that, the Mets would be out of the jam and conceivably on their way to a heartening sweep of a team they might see in October.
If you were watching, well, you know that things turned out differently, and we’d wound up missing the entire good part of the game and witnessing only the dregs. Life does that to you sometimes, though I doubt anyone’s going to turn that into a placard broadcasting cheerful wisdom.
Profar refused to fish for any of Familia’s sliders out of the strike zone and drew a walk. Luis Rojas stuck with a clearly spent Familia, who walked Pham on four pitches to tie the game. Rojas chose Jacob Barnes to face Fernando Tatis Jr.; Barnes’s fourth pitch was a cutter that did very little cutting, and Tatis demolished it. The competitive part of the ballgame was over, leaving nothing but a few curiosities: Pete Alonso got hit in the helmet with an errant pitch but seems to be fine (whew); Tomas Nido went into the books as the 178th third baseman in team history, seeing no action except heckling from Francisco Lindor; and with the bench nonexistent, the last out of the game was made by Robert Gsellman, who looked less than thrilled with the whole thing.
I felt much the same way. Rojas had to navigate some unavailable/gassed relievers, a short bench and the knock-on effects of both problems to the lineup, and he’d thought through how he wanted to solve the resulting riddle. But damned if it didn’t strike me then and now as another case of tree vs. forest: He asked for too much from an exhausted Familia and then chose the last guy in the pen to face one of the deadliest hitters in baseball in a tie game. Spreading out the relief workload may prove wise over the long term, but a game lost is a game that can never be reclaimed, and sometimes just a few of those missed chances mean your October is empty when it could have been full.
Still. The Mets took two of three from the Padres and have now navigated the first 9% of their month from Hell in a manner much to our liking. Here come the Cubs, and I bet the players will tell you they’ll play ’em one day at a time, give it their best shot and the good Lord willing, things will work out. In case you want some wisdom for your wall.
by Jason Fry on 13 June 2021 12:16 am The Mets, undermanned and improvised though they are, beat the big bad San Diego Padres yet again Saturday afternoon, taking the season series from a fellow playoff team and getting their 33 games in 31 days stretch off to a positive start.
It was what baseball should be — fun! It was fun watching Marcus Stroman coax ground ball after ground ball from enemy hitters and exit the mound with a gait one could describe as a skip or a strut or something very much akin to both at once. Stroman has been a godsend to these Mets, particularly with Carlos Carrasco and Noah Syndergaard‘s returns retreating from the observer like the end of the hallway in Poltergeist, and I heartily wish Steven Cohen would give himself a belated birthday present and sign Stroman to an extension posthaste.
It was also fun watching Francisco Lindor and Luis Guillorme vacuum up said ground balls, moving with an instinctive grace that was thrilling to witness. I’ve been a Guillorme fan since before his oh-so-casual grab of a flying bat made him a cult hero a few years back in spring training, admiring not only his soft hands afield but also the fact that he invariably does the right thing when the ball comes his way, never succumbing to the panic that can waylay even capable young players after the game speeds up on them. As for Lindor, he’s a wonderful quarterback of the infield on every play and always where you hope he’ll be, with his hands a blur on transfers at second. Even when he was hearing boos from the Citi Field faithful (an era that thankfully seems to have ended), Lindor’s defense never went into a slump — he was a $34 million a year glove even when the bat was considerably south of that valuation.
(Truth be told, I’m having trouble adapting to the idea of the Mets as a team that might be not just capable on defense but actually good. That’s foreign to me — for years they’ve been a team whose best-case scenario was, “Well, they have a chance to outhit their mistakes.” Now, more often than not, they’re a team that maximizes its own chances by being stingy with misplays and by minimizing enemy balls that drop in, and I’m having a bit of a problem adjusting. To be perfectly clear, it’s a problem that I’m willing to give further attention, as it’s a wonderful one to have.)
The combination of Stroman’s stalwart pitching and the Mets’ excellent defense somewhat masked the fact that this was yet another 2021 three-true-outcomes game, without much offense except that supplied by the home run: Lindor homered in the first, Fernando Tatis Jr. hit a majestic second-deck shot to hurry along Stroman’s exit, and Jonathan Villar outdid Tatis in terms of physical prowess and post-homer demonstrations by annihilating a ball into the upper reaches of Soda Corner. That leaves just one run unaccounted for — a sixth-inning fielder’s choice in which Dom Smith reached base on the back end of an attempted double play.
