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January 26, 2012 On Board with Steady Eddie and Johnny Franco There has been a lot of talk about the Mets retiring numbers lately, but I think the team is doing the right thing by holding steady and sticking to honoring not just great players for their team, but those who stack up with the greatest of all time. 37: Casey Stengel, a legendary manager who gave the Mets their start. A special man and a special case. 14: Gil Hodges masterminded our touchstone moment as a franchise, the unbelievable transformation of chump to champ. 41: Tom Seaver is the best Met ever, case closed; Baseball-Reference lists him as sixth best in the history of pitching. Mike Piazza, if he gets into Cooperstown, is the only player I foresee who can crack this numerical code. A Met like Mike comes along every 20 years—if you’re lucky. While we’re waiting, and are preparing for the 50th anniversary of the Mets, it is only fitting to fete a new member of the Mets Hall of Fame. And John Franco is the ideal candidate as the 26th member of the Mets Hall of Fame. In the past I’ve complained that the Mets ignored their Hall of Fame—notably during the eight years where no one was inducted between Tommie Agee (2002) and the deserving ’86 quartet: Dwight Gooden, Darryl Strawberry, Davey Johnson, and Frank Cashen, all inducted at Citi Field in 2010. You can’t argue with the ones who are in the Mets HOF. The ones who aren’t—a group of deserving Mets that includes Edgardo Alfonzo, Howard Johnson, Jesse Orosco, David Cone, Al Leiter, Sid Fernandez, Ron Darling, and my dark horse favorite, Jon Matlack—are all fodder for future discussions during the Hot Stove period and on those days when the team is actually playing and you wish they’d just stop. Franco is what Mike Francesser would call “a compila.” He compiled a lot of saves—426 in all, good for second all-time when he retired in 2005. He has been surpassed by Mariano Rivera and Trevor Hoffman, but he is still number one among lefties. For those who think the one-inning save is too easily gotten, wait ’til next year. I hope I live long enough to see someone surpass his 276 Mets saves. Franco’s 695 games as a Met seems pretty safe as well, unless Pedro Feliciano (459) gets his shoulder in shape and returns from the Dark Side. Franco who gave his number to Mike Piazza in 1998, acquiesced to a secondary bullpen role for the good of the team in 1999. And for those who want everything perfect and liked to complain when he left too many men on base while getting out of a jam throwing junk, look at how well big man Armando did in this category. As setup man for Benitez, Franco ranks fifth in club history with 53 holds—Feliciano leads this ho-hum category with 98. Aaron Heilman (69) is second, so take this stat for what it’s worth. But as far as years of service, Franco’s 14 seasons in a Mets uniform is second all-time, edging out Bud Harrelson (13). His post-Tommy John surgery GT (garbage time—it’s OK, Franco’s dad was a sanitation worker) puts Johnny ahead of a large crop of Mets who spent a dozen years on the field in Flushing: Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Tom Seaver, Craig Swan, Jerry Grote, Bud Harrelson, Cleon Jones, and—as proof that a good attendance record is worth something—Ron Hodges. Number one on that list is Ed Kranepool with 18 years served. I was talking to the master of Mets longevity about another project just after Franco was announced as a Mets Hall of Famer Thursday. Krane, a Mets Hall of Famer since 1990, was understandably pleased. Franco has a great record. He’s done a great job. He’s a New Yorker, but he came out of Cincinnati and did a tremendous job. Look at how many saves he had for the Mets organization. He’s in the top half a dozen for saves lifetime. He deserves it. He’s been a great player for them. I like him and respect him. Steady Eddie also noted that it’s getting tougher to find Mets who have the longevity to be worthy of Flushing HOF induction. I guess the Mets now are shortchanging guys who jumped around so much with free agency. It’s tough for guys to have any kind of longevity with the ballclub. John certainly produced on the field. And I think he does good work and does some PR for the club, in a limited capacity. So he’s still around New York. I saw him the other night at the [Baseball Assistance Team] Dinner. (Two note taking sessions in one week! Try not to get used to me doing actual reporting. This could hurt my image.) Anyway, welcome to the Mets Hall, John Franco. In a year that no one is too excited about, the June 3 induction gives us something to look forward to. <> <> <> To see how Franco, Kranepool, and other top notch Mets rank in my all-time top 50—and how they are ranked by Wins Above Replacement—check out Best Mets. |
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January 23, 2012 Carter Kids Pinch-Hit Homer for Dad at BBWAA Dinner I attended the New York Chapter of the Baseball Writers Association Dinner Saturday night. That this is coming out 24-plus hours after the fact is perhaps reason one why I’m not a BBWAA member. As a newspaperman, I was still at least half a dozen career moves away from even being close to a beat writer job, and that career path was irrevocably changed when I read The Bad Guys Won by Bob Klapisch and John Harper, both of whom were in attendance Saturday. Their book portrayed the job of beat writer as one of hellish torment surrounded by rare moments of clarity and pleasure. At the very least, according to the writers, the occupation would make me hate whatever team I covered, and perhaps the game itself. If I reached this pinnacle of the profession, whenever I was asked what my favorite team was, I would be required to say something insipid like “I don’t root for teams, I root for stories.” But there I was at the 89th annual dinner anyway, thanks to Mets Inside Pitch’s Andy Esposito. And it was an entertaining and newsworthy night, if I may add. I guess this is where most of the people in attendance would tell me I’ve buried the lede (it’s pronounced lead—to be more specific, leed—but newspapermen on deadline are in such a hurry there is no time to wonder whether a word refers to the potentially hazardous material or a potentially hazardous paragraph opening so as to make a reader continue flipping the page, or in modern newspaper parlance, hit the “close” button). I got to chat up some of the veterans in the crowd like Marty Appel, Marty Noble, Lee Lowenfish, Jay Horwitz, New Breeder from Newsday Steve Jacobson, and 1980s Mets dynamo Randye Ringler, creator of the timeless tome GourMets. I also had a great chat with Tommy John and met original Met Frank Thomas. But the big news from the dinner wasn’t about me, or them, or any of the younger, crustier writers, it was about Gary Carter. As you may have heard, the news turned grave on Kid Carter the other day when new tumors were found on his brain. In the party-hearty 1980s, Carter sometimes got an unjustifiably bad wrap as a goody two shoes, but he was the best catcher in the league, and when we look back in hindsight, it’s plain to see that he was also probably the best person in the league. You can judge a lot about a person by his children, and Kid’s kids did him proud Saturday when they accepted the Arthur and Milton Richman “You Gotta Have Heart” Award. With a crowd of people that tends toward the cynical, you could hear a pin drop when Bobby Ojeda introduced the Carter clan, saying that “they’re learning that [when] you go through something like this, you go through it with that fight in your heart.” In Best Mets, when I assigned MVPs for the top Mets teams of all time, I picked Bobby O. as the ’86 Mets MVP. He’s still proving he’s the man more than a quarter century later. The 40-second standing “O” from the no-cheering-in-the-press-box crowd was the equivalent of a mid-1980s curtain call. All that was missing was Carter himself, permed, a little sweaty, and very excited, popping out of the dugout for a fist pump. But that his family would make the trip after the devastating news received this week, says a lot about what the Carters think of the city and its game. Here’s some of what his daughter, Kimmy, said: I’ll be telling my dad about that standing ‘O.’ He’d like that a lot…. We are so honored to be accepting this special award tonight even though we wish our mom and dad could be here. It’s been a difficult eight-month journey, however, the Lord has given us our daily strength. We would like to thank the friends and friends for their countless prayers, love, and support for our dad and our entire family. We are incredibly proud to be the kids of such amazing parents whom we love very much. There is no doubt that both of them have a lot of heart. Before we left for New York, I asked my dad if there was anything he would like to share on his behalf. He spoke from his heart, and with the help of family, we would like to share his words. This is where D.J. Carter, who looks quite a bit like his dad did as a fresh-faced Expos rookie, stepped up and read his father’s words: I’ll always have a special place in my heart for the people and city of New York. I’ll never forget my first day in a Mets uniform on Opening Day 1985 when I had the fortune to lead our team to victory over the St. Louis Cardinals with a 10th inning home run…. I have nothing but fond memories of my time in New York, highlighted of course by the World Series championship in 1986. I still remember the feeling of riding in that World Series parade with over one million people lining the streets to celebrate our championship. The fans were always supportive of me on the baseball field and continue to support me and my family since my diagnosis of brain cancer in May of 2011. I’ve always strived to put my heart and soul into everything in my life, whether it’s playing baseball, coaching my team at Palm Beach Atlantic University, or raising money to support efforts for the Gary Carter Foundation. I am truly humbled to be recognized by the New York Chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America for the Arthur and Milton Richman “You Gotta Have Heart” Award. It is with honor that I accept this award. I want to wish all of you the very best in the future and hope the Mets can win many, many more World Series championships. Carter’s other daughter, Christy, followed that up the only way anyone possibly could, by saying “Thank you and God bless you always.” There were actually many more acts to go on the night, including some needed levity in a sportswriter’s version of “Who’s on First.” And one of the few publication covers the Mets will get this year is Scorebook, the annual NYBBWAA dinner program edited by Marty Noble. And I could not leave without getting a Casey Stengel coffee mug caricature by Johnny Pennisi (and I don’t even drink coffee). The other highlights, edited for your protection: The “Willie, Mickey, and the Duke” Award went to the ’62 Mets, represented by Al Jackson, Frank Thomas, and Jay Hook, who was pretty funny for an engineer and a 19-game loser. Choo Choo Coleman was also in the audience. The Joan Payson Award for community service, first given to Payson in her memory following her death in 1975, was awarded to Yankee Dave Robertson, who worked tirelessly in his hometown of Tuscaloosa, Alabama following the tornado devastation there last spring. The Casey Stengel “You Could Look It Up” Award went to former Met Tommy Davis, who corrected ex-Met Jay Hook, who introduced him by saying Davis knocked in 193 runs instead of 153 in 1962 (as a Dodger, mind you). “If I’d knocked in 193 runs,” the Brooklyn native said, “I’d own this whole place.” And yes, Jose Reyes was back in town, wearing glasses I noticed, to receive the Ben Epstein-Dan Castellano “Good Guy Award.” He was not on the podium long, but he was up there longer than he was on the field on closing day last September. Jose Bautista, Jeremy Hellickson, Joe Maddon, and Tim McCarver, were also honored but not present. On hand for their fete were retiring Yankees trainer Gene Monahan, never-retiring Yankees relief ace Mariano Rivera, Braves top-notch rookie reliever Craig Kimbrel, Diamondbacks manager Kirk Gibson, and Cardinals World Series MVP David Freese, winner of the most obscure major-minor award in the game, the Babe Ruth Award. That award has been given out annually to the top World Series performer since well before there was an MLB official Series MVP. It does make it easier when, like this year, the Babe Ruth winner and Series MVP are the same guy. Sometimes life has more spice, like in 1969 when Met Donn Clendenon was Series MVP and Al Weis won the Babe Ruth Award. That’s the kind of spice I’d love to try more often. There was another award that also requires some explanation: the J.G. Taylor Spink Award. Named after the longtime publisher of The Sporting News, this honor does not put you in the Hall of Fame per se, but it puts your face on a plaque with all the other sportswriters in an exhibit down the hall from the player plaques in Cooperstown. This year’s Spink Award winner went to Canada’s Bob Elliot, who has fought the good fight for years to bring the best baseball coverage to a nation that thinks as much of baseball as most Americans do of hockey. That’s only a slight dig. I like hockey, but I’m probably as lukewarm about the sport’s daily doings as the average Canadian is about the grand old game. Turnabout’s fair play, eh? And then there were the awards we were all waiting for: the presentations of the MVPs and Cy Youngs. Justin Verlander made it easy by winning both awards in the AL, but 85-year-old Don Newcombe made it unforgettable with a hilariously long tale of double entendre about how he finally tracked down Verlander on vacation to congratulate him. Newk and Verlander are the lone players in history to own a Rookie of the Year, Cy Young, and MVP award. Verlander can only hope he makes it to this dinner in 57 years, and gets this level of both respect and laughter. Mets manager Terry Collins, who was part of the Dodgers hierarchy when he saw Clayton Kershaw make his minor league debut just five years ago, introduced the southpaw. The deserving Cy Young winner came across as humble and engaging as you’d want your Cy Young winner to be. And then there was Ryan Braun. To be honest, I thought Matt Kemp deserved the MVP. And you have to be honest, this would be a lot less messy if Kemp had won. Of course, a few weeks after Braun won the MVP, it was leaked—pardon the pun—that he had tested positive for a banned substance and would be suspended for the first 50 games of 2012. Braun spent part of this week’s trip to New York meeting with MLB execs about his situation, to no avail. Most of his Saturday speech was innocuous, but at the end of his four minutes he addressed the elephant in the New York Hilton ballroom. Sometimes in life we all deal with challenges we never expected to endure. We have the opportunity to either look at those as obstacles or as opportunities. I chose to view every obstacle—every opportunity—excuse me, I chose to view every challenge I’ve ever met as an opportunity and this will be no different. I’ve always believed that every person’s character is revealed by the way they deal with those moments of adversity. I’ve always loved and had so much respect for the game of baseball. Everything I’ve done in my career has been with that respect and appreciation in mind, and that is why I am so grateful and humbled to accept this award tonight. Thank you again to everybody and hope you enjoy the rest of your evening. Freudian slip aside, it was a nice try by a ballplayer caught in a pickle. Sorry, Braunie, I just can’t believe anyone anymore who gets caught using banned substances. Even if the test was incorrect, Braun can thank his fellow Players Association members, whom he did thank earlier in his speech, for creating this situation where a whole generation of ballplayers may never be trusted by the same public that once watched them in awe. And Braun was addressing an audience that will one day judge him and others in his situation—or who just seem like they might be under suspicion. Hope he enjoyed the dinner because I think MVP votes for him will be harder to come by in the future. And sitting next to the podium was Boston’s new manager, Bobby Valentine, with a look of distaste on his face the entire time Braun was speaking next to him. The filet was rumbling a bit in my belly as well, Bobby. But what’s a big night in the city without a little drama. |
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January 16, 2011 Thank You Notes and More I have a tradition where I collect my favorite letters a couple of times per year and run them like a Sunday letters to the editor section in your favorite newspaper or other anachronism. It features sometimes pithy—and often real—responses given to the person who sent an email here at the site. Best Mets came out a few weeks early, and today is the official publication date. There’s already been a mythical party in the book’s honor, so here are a couple of thank you notes penned within a month of the holiday and sent out on the world wide web rather than in personal mailboxes. And there is a third note I am not sure how to classify. -- To Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Book Shelf: Thank you for including two of my books on the Mets 50th anniversary of the Mets, New York Mets: The Complete Illustrated History and Best Mets: Fifty Years of Highs and Lows from New York’s Most Agonizingly Amazin’ Team. One book is not meant to replace the other but rather as a compliment. And I appreciate the compliment of being compared with some of the more prodigious Red Sox authors. -- In an online review of the paperback version of 100 Things Mets Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die, you said, and I quote:
I am an avid Met fan and I did enjoy
reading about the history of the Mets and top Mets moments, but I found
the title of the book to be a little deceiving. Well, that was some of the best criticism I have ever received. Really. First, let me explain why there wasn’t much in the way of activities in the version of 100 Things. The hardcover version, which came out in 2008, included many activities at Shea Stadium in honor of the last year of the park. When the paperback version of the book was released two years later, Shea was lamentably gone, and most of the activities and advice were thus rendered worthless. With just a couple of weeks to make changes for the paperback version, I replaced the obsolete Shea chapters with profiles of several Mets who missed the cut in the original version. And I also included a bit on the last game at Shea. The short turnaround time for the paperback did not allow for changes to the book’s structure. But your criticism was 100 percent accurate. I thank you. When I started working on Best Mets, I recalled your words and put together a special section on Mets Activities with this in mind. It features numerous things to keep a Mets fan busy, including books, the internet, spring training (something near and dear to your heart I’ve noted in your postings on other websites), Mets minor league team info so people can see them in person or follow them on the web, a few favorite watering holes where you can be with Mets-minded people, the upcoming Mets 50th Anniversary Symposium at Hofstra University, and something on the Hall of Fame at Citi Field, which hadn’t opened when the 2010 version of 100 Things came out. Of course, when I handed in Best Mets to the publisher, who knew the Mets would welcome back Banner Day and usher out their Gulf Coast League team. Both decisions floored me. Anyway, thanks Rich. -- To the first reviewer of Best Mets on Amazon.com: Thanks for acquiring a copy and providing feedback. Your review on Amazon included some valid criticism, but it is apparent you did not read the book—or look at the Table of Contents—because most of the points you railed against are indeed in the book, including a list of best regular-season games—with the post 9/11 game well represented—and two pages on the “Midnight Massacre.” Online reviews are always welcome—encouraged even—but, good, bad, or inaccurate, they sit on Amazon forever and are viewed by every potential customer. In the latter instance—a first for me, I will admit—all I can hope for is the kindness of strangers in cyberspace. And when this reader asks if the author did “any real research,” I have to stand up and point out where the reader is wrong. Hope this doesn’t come out as snitty, but I take a lot of pride in the opportunity afforded me to write about the team through 50 years of triumph and travails. By all means, feel free to share your opinions on the book, or any of my works, whether in letters on this site, reviews, discussions on other sites, loose talk on the street corner, graffiti, whatever. We can be defensive, obviously, but we are not that particular. |
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January 10, 2011 Fame Not What It Once Was So Barry Larkin is in the Hall of Fame. It has become such a ho-hum that I forgot to even check on the Hall voting until a day after it was announced. When I heard, I winced. I knew Barry Larkin probably had as good a shot as anyone, but I often wince when the Hall of Fame voting is announced. I winced when it was announced Barry Larkin was the 1995 MVP. He didn’t deserve that either. I’m not against Barry Larkin. He was a solid shortstop for a long time for Cincinnati. But was he 50 percent of the vote better than Alan Trammell, who had a long and illustrious career and also helped an underdog Midwestern team to its only world championship of the last couple of decades? I would put Dave Concepcion in the Hall of Fame before Larkin if there was a need to put a Reds shortstop in. If someone from this class should have gone in, I would have taken Tim Raines, and only half the baseball writers needed to make that happen agreed. All things considered, I am not a big fan of recent Hall of Fame inductees Andre Dawson and Kirby Puckett, and to some extent, Jim Rice and Ryne Sandberg. And do not get me started on the Veterans Committee—or whatever they call it nowadays—banging in fellows that were not voted in by the baseball writers. This is also not a case of sour grapes over Larkin not waving his no-trade clause to come to the Mets in 2000. Though I’ll admit if he were wearing a Mets ring into the Hall of Fame as a slayer of the Yankees I would wince considerably less. I like the Hall of Fame. I like the above-mentioned players. But there are more people in the Hall than there should be. The first 40 years of the Hall of Fame’s existence enabled Cooperstown to catch up with all the players from past generations who deserved to be in the Hall of Fame. And there are only a few players from each generation that deserve to join them on the walls in Cooperstown. If there is no one deserving to be in the Hall of Fame in a given year, I think no one should be voted in, regardless of what MLB or the Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce thinks. If you’ve been to Cooperstown lately—and if you haven’t, you should—you will see that they are running out of plaque space in the rotunda. But they’ll find a place for more plaques. Whether they are needed or not. Whenever I see players elected other than those I looked at during their playing days and said, “Oh, yeah, he’s a Hall of Famer,” my reaction is to wince. I won’t wince when Greg Maddux or Randy Johnson or Pedro Martinez are elected to the Hall of Fame. (I’ll wince when Tom Glavine gets in, but for a different reason.) I don’t know what my reaction will be when the first guy gets in that I’m not really sure didn’t have Hall-worthy stats because some substance might have given him a boost. And that may be coming as soon as next year (and, yes, I know which Mets catcher is on the ballot). All things being equal, I’d rather wince than cringe. |
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January 6, 2011 There’s Some Things in This World You Just Can’t Explain The latest news is that a bankruptcy consultant is on the case with the Mets. And despite what the team may tweet in the meantime, people are going to draw their own conclusions. Or at least draw hope. Many Mets fans have—in the short term—stopped getting on their knees and wishing for a financial windfall out of the sky for themselves, but they look to the heavens for something to happen that will finally force the Mets to be sold. At this point when you see that the Mets won’t retain the services of Willie Harris, your first thought isn’t that Willie Harris sucks (though his .351 OBP was downright productive for this team), your first thought is that the Mets can’t afford Willie Harris. Though they somehow scraped together enough from the seat cushions to bring back the least useful Hairston brother. There is no more legitimate good news surrounding the Mets in what we can only hope is the waning days of this ownership regime. Most news about the Mets these days falls into the categories of either humbling or pathetic. The perks the team is handing out to minority owners for handing over $20 million are especially embarrassing. So let’s stop calling for a Mets fan boycott. How about a boycott that will actually force a change? You know who you are. That person with so much dough that they might actually consider handing over $20 million for a piece of the Mets nonaction. If getting a front show seat on the deck of Metanic somehow sounds appealing, please think of something more productive to do with your money instead. Give it to the poor, use it to develop alternative fuel sources, bury it in the yard like crazy old Lucius Clay in “The Legend of Wooley Swamp.” Handing over large sums of money to the current ownership is like tossing a sponge into the ocean and thinking it could soak up all that water. I don’t care about the Ponzi schemes. I don’t care about who is in the right in the courts. What I care about is the Mets, and if the people who owned the team truly cared about it, they’d sell at a nice profit and give their descendants cash instead of the headache the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club Incorporated has become in the latter years of their reign. They figured all they had to do was get at the revenue streams of a new ballpark and get through the final years of Shea Stadium, which they denigrated at every opportunity. Now what? I lived through Lorinda deRoulet ownership in the late 1970s, the woman that Nelson Doubleday—and yes, minority owner Fred Wilpon—saved us from in 1980. But you can say that Mrs. deRoulet went out trying, even if she did greenlight Elliott Maddox and Mettle the Mule. Though she has remained a fan from afar, I’m sure it was a little lonely for Mrs. deRoulet to watch her mother’s team win a world championship for somebody else. Mrs. deRoulet at least had her dignity. |
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This was supposed to run at the end of 2011, but something more important came up. Thanks to those who sent me notes in the past few days. Now we move on to the future by saying farewell to our shared past. January 2, 2012 2011 in Review: The Eve of Destruction “Probably all the other families will line up against us. That’s alright—this thing’s gotta happen every five years or so—ten years—helps to get rid of the bad blood. Been ten years since the last one.” —Peter Clemenza, The Godfather (1972) (Insert “fans” for “blood” above and that pretty much sums up where we are.)
