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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 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 As matters of concern went, Jacob deGrom’s right flexor tendon immediately superceded Jacob deGrom’s near-perfect game, which Jacob deGrom was leading, 3-0, thanks in great part to Jacob deGrom’s two-run single.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.
by Jason Fry on 4 June 2021 10:58 am Well, at least the pig exited covered with lipstick.
The Mets fell behind 4-0 against a scintillating Yu Darvish on a night when Taijuan Walker didn’t have his best stuff, kept getting into trouble of his own making, and had very little in terms of bullpen and bench behind him – a situation that led to some conservative calls in the dugout by Luis Rojas. And yet they came within a couple of whispers – a great play without a disastrous reversal, a runner’s mad dash getting just a little madder, a sharp hit not hitting the mound – of erasing the deficit and maybe stealing a game from Fernando Tatis Jr. and his supporting cast.
The result was a Rorschach game: Maybe this long journey into Friday morning left you impressed with the pluck and spunk on display in a losing cause; maybe it left you annoyed with Rojas, fate or both; maybe you can’t make up your mind between the two. All valid – the older I get, the less interested I am in telling other people what to feel, and that forbearance goes double for anyone who slogs all the way through a West Coast night game. If you survived you get to pen your own memoir of the journey.
But we can all agree that Tatis is an electric presence, which baseball sorely needs, and that the Padres are a lot of fun, the kind of relentlessly uptempo outfit whose first impression creates lifelong fans. Retiring Tatis on a foul pop in the first felt like getting away with something, and the rest of the game seemed to revolve around him. Meanwhile, the Padres’ grabby, semi-reckless energy was on display from the very first inning: Manny Machado made a tricky play at third to throw out James McCann as if expanding the diamond by 10% was no big deal, and Jurickson Profar arrived at second faster and harder than one would expect on a sure fielder’s choice. Not to mention the crowd’s delight at Darvish’s unlikely hitting heroics – he’s their Al Leiter.
Darvish is one of those pitchers who seems like he should never lose. He’s got an arsenal with the depth of Bret Saberhagen’s and the ability to throw between 67 and 97 with pitches that comes from the same angle and follow the same apparent path before deviating from it too late for hitters to react. Now throw in that strange hesitation in his windup: He pauses with his knee on the way up, then raises it slowly and a little creakily, like an old winch that needs to be babied, and then he’s through his motion and the ball is on you faster than you think.
It was Tatis, of course, who drew first blood for the Padres, but it came with a painful asterisk: In the third, with Machado on first, Tatis hit a high arcing drive to dead center. Mason Williams went up for the ball, which thudded into his glove but also drove it backwards, so that the ball flopped out and went over the fence. Williams was left with his hands on his head in horror, the author of a great catch that somehow became a disaster. (Still, the mischance felt overdue – and the Padres’ post-homer “swag chain” is all kinds of awesome.)
In the fifth, with the Mets down 3-0, Williams got their first hit and the tying run came to the plate with two out. It was Walker, who’d thrown 81 pitches … but Rojas let him hit, mindful of how taxed the bullpen was because of David Peterson’s Wednesday woes and of his short bench. Walker grounded out, which was unfortunate; worse, he then yielded a fourth run (albeit unearned) on a Tatis dash for home on a wild pitch, and departed after five.
I’m not a Rojas detractor – he’s almost preternaturally even-keeled, which I suspect players appreciate even more than they did a generation ago, and his team seems to like him and play hard for him. And he has a far better gauge of his clubhouse’s injuries and levels of exhaustion than any of us do. That said, I would have called for a pinch-hitter in hopes of getting back in the game and worried about tomorrow tomorrow; from the state of Mets Twitter, plenty of my fellow partisans agreed. Rojas might counter that he’ll almost certainly need bullpen length with Joey Lucchesi on the mound tonight and such a move would have been missing the forest for the trees, but I don’t think I agree. This felt like letting a healthy tree get sawed down right in front of you because you were looking way off into that forest — I’ve seen too many seasons come down to a game or two and a regretful look back at the calendar at losses you can’t ever get back.
Still, the Mets hadn’t surrendered. In the sixth, they cut the deficit in half on a two-run homer by McCann that drove in Francisco Lindor, yet another pairing of two high-priced acquisitions a lot of fans would have gladly consigned to a yard sale a week or so ago. For the 400th or so time, don’t make big, confident conclusions in May.
Darvish departed in favor of Tim Hill, a Laredo thrower who confronts batters with impossible arm angles and a following cross-body kick. He walked Billy McKinney and got Brandon Drury to hit a grounder to second, which Tatis dropped in his haste to turn a double play.