So no, it wasn’t the most action-packed matinee ever. But between Stroman’s cocksure walkabouts, the defensive excellence and the showcase home runs, it was a memorable game nonetheless. The Mets have played those a lot of late. One of these days maybe I’ll even get used to it.
by Greg Prince on 12 June 2021 2:27 am Jacob deGrom says “my level of concern is not too high” concerning the right flexor tendon of Jacob deGrom, revealing yet another layer of distinction that separates Jacob deGrom from the rest of us. The rest of us had a level of concern higher than the seventeenth row of Promenade once Jacob deGrom had to leave the one-hit, ten-K shutout Jacob deGrom was throwing after six innings at repopulated Citi Field precisely because of the tendinitic condition of Jacob deGrom’s right flexor tendon. As matters of concern went, Jacob deGrom’s right flexor tendon immediately superceded Jacob deGrom’s near-perfect game, which Jacob deGrom was leading, 3-0, thanks in great part to Jacob deGrom’s two-run single.
You can see how whether Jacob deGrom was excelling or exiting, Jacob deGrom thoroughly deGrominated our thoughts Friday night, similar to the way Jacob deGrom thoroughly deGrominated San Diego batters. If Jacob deGrom is pitching, Jacob deGrom is the show. If Jacob deGrom is hitting, Jacob deGrom is the salvation. If Jacob deGrom is suddenly departing and we are given a barebones diagnosis, we are all on WebMD striving to discern a prognosis for right flexor tendinitis.
The only thing we non-medical personnel knew for sure when the game was over was that the Mets had won it, 3-2, holding off the Padres without their leading man. It was as if Jacob deGrom’s teammates had chipped in to give Jacob deGrom a going away present…even though the win was crafted primarily by Jacob deGrom. It’s less that they presented their win to Jacob deGrom than they didn’t give Jacob deGrom’s win away to the Padres.
I didn’t know how long Jacob deGrom might be going away for, but when a pitcher of Jacob deGrom’s caliber (which is basically Jacob deGrom) goes away even a little bit — heading down to the tunnel rather than back to the mound — and the word “flexor” enters the conversation, it’s reasonable to brace for a bad case scenario. Maybe not worst case, but definitely bad case. A good case would have been Jacob deGrom going back to the mound.
The best bad case scenario I could come up with on the fly was another minimal trip to the IL. I could live with that. I did just live with that, only a few weeks ago for a different injury that turned out to be not that bad, but was an injury nonetheless. True, a turn or more through the rotation without a Jacob deGrom start is like a day without sunshine, yet there are shades of overcast when the clouds come out. I doubted we were headed for a dark night of the soul. Jacob deGrom had tendinitis? I once had tendinitis. It didn’t end or seriously derail my career. It probably wouldn’t end or seriously derail Jacob deGrom’s, never mind that only one of our careers involves pitching and only one of our careers is of utmost concern to millions of Mets fans.
Then Jacob deGrom sits for the media after the game and pronounces himself unconcerned regarding the chance right flexor tendinitis might prevent Jacob deGrom’s scheduled return to the mound five days hence, which is either fantastic or delusional. Probably closer to the former, because the fantastic Jacob deGrom — who lowered his ERA to 0.56 and passed 100 strikeouts quicker than anybody in a season since pitchers began to stand sixty feet, six inches from home plate in 1893 — doesn’t seem to delude himself. Jacob deGrom knows his right arm, flexor tendon and all, better than anybody else. If Jacob deGrom chooses to not be concerned, perhaps we should follow his example. Then again, Jacob deGrom doesn’t watch Jacob deGrom pitch, let alone hang on every strike (and extremely infrequent ball) Jacob deGrom throws, so how would Jacob deGrom know enough to be monumentally concerned with Jacob deGrom’s right flexor tendon?