It having been three months, I’d forgotten exactly what the Mets record was for 2011. They finished 77-85, which is pretty good for a team that from all I’ve heard of late is coming off a 7-155 season and will be even worse in 2012. For all the gloom and doom—and I’m guilty of some of it as well—maybe it’s not so bad winning 77 times and finishing ahead of the Marlins before that team changed its address to Miami and found its checkbook and mojo along the way. Take away the Yankees residing in the same town and the Mets are suffering a similar fate that has befallen most major league teams at some point in the past decade. And things could be worse. Haven’t you heard the Mayans, whose glory days are even further in the past than the Mets’, declared hundreds of years ago that the world would end in 2012? On the good side, it’s not supposed to happen until December 21, 2012. On the down side, we have this baseball season to get through. It’s a shame that so many Mets fans are going to boycott the team this year and miss the final fleeting pleasure of a summer afternoon or evening at a ballgame. Oh, well. It’s your funeral. But that is then, this is now. What happened that was considered the end of the world in 2011? I’m going to tell you, like it or not. And I’m going to sprinkle in a pleasant moment now and then, so stay alert. Here are ’11 Mets moments in time, in no particular order in a season that made no particular sense. 1. Jose Reyes. He is like handling a rose bush. It could be beautiful, it could crumple in a sudden frost, or a thorn could get stuck in the wide part of your thumb and hurt for days. Jose became the first Met to win a batting title in 2011, but he won it after taking himself out of a tight race following one at bat on the last day, thus robbing the fans of giving him the hand he deserved for nine seasons, several of which were among the most exciting individual years that offensive-starved Mets fans have ever enjoyed. He also had two 2011 stints on the disabled list, making it three straight years that his legs have broken down at some point. We all knew he was going to bolt the Mets, but it was an unnecessary parting shot saying the Mets didn’t show him the love. Et tu, Jose? 2. Terry Collins and Sandy Alderson. Let’s give a little credit here for these two hires. Maybe they were hired because they work cheap, but they made a decent team out of the stuff that others had thrown away. And they did this while still paying—and playing—Jason Bay, a left fielder who makes one long for Joggin’ George Foster the Met. Alderson has thrown some clunkers out there—D.J. Carrasco comes to mind—but he cut bait with Oliver Perez and Luis Castillo and we were all better off for that. Alderson dealt the impossible-to-move contracts of Francisco Rodriguez and Carlos Beltran and got good value. And Collins may not have had a team that was capable of competing every day, but he always gave it his all and I think he got more out of a few players than could have been expected. 3. Johan Santana. He did not throw a pitch all year and has a $24 million price tag. The two-time Cy Young winner cannot be counted on for anything except to serve as an albatross around the team’s neck. And by albatross I mean an anvil forged to a stone, wrapped in iron chains, and hung around the neck of a man standing at the edge of a cliff. Can they get a Leroy Neiman rendering of that for the cover of the 2012 yearbook? 4. The Atlanta Braves. You think we forget how you forced the decimated Mets to play a doubleheader after they just lost a doubleheader in April? It’s two weeks into the season and the Mets have two more trips to Atlanta where could make up that rainout. You might even draw more fans if you did a twinbill when the Mets return in June. OK. Fine. The Braves have their April doubleheader despite the Mets’ wishes and Atlanta wins both games. But come late September and Atlanta is running on fumes, the Mets, just swept four straight at home by the Nationals, take two of three in Turner Field, until then a House of Horrors for the Mets. The greatest moment was a classic late comeback in the Sunday finale to throw a wrench into the postseason dreams of a team that seemed to have the Wild Card in the bag long ago. My middle finger was raised in mock Tomahawk Chop at the TV every time a Brave was shown sitting stunned in the dugout. Been waiting for any kind of payback in Atlanta for a loooooooooooooooooooooooong time. 5. The St. Louis Cardinals. Just after that Atlanta September trip the Mets went to St. Louis, a team in hot pursuit of the Braves. The Mets slept through the first two games and appeared well on their way to doing it a third time in the afternoon matinee when, down by four runs in the ninth, they put together an unlikely rally with Ruben Tejada getting a game-tying two-run double and Willie Harris notching the go-ahead hit. A lot of things did not go right for this team in 2011, but I was as impressed with the Sunday Atlanta win and Thursday victory in St. Louis as anything I saw all year. And if you admire pluck, you had to hand it to the Cardinals for getting off the mat after this devastating loss left them two out in the Wild Card with six games remaining. But the Cards stole the Wild Card from the Braves, beat the Phillies in the NLDS, knocked off the why-so-cocky Brewers in the NLCS, and put together their own rally for the ages in the World Series against the Rangers. 6. Best comeback ever. Almost. A fun comeback with no postseason meaning occurred on June 2 against the Pirates. Because of a change in my schedule, I had gone to the game the previous night—an uninspiring loss—and gave away the tickets I had for the Thursday matinee against Pittsburgh (asking anyone to give you money for tickets to a Mets game became as laughable in 2011 as it had been in 1981). But on this afternoon Mike Pelfrey—so mediocre and confounding in 2011—allowed the Bucs to take a 7-0 lead in the third inning. But Carlos Beltran hit what I will remember in the future as a “real” Citi Field home run to left field to put the Mets back in the game and Ruben Tejada and Daniel Murphy came up big as the Mets completed their second-biggest comeback in history. 7. The New Yorker. I don’t know if it was reading on a moving bus or the words from Fred Wilpon in the infamous New Yorker piece on him that made me feel nauseous. I had already heard reactions to what the Mets owner said, but I figured it was probably overblown. I got off the bus in Manhattan realizing that I was wrong, wrong for previously believing that Jeff Wilpon was the biggest problem in the Mets universe. His father has personally messed up the Mets in every conceivable way—and a few ways that hadn’t been invented. 8. Cutting the GCL Mets. I’d love to talk about the positives from rookies Dillon Gee and Lucas Duda, but given the team’s financial straits, there will be a lot more rookies where they came from—but don’t expect them to come out of Rookie ball in the Gulf Coast League. Saving $800,000 is a lot for most of us, but for a major league team it truly is peanuts. And nothing reeks of desperation or refutes what Sandy Alderson has been saying about the importance of player development quite like cutting a low-level minor league team. Yes, I know the franchise had among the most minor league affiliates of any major league team, but the Mets need all the minor leaguers they can get. It is also makes it look like a team that’s hemorrhaging money has totally lost its way. If Sandy Alderson is staying at his post in New York for Bud Selig’s benefit, the commissioner owes him big time. 9. Remembering. The Mets have a special tie to 9-11 and they were on Sunday Night Baseball telecasts with Bobby Valentine in the booth for the night that Osama Bin Laden was taken out and the evening that September 11th marked its 10th year. Both games went extra innings and the Mets won one and lost the other. Doesn’t really matter which was which. 10. R.A. Dickey. This guy’s personality alone could scale Mount Kilimanjaro. He said the wrong thing early on in the year when the team was floundering and he endured a tough first half, but R.A. hung in there and finished 2011 as the team’s most consistent pitcher. Again. I’d love for him to be the Mets knuckleballer in residence like Tim Wakefield was in Boston for 15 years. Prost, Prof. Dickey. Can we pay you in books instead of bucks? 11. Carlos Beltran. He freed himself of the burdens of center field in spring training and went on to have a sensational season. He was so good the Mets were able to get a desperately-needed top-notch prospect in return for him at the trading deadline. He didn’t play the last two months of the season in Flushing and still led the team in homers (15) and RBI (66). That says a lot about Carlos and even more about this anemic offense. Don’t blame the park, blame the players who call it home. Good luck in St. Louis, Carlos. Wish us luck, too. We’re really going to need it. My advice for 2012? Enjoy. Bring your kiddies, bring your wife to Citi Field. None of us may be around at all by the time 2012 ends and our final thoughts should be about weightier matters than David Wright’s contract status or the financial status of the Wilpons. Such as how is Britney Spears preparing for the end of days? |
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December 31, 2011 Greg Spira (1967-2011) I used to have a big office. This may sound self-important, but the former IBM complex in Kingston, New York had space for more than a thousand workers, all of whom had come into work one day to find their occupation no longer existed. A gun shop located a quarter of a mile away was purposely closed that day, lest anyone do anything rash. Five or so years after that dark day in Kingston history, I worked in the abandoned IBM compound, with its row upon row of cubicles, dust-covered offices, and bathrooms of a size you’d normally find in a ballpark. Total Sports Publishing had big plans on the eve of the millennium. We were hiring, airlifting people to otherwise sleepy Ulster County, and cranking out honking-big sports reference books and other titles as quickly and prudently as possible. I had several reference books open on my desk because information like this was much harder to locate on the Internet. And there was a need to get things done quickly because we were less than three months away from D-Day on Baseball: The Biographical Encyclopedia. The book, containing biographies of the 2,000 most important people in baseball history, was such a massive undertaking and one taken so seriously by my boss, esteemed author and later MLB historian John Thorn, that most new editorial people were handed over to me upon arrival. As associate publisher for reference, I in turn handed them all manner of biographies to edit. A knock came on my door one morning in December 1999—scratch that, he rarely knocked and the door was generally open, and make that late morning because he was not what you would call an early riser. I looked up from my books. I can’t say he said his full name or even his first name, he just started talking. His unique manner of speech, the result of overcoming a cleft palette as a child, took a moment or two to get used to. If I thought my initial meeting with Greg Spira would last 10 minutes, it was probably closer to an hour and 10 minutes. This was a trait of the countless conversations we had from that December day until we had our last conversations this December, those marked by an odd feeling that he was hanging up too soon. Greg was ill more often than not. Before arriving at Total Sports at age 32, he had spent most of the previous decade undergoing, and recuperating from, procedures related to kidney disease. That was what why he was in the hospital when he died after a series of heart attacks on December 28, 2011. It wasn’t always easy working with Greg, though he—along with me—worked better when we were free of the small talk and niceties required in an office setting. He was all honesty, telling me when he thought my work was not up to snuff, irritating me to the point where I made him buy my last few books on his own. When a month ago he told me that New York Mets: The Complete Illustrated History was the best of the crop of books released for the team’s 50th anniversary—he ordered all of them—I felt I had won over my toughest critic. And he knew his Mets as well as anyone I’ve known. From Whitestone, Queens, he was a Mets fan from the day he watched Benny Ayala homer in his first major league at bat in 1974. I did not join the Mets multitude, if you could call it that, until a year later. Greg was far better than me at making and keeping contacts. He had a long and complicated network of people that he regularly kept in touch with and when his health allowed he frequently visited far-flung outposts, trips often highlighted by a new ballpark and a serious bookstore. For a former state capital, Kingston had no first-run bookstore when he arrived, and insider talk was that the chains did not think Kingston “smart enough” to support a big-time bookstore. Within a couple of years of his moving there, though, Kingston not only got its own Barnes & Noble, but it was located a mile from Greg’s apartment. It was coincidence, I’m sure, but good business on B&N’s part nonetheless. When Greg moved to Philadelphia three years ago, I was drafted to help him pack. His housekeeping habits, to put it nicely, were along the lines of Oscar Madison. He had more sports books in his not-so-big apartment than big box B&N down the street. And he also subscribed to every periodical known to man and had a serious comic book, soap opera, and DVD habit. For my packing effort I received a T-shirt that I wear as I write this and will fittingly retire to the attic, to reside near a box of Mets artifacts that Greg left behind for safe keeping. The shirt reads: “I Helped Greg Move And Didn’t End Up Buried Under a Pile of Books.” Though, I will confess, it was close. Greg enjoyed pursuits beyond books and baseball—after several years of trying, we finally saw the annual hockey game between his alma mater Harvard and the local power, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy. But most everything else in his sports consciousness was baseball. If there was a baseball-related, car-bound journey to undertake, he was a willing participant—if his health permitted. We took the long drive to see the Class A Pittsfield Mets in their final year in 2000, and when he finally nudged me enough to attend the 2002 Society of Baseball Research Convention in Boston, I witnessed a game with him at his beloved Fenway Park. I took him to the only postseason game he ever attended, the “Benny Agbayani Game” in the 2000 NLDS. He became seriously ill at the end of the workday that Monday and the paramedics thought him in enough pain that someone should ride with him. I hopped on board, spending the evening waiting with him for treatment at the Kingston Hospital E.R. He was still there two weeks later, fading in and out of consciousness as the Mets lost to the Yankees. His health forever dogged him, always putting him behind or making him start over once more. I like to think Greg and I worked together in the smartest sports-information company in the field. We had the best minds in the field of statistics—at least those who would agree to live in Kingston—and created books that presaged or improved upon many of the other publications and data portholes now common. Perhaps we weren’t the best marketers, and maybe we would have been all right if we hadn’t been tied to a parent company that went from flush to flushed down the toilet as the Internet bubble burst in May of 2000. By then I’d moved to another office in the same vacant building, one located up the hall from Greg’s cave, where I could hear his loud humming and his loping gait gaining steam as he trekked to my office with a new revelation about Total Baseball. Our company survived into November of 2001, with many of the 1999 hires long since let go. Greg stayed on as a consultant, if that describes his status, and we took in many Mets games, movies, and lunches. Since I was also an outsider to the area—and we were both pretty heavily into the Mets—we were natural friends. He was a frequent guest at my house, sometimes pulling a brand new board game for the kids out of the back of his messy Subaru. He confided that his own family or even a pet was not in the cards due to his health, and he loved being around kids and dogs. He sometimes served as our dog walker when we were away, and when I called from Florida to say that the animal he was supposed to walk had been found dead by another dog walker (Gilbey had been diagnosed with cancer an hour before our plane left), Greg was inconsolable. The day of September 11, 2001, he came over to my house to watch the Presidential speech that we both agreed wasn’t exactly FDR. A couple of weeks later—after having seen three games in San Francisco and enduring the rather stressful act at that point of merely getting on a plane—I insisted that I attend a meaningless Mets-Pirates game at Shea. Exhausted and not wanting to drive the 100 miles each way alone, Greg went with me after a friend canceled at the last minute. Greg’s health would force him to cancel on me at the last minute, more than once, including the last game we were supposed to attend a few months ago at Citi Field, but I like to think I could coerce the best out of Greg when it was needed. Though it took the work of many people, the Maple Street Press Mets Annual was organized and assigned by Greg and me: coordinating writers, adhering to budgets and mandates, meeting deadlines, and trying to keep it as interesting as possible with a club that we both felt, deep down, repeatedly blunted its own efforts. We both loathed bringing in the fences at Citi Field and were torn by the need to keep Jose Reyes against hamstringing (appropriate word) the club’s dwindling finances. For reasons beyond our control, the magazine will not come out in 2012. For reasons beyond anyone’s control, its co-founder is now gone. I left him for the last time Friday in Flushing, not at a ballpark, but at Mount Hebron Cemetery on the other side of the Long Island Expressway. You can see the Unisphere from there. |
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December 26, 2011 Reflections of a Mets Life: 2010 This last entry of Reflections is supposed to be about 2010, but 2010 was about what we are experiencing now. A year or so ago, the hope was that the growing pains would blossom into something positive in the future. Well, here we write from the future, and the earth isn’t blossoming, it’s scorched. The pains are only growing. But for a couple of months in 2010 we got a reprieve from the drumbeat of doom. And for those who say the Mets weren’t given a chance to compete in 2011 because they traded Beltran and K-Rod, well, they had both men for the second half of 2010 and see how that turned out—one more year in which a promising start turned into meaningless games in August, much less September. Yet ownership still kept Jerry Manuel and Omar Minaya on, even after it was obvious the players no longer listened to Jerry, and Omar was not allowed to do any long-term, damage with the club—except maybe making Jenrry Mejia into a short reliever at the major league level and helping blow out his arm. Even when news of these lame ducks being fired leaked to the press the last weekend, they were still kept around. Holy Art Howe. While I genuinely enjoyed doing most of these Reflections, I will admit the ones from the most recent years were the most painful to do. Even 2006. The best homegrown hitters in franchise history were supplemented by the best talent Wilpon money could buy, and it still blew up in their faces. They tore down Shea put up the park they pined and whined for. And they christened the place with a season that made The Worst Team Money Could Buy seem like a club with a lot of redeeming qualities. In 2010 they added a Mets Hall of Fame and got lucky with R.A. Dickey and somehow getting 15 wins out of enigma Mike Pelfrey. But their most fortunate moment came in the wake of the 20-inning win in St. Louis when the 4-8 Mets were already desperate enough to promote Ike Davis. They had a winning record once they promoted Ike, despite playing .580 ball at home and just .395 on the road. In the end, a 79-83 season sounds about right. The season ending on a bases-loaded walk in the 14th inning by Ollie Perez is about par for the course as well. What can you say about the last year of the budget-less, plan-deprived Mets? In 2011 they seemed to have come up with a plan, but without the money to properly implement it. The most fitting summary for 2010 that I can think of is through the mystical power of the limerick—the bad joke format for what turned out to be a bad joke of a year. See if you can keep up with the syllable pattern: 9-9-5-5-9. Sounds like an old phone number—“Mabel, get me 99559.” And on the other end the pickup line would be: “New York Mets, a Madoff-ravaged company. How may I help you?” If 2010 was an incoming call, you’d let the machine pick it up and not return the message. ’10 Limericks Prologue There once was a skipper named Jerry Whose laugh, over time, became scary With Omar in tow The forecast was woe And this year looks way friggin’ hairy.