Up came Pete Alonso to pinch-hit – the guy many Mets fans had wanted an inning before, now front and center in a perfect spot. Alonso always looks sad at the plate: closing his eyes, looking skyward, and trying to get his breath. I’m sure he’s just visualizing a good outcome, but it looks like he’s in agony – which he really was in after hitting into the DP Tatis had just missed out on.
The Mets got closer in the eighth, when McKinney slammed a ball off the top of the right-field wall to bring in Lindor, with only Machado’s playing deep in the shift beyond second preventing an inside-the-park homer for the tie. (When a team has two right fielders at the optimum moment, maybe it isn’t your night.) In the ninth, Mark Melancon yielded a leadoff single to Tomas Nido and walked Jose Peraza. That’s the one situation where a bunt’s defensible, but Travis Blankenhorn was told to swing away. He put together a very patient at-bat (his second in a row) but hit a grounder to third, which Machado only converted into a lone out. Up stepped Kevin Pillar, who spanked a ball up the middle – one that struck the mound and wound up right where Ha-Seong Kim had shifted.
Ballgame. Exit the pig, covered with blue and orange lipstick and protesting the indignity of such treatment. And exit a ballgame that the Mets had clearly lost and yet then somehow almost won. Might have won, except for the ball assisted over the fence and the second shot at an enemy double play and the backup by a third baseman in right-center and the ball that spent all its energy hitting the mound. Which is to say, the one they didn’t win.
by Greg Prince on 3 June 2021 3:09 am Welcome to YouTube! Based on your viewing history, these videos are specially recommended for you!
DELUGE OF OFFENSE OUT OF THE GATE
Six New York Mets come to bat right away at Chase Field, six New York Mets get hits right away — first time leading off a game since 1979! Jonathan Villar singles; Francisco Lindor singles; James McCann homers (!); Pete Alonso singles; Kevin Pillar singles; Dom Smith singles. The Mets score four first-inning runs!
STILL MAD AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
Madison Bumgarner pitches against the New York Mets for the eleventh time since 2012 and never gets pinned with a loss! Hardly ever gets hit, either! MadBum beats the Mets over and over, including once with an entire postseason on the line! When a Met beats Madison Bumgarner, that Met (Justin Ruggiano with a grand slam) gets injured practically ten minutes later…and the Mets as a whole lose to Bumgarner anyway!
THE PITCHER WHO GAVE UP AN ENORMOUS LEAD
David Peterson is a young and unpredictable pitcher. Occasionally he’s as unhittable as Madison Bumgarner in his prime. More often he’s as hittable as Madison Bumgarner was during the top of the first inning in the Wednesday, June 2, 2021, Mets-Diamondbacks game televised exclusively on YouTube. During the bottom of the first inning in the Wednesday, June 2, 2021, Mets-Diamondbacks game televised exclusively on YouTube — in exactly one-third of an inning — Peterson outdoes Bumgarner, giving up five runs along with the four-run lead his team’s deluge of offense out of the gate provided him!
THE (OTHER) BEARD
Not as famous as James Harden, but longer-tenured in New York, hirsute Robert Gsellman puts his own moves on the Diamondbacks, bailing out the Mets after Peterson’s implosion and keeping the club viable from the first through the fourth, giving up only two hits and no runs of his own!
WHO’S A BUM?
Madison Bumgarner, hero (or villain) of multiple Octobers, cannot survive a June afternoon in the desert. He surrenders a fifth run and leaves after two innings of eight-hit ball to a team that had collected all of 47 hits off him in 72 career innings, the 2016 National League Wild Card Game included!
MORE HITS, ONE RUN
The Mets keep pounding the ball versus Madison Bumgarner’s successor, the less-celebrated Riley Smith. Six hits! But only one run. The one run gives the Mets a 6-5 lead in the fifth. It feels like they should be ahead by more (it always feels like they should be ahead by more!).
TRIUMPHANT RETURNS OF 2021 (UPDATED)
Kevin Pillar in a plastic mask! Pete Alonso going deep! NOW Seth Lugo emerging from mothballs!!! Lugo, the Mets’ most dependable reliever of recent years, comes off the injured list and throws a clean bottom of the fifth. Seth is back and everything is gonna be great!