Because Jacob deGrom is Jacob deGrom, and who are we to doubt Jacob deGrom?
by Greg Prince on 10 June 2021 2:10 am As the Mets scored their first seven runs on Wednesday night, I felt a tinge of sadness for the Orioles pitcher who surrendered them. It wasn’t a particularly ceremonial surrender. No white flags, just pitches that didn’t have much fight left in them. I wouldn’t claim to know if the same could be said for the man who threw them.
We’ve done Matt Harvey postscript plenty since the sun set on the Dark Knight. It would be redundant and kind of cruel to go there again. Likewise, it was redundant and kind of cruel for the Mets to keep hitting him, but that’s what they’re supposed to do to the opposing pitcher, regardless of opposing pitcher pedigree. They were having a very good evening in Baltimore. Harvey wasn’t. I’ll admit I was only partly enjoying the onslaught they’d wrought on our former ace. I was enjoying the runs, but wasn’t totally comfortable that they were being charged to who they were being charged to. I’ll additionally admit that when with two out in the top of the third, the Mets up by one and Harvey threatening to slip out of a first-and-third jam, I almost…almost wanted him to not give up anything else.
Then James McCann singled in Jonathan Villar, and Billy McKinney singled in Pete Alonso, and Kevin Pillar homered to bring in everybody else in this sentence who’d yet to cross the plate. It was 7-1. That tinge of sadness lingered like the television camera did on Harvey. “He looks like he wants to cry,” my wife said sympathetically. He wasn’t the only one.
Soon, Harvey and his 7.41 ERA departed the mound and the seven Met runs he yielded remained on the scoreboard and I wasn’t about to give a single solitary tally among them back, because though Matt will always be a Met icon to me, he’s not a Met at the moment. Kevin Pillar, who gave his face for our cause, is. James McCann, who borrowed a first baseman’s mitt and said “OK” when he could’ve big-timed or begged off, is. Billy McKinney, who’s now officially gone longer without ever having heard of me than I’d gone without ever having heard of him, is. Those are our Mets at the moment, and that will do when it comes to deciding battles for hearts and souls.
As the Mets scored their second seven runs on Wednesday night, I was quite content to gorge on the offense, regardless of whatever dismay it inflicted on whatever other Orioles pitchers. Listen, I can’t be responsible for the seamy underside of every boisterous blowout (good luck in future endeavors to Adam Plutko and Mac Sceroler). Furthermore, I haven’t checked the rule book lately, but I assume there is no actual saving “some of that for tomorrow,” especially when tomorrow from the vantage point of Wednesday (a.k.a. today) loomed as an off day. If the Metsies want to score 14 runs in one game while giving up no more than 13, they are my guests to do so.
As it happened, they — primarily via seven typically excellent innings from Taijuan Walker — gave up only one run. Nobody ever tells the pitching staff to save some of that for tomorrow, so why should the slugging staff? Better advice would consist of telling Pillar (two homers), McKinney (also two homers), Alonso (his third homer in two games) and Mason Williams (first homer as a Met) to do again very soon what they just did.
The Mets generated two seven-run halves on Wednesday night. While you’re coming to happy grips with such fabulous fractions, you might want to note the Mets completed the first third of their season at 30-24. Few were the games that ended 14-1 in the Mets’ favor, but there was a veritable cornucopia of victories in the realm of 4-2 and 5-1 and 3-1 and whatever it took to get on a pace for 90 wins, or twice as many wins as Met players have deployed to date. What’s more likely, ya think — the Mets finishing 2021 at 90-72 or the Mets using 135 players? Cite “at this pace” at your own risk, of course. Still, we’ve run through 45 Mets; maintained a very nice clip without a whole bunch of heretofore presumed key Mets available very much; and, well, here we are, out in front, winning a geographically challenging road trip and, at the end of it, bouncing back from a letdown the night before.
The competition stiffens for the next month. All those pesky postponements are knocking on our door demanding an extra seven innings of our time on multiple occasions. The plunge from our version of The Big Three to fourth and fifth in the rotation is as frightening as anything ever ridden at Great Adventure. But ours are the Mets of Pillar and McKinney and all the other blanks that keep getting filled in so very amply. Ample ain’t always sexy, but it gets the job done.
Swell bunch of parts we have here. The sum could be something else.
by Jason Fry on 9 June 2021 11:53 am The Mets got their butts kicked in Baltimore on Tuesday night.