March The calendar says spring has come To Mets fan this makes one quite numb Even spring training So very draining How could they sign Jacobs? That’s dumb.
April The Mets find their way to last place Dull, especially at first base Boom, Ike arrives Then the team thrives Who sent him down in the first place?
May The Mets fully shut out a guest The Phillies found Citi a pest If walls could talk They’d never squawk On distance or height or the rest.
June In June they went 18 and 8 On the road they won seven straight Eleven over? Must be hung over This team is just not all that great.
July It is hot, hot, hotter than hell R.A. and Pelf hold up quite well Lurch to the break But Mets fans will take One out in the Wild Card is swell.
Post All-Star Break Carlos and Luis now are back As welcome as a heart attack Whipped on the coast This team is toast And Bay’s done when his head is whacked.
August The pattern: win, loss, loss, win, loss, win Up, even, and under again Like this for weeks Can’t even speak And the end is one bloody sin.
September The meaningless month comes once more These Metsies have played dead before 20-10 ended No fences mended Ollie walk, the winning run scores.
Postscript Jerry is cut loose pell-mell Omar is banished as well Now here’s comes Sandy Here’s hoping he’s handy And can fix a ballclub shot to hell.
<> <> <> And you thought limericks were all just about Nantucket men? A prose form of the first 50 years in Mets history is available in book form in Best Mets as well as New York Mets: The Complete Illustrated History. In case you’re curious, I will look at the 2011 season in my first annual year-end review. |
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December 21, 2011 The Best Mets Book Party Ever! When you start thinking that maybe you can be a writer someday, you think about the finished product: the thrill of seeing your book in the front of prestigious bookstore windows, the longwinded interviews where you provide sage wisdom fit for publication from coast to coast, the royalty checks pouring in, and of course, the parties. Well, there’s little bits of truth in the first three, but I still haven’t seen that author’s party. That’s not to fault the publishers. It’s just not done anymore—the money is spent elsewhere. Hopefully in promotion. And save for a few big-time authors, the author’s soiree belongs to another time. I can still dream about it 1950s style, booze being poured out by publisher’s assistants while I hold court in a smoky hotel ballroom or suite or even in Holly Golightly’s apartment in the only scene from Breakfast of Tiffany’s that is worthy of the book. (The publishing party was practically created with Truman Capote in mind.) Yet with the early arrival of Best Mets: 50 Years of Highs and Lows with New York’s Most Agonizingly Amazin’ Team on Amazon and other outlets this week, I started thinking about the kind of party I might have if time, budget, and maybe even subject were no object. I’m still a little giddy about the book coming out ahead of schedule—and having it out in time for last-minute holiday shopping is worthy of a celebration, even if the party is all in my little head. The doorbell rings and the hum heard through the closed entryway reaches conflagration as the door swings open. Come on inside. Fix yourself a drink. You know everybody. Everybody, this is you. Chatter, chatter, peas and carrots, chatter, chatter, a chortle of laughter from a woman in a green dress, while a woman in a blue cocktail dress with ever-so-minute orange piping has her cigarette lit by a man in a gray suit with a thin black tie. The author is in the corner talking to the writer from the New York Herald, Madison is his name. A publishing assistant comes in with a box of books and hands them out—the box emptying even quicker than the a bottle of Cutty Sark that winds up in the hands of the disappointed man in the black suit with the thin gray tie. A call starts, low at first, then louder. “Speech! Speech! Speech!” Oscar slaps the author on the back and nudges him forward as his friend takes a photo. Unger I think it is—commercial photographer, portraits a specialty—took some nice shots for Playboy once. Lawyer turned commentator Howard Cosell steps in with Madison and starts pointing a finger in his face. Even Cosell pipes down for a moment as the author begins, with his young son in front. “Great speech,” calls out a writer from the Brooklyn Eagle. “But this is the 1950s. Who the hell are the Mets?” Everybody laughs. “Someone fill up that guy’s glass. Fill up everyone’s glass.” The author pauses and regains his train of thought. “I want to say thanks to Yahoo…” “Who called me a Yahoo?” “I called you a new breed. Like a dachshund. If I were you, Dick Young, I’d keep my presence a secret in this crowd. “As I was saying, thanks to Yahoo for including me on the list of prominent Mets authors with the likes of Greg Prince, Stanley Cohen, Jeff Pearlman, and Howie Karpin. And I will add Dana Brand to that prestigious list. When the Mets sang, “You Gotta Have Heart,” they were singing about him. Smartest fan with the biggest heart. “And Breslin, I know you’re back there—no Daily News writer would miss a event with free booze—you’ll be on that list one day yet. “But I said it in my speech and I’ll say it again now. Raise ’em high. To the New York Mets fan: The most resourceful and good-hearted people on the earth.” Everyone pauses, raises their glass, and knocks back their drink. The author wipes strong liquid from his chin. “Now I’ll shut up!” Everyone applauds. The search for refills is on once more. The clinking of glasses and boisterous conversation lasts until the morning comes. |
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December 17, 2011 Reflections of a Mets Life: 2009 My wife’s computer has hundreds of photographs from the last few years in an odd screen saver shuffle mode that we didn’t program and don’t really know how to change. At dinner—with the table right across from the computer—we all steal looks at the screen. It is strange seeing yourself from not all that long ago while surrounded by the kids who are so little. There I am wearing a hat and a shirt I gave to Goodwill many moons ago. There we are on vacation in Maine. And there we were just last year hiking. There the kids are playing ball. There’s Shea. A pang in my heart. Wait, it’s not supposed to feel that way. That feeling is only reserved for living beings, for lost relatives, or the dog I had as a child, or this person on the screen who has since passed on. But there’s Shea again. And that pang again. I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t know if I even should explain it. I really thought I was over Shea by now. I thought I worked that all out a couple of years back. A lifetime ago. I guess the only way to address it is to look at that first year at Citi Field in scattered pictures from 2009. Grumbling at every small pocket of traffic, I make my way to Shea, I mean Citi Field. I’ve never told anyone this before, but the last time I went to a Mets game—the last day at Shea—stuck in an endless knot of traffic past the Whitestone, I looked out the window and saw a runover kitten. I mumbled, “Please don’t let this day end with me feeling like my kitten has been run over.” Good luck on that. No dead animals on the way this time—maybe because I take a different route. And when the Marina Lot is filled for this infernal night opener, they don’t send me to the nether regions of Flushing. (I literally was directed to park four miles away for the last game at Shea and had to have a friend drive me to find my car.) This time I park in an almost convenient overflow lot and pay my ransom to a bubbly cashier equipped with a brand-new uniform, portable receipt machine, and multi-pocketed money belt. Snappy. I walk underneath the subway platform, heading right for the old Shea, bits of its steel and concrete still mangled and pushed into a large fenced-off debris area that will be gone in a few weeks. It’s not as hard to look at as the cat. I had tickets to go to the first event at Citi Field, a St. John’s-Georgetown baseball game that sounded cool until the day came and it was raining and the person I was going with couldn’t make it. So I blew it off. Can’t blow off Opening Day. Not at these prices. I am livid as I enter the Robinson Rotunda, not because of its tribute to Jackie Robinson, but it is only the start of all the frigging Dodgers references at the expense of any Mets presence on the premises. The enclosed corridors of the field level make me feel like I’m in a mall. (Maybe I am.) Steam is coming out of my ears when I show the red-clad usher—red?—my ticket and he pleasantly points me to my nearby destination. The Ebbets Club. Well, I never. When I walk through the door and see the view of the field. I am stunned. These are great seats! My buddy from high school has these seats? He tells me all about the amenities and shows me to the World’s Fair food court. I am speechless… until I walk out of the stadium alone after another in a seemingly endless stream of pissed-away games. I mutter to myself over and over, “This team sucks. They’re just not good. They really, really suck.” NOW, I’m right. There was a brief time when the Mets actually contended during 2009. After the ugly April came the merry month of May, when the Mets went 19-9. I saw four games that month at Citi: the completion of a two-game Mets sweep of the Phillies; a double loss, falling to Atlanta in 12 innings and losing Jose Reyes for what would turn out to be the year; the stadium’s first complete-game triumph, a 6-1 victory by the immortal Livian Hernandez; and the night Omir Santos made the Mets feel it was finally safe to trade Ramon Castro. Greg Spira, Greg Prince, Jon Springer, and I took in the last Friday night game in May, a mere six days after Omir’s two-out, two-run home run off Jonathan Papelbon in Boston etched itself as the high moment of what would be a down year. This game was Omir’s encore. His homer was the only Mets run of the game for the first 10 innings. After Gary Sheffield stunned the crowd by stealing a base in the 11th, Omir stole the show by singling him in. Look Who’s Number One! Not only were they in first place, but Omir Santos was the first-string catcher when it was announced minutes after the game ended that Castro had been sent to the White Sox. The next time I hit the Citi the Mets had suffered through the dropped popup at new Yankee Stadium that consigned their attempts at contention to the waste bin. They were trying to hold everything together, but they were slipping. Things were looking up for me, though. I had a Father’s Day book signing in the Robinson Rotunda with Keith Hernandez for Shea Goodbye. It was a check-one-off-the-bucket-list moment for me, but the Mets helped keep me from getting a swelled head. My name was surgically removed from the book cover on the fliers put up around the ballpark. And then not long after Keith returned to the booth for the day, the cartons of books were packed up and returned to the publisher. And this was before a Mets Hall of Fame existed—something the powers of be didn’t think of until the villagers came at the gates with torches and pitchforks. The Mets store had enough room to house a 10,000-book library with every Mets book ever produced, or at least every Mets book still in print. But then they might not have room for the Carlos Delgado jersey (he had played his last game as a Met weeks ago). I got to walk on the new field for the first time. It felt like a championship golf course. I don’t think nearby Bethpage Black, hosting the U.S. Open at that very moment, was manicured to this level. Then I sat in the Mo Zone for a Father’s Day function for Gary, Keith, and Ron for kids who had lost their fathers. Nice kids. And when I got home after the 10-6 loss to Tampa Bay, I made sure I called my dad. Oliver Perez was the first Met to win at Citi Field. He won exactly twice more as a Met in two years (three, if you count the year he was paid a dozen million to not play). And I was there in person to see one of these $12 million wins. With the Mets options for starting pitchers dwindling on the free agent market in February 2009, Omar Minaya hurled a three-year contract at Ollie. And then Perez couldn’t throw strikes. They started coming up with maladies that would keep him off the field. After one of these DL stints he returned to Citi Field in July and was his usual wild self, yet he somehow managed to be the only Met to beat L.A. all year. Greg Prince and I—and Centerfield Maz, whom we ran into during my new upper tank debut—were amazed at Ollie’s, and our luck. And disgusted at the team in general. I was working with a bunch of people on The Miracle Has Landed, a book celebrating the 40th anniversary of the 1969 world championship. To be honest, I was disappointed at the general yawn many so-called fans gave for what I know to be the most important season in franchise history. I had my priorities straight and got on the field for the ’69 ceremony. I wasn’t close enough to talk to any ’69 Mets, mind you—I wasn’t permitted that kind of access—but I did get to be on the field when Nolan Ryan donned a Mets uniform for the first time since the most asinine trade in club history (and one could certainly argue, in New York history). Kooz, Seaver, and Ryan shambled down to our end of the field near home plate and each threw a pitch (to Dyer, Grote, and Berra). Anyone who can’t appreciate that needs to find another hobby. The Mets fell into an abyss, going 18-39 in the months of August and September. A personal four-game winning streak was followed by a four-game losing streak, which spoiled the 1969 Mets reunion; a Mr. Met Dash; a personal reunion with grade school buddy Rob Pizzella as well as Al Yellon, a co-author for Cubs by the Numbers; and a get-together with me, my brothers, and their high school friend, Gene Caputo. All the planning and effort to set up these rendezvous on my end wound up with a half-ass effort by an unwatchable bunch of nobodies in a park I’m starting to realize I like only because of my friend’s box seats. Oh, and the Mets hit one home run in the last seven games I saw at Citi Field. I did personally witness Fernando Tatis grand slams earlier in the year. Go figure. When I was writing in the new book Best Mets about worst Mets teams of all time, I did not start the process thinking about 2009. Truly bad seasons aren’t just based on the number of losses, especially when it comes to the Mets—otherwise the franchise’s 1960s clubs would basically own the top five. But when you look at the two previous years leading up to it, losing on the last day both times to get bumped from the postseason, and you add in the never-ending injuries crapping all over the new stadium hoopla, I think that pushes 2009 over the top. And with 92 losses, it’s not like ’09 is some forgotten gem. And the Mets would have lost more had the Astros not rolled into town the last weekend of the year mailing in the effort like they were on the USPS payroll. The sweep of the Astros pushed the Mets to 70 wins—finishing the season with a Nelson Figueroa shutout that was completed in about 23 minutes. My record in the new park was 10-10. That’s not bad, given the stench coming off the Mets. Then again I had the exact same personal record when they lost 103 games in 1993, another top five stinkeroo season where the Mets finished with a meaningless sweep. Where the hell were you all year, Houston? I thought it would never end. <> <> <> Want to relive the better years of Mets baseball? Here’s one more subtle hint: Consider giving the gift of New York Mets: The Complete Illustrated History for that Mets fan who has everything, except piece of mind. |
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December 5, 2011 The Gift of the Future If ever Mets fans needed a gift, it would be now. For those of you wanting a holiday gift that relives the better days of the team’s first 50 years, I recommend the Mets Police Book of the Year—New York Mets: The Complete Illustrated History. And if you have that, you can pre-order Best Mets: Fifty Years of Highs and Lows with New York'’s Most Agonizingly Amazin' Team and be reading it before the Mets hit the field in Port St. Lucie. But this holiday season isn’t about you, or me. In some ways it is about loyalty, about sticking with something that may not be at its apex just now. I know such blind loyalty is not necessarily popular in this buy-whatever-I-want, I-want-a-champion-yesterday town, or society. But loyalty through tough times is what we have, or need. For those Mets fans with kids, this is not the time to abandon your team because they have failed to live up to your lofty or unrealistic expectations. Simply put, buying players from other teams has never worked for the Mets. And paying through the nose to retain your own players beyond their worth is not something that necessarily builds winners. But whatever your attitude, do not take it out on the next generation. Every parent who ignores the team he or she came up with is inviting their children to become Yankees fans, Red Sox fans, Phillies fans, or worse, fans of no one at all. And while people grouse about how expensive it is to take a kid, or a family, to a ballgame, the Mets have a program that I came across last year that was cheap and a lot of fun: the Mets Fan Club for Kids. I mentioned this during the season, but I am mentioning it again at holiday time because the gift of the future is the best present I can think of this year. For $25 the kids gets a handful of Mets paraphernalia you can wrap—or stick a bow on—and put under the tree. I just opened the box and it was stuffed with a Mets visor, a backpack, baseball cards, a sticker, Subway card, and other items tucked in a Mets folder, plus an ID card that allows for 10 percent off at the three clubhouse shops located off premises. If you take your kid to three games and get their card stamped at a Mets fan assistance booth, the kids get a free gift. (The workers at Citi have become a little gruff over three years, but the fan assistance people were extremely nice and handed out some extra swag and a smile along with each stamp.) The best part of the deal is that it includes two tickets to a Mets game of your choice. When we ordered tickets, there is an option of ordering extra seats to take friends or family to sit with you. The catch last year was that the tickets were only good for games from Monday to Thursday. People have different time schedules and priorities, but staying up past bedtime to go to a game once a year or taking a day off work to go to a game with your kid is a wise investment. And last year the Mets provided seats in the lower deck in left field in the shade, which was great because on the afternoon we went—Carlos Beltran’s last day in the home whites—the heat index was around 101. To that end, the tickets included access to the Promenade Club, which was a wonderful refuge from the heat (and the stinker of a game the Mets put on that day). My son, who is eight, loved it. He did not care that Carlos Beltran was leaving and not coming back—he doesn’t really even know who Carlos Beltran is. All he, and most kids that age, care about is being at the game, with their parent, with their team, with tickets he felt he owned. That’s worth a lot more than sitting at home wearing the jersey of someone who might be gone tomorrow. The Mets Fans Club for Kids is about tomorrow. I’ve been to hundreds of Mets games in my life, but the ones I think about most fondly are not necessarily the dramatic comebacks or clinchings or playoff victories I saw in the 1980s or 1990s. My heart—and mind—keeps coming back to those games in the 1970s where my dad and I quietly sat at Shea, usually watching the Mets get whipped by a superior team. And my favorite game last year was a nondescript 6-2 loss to the Cardinals in heat that made you want to die. With all this talk of kids, holidays, and heat, I give you: Heat Miser! Best to you and yours, Mr. 101. |
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December 4, 2011 Goodbye, Jose, Goodbye Well, it’s official: Jose Reyes is a Marlin. I guess this is why the Mets have never had a batting champ before. You may be mad, but please don’t boo Jose when he comes back to face the Mets. And be kind to Ruben Tejada, a fine young second baseman who hasn’t shown the ability to play shortstop every day. It wouldn’t be quite so sad if Jose signed with a team that the Mets did not play a dozen and a half times each year, but, hey, he could be a Phillie. Or a Yankee. Though he still could wind up in those places in the future since the Marlins have a long track record of trading their most marketable, or expensive players, with the warranty still on them. Past Marlins free agents have not generally worked out (see 1998 Florida apocalypse, Carlos Delgado). I don’t wish anything bad for ex-Mets Jose Reyes and Heath Bell—one my favorite Met, the other a coveted Favorite Non-Playing Met. But I do hope the gray clouds of disinterest follow the Marlins inside their precious—if not legitimately-funded—new retractable dome. If you are in the Kingston, New York area on Monday (December 5) and want to hear some more Mets laments, I’m on WKNY 1490 AM at 6 p.m. Life goes on with the Winter Meetings. The Mets have a GM that I hope will see this through. With the Mets, when in doubt, hope. |
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December 1, 2011 A Valentine to Beantown’s New Bobby In this fall where nothing is happening for the Mets, the extended Mets family has a marriage to celebrate. The union of Bobby Valentine and the Boston Red Sox is like a close’s cousin’s wedding. Besides that nasty fight with our Boston brethren 25 years ago, we are on the same page when it comes to hating all thing Yankee. And we are officially related now that we have the first former Mets manager to ever take the reigns in Boston. If you grew up following the Mets in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, or early 2000s, Bobby V. was always around or had just left. He arrived at Shea as a fringe player trying to stay in the show, part of the paltry return (along with Paul Siebert) in the “Midnight Massacre” deal with San Diego for Dave Kingman on June 15, 1977. He was a coach to keep an eye on in the 1980s, one of the best third-base coaches the Mets have ever had—his greatest feat was in 1983, when, twice in one week the Mets won games in their last at bat when he orchestrated Mookie Wilson scoring from second base on balls that didn’t leave the infield. (And yours truly made you $50 by orchestrating a list at Fleer’s behest that gratuitously included the Mookie moments among the greatest in baseball history.) Finally, in the 1990s, Valentine was hired to manage a Mets team that had thoroughly disappointed. “Generation K” was a disaster, with none of those pitchers ever putting together more than a few months of actual performance as Mets. Still, Bobby V. helped rebuild the staff, turned the team around, and improved the team’s record by 17 games his first year at the helm. After a disappointing end to 1998—one that would become all too familiar with other managers—he brought the franchise their only back-to-back postseason appearances. Losing to the Yankees in the 2000 World Series was a bittersweet end to a brilliant two-season October run where the Mets faced superior opponents and more than held their own. And the pride and compassion he brought to the city in the wake of the 2001 tragedy cannot be properly quantified. You could feel it in his voice when he spoke with his former players at the 10th anniversary of 9/11 at Citi Field in September. You knew that Mets incompetence was here to stay in the fall of 2002 when they fired Bobby V., kept Steve Phillips, and hired Art Howe. Bobby V. should have been gobbled up by the first team that wanted to make a winner from existing parts. Bobby V.’s finest ability as a manager was fashioning a bullpen and a bench from the players allotted him while also keeping everyone happy with playing time (a quality he shared with the best Mets manager, Gil Hodges). Valentine went to Japan, becoming a winner and an icon before being forced out by salary considerations. He came back home and was the model of what an in-studio baseball analysts should be: engaging, provocative, and knowledgeable. My one nonflattering statement: He wasn’t great in the booth, but he was a hell of a lot better on Sunday Night Baseball than Steve Phillips. Now the Red Sox, far more desperate than even the Mets were in 1996, have brought in Bobby V. Not everyone in New England is ecstatic right now. I will admit that I wasn’t exactly overjoyed when the Mets hired Valentine in late August 1996. But by mid-1997 I was a believer for life. If you want everyone to love you, well, Bobby V. will invariably piss some of those people off. You know what? Screw them! I sure like the view of this marriage from the reception. The man who knows baseball better than anyone going to the town that cares about baseball above all else? Watch the sparks fly. |
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November 23, 2011 Reflections of a Mets Life: 2008 I could write a book about what happened with the Mets in 2008, and in fact I did. Or at least I helped write one. Now I bring back my co-author as narrator again, playfully putting new words in his mouth because it is his narration that runs through my mind whenever I think back to 2008. But with all its plot twists, the jovial and malevolent characters, range of emotions brought out in the audience and players, 2008 was not a mere book, it was a play. High drama, certainly, but there was toe-tapping music if you listen hard enough. Well-acted, tense, captivating, it was seen in person by a franchise-record four million people. And like most classic drama, this tale is a tragedy. So now, without further ado about nothing, the Metsilverman.com Players present the Cliff (Floyd) Notes version of: OH-EIGHT…OH-NO: A BASEBALL TRAGEDY (Keith Hernandez, in suit and tie, appears from behind curtain.) When I arrived here long ago The Mets were aimless, epic woe. Siberia I called it, yet much worse, Here I stand now speaking in verse.