DISPIRITING ABSENCES OF 2021 (UPDATED)
Met after Met after Met disappears from the playing field, usually in agony. The latest to depart from view is Jonathan Villar, the Mets’ de facto regular leadoff hitter and third baseman. Villar’s hamstring tightens. He is removed from a game that isn’t televised on television, though his hamstring remains tight on all streaming platforms!
MYSTERIOUS DEBUTS OF 2021 (UPDATED)
Travis Blankenhorn follows in the heretofore unforeseen footsteps of Jose Peraza, Patrick Mazeika, Jordan Yamamoto, Tommy Hunter, Jake Hager, Johneshwy Fargas, Khalil Lee, Cameron Maybin, Brandon Drury, Yennsy Diaz, Billy McKinney and Mason Williams, all of whom preceded Blankenhorn into a Mets box score over the previous month. Many are mentored by Hugh Quattlebaum!
QUESTIONABLE BULLPEN STINTS OF 2021 (UPDATED)
New York Mets manager Luis Rojas leaves Seth Lugo in for a second inning during the Wednesday, June 2, 2021, Mets-Diamondbacks game televised exclusively on YouTube despite Lugo not having pitched in 2021 until the Wednesday, June 2, 2021, Mets-Diamondbacks game televised exclusively on YouTube. Seth’s second inning ends differently than his first. (SPOILER ALERT: An Arizona run is involved!)
RANDOM METS SEEN SWINGING BATS, 2021
Jose Peraza strikes out! Billy McKinney strikes out! Travis Blankenhorn strikes out! All in the eighth inning of a 6-6 game because they’re pretty much all the Mets who are available!
RECOGNIZABLE METS SEEN SWINGING BATS, 2021
The New York Mets send three All-Star players — Francisco Lindor, James McCann and Pete Alonso — to bat in the top of a ninth inning of a 6-6 game and it becomes a 7-6 game!
CLOSER CLOSES
Extremely talented yet residually untrustworthy Edwin Diaz pitches the bottom of the ninth inning the day after a bad night and restores faith in his ability and constitution — three up and three down!
MILDLY SURPRISING ENDINGS, 2021
The Mets win, 7-6, which shouldn’t be a surprise, but because the Mets had so many more hits (16) than runs; because the Mets had to use relievers from the first inning onward; and because the Mets insert a new Travis Blankenhorn daily, it’s almost shocking!
HIGH-QUALITY BASEBALL AUDIO
Crack radio broadcasters Howie Rose and Wayne Randazzo provide excellent accounts and descriptions of Wednesday, June 2, 2021, Mets-Diamondbacks game televised exclusively on YouTube. YouTube’s great for going down video rabbit holes, but when it comes to following an SNYless Mets game in progress, stick with the voices that paint word pictures!
by Jason Fry on 2 June 2021 1:49 am To be fair, it’s only natural: As fans, we see everything through a certain-colored lens, in our case one split between blue and orange.
So let’s peer through it and see what’s what: Marcus Stroman was throttling the Diamondbacks, the Mets had the lead, and then everything went south. A minor but chippy on-field dustup between Stro and Josh Rojas looked like a pointless gesture from a team on a 1-15 streak, as Francisco Lindor tripled in a run to make it 3-0 Mets and Dom Smith just missed a three-run homer which would have been his second of the game. But he did miss it, and had to settle for a sacrifice fly. 4-0 seemed like more than enough, but a three-run blast by Pavin Smith that got Arizona back in the game, with Smith’s bat flip indicating a certain degree of unhappiness with the opposition. (I don’t mind bat flips in the least, but that one felt like it had an agenda.) Jeurys Familia shook off a leadoff two-base error from Jonathan Villar to keep the Diamondbacks from tying it and Aaron Loup was terrific, but Edwin Diaz looked a little off from the jump in trying to secure the save. With one out, Nick Ahmed singled and took second base on a Billy McKinney bobble, then moved to third on a groundout. The Mets were one out away, but Rojas — of course it had to be Rojas — drove in the tying run. In the tenth the Mets immediately cashed their free runner on a James McCann double, but proved unable to convert their earned runner, and in the bottom of the inning Trevor May blew up for the second night in a row: walk, two-run double, farcical replay review, ballgame.