Things went just fine at the outset, as Francisco Lindor walked and Pete Alonso hit a line drive into the left-field stands for a quick 2-0 lead. But David Peterson struggled through the first, gave up three in the second and was excused further duties after getting through two-thirds of a painful third, his second straight start ended by early difficulties. As they did in Arizona — a Plan B I witnessed from the Griswold, Conn., Park & Ride — the Mets asked Robert Gsellman to ride to the rescue. But this time the cavalry arrived and got riddled with arrows, as Gsellman was dinged for a run in the fourth and watched Maikel Franco unload on a three-run homer in the fifth. That made it 8-2 Orioles, and with the Mets unable to scratch further against Bruce Zimmermann, the competitive portion of the evening’s baseball viewing was over. Jacob Barnes and Drew Smith gave up an additional run each, and Alonso offered a small bit of solace by connecting for his second homer of the night.
What’s to be done with Peterson? The obvious answer would be to send him down to Syracuse to work out his issues a little farther from the bright lights, with reestablishing command of his slider the most glaring need. (And as noted in The Athletic, this kind of regression should have been expected about now for a young pitcher, seeing how curtailed Peterson’s rookie season was.) But there’s no obvious replacement: Carlos Carrasco and Noah Syndergaard are coming along more slowly than the Mets would like; Thomas Szapucki hasn’t thrown a big-league pitch; Franklyn Kilome didn’t look ready for prime time in a cameo last year; and Jerad Eickhoff is basically a warm body at this point. You could make the case for easing Gsellman into the rotation, as he’s generally been better than he was Tuesday, but that will take time and have a domino effect on the relief corps. The Mets could turn to the trade market, of course, but until we know who and how, that’s pointless speculation.
And remember the Mets are about to have all those deferred games from earlier in the year come due: They’ll play 33 in 31 days starting on Friday and then nine in seven days after the All-Star break. Odds are they’ll need everybody on the above list plus Peterson to get through that stretch, regardless of what’s best for disobedient sliders and young hurlers’ learning curves.
Looking longer term, this will of course work itself out, possibly in ways we find gratifying and possibly in ways we will recall with muttering and stormy looks. As Tuesday’s game cratered, I did the only thing one can after discovering the KICK ME sign is there for the night — I shrugged and let it be.
I won’t claim it’s one of my favorite things about baseball, or even high up on the list, but it’s a good thing that part of fandom is absorbing the occasional butt-kicking. A great football team can dream of going undefeated — there’s a reason the remaining ’72 Dolphins pop Champagne every time their perfect season remains the latest on the books — but even the mightiest baseball roster is guaranteed 50-odd defeats in a season. And somewhere between five and 10 of those defeats are going to involve that KICK ME sign, with relievers hiding under the stands and everyone else just waiting for it to be over. That means if you’re faithful fan who watches even the debacles to the end (a recommendation, not a commandment), the greatest season of your life will still feature 15 to 30 hours of watching your team get beaten like a drum. And I think that’s a good thing, given our world’s appetite for speed and volume at the expense of reflection and nuance.
If that sounds like masochism, well, if you’re in the fifth inning of a debacle, reflection is all you’ve got left. And some of my fondest baseball memories are of games at Shea or Citi Field where the Mets were absolutely getting strafed, with position players bravely attesting to their long-ago high-school glories on the mound. The games have (mercifully) faded from memory, but the conversations are still there to be recalled fondly. There’s a freedom to such games — they’re blank canvases to be filled with baseball memories, free associations, good-natured arguments, personal histories and anything else that the proximity of baseball, or at least something resembling it, brings to mind. Think of them as free spaces on your fan bingo card, once you no longer have any need to chew your nails or channel superstitions time-tested or newly invented.
That’s more than enough, but maybe there’s something more. Maybe, just maybe, it’s also that by bearing witness to a butt-kicking, we’re banking a little good karma. We’re sticking around to hold the patient’s hand, and maybe that loyalty gets recorded on some celestial scorecard, noted as an investment to be repaid down the road — perhaps it’s the seed of the next epic comeback that we’ll spend years telling everyone we saw. Or maybe that karma gets banked somewhere even more valuable, added to a reservoir we can draw on in our lives for things even more important than baseball.