Set clocks twenty-five years ahead Off of ’07, the Mets have been bled. Seventeen and seven, numbers still sting Yet of last year one can’t do a thing. Act I Willie Randolph opens with a soliloquy about perspective and history regarding baseball’s biggest collapse of a year earlier. In another corner, Johan Santana is introduced by Omar Minaya, who speaks of waiting out suitors from Boston and the Bronx to pluck the coveted southpaw from Minnesota. Omar tosses a bag of shells on the table, Johan stares, unmoving. Omar pulls out another bag and tosses it on the table. Johan smiles, brushes his moustache, and sits. As the scene shifts to Florida, other characters are introduced: Reyes, Wright, Delgado, Beltran, Wagner, Endy, Ollie, and the comic relief of Pedro, who stands in stark contrast to the stern Randolph. The curtain falls with Santana singing a ballad as he spins on the mound on Opening Day in Miami. All characters recite the final line together: “This time is different.” All join hands and raise them toward the sky as the curtain falls. Act II The stage is empty save for the name “Shea” appearing next to the numbers 37, 14, 41, and 42. Keith Hernandez enters and explains that this honors both the man who created the Mets and the stadium named after him. The Phillies spoil Shea’s final opening, clearly positioning themselves as villains of this play; yet even as the Mets ultimately win the battle (11-7 against Philadelphia), they lose the war. Local thespian Nelson Figueroa earns applause for his solo number, but the cheers for him are drowned out by the catcalls coming from offstage in Santana’s Shea debut. Bit players step forward, Ryan Church, with Brian Schneider, who appear wearing their Washington uniforms topped by Mets hats. Church battles with Nationals, Braves, and Pirates, earning high marks (.306/.376/.535 with 32 RBIs in 42 games through May 20), until he is struck in the head by a Brave knee, rendering his part nonspeaking from here on. There’s danger as Wagner’s arm and mouth both catch fire, umpires turn Delgado’s home run into a foul ball, and Randolph makes a comment about race. All the other actors stop and stare at Randolph as a single spotlight shines on him. Curtain. Act III Shifting to a California set, Randolph appears out of uniform as he walks a gauntlet of uniformed characters. Delgado and Wagner nod to each other. Omar makes a long, garbled speech as Randolph slowly walks offstage with Rick Peterson, who utters his only line: “I’m the hardwood floor that’s getting ripped out, and they’re going to bring in the Tuscany tile.” The reporters all cock eyebrows but don’t stop writing. They part and in the middle, poised on a pedestal is Jerry Manuel. His first line of the play becomes a soliloquy that suddenly breaks into a rap with Reyes: “I’m a gangster. You go gangster on me, I’m going to have to get you. You do that again, I’m going to cut you right on the field…” His laugh echoes and fades into Billy Joel’s Last Play at Shea. In the foreground the Mets reel off 10 straight wins, and a different character rips off a sign with a different number, going from “7½ Out” to “Tied for First” as a month elapses. Music stops abruptly with Manuel staring at the audience as the trainer gently holds Wagner’s left arm. Curtain drops. Intermission. Act IV Opens with a conga line of extras throwing one pitch and jerking their head to see where it’s hit. The back of the uniforms read: Smith, Stokes, Schoeneweis, Sanchez, Heilman, Feliciano, and Ayala. Santana rubs his head while Keith Hernandez reads the numbers: 206 strikeouts plus league-high 2.53 ERA plus 234 1/3 innings plus 964 batters faced minus 7 blown saves = 16 wins. Of course it does not add up. Late-inning nightmare scene: Endy Chavez helplessly chases a ball over his head, Albert Pujols homers in extra innings, two Astros score simultaneously when the game could have been over, and Padre Jody Gerut and Pirate Ryan Doumit each tie games in the ninth. The board now reads: “August… three games out.” Reprise of Manuel rap and suddenly the Mets are doing the celebrating at the plate, Ayala is congratulated, Wright and Beltran clout game-winning homers, Delgado forms his own conga line: swinging, admiring, and circling the bases. Keith Hernandez appears, back to the audience with number 17 showing, declaring: “Only 17 shopping days left.” Jerry jogs out, signals to bullpen, and stands alone. Waiting. After a full awkward minute, the curtain falls. Act V Sign reads, “September 22, 2008, Wild Card, one game lead.” With home plate conspicuously raised in the air, Johan repeats his motion over and over. He smiles. On the other side of the stage Daniel Murphy sits alone at third base, having a glum picnic while singing in an enthralling tenor voice about a future in a place that is dying. Murphy exits the stage, walking the opposite way of home. Reyes enters dancing, joined by Beltran as rain falls—Jimmy Rollins stands in the corner, wagging his finger disapprovingly. Mike Pelfrey throws one pitch and hangs his head. Santana reappears for an extended dance number, reeling in a giant Fish, refusing all help, and triumphantly raising his arms to signify he did it all himself. Oliver Perez pirouettes, Beltran swings, and an explosive sound, jubilation. Chavez leaps, looks in his glove and dances off stage. Then the reliever conga line reprise and an audible groan offstage. Finally Church enters in single spotlight, swings, and the Shea set goes black. Keith Hernandez reappears in a spotlight, still wearing the jersey. The house lights come on and he is suddenly surrounded by an army of older men clad in uniforms from every Mets era. They touch home plate and then walk into the audience in a farewell to Shea that brings down the house. Not a dry eye to be found. <> <> <> Want to read a slightly less-dramatized account of the Mets and their history from day one? Get New York Mets: The Complete Illustrated History for the Mets fan in your life, or indulge yourself and bask in the glory days of this franchise. The new Mets jerseys can wait. And whose number would you put on your back, anyway? And while I am shamelessly plugging, unbeknownst to me, someone at the Examiner.com was plugging me and my upstate New York-iness. Do not let anyone from Buffalo hear you call Hudson Valley upstate, but I will take the compliment. Thanks to Doug Gladstone and Happy Thanksgiving to all. |
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November 17, 2011 I applaud both Mets Police and Uni Watch for winning their long-waged war against those stupid black Mets uniforms. I will go along with many of my Mets blogging brethren to lament that it is too sad that Dana Brand did not live to see another Mets Banner Day. My two cents, they should give out one of the best banner prizes in Dana’s name and have real hardcore fans, such as the bloggers mentioned above—and certainly the Faith and Fear duo—sit as judges, plus Gary Cohen, Howie Rose, Steve Somers, and Bob Heussler. Please no morning disc jockeys and local TV weathermen as judges... unless they are died-in-the-wool Mets fans who recall Banner Day. But all the doings in Flushing this week, exciting though they may be for portions of the fan base, are mostly about moving more merchandise (and I’ll bet someone sells bedsheets and paint somewhere near Citi Field on Banner Day, at a date not yet determined). We live in the midst of a period of culling the weak-willed from the fan base, dispatching them to an over-priced holding pen in the Bronx or to their mother’s basement to play more X-Box or whatever. I am a little shaken at the concept of losing Jose Reyes, the only Met I can claim as a true favorite since John Olerud, but I am a Mets fan first. And I’ve been to this place before. I mourned the loss of Johnny O. around this time of year in 1999 and banged my fist on a table three years later upon hearing Edgardo Alfonzo signed with San Francisco. I survived those events and others like them. Losing Reyes is not losing Seaver—not even the ’83 version of Terrificness. I remain committed to the very long overdue youth movement. I only hope the front office remains like-minded and that Sandy Alderson sticks around to see it all the way through. I am becoming used to the idea that 2014 might be the year I look to and think the Mets may again be competitive. (When referring to the current Mets, the passive voice works.) The 2014 season will mark the 10th anniversary of the last time we were all assured of the glory of the future, only to have the Mets chuck the whole concept as it was about to ripen. Hindsight tells us that Scott Kazmir is no Nolan Ryan, but I never again want to deal with giving away a prize so highly regarded for a fourth starter when the chances of postseason play are remote. (Scroll down to Reflections of, 2004, for a sustained rant on that topic.) In the meantime, we buy the new merchandise, we plot our banner slogans, and we wait. |
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November 15, 2011 Reflections of a Mets Life: 2007 In 2007 the Mets fulfilled the prophesy that they are second-rate and might even be jinxed, if you believe in such things. I believed in such hoodoo in ’07 and down the stretch I tried to keep—or change—a hundred different routines in the futile hope that anything I did could somehow alter the course of the Mets swirling toward the business end of the toilet. All the Mets needed was one win in their last seven games against Philadelphia in the final month, or two more wins in their last seven games of the year against the lousy Nationals, the bored Cardinals, or freakin’ Florida. I would have gladly sat at Shea to watch the Mets get swept in the Division Series by eventual NL champion Colorado. I would have loved it. Four Septembers later the Red Sox stumbled down the exact same abyss as the Mets had taken. Having retreated for solace to Boston for a seat on the Red Sox bandwagon for the 2007 World Series, I might have felt the need to offer advice to my many Red Sox friends in their newfound (or re-found) circles of despair, but I know from that same 2007 experience that well-meaning words from outside forces are of no consolation. Because assurances, mathematical probabilities, or discussions of who’ll be pitching for you in the playoffs makes one want to grab a bat and just start swinging at anyone who gets close. I also know that if you ever want time to slow to a dead crawl, just watch your ballclub blow a September lead. September will seem to last as long as winter in Siberia. And feel about as inviting. On the last Friday of September, the Mets officially fell out of first place. Florida’s immortal Byunh-Hyun Kim, with an ERA north of 8.00 and pitching in his final major league game, beat 15-game winner Oliver Perez—yes, that win total is accurate. I unleashed a primal scream at the same unwitting evergreen tree in the Marina Lot as I had done after the Mets lost Game 7 in 2006—also an Ollie start, though a much better one. To heighten my personal stress level, I also had two books on the Mets slated for release the following year: 100 Things Mets Fans Should Know and Do before They Die and Mets by the Numbers, with Jon Springer. Worries about lost leads, lost book sales, and a lost youth with this exasperating team continued to steal sleep from me. The next day I didn’t even check on the Mets, now one game behind and losers of five straight at the worst possible time. I spent the day with my cousins on Long Island and had a wonderful stress-free, Mets-free afternoon. And I almost missed the first Mets no-hitter ever. John Maine came within four outs of that historic no-no. Plus the Phillies finally lost, setting up a tie with one game left on the calendar. Now there was hope. Cruel, vindictive hope. I was on my way to a memorial service on Sunday, September 30, which kept me from attending a Mets home finale for the first time since 1993. Yet I was lucky to A. not be the one being honored at the memorial, and B. be spared witnessing the baseball cataclysm at Shea in person. I got into the car departing my family following brunch, about 30 minutes after first pitch, trying to glean the score on the radio from Howie Rose, who as writer of the foreword of Mets by the Numbers, may be the only person that knows more about Mets uniform numbers than Jon Springer. I spent a torturous minute, maybe two, trying to probe the inflections of Howie’s voice that might hint at the score. Howie’s good, but I could interpret that the Mets were behind. Yet by how many? One run? God, don’t let it be two runs. In a moment the curtain was pulled. The emperor had no clothes. Or balls. The 7-0 deficit sent me into a five-year-old’s screaming tantrum in the car. Mercifully, I was alone. All alone. As alone as each of the 3,853,955 who entered Shea in 2007 had to feel. As alone as A. Bartlett Giamatti foretold. The agonizing season he never saw but knew would come for us all, one year or another. At the memorial service, which actually became the setting of a New York Times piece on my work a few months later, I forgot about my petty sadness about a game and tried to focus on the bigger picture. Yet when a somber-sounding person at the service, who described himself as a Mets fan, told someone next to me that he was going to his car to catch the Mets score, I had to do something. Instinctively I placed my hand on the arm of this person I’d never met. “Excuse me. I couldn’t help overhearing. It pains me to tell you this, but I can’t watch another Mets fan suffer. It’s over. They lost. I’m sorry.” My so-called bucket list doesn’t include traveling to ballparks for the sake of going, but I will make the effort to visit places I’ve always wanted to see. In July 2007 I attended a Friday night game at the new and not-so-improved third incarnation of Busch Stadium during the SABR Convention in St. Louis. And on a very sunny and hungover Sunday morning, I crammed into the back of a rental car with a bunch of people whose zeal for the game could classify them as baseball Deadheads. We drove across Missouri to get to Kansas City by noon. We couldn’t have been happier. Kaufmann Stadium, in its pre-2009 remodeled state, is one of the five best baseball places I have been to. It looked even more perfect in person than it had all those times I saw the Royals as my only hope for vanquishing the Yankees and saving the autumns of my youth. Six weeks after going to Kaufmann Stadium (and visiting Kansas City’s superb Negro League Museum), I knocked out another holy grail. One I would not have dreamed of had it not just worked out: Two games, two stadiums, two cities, two states… one day. Joel Youngblood, eat your heart out. My buddy Paul Lovetere, a salesman at the time, had seen games in all 30 major league cities (plus Montreal). He’d previously gone to Three Rivers Stadium, a structure I also visited and one that made Shea Stadium, or even Riverfront Stadium, look like Frank Lloyd Wright designs. While trolling online in 2007, Paul came across round-trip tickets to Pittsburgh from LaGuardia for $40. The airfare was actually less than an unused ticket I’d bought to a Mets-Pirates game at PNC Park in September 2004, when another college buddy, DBird, and I drove to Pittsburgh on the same day that a monsoon was also scheduled, washing out the ballgame and numerous other parts of Pennsylvania. We couldn’t see the Mets and Bucs on Saturday because we were going to Penn State (no need to express my newfound regret or rage about that decision). Now three years later, we had a plan, plane tickets, and luck. (This time I wisely opted to buy one of the plentiful Pirates tickets the day of game.) Pittsburgh hosted Milwaukee for a 12:30 game. To top it off, the Mets and Braves were at Shea at 7 p.m. What a day it was going to be. The day? Wednesday, September 12, 2007. And when we’d completed the two-city twinbill with the last five innings of a Mets win at Shea, we were ready to declare 2007 just about perfect in terms of baseball: My books had been handed in—100 Things was emailed to the publisher an hour before driving to pick up Paul at 4 a.m.—and the Mets had built a lead that the newspapers, TV, radio, and the SABR-skilled insisted was insurmountable. Seven games ahead with 17 games remaining. No one had ever blown a lead like that. Who knew the Mets were so readily capable of the impossible? They ruined my year and also spoiled the memory of my dream doubleheader. Yet even before it all went to hell, to be truthful, my love affair with PNC Park never got past the like stage. The land of forging metal suddenly ran out of material when it came to making Ralph Kiner a statue to match those of Willie Stargell, Roberto Clemente, Honus Wagner (and later Bill Mazeroski). They only had enough material, apparently, for Kiner’s hands. Even the bat he was holding had been bent from people pushing on it. Ralph Kiner, who’d been lauded at a Shea celebration a few weeks earlier, simply deserved better. And my previous favorite day of 2007 had been spent with the Mr. Kiner signing copies of Mets Essential at a Long Island bookstore. Seeing the way the Bucs mistreated the legacy of this super-sweet guy and seven-time NL home run champ as a Buc—Pittsburgh’s only star (in any sport) in the four decades between Wagner and Clemente—made my Primanti Bros. sandwich stick in my throat a little. PNC is still a fine park, but give Ralph back his body. Give me back my great day in the Steel City and Shea. Give me back my team. They’ve been missing ever since that seemingly perfect September day. Reward offered for prompt return. |
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October 31, 2011 Reflections of a Mets Life: 2006 My wife walked into the ladies room while I stared straight ahead at the Shea Stadium outfield. Were the Cardinals still having a ceremony on the field? Was the grounds crew tidying up? Was Carlos Beltran still standing stock still at the plate? I don’t know. All I could see over and over was a ball rising and traveling farther from me. I heard myself yell, “No!” as the ball climbed beyond even the Amazin’ Endy’s reach. And then Yadier Molina came into focus shaking hands at third base, his back to me. Still stunned, a little weak in the knees, and the game long over, I put my back up against the wall and slid to the floor. How did it come to this? Wasn’t this the year with the payoff? The 20th anniversary year of 1986 with a team that was just like that ’86 team. Or maybe we just wanted them to be just like ’86. Sure, the 2006 pitching staff wasn’t on the same tier as ’86, but the offense, oh, that offense. They had shelled the opposition and wrapped up the division title in June. And the bullpen was among the game’s best. The team was 31-16 in one-run games and a similarly impressive 34-17 in blowouts. Playing in a park that favored pitching, the Mets set a club record with 200 home runs, while placing third in the league in runs, slugging, and doubles. They were first in steals. Utterly dominant and consistently mentioned in the same breath as 1986 by the new announcing trio of Keith Hernandez, Ron Darling, and Gary Cohen. They were the stars of the new home of the Mets, Sports Net New York. Their own cable station! We’re ready for our close-up now, Mr. Webb. These Mets had ended Atlanta’s 14-year postseason run, performing the coup de grace at the end of July with a sweep at Turner Field. The Mets finished 12 games better than the Phillies in the NL East and compiled nine more wins than any team in the National League. Only the Yankees could match their 97 wins. But something funny happened on the way to the Subway Series. All that misplaced New York arrogance and self-appointed TV time wound up on the cutting room floor. It had happened to the Yankees almost two weeks earlier in Detroit. Now October cancellation had come to Queens. And here I was. Completely exhausted and depressed. Not sad like someone died, but sad like a piece of me had died. I would not have believed that this would be the last postseason game ever played at Shea. I couldn’t have faced that then even had I know. I was just starting to come to grips with 2006. I’d thought this would be The Year. From the beginning it showed all the signs. April 3: Mets 3, Nationals 2 I breathed in the red, white, and blue bunting on a cold, gray Monday afternoon at Shea Stadium. This was the day I recall hearing the chant of “Jose! Jose! Jose!” in person for the first time. Clueless yet obliging umpires called way-safe Nationals out at home and second in the last two innings, securing the first shaky save of Billy Wagner’s Mets career. Jimmy Jim got a $60 ticket for parking in a school zone—the only place we could find to park within a mile of the ballpark. Pleased as punch with the win, Duck, Dupes, and I each handed Jim a $20 bill, and we laughed at the idea of it, “Imagine paying $20 to park for a Mets game?” Funnier still was listening to the ad nauseum debate about the song played by the incoming closer. As Billy Wagner made his first Mets entrance, the P.A. played the same Mettalica song as was used when Mariano Rivera jogged into from the bullpen at Yankee Stadium. My position on this controversial and critical matter: Who friggin’ cares? April 6: Mets 10, Nationals 5 They were still talking about that stupid song three days later—after Wagner’s first Mets blown save pushed the Mets out of first place (for what would be the only time all year). Pedro Martinez had his fight song going, drilling four Nationals (Nick Johnson and hot-headed Jose Guillen twice each). Yet when Washington’s Felix Rodriguez hit the only Met of the night, new catcher Paul LoDuca, Rodriguez was the one ejected! And again, the focus was on some foolishness beyond what happened on the field. Carlos Beltran, booed by some buffoons the first few days of the year, hit two home runs and had to be pushed out of the dugout for an encore by ageless and useless Julio Franco. The curtain call actually got more play than the team’s 4-1 opening homestand. April 18: Braves 7, Mets 1 The Mets were 10-2 and up by five games in the NL East when the night started. I sat in Loge seats provided by the Mets for colleagues involved in the first edition of the ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia. Free seats from the Mets? It really was a fun year. Pedro Martinez had been cheered lustily the previous night while earning his 200th career victory. On this night, Victor Zambrano was booed off the field after allowing seven runs in five innings against the Braves. Zambrano’s elbow would give out a few weeks later and he would never win another game for the Mets—or anyone else. Yet what would persist through October and beyond was Scott Kazmir being healthy, young, and hard-throwing in Tampa Bay with Duaner Sanchez not in the pen but watching as helplessly as us fans, following his taxicab accident that cost the Mets his valuable right arm. A stereophonic lament of “If.” Sad and beautiful at the same time, sung by Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd legend I saw perform at the Garden in 2006. June 4: Giants 7, Mets 6 This loss actually made me feel good. With the Carlos Delgado shift on, Jose Reyes