That’s a chronicle of the Mets riling up sleeping snakes, failing to add to a lead and seeing their bullpen falter, and seeing that way is perfectly accurate. I’m a Mets fan, after all. And more than that, I’m a Mets fan who finds the Diamondbacks … annoying. There’s their ceaseless quest for the worst uniform in baseball — they’ve now settled on switching color schemes seemingly at random, and the rattlesnake with a baseball in its mouth looks more like a heart than a serpent, which you now won’t be able to unsee either. There’s their weirdly sterile park, their uncanny-valley mascot, their creepy on-field race with former players turned into caricatures, and hovering above it all the general sense that they were born as half of an expansion no one particularly needed. (Sure, they beat the Yankees once, and I’m grateful for that, but enemy of my enemy etc.) I don’t hate the Diamondbacks, because that would require me to take them more seriously than I ever have, but if they moved to Portland or Charlotte or Montreal or Vegas tomorrow I suspect I’d shrug and hope they actually became a franchise with an identity and one I’d feel something about.
But enough with the blue and orange lens. There are Diamondbacks fans, even if you wouldn’t know it from the cascade of pro-Mets noise the last two nights, and they’ve been through a lot in the last month, watching in horror as their team plummeted into one of those baseball abysses that makes you wonder if your team will ever win again.
I don’t know what colored lens those fans would look through, because it’s the Diamondbacks, but put it up to your eye and you’ll see a come-off-the-deck victory, the kind that doesn’t erase a horrific May but at least makes you fantasize about resilience and newfound toughness and all those baseball cliches and a better June. Rojas had had enough and let Stroman know it, Smith showed the kind of emotion you admire in a rookie, and the team came back and stared down a gang of first-place interlopers from the east, shocking them with a walkoff loss.
As fans it’s of course all about us, and there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with that perspective. But it’s not the only point of view. The other guys are trying to win too, and sometimes they do, and sometimes that’s as much the story as your own team’s failures.
by Greg Prince on 1 June 2021 1:16 pm Prior to nine years ago today, I regularly wove fantasies about a New York Met throwing a no-hitter. Then Johan Santana threw The First No-Hitter in New York Mets History, and I didn’t have to fantasize anymore. The Second No-Hitter in New York Mets History — perhaps one a little more spotless than The First — is still out there as a franchise goal, but if it comes, it comes, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I’ve gotten the one I closed my eyes and wished harder than hard for. On this count, I’m good.
Jacob deGrom, on the other hand, is extraordinary. Monday night he was pitching The Second No-Hitter in New York Mets History. The First Perfect Game, too. It was so obvious, it was routine. My muscle memory nudged me to get nervous, to overthink whether I should think this way or that way about what was unfolding in Phoenix. Do I sit over here? Over there? Did I just jinx everything? My contemporary mindset, however, transcended the traditional anxiety attached to following Met no-hit bids in progress.
It’s Jake. He’s got this.
Then he didn’t, after Carson Kelly registered a clean base hit in the fifth inning, yet it was no biggie as far as I was concerned. Maybe had it been deeper into the game, I wouldn’t have had to have just now gone back to the box score to look up which Diamondback it was who sullied Jake’s line. Maybe Kelly would’ve been synonymous already for Qualls or Wallis or Lyttle in my personal vernacular had it been the seventh or later. Maybe had it grown so close to taste, I’d be spitting regret right now.
But nah. Jake gave up a hit in the midst of a no-hit bid. Being Jake, he simply went back to pitching the same game, which felt as good as a no-hitter, minus the angst. Because the Mets are proceeding with commendable caution following his recent visit to the IL, they let him go only six innings anyway. There’d be one more Arizona hit, which could have been ruled an error — Billy McKinney made a nice diving play on a sinking Josh Reddick liner only to wind up dropping the ball — and everything else was deGrom to the nth degree: no walks, eight strikeouts, a run-scoring single of his own, an aura of hitless impenetrability that the two Arizona hits didn’t pierce whatsoever.
Jacob even got a W for his troubles, the beneficiary of other Mets besides himself lighting up the scoreboard, particularly the activated Pete Alonso, thriving in the desert as only this Polar Bear might. Pete homered and drove in four runs. McKinney compensated for his fielding faux pas with a grandstand shot of his own. Newest newcomer Mason Williams had himself a hit and a catch (the latter at the wall) for the first page of his Met scrapbook. Kevin Pillar donned a clear plastic mask to play the field after his brush with hit-by-pitch horror two weeks earlier and discarded it in order to swing and connect for a single in the seventh. The first-place Mets, comprised of a slightly different collection of first-place Mets every time they manage to take the field, played like whichever cast of first-place Mets they continue to be and beat the D’Backs, 6-2. A game that began on May 31 ended with the calendar in New York flipped to June 1 and a happy Johanniversary to what happened on this date in 2012.
DeGrom bookending Santana would have made it a greater story. DeGrom being deGrom made it a great game, per usual. On that count, we’re all good.
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