Probably not. Almost certainly not. But it’s nice to think about it. And it’s the kind of thing that comes to mind when it’s 9-2 and there’s an hour of futility yet to come.
by Greg Prince on 7 June 2021 9:04 am The Mets made it out of San Diego in one piece and first place. The 26 Mets who began the series with two aggravating losses were the 26 Mets who ended it with two energizing wins. Could these be the Mets we come to know and love for more than just a four-day Southern California getaway?
On days that copacetic is the rule rather than the goal, I grow attached to whoever’s filling those Met uniforms (a $50.00 fine to anybody who invokes Jerry Seinfeld and rooting for the laundry as if we all haven’t said it or heard it a thousand times). When Brandon Drury turns a nifty 5-5-3 double play after diving, stopping a grounder, tagging third base with his glove and then throwing across the diamond, Brandon Drury is my third baseman. When Billy McKinney distributes his base hits as if from a variety pack — at least one among doubles, triples and homers before bothering with singles — Billy McKinney is my right fielder. Jose Peraza, who gave Jacob deGrom all the offense Jake needed to notch a win on Saturday night, has been entrenched as my second baseman since he was passed the torch by I wanna say Doug Flynn. In the relative scheme of temp Mets, Jose Peraza is a veritable permanent fixture.
The bounty of emergency Mets you’d barely contemplated are making impressions and the handful of healthy Mets you counted on remembering are coming through, too. On Sunday, as the Mets completed their split with the Padres, Dom Smith homered. That you expected before April. James McCann homered, too. Not a shocking development from the vantage point of winter. You began to wonder during the arid weeks of a wet spring when the likes of Smith and McCann would get hot or even warm, but here they are. It’s an endorsement for patience. It’s also a caution against the impulse a person feels to call WFAN and suggest maybe Conforto shouldn’t get his job back if the Mets keep going good with McKinney in there or similar personnel strategy.
Let us enjoy who’s getting the job done for us while they’re getting the job done for us. Let us enjoy Marcus Stroman on sunny Sundays when Marcus is frustrating the San Diego nine as he’s done to other outfits across the circuit thus far this season. A little trouble here, a little trouble there, adequate extrication from trouble, maybe one fielding play that could have made smoother (not too many tappers back to the mound wind up de facto infield triples), definitely one pitcher’s batting play that couldn’t have been more exciting at Petco Park unless Bartolo Colon was involved (Marcus with an RBI two-bagger like he’s Billy McKinney all of a sudden).
Why not be into these particular Mets? Gleaned from peeks into the dugout and postgame remarks, they’re sure into being these particular Mets, no matter the stresses and indignities and outside forces attempt to inflict upon their vibe. Stroman receives a verbal elbow to the ribs from another team’s retrograde announcer because Stro needs to keep his hair in place under his cap? We won’t stand for it! And Stroman just keeps pitching. Kevin Pillar is subject to nonsense from fans of another team because Pill has to wear a protective shield over his surgically repaired face? We won’t stand for it! And Pillar just keeps hitting. We can’t help ourselves from making smart remarks every time another Travis Blankenhorn is added to our roster? We’ll try to control ourselves. And Blank is one of 26 we lend our support without necessarily asking for it back when he’s done with it. The accessories are just details. The unfamiliarity melts away. We inevitably rally behind Our Guys, especially when Our Guys top those Tough Tatises with 6-2 ease.
Winning makes everybody lovable, but our Mets seem pretty likable even outside the box score. They don’t just play well in those uniforms. They feel right in them for now.
by Greg Prince on 6 June 2021 10:45 am Dear Mr. Elias:
I am returning the earned run average you sent me following my most recent start in San Diego. I hope this causes no difficulties for you in your role as official statistician of Major League Baseball. While I appreciate the diligent recordkeeping that you’ve made synonymous with your globally recognized brand, the truth is I really don’t need an earned run average and I’d hate to think you and your associates at the Sports Bureau are going to the trouble of calculating one on my behalf.