had such a big lead off third base that he could have stolen home standing up. He didn’t but Lastings Milledge stole the show—or at least the showboat. Called up from Norfolk a few days earlier due to an emergency appendectomy by Xavier Nady, Milledge bashed his first major league home run to tie the game with two outs in the 10th. My wife and I, hustling out of the park with the kids to get in line for the Mr. Met Dash, heard the crowd suddenly erupt. I tried to sneak a look through the light filtering in from the Shea portholes, but I instantly knew what had happened when an usher turned around and shouted an expletive that meant only one thing to me: The game was now tied and the salty usher’s long day just got longer. The family was on the ramp out of the stadium for the Mr. Mets Dash line when Lastings high-fived his way out to his position in the 11th. The Mets subsequently lost, but up by 4½ games, with untouchable reliever Duaner Sanchez winning three times in a six-game homestand, I was still thrilled. Yet I was disappointed to find that rather than optimism, all I heard on the way home was how bush league this kid was and how he’d never amount to anything with his attitude. I put on some traveling tunes instead—right as they proved to be about the lastability of Lastings. The Mets embarked on a road trip that had the effect of Sherman’s march on the NL East: A 9-1 sacking of L.A., Phoenix, and Philly that pushed the Mets 9½ games in front with the rest of the division in full retreat. August 8: Mets 3, Padres 2 A Yankees fan I had dealings with tried to dismiss the Mets to me by bragging about how his firm had great seats to Shea that clients never used because no one in the City cared about the Mets. So in March I contacted his office and put in a seemingly vanilla request for a set of four unused tickets for a Tuesday night Mets game against San Diego in early August. Three friends and I sat eight rows from the Mets’ on-deck circle and witnessed Mike Piazza’s return to Shea as a Padre. We were comped the night where Mike bathed in applause and had one hit, not the next evening when Piazza scared the standing O out of the crowd with two homers. In both cases, the Mets won one-run games and wound up sweeping Piazza’s Padres. The lead was 14 games. September 7: Mets 7, Dodgers 0 The Mets, now up by 14½, held a 4-0 lead with two outs, two on, and first base open in the sixth with Jose Reyes at the plate. Brad Penny, an All-Star who would actually lead the league in wins, fell behind Reyes and put one over the plate rather than walk him to face Paul LoDuca, batting .315 at the time. Reyes crushed Penny’s pitch and center fielder Shawn Kemp hit the wall just as the ball bounded toward the infield. The New York Post clocked Reyes at 14 seconds rounding the bases. He dove into home, though he could have—and should have—gone in standing up. Reyes was going so fast that he could have turned home and run to first and even taken second before they got the ball to the proper fielder. Now that would have been showing off. The 48,000-plus house on a Thursday night—the week school started up, mind you—was so elated they even cheered when Reyes dropped a popup the next inning. Tom Glavine, coming back from a blood clot, and newbie bullpen darling Guillermo Mota drew cheers that would be unimaginable in the September they helped devastate a year in the future. September 18: Mets 4, Marlins 0 This school-night packed house never stopped cheering for the Monday night clincher. I actually snuck someone down to the Field Level with an Upper Deck seat to get a close-up view of the first Mets division title clincher in 18 years. While it was great to be there, I would sometimes think of that night and wonder if the Mets had clinched the 2006 title in Pittsburgh—where they’d been swept just before this home series with Florida—maybe the Marlins wouldn’t have had to endure the over-the-top clinching celebration, which maybe helped the bottom-feeding club form a grudge that would push them to play so much harder against the Mets in September ’07 and ’08 than they did against everyone else. I left about 15-20 after the clinching, figuring the show was over—only to hear that the players came out again immediately after I left. If only I’d known this would be the last champagne bath for the home folks at Shea... October 4, 2006: Mets 7, Dodgers 6 This is the way October baseball should be: late afternoon, Indian Summer, kids in the seats instead of corporate suits, and the place roaring long before player introductions for the first Shea postseason game since the 2000 World Series. I snuck behind the dugout during the intros to snap photos of the Mets lining up that would be used for Mets by the Numbers, which Jon Springer and I signed as a book contract with a publisher that morning after a long time trying. I was so happy I forgot my disappointment about Orlando Hernandez’s jogging injury knocking him out of the rotation the previous day. Rookie John Maine got the ball for the opener and Paul LoDuca tagged out two Dodgers at the plate in a play I was blocked from seeing. A secondary roar went up upon among the blocked out and slow witted among us when we looked as one at the scoreboard and realized no runs had scored on the play. The Dodgers had four consecutive hits and a walk in the inning and scored only once. The bullpen blew a lead—not for the last time—but the Mets held on to win this one and would sweep the Dodgers. October 13: Cardinals 9, Mets 6 There was heartache one night after Tom Glavine combined for a shutout in the rain-postponed opener. On Friday the 13th, the Mets hammered Cardinals ace Chris Carpenter and clung to a 6-4 lead in seventh. With two outs and two Cards on, the previously unhittable Guillermo Mota threw a pumpkin that Scott Spiezio slammed to right. August acquisition Shawn Green got a glove on it, but he could only knock the ball back onto the field as the tying run scored. It wasn’t quite Nelson Cruz being a step from the potential clinching high fly ball in the 2011 World Series, but you got the feeling that if Endy Chavez is in right field for either of those October nights five years apart, the Cardinals might have two fewer World Series trophies. But on this unlucky night in 2006, Endy was already stationed in left field, filling in for injured Cliff Floyd. And all Endy could do was watch So Taguchi’s home run off Billy Wagner in the ninth. That that was not even the most painful ninth-inning home run to left field at Shea Stadium in that NLCS tells you all that is needed. I had literally thought of nothing besides the Mets for weeks. Behind schedule, I wrote the last chapters of Mets Essential in October during the daylight hours before heading to the games at night. It could have been my favorite October. Should have been. The AL champion Tigers were so ripe for the taking, I was practically ill watching the Detroit pitchers make wild throws in every game. Hearing Game 7 of the 2006 NLCS mentioned by Albert Pujols after the Cards won the 2011 World Series was a new stab in an old wound. A wound that would seem like a tiny boo boo compared to the fatal body blows to be inflicted in the two Septembers to come. But you could not see that coming in 2006. The Endy Chavez catch, which I had a fantastic view of, is only a fleeting glimpse of the greatness that was never to be. A fleeting glimpse in the images superimposed in my mind. As I stared out at the Flushing night. My butt on the cold, drab concrete next to the lady’s room on October 19, 2006. “You ready to go,” asked my wife, who’d probably not been inside more than three minutes. I stood up and walked down the ramp. We’d hear the Daniel Powter song “Bad Day” on the way home, making the long drive through the rain as we’d done six Octobers earlier after the bitter end of the 2000 Subway Series. Soon it will be the sixth anniversary of the long drive in 2006. Some bad days go on for years. <> <> <> I want to take a moment here to mention a couple of recent notices. Subway Squawkers said some nice things about New York Mets: The Complete Illustrated History. And Netgalley, a book industry site that aids reviewers in, well, reviewing, featured the upcoming book Best Mets up front in their profile on Rowan & Littlefield, the publishing house of imprint Taylor Trade, which is putting out the book. |
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October 28, 2011 Cardinals Fly High Once More Well, these Cardinals keeping winning championships. My Cardinals can’t win a game. For all of you who couldn’t be bothered to watch the World Series, you missed one of the all-time greats in Game 6. I’ve watched Game 6 in ’75, ’86, and ’02, and ’11 goes right with that batch, though ’75 will always be special because it was my first Series and ’86 has become my reason for living with no new Miracles on the horizon. I was pulling for ya, Texas. Can’t blame Ron Washington so much, but if Mike Adams hadn’t been used for one batter in the eighth inning of Game 6. And maybe if Endy Chavez had gone to right field for ailing Nelson Cruz... Tony La Russa’s bullpen machination cost him Games 2 and 5, but he’s a genius once more, pulling the 11th world championship for St. Louis out of a hat. LaRussa has as many world championships as John McGraw, who also managed 33 years. LaRussa will soon pass Mugsy for second on the all-time wins list, but Tony needs four more pennants to match the 10 by McGraw (and Casey Stengel). Most of us would be content with one pennant, at this point. |
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October 25, 2011 ’86 Turns 25 Where were you when the Mets won Game 6 of the 1986 World Series? If you are too young to remember or were not born yet, I still envy your youth, but you can envy me watching as it all went down. Though I contend that Game 7 and ultimate victory in the World Series was more important (and rank it accordingly in Best Mets, a book due out in 2012), Game 6 is the emotional epicenter of Metdom. Though I bet plenty of people who were around in 1969 will argue that point. Mets chronicler extraordinaire Mark Simon at ESPN.com asked several people—myself included—where they were and what they were feeling in the 10th inning of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. Unlike every other Mets postseason game since Game 3 of the 1986 NLCS—save for the last two games against the Red Sox—I was not at the park but in Paul Lovetere’s dorm room in Salem, Virginia. For that moment, no matter where you were, being a Mets fans was not the curse it has become, it was a gift from above, a light shining down. They called it “Baseball Like It Ought to Be,” but it was a Miracle, pure and simple. |
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Thank You, Bolton Landing I just want to thank the Bolton Central School District for having me up to talk to the students and making me feel at home. Kudos to the staff, especially Lori Humiston for setting it up and to superintendent Ray Ciccarelli, the biggest Mets fan in the 518 area code, whom I later learned drives almost six hours each way for Bills home game and is back at the office first thing Monday morning. Holy Joe Ferguson! And of course, thanks to the students for listening, asking, and buying. A perfect fall day for a drive to Bolton Landing along the banks of Lake George. A great place to be in New York State. |
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October 21, 2011 Reflections of a Mets Life: 2005 Record: 83-70, Third (Tie) Manager: Willie Randolph One Line Summary: “The change it had to come, we knew it all along.”—Pete Townshend I find the celebration of all things 1986 simultaneously heartening and depressing. Don’t get me wrong, no one relishes Mets history more than yours truly, but with every celebration of 1986 comes the realization that the Mets have not won since I was 21. By 2005, I was 40 and it seemed like an eon since 1986. All the news the Mets were making in the waning days of the 2004 calendar and the frigid early days of January 2005 belied the reality that the team had crashed so badly the previous summer that they had to resort to stealing the Montreal Expos GM as that franchise lit out for Washington. I was head over heels about the kids, Wright and Reyes, but rather than build from the ground up—as the 1986 Mets had done (never mind the 1969 champs)—the Mets were once again trying to spend their way to the top. Where had we seen this before? I was so jaded that I did not think any free agent would ever prosper at Shea Stadium. How many had failed? Vince Coleman, Bobby Bonilla, Eddie Murray, and Roger Cedeno were the most notable busts, with Bonilla and Murray’s positive numbers cancelled out by their negative effect on younger players and fans. Even a couple of rare good ones, 1999 free agents Robin Ventura and Ricky Henderson, had one superb year and then dropped off—or in Rickey’s case, dropped out. By 2005, Rick Reed may have been the most successful Mets free agent signee ever… and he’d come to the team as a minor league free agent. The 2005 roster was chockfull of major league free agents taking home lots of cash and bringing the Mets so-so results: Tom Glavine, Braden Looper, Cliff Floyd, and Mike Cameron. I liked speak-his-mind Cliff, while Cameron had 30 homers and 22 steals in 2004, but Cammy permanently got on my bad side in ’04 when he dropped a bases-loaded pop-up to ruin my first solo game at Shea with my daughter. I so wanted to see the Mets go with young players. Yet the reality was that the best of that potential lot had been traded the previous summer to Pittsburgh and Tampa Bay for Kris Benson and Carlos Zambrano, respectively. Now this unwanted pair made up two-fifths of a rotation that got remarkably shaky after the new ace’s turn. Pedro Martinez was that new ace. I listened to his introductory press conference as I drove around doing errands the day before starting a new job, just as I’d listened to Willie Randolph’s press conference while returning from my final interview at a small publishing house in Irvington, a cute town on the Hudson in upper Westchester where fabled author Washington Irving long resided. The job kept me busy enough where I barely noticed that, like Steve Phillips before him, the early years of Omar were going to be the highlight. Like Stevie Wonder Boy, Omar had a solid run of bringing in the small pieces to make the whole more cohesive: Ramon Castro, Chris Woodward, Juan Padilla, Marlon Anderson, Roberto Hernandez, and Doug Mientkiewicz. Mientkiewicz had been run out of Boston for getting on management’s bad side after catching—and not letting go of—the ball that clinched the first Red Sox title since 1918. Mientky had a weak bat and a big mouth, but the slick-fielding first baseman saved David Wright countless throwing errors in 2005. It also took a while for me to realize my 180-mile daily drive back and forth to work, along with ridiculous hours and the most unrealistic bosses I’d yet come across, made this job a living hell. It was also the only job I’ve ever lost—though I had my letter of resignation in my pocket when a book conference became a bait-and-switch for my termination interview. By the time I’d mercifully been released, I’d only missed the first month of baseball season, though I had managed to attend the debut of the New Mets at Shea Stadium (and the uncalled for booing of John Franco as an Astro). I also saw the first game at Shea against the Washington Nationals (nee Montreal Expos). Braden Looper ruined Pedro and Carlos’s brilliant debuts on Opening Day in Cincinnati. Friends were soon emailing back and forth the corrupted final line of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” by the Who: “Meet the New Mets, just the same as the old Mets.” But it wouldn’t take long before we bought the Omar and Willie package of hope, swallowing it hook, line, and sinker. And we would learn at 40 what we’d known at 17, that Pete Townshend was always right. “And the Slogans Are Replaced, by the Bye” Like the above clip, when you’ve pulled one out of the fire and stand defiantly, you’re not thinking about the lyrics, you’re in awe of the performance. All you can say is, “Awesome. Totally awesome.” Awesomeness was needed in Metdom. The Art Howe experience in 2003 and 2004 had been both mind-numbing and excruciating. Not that “Willie-ball” couldn’t make you nuts. Right off the bat came five straight losses, followed by six straight wins. Looper, who pitched all year with a bum shoulder he didn’t tell anyone about, constantly coughed up leads, including a Sunday night game that, to this day, is the closest the Mets have ever come to sweeping a series in the Bronx. After three wins in four days at first-place Washington (!), the next night Pedro’s 4-0 lead with two outs in the ninth was given away by Looper in Pittsburgh. Pedro held a 7-0 seventh-inning lead that the bullpen blew and would have lost if Favorite Non-Playing Met Chris Woodward hadn’t come through in extra innings. (The next day, during my first Mr. Met Dash with the kids, I conducted an on-field inspection of the dent in the wall at Shea where Brian Schneider—yes, Brian Schneider—hit a ball for the Nationals that was a foot from being a game-winning homer instead of being a game-tying double.) Looper essentially cost Pedro a 20-win season in what would be his only injury-free year as a Met. The roller coaster continued all summer. One pitch from defeat, Mike Cameron homered and the Mets won in extra innings over Milwaukee, only to lose to the Brew Crew on a five-run ninth two days later (Looper had the day off; Roberto Hernandez handled that implosion). The Mets swept the Cubs and then went to San Diego and lost their right fielder, Mike Cameron, in a violent collision with Carlos Beltran, who was never right after that in 2005. The Mets embarked on a five-game winning streak, fueled by Mike Jacobs. About to be sent down after a brief callup, I witnessed Jacobs homer in his first major league at bat in a blowout loss to the Nats. Jacobs not only stayed with the team, but he set a major league record with four homers in his first big league games, fueling a four-game sweep in Phoenix. The Mets scored just three runs in three days in San Francisco, yet upon their return home, the Mets took the Wild Card lead. Ramon Castro’s three-run homer in the eighth for a 6-5 win over the Phillies had me dancing for joy in the Mezzanine. The Mets then went 2-12 and any dreams of the postseason dissipated, as did the more modest dream of finishing .500 for the first time since 2001. As the “Meet the New Mets” line passed hourly through my head, things turned the other way. Oh, it was too late to get back in the Wild Card race. Six years ago, we didn’t see the now almost routine multi-game, late-season collapse by seemingly playoff-bound teams that Omar’s Mets would make fashionable. This time, the Mets pushed their supposed betters out of contention. The Mets knocked out the Phillies, and did the same to the Marlins, tying Florida for third place. And they pushed the Nationals into last place, albeit with an 81-81 mark the Nats haven’t sniffed since. The Mets had the best 10-game finish of any National League team at 8-2. (How we would wish for transference of this finish to future Septembers.) And that 8-2 mark to end 2005 included a throwaway 11-3 loss to Colorado on the final day, but raucous cheers rang out at Shea all that afternoon. It was all for Mike Piazza. Warm, but too early for Indian Summer, October 2, 2005 marked the final day of the great catcher’s 7½ seasons of service in orange and blue. He was cheered lustily for past home runs both dramatic and cathartic, for giving a full effort every time, and for working diligently at catching even as everyone said he wasn’t that good at it (though he had proved in 2004 that he was worse at first base). Piazza was stunned by the magnitude of the applause. And so was I. That kind of cheering may never happen again because you can’t clap while clutching a hand-held device to text, tweet, and Facebook simultaneously about how cool you are. Everyone, young and old, Mets fans and tourists visiting from Oslo, stopped what they were doing, and sustained the cheering for as long as possible. The only thing I’ve ever heard that compared with it in a non-crucial game was when Piazza visited for the first time as a Padre in 2006. . I was glad Omar did not try to bring Piazza back in 2006. Mike would never get a better sendoff. And it was time to move on. It was not, however, time to move on in the eighth inning of the last game. With 47,718 waiting to see Mike come up once more, the only Mike that came out of the dugout was named Difelice. The fans, standing, cheering, and just waiting for Piazza to emerge in his catching gear, were incredulous. And then they got angry—about as angry as people were when Jose Reyes left with a batting title seemingly in hand after one at bat on 2011 closing day. (There were 30,000 more at the Shea finale in 2005 than at the last game at Citi Field in 2011, but the level of annoyance by those in attendance was in the same ballpark, so to speak.) On that last day of 2005, the fans booed Piazza’s removal almost as loudly as when Victor Zambrano had been knocked out in the sixth inning. We were disgustedly on the way to the parking lot when Difelice singled in Piazza’s spot in the order in the bottom of the eighth. We were enjoying a much cheaper beverage in the Marina Lot than Shea could provide when Anderson Hernandez got his first major league hit—in his 18th career at bat—moments before the season ended on a line-drive double play in Jose Offerman’s last big league at bat. (There would be other days for Jose Offerman to get his licks in.) And 2005 begat 2006, with an ending that would cause far more angst and much more bitter tasting beer in the same Marino Lot. But we would learn the hard way that there were worse endings than being dumped in the playoffs. As a result, ’05 stands as the last season to date that ended with better days still ahead for the Mets. Finishing 83-79 was just a beginning, the beginning of what may be as aggravating a period in Mets history as I have lived through. And I’m still living it. You, too. However you want to process it, don’t let hindsight ruin what was still in store for this crew in ’06. Some of my favorite days at Shea were still to come. And so were some of my most frightening. <> <> <> Want to see how our story ends? Check out New York Mets: The Complete Illustrated History, where we uncover all GMs great, evil, and in between in a half-century so fraught with tragedy and pathos you would think I made it all up. Except, of course, you know I did not. Know I could not. |
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Letters to the Met-idor, World Series Edition I’m creating a precedent so that when the Mets actually make the World Series, I can throw one of these Letters columns together before I head out to the ballpark. Of course by then, it will be the year 2525 and I’ll be teleporting to Wal-Mart Field at Krispy Kreme Park and all that will be left of me is a head in a jar. But I’ll have a column ready to go. Old habits die hard.
Why We Run Letters Dear Met, I enjoy your letters columns. Greg Prince (Faith and Fear in Flushing). ------------------------ Greg, Thanks… [Actually this is a pretense. I didn’t write back to Greg on this particular occasion, though when we communicate it’s usually lengthy and sprinkled with obscure Mets references. So the brevity of Greg’s note spoke volumes. Think of this as an aside to the audience. And while we are aside together, I will jump on with Greg with Texas over St. Louis in the World Series, though I am slow to disembark from the fully engulfed Detroit bandwagon. Football is kind of volatile in that town, too. Texas at least knocked the Yankees out last year while the St. Louis Cardinals have yet to beat the Yankees in October in my lifetime.]
No Way on Jose Dear Met, I disagree that Jose Reyes besmirched the legacy of Ted Williams [with his one at-bat in the final game to secure the batting title]. As a Mets fan and a Jose Reyes fan I was disappointed that he left the game in the first inning, however, it is unfair to compare this to Ted Williams’s situation or to say his bunt single has historic significance. Ted Williams may have been the greatest hitter that ever lived but he was competing with a “number” and history, not another player. Lots of stuff swirling around Jose, his last Mets game? Why was Terry Collins crying? Does he know something we don’t? Reyes earned the batting crown, his last hit was just as important as his first hit, but we all would have felt better if Jose played the whole game. Jose Reyes taking himself out of the game pales in significance to the incredible games that took place that night. Now, I’m just looking forward to next season and your 2012 edition of Mets Annual Maple Street Press. Arnold Dorman ------------------------ Arnold, Good points all, but I just thought his move was bush league. Even if Jose Reyes came out of the game before his next at bat, he could have given fans the chance to cheer instead of boo—and most of those on hand booed Terry Collins, not understanding it was Jose’s decision. Watching the replay later, Keith Hernandez went from ecstatic about a last-day batting race to completely disgusted. So did Gary and Ron. Not being a former batting champ, I didn’t feel that strongly and I put the Jose bit in my article after the great day of games because of how little it mattered in the great scheme of things. Some team will pay him an extra few million for that title, but I don’t think it’s worth all that. As for the Maple Street Press Mets Annual we will be doing a fifth year of the publication due out in late February. I’m praying that Jose can be our cover boy, like he was on our first edition. Best, Matt
Averting Nix on Season Tix Dear Met, Since Taryn and I are season ticket holders, I wholeheartedly agree with your ideas for those who buy tickets to all 81 home games. The Mets added their “Amazin’ Perks” for season ticket holders like ourselves, but all that got us with a meet-and-greet with Scott Hairston in left field. (And that was Taryn who met him; I wasn’t even there!) The best way to keep their most loyal fans is by rewarding them in their wallets. Let’s hope Dave Howard reads your ideas and takes them to heart. Ed Leyro (Mets Mesmerized Online) [Note: Ed is referring to my August 27 post that the Mets should give season ticket holders some type of discount like they gave all the single-game ticket buyers with the summer promotions like “two for one” and “kids go free.” My suggestion was to let the season ticket holders pay one price for tickets to every game in 2012 and let single-game ticket holders pay for the variable pricing plan. When you start having a championship-caliber club again—and actually see the world beyond the last week of September—you can start gouging everyone again. We expect that in New York.] ------------------------ Ed, I think it’s a good thing the Mets are making changes on the go to give fans incentive to come to games that aren’t of great import in the standings, but it’s only right that they take care of the season ticket holders while they help everyone else out. No one likes to feel they’ve being taken. Even by their favorite team. Best, Matt
A 111-Loss Phillies Team? Break Out the Cake!
Dear Met, Mike McNamara ------------------------
Mike! A very happy birthday to you! Vince Coleman, on the other hand, can blow out his own (roman) candle. Best,
Matt Dear Met, Just finished Baseball Miscellany and thoroughly enjoyed it! I love being entertained along with learning something new along the way. Thank you. I am an artist and did a drawing of Tom Seaver you may be interested in. I sent a copy to Tom (care of his Northern Cal winery) and he loved it and signed one for me! You can check it out at my website: martyparkerart.net or on facebook at facebook.com/martyparkerart. Would love to hear what you think.
Thanks again for the great writing! ------------------------
Marty, Did you grow up in the Bay Area, watching those A’s teams? I have always been in awe of that club and how they put up with Charlie Finley and themselves to turn it on and win when they needed to. They were like the Raiders. If they could have gotten by the Steelers, you know they would have rolled the Vikings a couple of more times in the Super Bowl. For a great look at those 1970s A’s and Raiders teams, check out the 2003 HBO special Rebels of Oakland, hosted by Tom Hanks, who grew up rooting for those great Oakland teams. The DVD is hard to find but worth the search. If anyone else besides Marty somehow is reading this—wink, wink—and has a copy of this (or a DVD of any of the 1973 World Series games broadcast on NBC), drop me a line and “Let’s Make a Deal.” Best,
Matt Pilot to Tower Dear Met, I just finished your book Baseball Miscellany and read the book in one day. I picked up your book because I really was looking for the book about Ron Santo but that book was checked out of the library. I like to read baseball books in the summer and hockey books in the winter. In your book you mentioned that Seattle took the name of the Pilots because of the nautical history. Yes, but that is only partially correct. Seattle does have a longstanding waterfront history but the Pilots name became because of the airline industry. The Seattle area town of Everett is home to the manufacturing of the Boeing Aircraft Company. In the late 1960s Boeing was building the new aircraft, the 747. A lot of the Seattle economy was somehow influenced by the Boeing Company and aviation. When the team came about, the owners choose the Pilots name to show thanks to one of the largest employers in the area. I don’t know the reason the Pilots only lasted one season before moving to Milwaukee. The only reason I know all this is because my older sister was an airline stewardess living in Seattle during that time. The family went out there for her wedding where my older brothers went to the game and all I received was a pennant. Boy, I wish I still had that pennant! Maybe you have additional research on this information. Thank you. Pat Trunda P.S.: A White Sox fan but Santo played for the Sox for one season. ------------------------ Pat, Thanks for the note and glad you enjoyed the book so much. You make a really good point about Boeing being in Seattle. The Seattle Pilot hats did sort of look like something an airline pilot would wear. It was kind of cool that the Brewers kept the Pilots colors and used a similar font—minus the “scrambled eggs” on the bill. I really liked the simple and classic “M” logo in their formative years in Brewtown as an AL team before Bud Selig went political and spread his doddering to all regions of the game’s sphere. On a positive note, the Pilots pennant was only worth about $12 on e-bay when I checked today—probably about the cost of a low budget sushi plate at Safeco. But that pennant would be a lot cooler to have than a plate full of raw fish at a ballgame. Pennants can be hard to get, though, just ask the Pilots/Brewers, who have won only one pennant in their 42 years of existence—and that came in their old league. And to the fun city of Milwaukee, we have an old baseball saying in Flushing, by way of Brooklyn, “Wait til next year.” Best, Matt P.S.: And regarding your sister the 1960s stewardess, that reminds me how much I have been enjoying Pan Am on ABC. It is light, fun, nostalgic fare and it is getting me through this dead time waiting for Mad Men. The show would form a nice Sunday night doubleheader when Mad Men returns. Of course, if Pan Am somehow gets grounded by the network because of too few passengers, I vow to never get hooked on another network show. Ever. I have been burned before. Hey, you could be stuck watching the Yankees right now, so sit back, sip some champagne, and buckle up. But now turn off the TV. We’ve got one more letter.
The Forgotten Big Red Machine Dear Met,
While your book
Baseball Miscellany is an interesting read, it has come to my attention
that there is an error on page 15. If possible, please correct this error in future publications. John Piassek ------------------------ John, So other readers aren’t in the dark, on page 15 of Baseball Miscellany is a chart about repeat world champions since the World Series began in 1903. Here’s the list with the correction scrawled in. Repeat Champs Years Chicago Cubs 1907–08 Boston Red Sox 1914–15 New York Giants 1921–22 New York Yankees 1927–28 Philadelphia Athletics 1929–30 New York Yankees 1936–39 New York Yankees 1949–53 New York Yankees 1961–62 Oakland A’s 1972–74 Cincinnati Reds 1975–76 New York Yankees 1977–78 Toronto Blue Jays 1992–93 New York Yankees 1998–2000 I remember writing that chart and I cannot believe I left out the 1975–76 Reds. Those were my first two World Series as a kid and I watched almost every pitch in rapt awe. While I was rooting hard for the 1975 Red Sox against Cincinnati, I was pleased as punch to see the Reds sweep the Yankees in 1976. I just wished the Reds could have kept on adding to their championship ledger the next two seasons as the Yankees kept going to the World Series. The Mets were nice enough to gift wrap Tom Seaver to Cincinnati for the three-peat effort, but to no avail. You couldn't trust the Dodgers to get the job done in October—just don’t tell that to the ’77 and ’78 Phillies. It is kind of cool that for seven straight seasons in the 1970s there were repeat champs with the A’s, Reds, and ugh, Yankees. No more repeat champions came around until the Blue Jays in the 1990s. Thanks for reading and writing. Here’s hoping there is a future edition of Baseball Miscellany for me to add this correction to. Best, Matt |
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October 6, 2011 Delighting in the Work of Others First week of October and already it’s been a really fun postseason. A lot of people with Mets ties—and I’m not talking about Tie Guy—have been heard from already this postseason.
Keep watching this October. It is a good one. It will keep you sharp for the day when it really matters again. |
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October 5, 2011 Reflections of a Mets Life: 2004 Record: 71-91 Manager: Art Howe One Line Summary: “Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”—Herman Melville The 2004 season was like a diet. Maybe it was the food poisoning that skimmed 10 pounds off me. Or maybe I wasn’t eating as well because a publisher reneged on a verbal commitment for my first book. Anyway, I felt a little better when the Mets started winning. And I felt more pained when they stopped. By economizing now and biding our time, we were told repeatedly, the Mets would look fabulous some day soon. For now, Jose Reyes was hurt, and we would just have to make do while the kids on the farm got ready. That made it a little more palatable for Kaz Matsui to skip throws from short to first in the top of the inning and skip grounders off his bat to second in the bottom of the frame. It was OK. We weren’t expecting much. The Mets hadn’t done much to heighten anyone’s expectations. Instead of Vladimir Guerrero, the Mets had Mike Cameron and acted like he was the man they preferred. The first month of the season the Mets had been swept at home by the Pirates and the following weekend were swept out of Wrigley Field, scoring twice in three games against the Cubs. They won a series in Los Angeles but dropped the first two games at brand-new Petco Park to sit at 9-15. Then something very strange happened. The Mets started winning. With Art Howe managing. And you know if you’ve seen the film Moneyball, winning and Art Howe are often considered coincidental. (Brad Pitt is very solid and the film legitimately good, but what got me in the theater was Philip Seymour Hoffman as Art Howe. Sure, the guy won an Oscar for playing Truman Capote but he played Art Howe for more than two hours and did not once use the word “battle” as a verb.) The Mets won the last game in San Diego before coming home to face the Giants. After winning the first game of the series, Mike Piazza set the record for most homers as a catcher the next evening. It’s strange that someone keeps track of the position a player is listed at when he hits a home run—it’s not like they’re wearing their catching gear while batting. Piazza hit his 353rd homer as a catcher to break Carlton Fisk’s all-time mark—meaning that, unlike Fisk, Piazza would now be hustled to first base where he would solve all the world’s problems except what to do if a ball was hit at him. Piazza wouldn’t start playing first base on a nightly basis until the next road trip. The night after he set the homer record, however, I was at Shea as Piazza donned the gear again. The Mets actually had a job fair in the Picnic Area that my buddy Paul was working. I think it cost around $35 to go to the fair, but it included a ticket to sit in the bleachers afterward. I was 39 years old and competing against people just out of college, or still in college, for a handful of jobs—many of them unpaid or minimum wage—with minor league teams all over the country. It was fun being there, but I was 15 years too late to the party. With a wife and two kids at home, the odds were pretty good that I would never be paid to don a chicken suit. But after I changed out of my gray suit, I did see one hell of a major league game after the fair. I sat in the Picnic Area for about half the game before using the old ticket stub dodge to sit with friends over in the Field Level. Paul came, too. Al Leiter and Jason Schmidt were locked in a scoreless duel through six innings. In the seventh, Pedro Feliz homered off Leiter, but the Mets tied it in the bottom of the inning on a home run by Karim Garcia—he and Shane Spencer tunneled out of the Bronx to beat up a Port St. Lucie pizza boy and add a couple of rough and tumble months to their résumé. They were using Shea as their own job fair. It didn’t work for Shane, who cut his feet walking barefoot in a Manhattan bar—apparently looking for a pizza boy to kick box—and then a few days later he was arrested for driving while intoxicated on a rehab assignment (insert your own comment here). Karim, who had started a brawl in right field at Fenway Park during a playoff game the previous fall, tried to keep things a little more professional. This enabled the Mets to swap him for Mike DeJean, who would have a 1.69 ERA out of the bullpen for the 2004 Mets. But back at Shea in May against the Giants, the score was still locked at 1-1 after 10 innings. It was a great duel, but it had been a long day. Boother, who used his knowledge of Japanese to heckle Kaz Matsui, suggested it might be time to go. The others agreed. I said give it another inning. David Weathers, who would be traded for a month of mashing by Richard Hidalgo, struck out Feliz with the bases loaded in the top of the 11th inning. Our time was just about up when Piazza stepped up with two men out in the bottom of the frame. I didn’t hear the radio call that night, but I heard it hundreds upon hundreds of times as a Mets bottle opener sound effect that came up every time I opened a beverage. Pop! Brower delivers. And a drive in the air to deep left field, back goes Bonds to the track, near the wall, jumping... IT’S OUTTA HERE!!! MIKE PIAZZA WINS THE GAME!!! A line drive homer over the left field wall, and the Mets win it in the bottom of the 11th inning! Sweeps came and went quickly in the merry, merry month of May. The San Francisco sweep was followed by one of the Rockies a couple of weeks later, with Tom Glavine no-hitting the Rocks until two outs in the eighth in the finale. The Mets were swept by the defending world champion Marlins (how strange is that to say?) and then went to Philadelphia and swept their first series at new Citizens Bank Ballpark (how great is that to say?). June proved wacky as well, with the Mets hanging around .500 and keeping within five games of first place. The Mets lost the first five games of their first trip to Minneapolis and Kansas City and then went 5-1 on a homestand welcoming Cleveland and Detroit to Shea for the first time. The best—and most damaging sweep—came in July. The Yankees were fresh off sweeping the Red Sox, adding yet more layers of storylines to the epic ALCS the teams would battle through for the second straight October. But the Mets faced the Yankees after beating the Reds and the July Fourth fireworks in Flushing were heavy duty. (That was just a metaphor, of course, because Fireworks Night would not be wasted on an already sold-out stadium full of Yankees fans; the real Grucci display was held two weeks later against Philadelphia, before their fans started traveling as if they were Cowboys Nation.) The Mets pounded the Yankees Friday night, and then won on Saturday thanks to a Shane Spencer dribbler plus one of the worst—and most-appreciated—strike three calls in recent memory. On Sunday, the Mets held on for a tight victory to give them the season series a year after going 0-6 against the crosstown buzz killers. Now the Mets stood two games over .500, and just two games out of first. That’s when the Mets went insane. An 8-13 stretch in July that dropped the Mets six games back in division and almost eight games back in the Wild Card, the Mets could have concentrated on getting their young players, like newly-promoted David Wright, major league experience. Instead, the team’s oft-preached approach of patience was thrown right out the window. The Five D’s: Dodge, Duck, Dive, Dip, and Dodge I guess the sixth—and maybe the seventh D—that Patches O’Houlihan left out would be the double DD’s that came with Kris Benson from Pittsburgh. But even if I somehow missed Anna Benson, there was no missing a trading deadline brainlock that would have made Steve Phillips blush. I was driving in Maine with my family, coming from a whale watch in Boothbay Harbor that had me feeling a tad queasy. The trade deadline was fast approaching and the woodsy static of coastal Maine permitted radio reports of the deadline trades while my family innocently spoke of whales and seals. Then came the report that made me feel like a harpoon had just been fired into my solar plexus. Jose Bautista—just acquired from the Royals for Mets prospect Justin Huber—was shipped to Pittsburgh with can’t-miss phenom Matt Peterson (he missed) and gritty Ty Wigginton for Kris Benson and Jeff Keppinger. I had about 15 minutes to digest the shortcomings of this trade (it would take about five years to realize what the Mets had let slip through their fingers with Bautista, aka “Joey Bats”). Then in an instant I was lost in a far more gut-wrenching deal. “The Mets have made another trade. Victor Zambrano and Bartolome Fortunato to the Devil Rays for top prospect Scott Kazmir and Jose Diaz.” Jim Duquette, the seemingly sane-minded general manager of my favorite team, who had soberly preached patience since his promotion 13 months earlier, had turned into Captain Ahab. It was all gone in a an instant on the quarter deck, the Sporting News Radio had transformed into a running dialogue of Moby-Dick, Ahab spouting: Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the horn, and round the norway maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave. Brave? Well, the Braves immediately swept the Mets, their tenuous plans for even mediocrity batted away like a giant tail through a whaling boat. “Man overboard!” Like Ishmael and others aboard the Pequod, I would have gladly left the ship at the moment of Duquette’s folly. But I had as much chance to leave as Ishmael or Starbuck, stuck aboard a tub in the middle of the wide ocean on a voyage years long, with no escape. Down, down, down the Mets dropped. They were 22-39 from that point on, dropping 11 in a row and 17 of 18 as August blurred into September. Free-speaking Cliff Floyd spoke for all when he said, “I don’t see light at the end of the tunnel.” We could not even see an end. As I prepared to go to a Mets game that I’d gotten a free ticket to for sitting through the rain earlier in the year, the news leaked that both Ahab and Fedallah (or Duquette and Howe) had been set adrift… though both would stay on: Duquette in a lower capacity in the organization, and Howe as lame duck skipper for the final 18 games (the club would go 9-9 and even start the Cubs on a downward spiral that left them out of the postseason). As I expounded at length to poor Paul in the Mezzanine overhang seats the Mets had gratised: The crime wasn’t in trading 20-year-old Kazmir, who that night happened to be beating the eventual world champion Red Sox for his career win; the unpardonable sin had been to trade someone so coveted for so little in return. Some would blame Rick Peterson or Jeff Wilpon for the trade, but it is a general manager’s duty to fully believe in a trade or offer his resignation if forced to make a bad trade. And if Duke had only waited until November, he could have perhaps shipped Kazmir for Oakland’s Tim Hudson or Mark Mulder, both of whom were traded by the A’s. Even the inevitable lack of success by Kazmir since 2009 cannot wash the stench for this error that cost the Mets the starter they so desperately needed to support the offense the Mets later assembled. Paul and I went once more to Shea in 2004, for the last game of the year. Yet the final game of the season and of the Montreal Expos’ existence was more Joycean than Melvillian. The death of a beloved comrade—in this case a team whose relocation would blot out its prior identity—was almost as hard to take as revealing the future of our club to be a lie. The future was a lie, a beautiful lie. One that would be paid for over and over, not in blood—but in dreams dashed just short of fulfillment. It was not Ishmael, but Omar whose foot was pressed against the rail of the boat as he chased leviathans that could turn on him at any second. # # # In case you’re wondering if this series will be extended another year now that this season is over, the goal is to try to finish the series by Christmas. And speaking of gifts, the whole story on the club—with more about the Mets, less about me, and far less excess from my 400-level English classes or Mr. Magoo Literary Classics—can be found in New York Mets: The Complete Illustrated History. It’s no fish tale. |