Lest I seem overly altruistic in making my request, I should admit that during the pandemic, I became an adherent of Marie Kondo’s philosophy of keeping only the items that spark joy. As you can imagine from your coverage of so many athletes, we tend to accumulate myriad material goods. Don’t get me wrong. I’m extremely grateful for the possessions to which my pitching as allowed me access. Thank goodness I don’t have to worry about taking care of my family in these uncertain times.
Yet as I take a step back from what my career to date has yielded, I realize the most tangible thing to come out of it (besides my pair of Cy Young Awards) is the satisfaction I derive from competing roughly every fifth day, whether it’s vying against the accomplishments of pitchers who’ve come before me or trying to better my previous personal bests.
Oh, and the batters! Please forgive me for failing to mention their participation in my pitching. There’s nothing incidental about their presence in my games, as I do need somebody to throw my pitches past.
Though I may not be the most diligent student of analytics, I do understand the crux of my job is run prevention. My primary challenge therein is, having solved run prevention as a going issue, I had to find something else to apply my efforts toward. Lately I’m focusing on baserunner prevention. I can’t keep every runner off base yet, though I continue to try if not wholly succeed. In my aforementioned most recent start at San Diego, I did, in fact, allow as many as three runners on base in a single inning and greatly disappointed myself. Fortunately, I proceeded to strike out the succeeding batters and end the inning. It is gratifying for a pitcher to know he maintains such a skill set on the off chance it might be required within the course of standard competition.
I suppose you knew that, as you officially keep track of all the numbers, but at the risk of seeming dismissive of your endeavors, I have to admit I pay minimal attention to those numbers. Honestly, they get in the way of concentrating on my pitching and the joy it sparks for me (and, from what I’m told, others).
After I completed my work at Petco Park, I was informed my season’s earned run average is now 0.62, or sixty-two one-hundredths of an earned run permitted every nine innings. As you can plainly infer, that’s tantamount to not having an earned run average at all, therefore I’m hoping you see my predicament. Creating space in my life for an “ERA” that barely exists strikes me as an existential complication that potentially takes away from the pitching that constructs the “ERA”. I hope you understand the conundrum I’m attempting to untangle here…though the conundrum is proving to be quite an interesting one. To be honest, I needed a new challenge.
Let me reiterate I admire the work you put into your statistics. I know my teammates do as well, and by all means please note the solo home runs hit Saturday night by Jose Peraza and Francisco Lindor off my worthy opponent Mr. Musgrove, the run driven in on a pinch-single by Jonathan Villar, the additional run added later on via Kevin Pillar’s RBI single, and the scoreless inning apiece rendered by relievers Seth Lugo and Edwin Diaz. They, along with the other New York Mets, are no doubt buoyed by their respective numerical accomplishments. Likewise, everybody on the ballclub is very enthusiastic for the greater baseball-following population to know we beat the Padres, 4-0. I include myself in that cohort. While I may compete at a level known only to me, I like to think of myself as “one of the boys” in most other ways.
As for what I did — the seven scoreless innings; the eleven strikeouts; the surpassing of Sid Fernandez for fourth place in strikeouts among all Mets pitchers ever; the three hits and one walk allowed (I apologize for both of those unbecoming besmirchments, even if perhaps I should welcome them as a reminder of our common humanity); and the lowering of my earned run average to 0.62 — I suppose keeping track of it all is what you do. What I do, however, is pitch. Your presentation of my statistics to me, frankly, seems beside the point. Maybe after the conclusion of the 2021 season I’ll be curious, but for now I’d prefer to pursue the perfection of my craft without statistical distraction.
For now, then, please accept the earned run average I’m returning in the spirit intended. Be sure to shake this envelope vigorously to retrieve it. My “ERA” is so small, it may be impossible to detect when you look for it.
Sincerely yours,
Jacob deGrom
Pitcher
by Jason Fry on 5 June 2021 2:31 pm Was Friday night’s late-night tilt against the Padres A) deeply weird; B) snoozy with a side of annoying; C) frustrating; or D) all of the above?
I’m going with D.
For a while it looked like Blake Snell would achieve one of the less impressive no-hitters in baseball history – he gave up a lot of solid contact early, none of which translated to a Met safety, thanks to the Padres’ solid defense but also to plain old-fashioned bad luck. The no-hit bid went by the boards when Francisco Lindor led off the 7th with a dunker in front of Tommy Pham, which Pham played into a triple.
That was highly significant, as Snell only had a 1-0 lead, the one courtesy of a Manny Machado missile to the upper deck in the first inning off Joey Lucchesi. Lucchesi had been open about his unhappiness at being traded by the Padres and getting on-field revenge against his old friends and teammates. In my experience revenge is a best served solely in one’s own imagination, and Lucchesi was clearly overamped in the first, running four 3-2 counts and losing pretty thoroughly in challenging Machado. But with the adrenaline having ebbed he found a good groove, allowing nothing else while pitching into the fifth. Which is how the game wound its way to Lindor standing on third with nobody out in the 7th and Snell looking disappointed.
Then it was our turn to be disappointed: James McCann struck out, Pete Alonso put together a good at-bat but fouled to Eric Hosmer at first, and then Brandon Drury struck out. In the seventh, Jeurys Familia was clearly unhappy about his landing spot on the mound, but didn’t call out the people who get paid to fix such things. He walked in a run to make it 2-0.
Another source of frustration was the strike zone of Quinn Wolcott. The strike zone is supposed to be rectangle, but Wolcott’s was more akin to a tracing of an amoeba, one spastically shooting out pseudopods below the zone and across its inside boundaries, then mysteriously withdrawing them from those boundaries. Wolcott’s inability to do his job properly didn’t just affect the Mets – Billy McKinney walked after being struck out according to any sensible rulebook – but it interfered with the game in the top of the ninth, when McCann was called out on an inside pitch with Lindor on first and one out. That got McCann and Luis Rojas excused further in-person attendance. Alonso singled, but Mark Melancon ate Drury alive with a steady diet of tantalizing curves and a high cutter for the coup de grace. By now I think it goes without saying, but baseball needs to take enforcement of the strike zone away from fallible human beings … well, yesterday.
The game wasn’t much fun, but it was made a lot more palatable by having Gary Cohen and Ron Darling on MLB.tv via iPhone. I drove up to Maine on Wednesday to check on my parents’ summer cottage and get some family stuff done before my son’s high-school graduation (???!!!) on Sunday, and the entire trip has been a lesson in how lucky we are to have the announcers we do – not just Gary, Ron and Keith Hernandez, but also Howie Rose and Wayne Randazzo.
On Wednesday the Mets were playing the Diamondbacks at 3:30 pm, meaning I’d have Howie and Wayne as company for the last couple of hours of the drive. It was a great plan until my rental car blew a tire in Griswold, Conn., and I had to seek refuge in a Park & Ride – should you be traveling and find yourself more bored than I hope you ever are, it’s the one at Exit 24 off of I-395 North.
I was there for a couple of hours, while Avis Roadside Assistance struggled with how to find me (“Griswold. G-R-I-S-W-O-L-D. No, not in New York. In Connecticut.”) and then with how to actually get someone out to help me. With the sun beating down, I took refuge in the shade created by the open tailgate of my Toyota 4Runner turned 3Runner, perching amid boxes of books and waiting for a wrecker to show up. (Before you ask: The tire was gashed open, I didn’t have the proper tools to change tires, and I last wielded a jack during the original Bush administration.) When I realized it was 3:30, I decided to see what kind of video quality my phone could pull down, which was when I remembered this was the game that had been handed over to YouTube.
The video quality was surprisingly good – pretty much HD, somehow. And the announcers weren’t that bad – I smiled at hearing the Brooklynese tones of old friend John Franco, who did a capable job discussing what was wrong with Madison Bumgarner in a nightmarish first. After the Mets scored four in the top of the first, I got back on the phone with Avis to see about the prospect of a rescue, only to discover the request was moving through the bureaucracy with a speed that implied carrier pigeons were involved. A minute ago I’d felt like George Jetson; now I felt like Fred Flintstone. And that was before I turned back to the Mets’ game and saw a score that made me do one of those Is That a Typo? double-takes: AZ 5, NY 4.