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October 3, 2011 One Fan’s Citi Tally from 2011 In going over the facts and figures from my 10 games at Citi Field in 2011, I have this to report: It sucked. I attended exactly 20 games each of the first two seasons at Citi. The Mets played .575 ball at home for me in that span even as they stunk up joints everywhere else. This year they went 3-7 in front of me, a Stengel-esque .300 win percentage to put me at just over .500 at Citi (26-24), though that is actually ahead of the 122-121 overall Mets mark at the park since the team moved in. My family's undefeated reign also ended as the Silverman Four lost for the first time—and took out two top five batting leaders on August 7: Jose Reyes and Daniel Murphy. I’ll momentarily dispense with my narcissism for a bigger question: Are the Mets going to bring in the fences? I wouldn’t. And I went from April to the last day of the year with one Mets home run sighting. The Mets simply don’t hit for power regardless of the dimensions. Wright and Bay are shells of their power-hitting selves. Ike Davis, when healthy, can blast a ball out of anywhere; same goes for Lucas Duda. The only ones it might help are opponents, who are already bashing the Mets pitching staff. The Mets scored the most runs in the division with 718—five runs better than the Phillies and 50 runs better than league average. Mets pitching, meanwhile, was 12th in the NL, 69 runs worse than the average staff. After losing 101 times on the road over the previous two years, the Mets finally got the knack of playing away from home. But I can’t expect the Mets to start listening to me no matter how much I yell at the TV screen at home. And that is where I will be watching from more and more in the future. If the ballpark lost its new-park shine in 2011, the ushers and other stadium employees lost their new-job shine as well. For every pleasant employee I came across, two went out of their way to act superior, move at a glacial pace, or, in the case of ushers, enforce ridiculous rules—such as not allowing us to sit in a worse seat than our tickets indicated in the waning innings when tens of thousands of seats were empty. One usher told us, in all seriousness, that we had go up a flight of stairs, wait for an elevator, and take it down to an area that was a 50-foot walk away, but he would not let us pass his station. We waited until he got in someone else’s face and then walked the 50 feet. My suggestion—you know I always have one—is to let the ushers accept tips again. Allow a return to the system that made Shea hum. So you sell fewer Caesar Club seats. You’ll get more people entering the building, you’ll boost the local economy, and maybe the ushers won’t be so crabby. On a positive note:
Thanks for coming. I’ll leave you with the 2011 big board. Hope you missed some of these gems… Captain’s Log 2011 Citi Field
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September 29, 2011 Races for the Ages I am not one for hyperbole when it comes to baseball history, but I cannot readily come up with a better season-ending sequence that I’ve seen that tops the last hour of the season on Wednesday night. The final day 1908 dual pennant races, 1949 Yankees-Red Sox, the four-team races in 1964 and 1967 are all legendary. There are the epic two-team races that ended in tiebreaker playoffs, notably 1948, 1951, 1962, 1978, and for our own purposes, 1999. But 2011 was unique in that the MLB Channel and modern media enabled one to follow the climactic events for each race with live play-by-play and video. Usually when a ballgame is on, I have the newspaper out, channels are flipped during slow moments, and I occasionally get caught up in a movie or TV show—I saw Mad Men wannabes Pan Am and The Playboy Club earlier this week in this very scenario. But Wednesday night the only time I turned from MLB-TV was for ESPN2 coverage of Phils-Braves or the YES Network for Rays-Yankees game. (Joe GirARdi—“AR” stands for Anal Retentive—would it have killed your grandiose schemes to bring in “The Great Mariano” for a dozen pitches in the ninth?) The destinies of four teams were decided in the last hour of the season. Three games culminated in blown saves. Two games went 12 innings or later, including a comeback from a 7-0 deficit (ironically that the same deficit the Mets faced after one inning in the Closing Day Disaster of 2007). And Wednesday saw the surrealistic hometown walkoff celebration in front of the devastated visiting Boston fans who long ago took over Camden Yards. Oddly, the late-inning rain delay in Baltimore kept all four games on the exact same programming schedule. The Cardinals won an 8-0 laugher over 106-loss Houston, but they partied like 1999 when the Phillies turned a slick 3-6-3 double play in the 13th to end Atlanta’s season. Oh, and by the way, if the much-discussed two-Wild Card format had been in place this year, Wednesday would not have meant a thing. Leave great enough alone, MLB. I am proud of the 2011 Mets for their little part, playing top-notch spoiler, going 3-3 against the Braves and Cards last week on the road—overcoming a four-run deficit in the ninth in St. Louis plus Lucas Duda’s home run off Craig Kimbrel in Atlanta starting the rookie on a downward spiral that saw him blow two of his final three save chances. The Braves—like the Mets four years earlier—saw their bullpen fall apart because of all the close games and the lack of innings from the starters. But if I ever thought about feeling bad for them, all I had to do was remember Atlanta’s announcers mockingly singing “Meet the Mets” on the air after New York was eliminated in 2007—with Atlanta spy Tom Glavine doing the sabotaging. I spent a full minute on Wednesday night after the Braves were eliminated doing the tomahawk chop with middle finger extended. And Thursday morning I stumbled across the updated Mets Wikipedia entry. And I quote: [2007] is widely considered the third worst collapse in baseball history. (The 2011 Red Sox blew a 9 game lead with only 26 games left, going 7-19, and the 2011 Atlanta Braves blew an 8.5 game lead with only 22 games left, going 7-15, as opposed to the Mets’ 5-12 record in their final 17 games.) Talk about an instant upgrade. I am truly sorry about the Red Sox. We Mets fans know what this is like. You will survive and you’ll probably do so far more successfully than the Mets. In 2007 I was invited to the first two games of the World Series at Fenway Park and that went a long way to healing the deep wounds from the Mets’ fall and recreating the agony for several different publications. Even with Boston as 1986 foe and the sometimes frightening over-exuberance of Red Sox Nation, the Saux will always be a team I enjoy. My first World Series was in 1975 and I pulled so hard for them I cried. A couple of years later I attended Ted Williams Baseball Camp and took on the Splendid Splinter as an idol. As I told another friend: I’d love to see Jose Reyes back, but Ted Williams he’s not. Seventy years to the day earlier, Williams, sitting on .400, eschewed his manager’s advice and played both ends of a season-ending doubleheader in Philadelphia and went 6-for-8 to hit .406. The event began the Williams legend. Jose pretty much did the opposite. Reyes did the wrong thing by taking a seat after one at bat in the final game. I was there with a disappointed crowd that must have been made up of 80 percent bloggers, plus Cowbell Man and some guy with a Jose Reyes cape. I appreciated Miguel Batista’s two-hit shutout far better than the Closing Day effort four years earlier by another number 47. Or walking in the winning run to end last year by a number 46. I even enjoyed Jose’s bunt—harkening back to the controversial 1910 batting title—but give us at least one more trip to the plate. Then come off the field from shortstop so everyone can cheer you. Instead, everyone booed. As it turned out, Reyes would have won the damned title anyway. I actually missed Evan Longoria’s second home run after flipping to SNY to watch a replay of Terry Collins getting misty about the whole thing. Collins has given everything he has for this team. He blew up after that horrible 10-1 loss I witnessed that ended the 1-8 homestand, and the Mets finished the year with renewed vigor. Don’t force TC to reign in your ill-conceived notions, Jose. To paraphrase a Bob Murphy game-day announcement outside Shea: He wants you safe, because he wants you back. At the Reyes compound where a large gathering watched Ryan Braun go hitless Wednesday night, I just hope that Jose’s posse stuck around to see the end of the races that mattered. And while a Met won a batting crown for the first time, the Brewers—and K-Rod, for that matter—will play on. Teddy Ballgame would have told you that that is the name of the game. |
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September 26, 2010 FNP Met for 2011: Pridie of the Metties If you’ve been reading this site the last couple of years, you may vaguely recall that we dole out a prestigious award every year to an overlooked Met who didn’t play as much as their talent should have allowed. My Favorite Non-Playing Met, or FNP Met, has been distributed among some of the great scrubs in recent Mets memory. Some have gone to greatness, or at least mediocrity. Mackey Sasser, Todd Pratt, Robinson Cancel have taken home the trophy for their lack of work behind the plate. Heath Bell is the only FNP Met to go on to be an All-Star… with another team, of course. Most FNP Mets do not reach such heights and can often be found in the footnotes of Metdom in small type at the bottom of a page. And then every once in a great while, one of our own makes it. Nick Evans, the only two-time winner in the award’s two decades of ballyhooed history, went from Jerry Manuel’s doghouse to Terry Collins’s top dog, though it took exposing Nick to waivers three times this year before he finally received significant playing time and showed what he can do. We’re very proud of Nicky boy—and TC, too. Collins played him despite going hitless in his first 20 plate appearances after being called up in May. During the slump Evans did draw five walks, including one that helped key a rally from a 7-0 deficit against the Pirates on June 2. Nick may stick, even when the long list of wounded presumably returns in 2012. Evans has shown he can play in the majors and has a really nice glove at first base, plus he is adequate at the other corner spots. So with Nick’s status happily changed from non-playing, he is out of a third straight FNP. Who else had a shot this year?
And the winner is—if you’ve forgotten the headline above—Jason Pridie. The race was never really close. Please handle the award with pride, Pridie—I have been waiting to say that since I fell hard for JP when he came up in April. The Mets needed a center fielder and brought up someone who could pick it and get on base at least once per start (he reached base in each of his first 13 starts). He showed both good defense in center and the ability to hit home runs with men on base when it was completely unexpected (all four of his homers came with runners aboard). It is a tribute to Collins for getting Pridie so much playing time. (Though it also says something about the fragility of Angel Pagan.) I was stunned that Pride had 220-plus plate appearances and that his seven steals tied another surprise, Justin Turner, for most among the extensive Mets rookie class. Only once did Pridie really test me, and that was his strikeout on a questionable pitch in a full count in the Sunday night game against the Cubs. His home run his next time up—with the Mets down by six runs in the 11th—was hit moments after I’d gone to bed in disgust. The Pridie pride was swelling again this Sunday against the Phillies. He was a home run away from the cycle yet stayed within himself. Pridie had to have known of his chance to nudge past Mike Phillips as the most obscure Met to hit for the cycle (Phillips, by the way, sort of acts as the patron saint of FNP Mets). Pridie did not start swinging from his heels in search of that cycle-fulfilling homer. He worked the count, got a 3-1 pitch, fouled it off, and then took an inside pitch for ball four. Nick Evans, on the bench after hustling home from first on a double, may have been wiping away a little tear as Pridie marched to first. They just might make it after all. |
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September 22, 2011 Reflections of a Mets Life: 2003 Record: 66-95 Manager: Art Howe One Line Summary: Howe rhymes with “Ow!” Please end this now. It’s always a little jarring when, after a few years of success, your team sucks from the get-go. The realization can take a lot out of you. Yankees fans have now gone 20 years without this happening, but perhaps one day genetic therapy will allow them to experience this feeling, too. Though I wouldn’t wish Art Howe on my worst enemy. I caught one inning of the Mets opener on TV before I had to leave for the ballpark... in Phoenix. On the way to the park I was so happy I’d decided to stay with the friends and relatives in Arizona while also seeing the end of spring training and Opening Day between the Dodgers and D-Backs. Tom Glavine and Art Howe both debuted as Mets, and though I hadn’t missed a nonstrike Mets lid lifter since 1988, I decided that was fine and dandy if family, friends, and another Opening Day was involved. All I missed at Shea was an historic 15-2 Mets drubbing in near-freezing temperatures. My vacation from reality was short lived. The realization that 2003 was going to be a long year came exactly two weeks after the opener. Four-game sweeps against mediocre teams early in the season have a way of derailing one’s optimism. This sweep occurred in Puerto Rico, where Major League Baseball’s other 29 owners, who now ran the Expos, decided that the team should play arbitrarily-scheduled series against major league clubs in a minor league stadium several countries away from Montreal. Not that they asked for my help in the matter. A nicely-worded form letter from the Expos denied an earlier request for employment. Hey, they seemed desperate. They’d hired Omar Minaya, hadn’t they? The Mets had almost swept the Expos at Shea the first week of the year, but a ninth-inning three-run homer by the immortal Jeff Leifer off Armando Benitez put an end to that. David Cone’s comeback after 11 years away from Shea was billed as a feel-good story for the pitcher rather than the desperation move that it was for the team. After beating Montreal at windswept and frigid Shea in his first start as a Met since 1992, he was pummeled in his next start in Puerto Rico as les Expos became los Expos. Three days later, when the Puerto Rican nightmare was over, you had to question if MLB was threatening to contract the wrong team. In my first meeting with Jon Springer of mbtn.net, we saw Cone get knocked all over Shea by Houston before he left the game with a bad hip. It was his last major league start. Cone pitched a month later in Philadelphia in his final career appearance. By then Mo Vaughn had also played the last game of his career. Though an insurance dodge would require news agencies to post random stories about a Mo comeback, it was clear that he was done. The Mets were better off without him. Just as they were better off without Armando Benitez. As if to showcase his availability, Benitez and his seven blown saves (already more than he’d had in any of his previous four full seasons as a Met) represented the club in the All-Star team. He wisely was not used by NL manager Dusty Baker in the “first All-Star Game that counts!” The day before the break, with terminally-ill Tug McGraw at Shea for the final time, the Mets were in position to salvage a win in a four-game series against the Phillies and end a six-game losing streak. Benitez coughed up the lead, again, but the Mets won in the bottom of the ninth, sending him to the All-Star Game with a vultured victory. Benitez would be a Yankee by the time the break was over, a crosstown debt seemingly owed for handing the Yankees a Sunday night game that should have been the only win the Mets managed against their the Yanks in 2003. Instead the Mets went 0-6, a frightening Subway mugging. “Help, stop that man, he just stole my dignity!” Dignity was in short supply in the Art Howe era. A month into the job, players sat down for haircuts in the locker room in the midst of a blowout loss in St. Louis—Armando supposedly provided a mid-game trim to Rey Sanchez. Howe’s “we’re not in Oakland anymore” moment came during a pre-game discussion when he publicly shared his idea of moving Mike Piazza to first base… without first telling Piazza. Piazza, still very much a catcher, injured his groin in mid-May and was gone for almost four months. Piazza did appear at first base for an inning in the last home game of the year, a night that also marked Bob Murphy’s final game at the microphone. Murph left the booth with the style and grace he had always shown, getting to call one last exciting play when Piazza caught a vicious line drive that could have killed the unsteady first sacker. The team was clearly bad. Howe only made them worse. Since the Mets couldn’t fire a manager partway through his first season with the team—especially after giving him a four-year deal—ownership finally agreed that perhaps Steve Phillips had made one too many bad decisions. Ya think? One of his final calls was a good one: Bring up Jose Reyes. Jose arrived in Texas on the eve of his 20th birthday in June. Phillips had sanely resisted the offer by the Mariners the previous fall to send manager Lou Piniella to New York in exchange for the shortstop prodigy. (Piniella went to Tampa Bay in return for outfielder Randy Winn.) So, rather than hire one of several novice managers available—Willie Randolph was among those interviewed—Stevie Boy called old friend Billy Beane, who played him for a stooge one last time. It was too late to get this one into the soon-to-be-released book, Moneyball, but it would be a perfect fit if the movie has a sequel (ooh, ooh, I have the title: Moneyball II: The Quickening). Anyway, Beane, who loathed Art Howe, let the Mets have the manager for no compensation. Howe generous. The 2002 A’s had set an American League record with 20 straight victories in 2002, winning number 20 the hard way after blowing an 11-run lead to Kansas City. Watching Howe manage in New York, you got the feeling that perhaps those A’s would have won 30 straight games without him. And maybe they’d have managed to win one of the three straight Division Series they played in. But after Howe’s replacement, Ken Macha, coughed up a two games to none lead against Boston in the 2003 ALDS, you couldn’t say Oakland’s shortcomings began or ended with Art. Must I go on about 2003? I really don’t feel like going into new GM Jim Duquette dumping washed-up veterans for “prospects” who never amounted to anything; or the team’s not winning a single game against a contending team in September; or how the Mets recalled 30-year-old minor league scrub Mike Glavine (a first basemen who wasn’t as good a hitter as his brother, Tom, the pitcher); or how the Marlins, who had actually borrowed last place from New York in June following their hiring Jack McKeon, a manager everyone said was too old, clinched a postseason berth at home during the final weekend of the year against the moribund Mets—an indignity that would become more galling as the decade progressed. And don’t even get me started about Aaron Francouering Boone and the Yankees beating the Red Sox in the seventh game of the ALCS—though for one shining moment I rooted for the Marlins as they ruined the Yankees’ assumed coronation. Baseball-wise, 2003 sucked. But I am reminded every day that wonderful things happen even in the darkest days. My son was born that July, during a one-sided loss to the Phillies. He’s a Mets fan from birth. Like his dad he was born during a year (1965) when the Mets finished in last place. Forged in steel, schooled in heartbreak, perpetually awaiting deliverance. |
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September 16, 2011 Reflections of a Mets Life: 2002 Record: 75-86 <-------40 years in we come up with bullet points and such. Fancy. Manager: Bobby Valentine One Line Summary: “Alomar Shrugged” or “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fired.”