More double takes would follow: Avis decided I’d canceled my own request for help, which is when I did what I should have done in the first place. I told Avis Roadside Assistance that while they were indeed Avis and I was most definitely roadside, assistance – which, if you think about it, is the most important word of the three — had been nowhere in evidence and I wasn’t particularly confident that would change. Then I started Google-Mapping service stations and auto-repair places until I found one that could send somebody out to help me. Mikey from A&J Auto was just seven minutes away, knew perfectly well where the Park & Ride was, and didn’t need to wait for a carrier pigeon bearing a note that approved saving me.
My 3Runner was soon a 4Runner again, and I got back on the road in time for the Mets to take the lead, give it back and settle in for a long siege. Now that I was driving, I was able to return to the original blueprint, with Howie and Wayne painting the word picture. Which they did admirably: A few minutes into my resumed ride, Wayne cracked Howie up with a riff on Thurman Munson and Lou Gehrig’s widow that somehow referenced both “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Captain Phillips.”
Which got me thinking about the YouTube team, and the perils of irregular announcers. It’s not that such announcers are necessarily bad – I thought the YouTube broadcast was fine, though I was comparing it with Avis Roadside Assistance, which isn’t exactly a fair fight. It’s more an issue of familiarity – and how home voices are not only more knowledgeable but also somehow reassuring. It’s like being a little kid and having the babysitter read your favorite book, and you have a tantrum about the way she read it and no one can figure out why, probably not even you. The problem isn’t that she read it badly – probably she did just fine – but that she read it in a way that struck you as wrong, minus the usual rhythms and cadences that had become as much a part of the story as the actual words and plot.
On Thursday night it was Gary and Ron’s turn, covering the game from the Citi Field, a mere 2,800 miles away from San Diego. That seems mildly absurd at this point in the pandemic, and sparked a great line from Darling when his monitor went black: “I looked at it like we had lost an Apollo flight.”
Here’s a partial list of players and bits of baseball history that came up in the conversation Thursday night: Lefty Grove, Denny McLain, Walt “No Neck” Williams, heart attack jackets (the plastic-looking sweat jackets players used to wear in spring training to shed offseason pounds), Ted Williams and Tony Hawk and Tony Gwynn being from San Diego, Babe Ruth’s spring-training regimen, Sandy Koufax, Doc Medich, Harmon Killebrew, Eddie Mathews, Miguel Andujar, Darryl Strawberry, Eric Davis, Alfonso Soriano, Huston Street, Moises Alou, Dick Williams, Matt Kemp, the San Diego Chicken, Joe Sambito, Jeff Musselman, the “billy goat strap” on a catcher’s mask and Doug Sisk. (Not covered: that there’s actually a human being named Jayce Tingler.)
It’s an impressive roster, but it never felt like a forced trip down baseball memory lane; rather, it was like a conversation in the stands with another fan who knows her stuff and is delighted to have a game in front of her to help those memories surface.
And there’s an easy rapport between the two that adds to the conversation. Watching Yu Darvish at the plate, Darling remarked that “Yu, with his seven different pitches, has seven different swings – none of them very good.” Inevitably, Darvish then got a hit, prompting Cohen to note, “that was one of his seven swings. The one that works.”
Darling brought his own career into the mix in discussing Darvish as a pitcher, noting the patience and discipline it takes to be able to throw 96 and mostly throw in the mid-80s. Yet he did so without larding that up with a bunch of “in my day,” wearing his authority lightly but in a way that made it feel more earned. And Cohen was right there with a bit of context, noting how few pitchers are able to follow such a formula.
With a two-man booth, SNY is missing Hernandez’s nightly dose of surrealism and unpredictability, but the conversation flows beautifully with just two poles. Zeroing in on Gary and Ron, I realized Keith is a bonus; his gymnastics work (at least most of the time) because his colleagues give him a net.
And the three of them give us all a net, which we need when the Mets are disappointing us, fate is unkind, or it’s 1 a.m. and we’re wondering why the hell we’re still up. Howie and Wayne do that too, in a different medium but drawing on the same wonderfully deep well. They’re the company I want, whether the Mets are up four or I’m having to process the fact that they were just up four and no longer are. And trust me – when you’re sitting in the back of a wounded 4Runner in the Exit 24 Park & Ride, good company gets very, very important.
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