By 2002 reality TV had gotten completely out of hand. I tried to steer clear of the genre, but I did find myself engrossed in HBO’s Project Greenlight and learned how difficult—and tedious—it is to really make a movie. I have still never watched any of the movies made during the series, but I would have time to explore all manner of programming. Wouldn’t you know it, reality ruined my year. And I mean actual reality, not the concocted version where Gwen tells Harper her feelings about Ben and we’re all supposed to care that Barbara is in the confessional commode whining about how hard it is to be 21, extremely hot, and living for free in an apartment on a beach with a houseful of supposedly beautiful people. Reality in its natural form ruined my perfect slacker’s holiday the previous November. I strategically arranged a vacation to stay with friends and family in Scottsdale that included two Sundays that my Cardinals just happened to be playing at Sun Devil Stadium. That would land me back home the Monday night before Thanksgiving. I’d go in to the office Tuesday, work that no-one-gets-anything-done Wednesday, and then get the rest of the weekend off for the holiday. It almost worked, too. Except when I was just out of the shower Tuesday morning, I got a call from my boss saying that the planned purchase of our lil’ company by a monolithic publisher had fallen through. I won’t name the publisher, but it rhymes with Condom Louse. My dream job was over. Now have a great Thanksgiving! While I tried to come up with a new career as a full-time freelancer, Steve Phillips was trying to come up with a new team. Wonderboy Stevie had a Hollywood-sized budget to work with and he picked people who had name recognition, if you looked beyond the fading skills and diminishing desire. Sentimentality is the bedrock of baseball fandom, but a roster built around this emotion is built to fail. So two clubhouse cornerstones, Robin Ventura and Todd Zeile, were dispatched. Ventura, whose mojo had been slipping since his magnificent 1999 campaign, was traded to the Yankees, believe it or not. The Mets got back David Justice, who was a paper Met for all of a week before he was dealt to the A’s for two relief pitchers—that term will come up a lot, and I don’t mean justice. Phillips signed two more relief pitchers, David Weathers, 32, and Japan League veteran Satoru Komiyama, 36. And he signed the likes of Pete Walker, 32, and John Frascatore, 31, who didn’t make much impact in 2002. Phillips signed Gary Matthews Jr., not a relief pitcher, but a scrubby outfielder still a few years away from reaping the benefits of steroids and a $10 million annual payday. (Hmmmm. I wonder if the Mets dumping Junior Matt twice had something to do with the hard feelings that made Poppa Sarge recently call the club “a bunch of crybabies.) Phillips made bigger moves. He scraped together the minor leaguers he hadn’t traded earlier and threw them at Cleveland, along with Matt Lawton, for future Barry Bonds BP pitcher Mike Bascik, plus Roberto Alomar, a two-time world champion second baseman and perennial Gold Glover. Alomar had hit .336 the previous year while producing 20 homers, 100 RBI, and 30 steals—numbers so even, it was as if he stopped trying after reaching these plateaus. The Alomar trade was big news, but wait, there’s more. Phillips scraped together a few major leaguers and sent them to the Brewers and Rockies for Dallas Green whipping boy turned slugger Jeromy Burnitz and right-hander Jeff D’Amico—the good Jeff D’Amico (kind of). Roger Cedeno came back to New York, apparently intrigued by all the food options in the Big Apple. Outfielder Tony Tarasco signed as well, perhaps because he heard Mets relief pitchers loved to party. (He was right.) Starting pitcher Pedro Astacio signed as well, having heard that pitchers with their arm attached by a single thread could still make good money in this town. All he had to do was ask Kevin Appier, but before the ink was dry on Pedro’s deal, Appier went west. The overpaid though generally effective Appier was sent to the Angels with three years and $33 million left on his contract for former MVP Mo Vaughn, whose remaining contract (three years, $42 million) was only exceeded by his own girth. He’d gained 30 pounds in two years with the Angels before missing all of 2001 with a torn biceps tendon. The blizzard of moves concealed the fact that a team that had won the National League pennant a year and a half earlier had precious little left from that club beyond the Opening Day battery of Al Leiter and Mike Piazza. The 2002 season began with Leiter beating Pittsburgh’s Ron Villone on Opening Day, but losing the next two games to a team that had Ron Villone as its Opening Day starter was a bad sign. The Mets hung around the wild card standings despite barely playing over. 500 for the first four months of the season. There were high points, such as five-game winning streak on the West Coast in May, though that immediately followed a six-game losing streak at home. On Memorial Day weekend the Mets rallied against Florida’s Braden Looper to take a lead in the eighth, only to see Armando Benitez blow it in the ninth before winning in the 10th on four straight walks. That was offset the next day by blowing a 5-0 lead with Weathers serving up meatballs and both Alomar and Vaughn committing egregious errors in the seventh. The circus came to Flushing on June 15. No matter how much Joe Torre tried to keep Roger Clemens from pitching at Shea, his turn indeed came up in Flushing in the unfair league where pitchers have to actually bat. And retribution was on the agenda for the double sins of 2000: drilling Mike Piazza in the head and later hurling a broken bat at him during the World Series. Former 20-game winner Shawn Estes, imported from San Francisco for fun ’01 Mets Tyoshi Shinjo and Desi Relaford—missed Roger’s big butt. You would have thought the world had ended. If you listened to the yammering meatheads on TV and radio, you would have thought Estes’s home run off Clemens, not to mention Piazza’s, did not count. Personally, I enjoyed how the Mets pounded Clemens and shut up the equally annoying David Wells the next night with a Mo Vaughn homer in the eighth inning to win the series. A cool and collected kid named Johan Santana mowed down the Mets in Minnesota’s first-ever trip to Shea. Despite witnessing a young star named Carlos Beltran working out a walk, going first to third on a scratch hit, and scoring the go-ahead on a flyball, the first-ever Mets-Royals game came down to a less-heralded player’s speed. Tony Tarrasco won the game in the ninth by scoring from second on a ball that didn’t leave the infield. Heavens to Mookatroid! Between June 2 and July 20, however, the Mets never went more than two games over .500, bobbing along five games or so behind in the wild card race, vying for air along with the Giants, Expos, Reds, Marlins, and other assorted teams. Yet the trade deadline would prove as fatal as playing a must-win game on the last day of the season—save for 1999. Is 1-for-4 really so bad… That was rhetorical, the trade deadline gaffes of Steve Phillips were historical. Here’s a look at the Phillipsian deadline deals made a week or less before the deadline. Because of the cutoff, this list skips the 1999 swap for Kenny Rogers (necessary) or the 2001 trade of Todd Pratt (not).
1998 Deal: Bill Pulsipher to Milwaukee for Mike Kinkade. Appraisal: Brought in the fastest HR trot in Mets history.
Deal: Bernard Gilkey and Nelson Figueroa to Arizona for Willie Blair and Jorge Fabergas from Arizona. Appraisal: Superb job of dumping dead weight on an expansion team.
Deal: Leo Estrella to Toronto for Tony Phillips. Appraisal: Useful if undesirable left fielder Tony Phillips (no relation to Steve).
1999 Deal: Traded Brian McRae, Rigo Beltran, and Thomas Johnson to the Rockies for Darryl Hamilton and Chuck McElroy. Appraisal: B-Bye, B-Mac. Hamilton came through in 1999-2000.
Deal: Craig Paquette to the Cardinals for Shawon Dunston. Appraisal: NLCS Game 5 alone makes this deal a winner.
Deal: Jason Isringhausen and Greg McMichael to Oakland for Billy Taylor. Appraisal: Nooooooooooooo!!!!!!
2000 Deal: Jason Tyner and Paul Wilson to Tampa Bay for Bubba Trammell and Rick White. Appraisal: Two shiny former first-round picks for two players who helped the Mets reach the World Series? Brilliant!
Deal: Melvin Mora, Mike Kinkade, Pat Gorman, and Leslie Brea to Baltimore for Melvin Mora. Appraisal: An already bad deal became a 5-for-1 rental when the Mets had to send another minor leaguer to the O’s to make up for Brea lying about his age. And the Mets could have gotten by with Mora plus a late-inning defensive replacement—the Tigers did just fine with an outfielder playing shortstop in the 1968 World Series.
2001 Deal: Dennis Cook and Turk Wendell to Philadelphia for Bruce Chen and Adam Walker. Appraisal: Chen is still pitching 10 years—and seven teams—later; Turk’s arm fell off after the Phils paid him.
Deal: Rick Reed to Minnesota for Matt Lawton. Appraisal: Reeder came out of nowhere to solidify the rotation, put up with scab BS, and just signed a three-year deal in New York. An almost mean-spirited trade that brought back a steroid scrub.
Given all that went before it, I was visibly afraid on July 31, 2001 when the Mets announced they had made a deal—no, make that two. “Please don’t do anything stupid, please don’t do anything…” Too late.
2002 Deal: Jason Bay, Bobby (Lefty) Jones, and Josh Reynolds to San Diego for Steve Reed and Jason Middlebrook. Appraisal: Imagine Bay, who’d been stolen from newbie GM Omar Minaya in March, having his productive years as a Met and letting someone else foot the $15 million per year bill for the late-career garbage time?
Deal: Jay Payton, Robert Stratton, and Mark Corey to Colorado for John Thomson and Mark Little. Appraisal: After Payton finally gets through his growing pains, now you trade him for a fifth starter who wound up hating New York and the Mets? And Corey was traded because he couldn’t handle his weed.
Sure, we all needed to light up after the Mets tanked in the wake of the trades. And if we did anything like that, we were only following the lead of a couple of Mets reserves. After a Mets game in June, Corey had suffered a seizure while getting high in a car with Tony Tarasco, heretofore best known in New York as the right fielder swindled by pre-pubescent Public Enemy Number One Jeffrey Maier in the 1996 ALCS. At only 27 years of age—and with an 8.59 ERA—Corey wasn’t Steve Phillips’s kind of reliever. Neither, it turned out, was Grant Roberts. A September 2002 report indicated that as many as seven Mets were linked to smoking marijuana. Grant Roberts became the new Mets poster boy after a 1999 bong picture—and I don’t mean Korean-born Braves callup Jung Bong—was circulated by a woman trying to extort money from the Mets reliever. The Mets could have closed ranks and sent all inquiries to the legal department. Any other way of handling it would surely make the Mets the butt of every pot-smoking joke growing stale since the ’60s. Just issue a press release, don’t serve pastry. Because pastry is sooooo good, man. It’s just like, y’know, great. I was at a wedding in Maryland at the time, getting dressed and watching the press conference on ESPN. Valentine stated that he could tell if someone in uniform was high. Then the manager made a derisive “stoner” face. You’d like to think that a face made at an unnecessary press conference about a two-bit reliever getting high three years earlier did not cost the second-winningest manager in franchise history his job. Maybe the 12-game losing streak that knocked the team completely out of contention in August played a bigger role. But with Mets ownership… well, you just never can tell what makes them tick. After an abysmal 6-21 August, the Mets had a .500 final month. The overall record was 75-86, the first losing season for the Mets since Valentine was hired late in the 1996 season. It was the first last-place season by the Mets since 1993. As only the Mets can do, the day after the 2002 season ended was even more depressing than losing every home game at Shea in August. The verdict: Valentine was fired; Phillips was not. Bobby V’s reaction: “You mean he stays?” Yes, he stays. So does immovable Mo Vaughn, useless Roger Cedeno, washed-up Jeromy Burnitz, burnt-out Roberto Alomar, plus David Weathers and all the king’s relievers and all the king’s innings eaters. They would all be staying. I had no choice but to stay, too. |
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September 12, 2011 Putting on My Top Hat I haven’t seen such a fuss over hats since that magician in Frosty the Snowman. “Silly. Silly. Silly.” Major League Baseball was/is wrong. And so is Joe Torre, who dared say he was doing “the right thing” in enforcing a stupid MLB mandate not to let the Mets wear the first responder hats during the 10th anniversary game of 9/11. Torre should have put down his Bigelow Tea and told the higher-ups on Park Avenue a few stories about the people he met in the weeks and years after 9/11. And then maybe he should have suggested that the MLB outfitters make “FDNY,” “NYPD,” “PAPD,” and other fitting hats with “NY” on one side and the flag on the back. That would probably have brought in more money for 9/11-related charities than auctions of these now tainted Mets hats. Just when you thought black Mets hats could not look any worse... Or Torre or someone else could have pointed out that the Mets have worn the first responder hats for numerous 9/11 memorial game since 2001! I found a photo from the Daily News of Orlando Hernandez wearing one as recently as 2007. I could swear seeing them wear the hats on at least one other 9/11 game since then, but I haven't located a picture. But you never know which petty thing will set MLB into a tizzy. A few weeks before El Duque and company wore the first responder hats in a real, live 2007 game, MLB performed a mid-game uniform check on Terry Francona at Yankee Stadium to make sure he was wearing a jersey under his ever-present windbreaker. (He was.) Well, there’s not much that can be done about the hats now, or the 1,175 men the Mets left on base until the Cubs finally got tired of gift-wrapping the game and put up a touchdown in the 11th (PAT not included). I thought for a brief second the Mets and Jets were going to pull out comeback victories in the same minute. Oh well. I know what I will do, though. I’m going to wear my son’s FDNY hat when I go to Citi Field Thursday. And I think I’m going to just keep wearing it every time I see the Mets in person. Feel free to join in. I think MLB will do the same thing to me that they would have done to the Mets. Nothing. Hell, I’m a Mets fan. What more punishment could they inflict on me anyway? Some things are bigger than the game. Or Clueless Joe. |
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September 7, 2011 Reflections of a Mets Life: 2001 In my great fortune of writing about Mets history, there are certain events that must be presented in almost every book. There is the ambrosia: 1969, 1973, 1986. The bittersweet: 1988, 1999, 2006. The heartbreaking: 1998, 2007, 2008. And the pathetic: 1962-65, 1977-82, 1992-93, 2003… But there is no season in Mets history, or in my lifetime, that I find harder to write about than 2001. It is tragically unique. The baseball portion of this story is comparatively easy. It begins the previous year, when an overachieving New York ballclub plays a storied New York team in the World Series... the outcome is no Cinderella story. The Mets are flat for almost the first five months of 2001, sitting 13 ½ games out on August 18. Suddenly, the team starts overachieving again, going on a 17-4 spurt that includes shelling Mike Hampton in his first game back after leaving as a free agent and insulting both New Yorkers’ intelligence and the region’s school systems; winning three straight one-run games from the Giants, including a walkoff hit on Irish Night by Rey Ordonez, of all people; five straight wins against the Phillies, including a ninth-inning rally with the go-ahead run scoring on an errant return throw to the mound at the Vet; and another ninth-inning comeback fueled by new Met Matt Lawton (acquired at the expense of beloved Rick Reed), who knocked in the tying and go-ahead runs, after the Marlins walked not quite immortal Mark Johnson to pitch to him. The Mets had a chance to reach .500 for the first time since the opening series of the season, but they lost the Sunday finale in Miami to end a six-game win streak. Oh, well… there’s always tomorrow. Tomorrow was September 10, a beautiful, sunny Monday. Spectacularly uneventful, historically inconsequential. It is these uneventful, inconsequential days strung one after another that make up life. I have a pretty good memory for specific days and such, but I cannot remember a single thing about that Monday except that it was sunny and a travel day for the Mets... and that the day became the demarcation line for everyone in the United States. And beyond. We were so overwhelmed those next few days, it is impossible to recall when all the actions, reactions, and emotions of that time were compartmentalized into the term “9/11.” It doesn’t really matter when or how the phrase came about. Nothing really mattered. There was no work to do at the office. Deadlines became meaningless. Recreation became meaningless. It seemed inconceivable that we would ever get to that point where we would ever have another uneventful, inconsequential day like September 10. I looked almost enviously at my three-year-old daughter or six-month-old puppy as I watched them enjoy their seemingly carefree days. Far from ground zero, the minds of everyone beyond toddler age kept going back to what happened in the city. For the first time in my existence every event was cancelled for almost a week, and not because of the elements. The weather was, in fact, perfect. And though I live in a spot where a dozen or more flights pass by per day, the only objects overhead for those six days were Canada geese. Come Monday, September 17, life was scheduled to start over again. This return to regular life felt forced, strange, unnatural. Any minute a news report or footage of another confirmed death could reduce one to tears. But that Monday’s news blended into baseball, tuned in by habit and professional curiosity more than a need to see a game. The Mets wore their NYPD, FDNY, and PAPD hats in the field in Pittsburgh, so even if you forgot about 9/11 for a moment or two as a ball found the hole, you remembered when the next frame showed Al Leiter standing on the mound in his NYPD cap. And when they showed the view from behind, you saw the American flag stitched on the back of every jersey. And the fact that the series was held in Pittsburgh told yet another story about the ongoing situation in New York. The series with the Pirates was actually scheduled for Flushing, but Shea Stadium was too busy for games. Shea served as a staging area for supplies and even acted as a shelter for workers, so the three games with the Bucs in Flushing were moved to the first week of October—a week added to the schedule as makeup for the games missed after the attacks. Many Mets had been working during the down time, visiting fire houses, hospitals, or—it makes you almost gulp to write it a decade later—newly-created orphans. Bobby Valentine was moving supplies at Shea until he hopped a flight to Pittsburgh a few hours before the first pitch. The players had taken the bus. They swept the series, perhaps the most low-key Mets sweep I’ve ever seen. And as much as people like to go on about PNC Park, the brand-new ballpark was mentioned sparingly in the Mets’ regular-season debut at the place. There was no time to prattle on about bridges, statues, and design nuances when all thoughts were on New York and two buildings that no longer existed. And given that Flight 93 had crashed on 9/11 in Pennsylvania, forced down by passengers rising up against the terrorists... well, everyone was pretty subdued for that first series in Pittsburgh. The Yankees were in Chicago, as scheduled, so when Shea returned to its accustomed role as a ballpark, the Mets-Braves Friday night game was the first outdoor sporting event in New York in 12 days. I pause here to provide some background on my Mets obsession. I have not missed a Mets postseason game since the 1986 championship. You joke, or at least a Yankees fan would, “What’s that, like three games?” Actually, it’s 21 games. And I have lived 100 miles away from Flushing for the last 13 of those contests. In all I went to Shea well in excess of 300 times. In the last weekend of September 2001, I flew from a mobbed San Francisco airport—going ahead with a trip to Pac Bell that DBird and I had long before planned, terrorists be damned—and after a full day at the office I drove to Shea the night after returning home to witness a meaningless Mets-Pirates rescheduled game. And that Sunday I found out the war in Afghanistan had begun from Eddie Coleman on WFAN as I pulled into the Shea parking lot for the even more meaningless season finale against Montreal. So it was peculiar that I wound up missing an event like the first game at Shea after 9/11. But my wife needed my help for a charity auction she was hosting for my daughter’s school, so I was with her that Friday night. That week where life, not to mention baseball, was on hold, I learned—or at least re-learned—that family comes before everything else. I was back home paying the babysitter as Liza Minelli sang, “New York, New York.” It’s not a song or singer I much enjoy, but it was perfect that night at Shea, complete with firemen chorus line and hug to Jay Payton waiting on deck. And an inning later Mike Piazza assured that he would never be booed again in Flushing with what is probably the most memorable home run in Mets history. That home run did not bring me back to baseball as much as the preceding walk to Edgardo Alfonzo did. Because I let out an “ooooooo,” thinking the full-count pitch was strike three—and I shook my head at the umpires and their damned individual strike zones. Just like I always had. Atlanta reliever Steve Karsay, as angry as I was surprised at the call, earned his place in ignominy two pitches later. Even Chipper Jones and Bobby Cox later admitted they didn’t mind losing to the Mets that night. I didn’t mind winning. When the Mets beat Atlanta again on Saturday night—their fifth win in a row—I was tickled that I had a ticket the next day to see if the Mets could pull within 2 ½ games of the hated Braves. In terms of the world, we were living in unprecedented times, the first major foreign attack on the continental U.S. since the British were expelled for good in 1815. But in baseball terms, the team’s 12-2 record to open September was even better than the 10-4 start to the Tug McGraw mitt slapping, Ball-on-the-Wall bouncing, “Ya Gotta Believe” September of 1973. I found myself tuning into sports radio more than news radio that Sunday morning. The world around me was starting to draw me back to the life I’d known on September 10. When Armando Benitez blew the save on that Sunday after Al Leiter spun a gem, I was genuinely pissed off. I barely slept a wink that night. The miraculous Mets climax I had started to believe in turned into a finish where the Mets won the same number of games as the 1973 team, but these 82 wins did not result in a World Series trip. And I would not be rooting for the Yankees out of sentimentality. When Jeremy Giambi did not slide and was tagged out after Derek Jeter’s backhand flip in the ALDS, I was livid. When the Yankees completed their two-games-to-none rally to beat the A’s, I wanted to battle Art Howe and submerge Eric Chavez in boiling oil. When the record-setting, 116-win Mariners turned into sheep in the ALCS against the Yankees, I wanted to crumple up Lou Piniella’s guarantee and burn it along with every Haiku written to Rookie of the Year/AL MVP Ichiro Suzuki. Ichiro Haiku #51 Batsman swings at all As graceful as the swallow Spits bit in the Bronx. And veins were popping from my neck when the Yankees pulled two games out of their arse against Arizona in the World Series. When the Yankees seemed poised to win Game 7 in Phoenix, I walked the puppy in circles in the yard, muttering to myself like a fellow whose heart had clearly returned to its normal baseball size. I came back inside the kitchen, runner on first, Mariano Rivera fielded a bunt and… threw it away. I froze, leash still attached to the pup, as the Diamondbacks rallied for what Greg Prince describes as “arguably the most uplifting non-Mets victory ever recorded.” The puppy and I jumped up and down in the kitchen. DBird, a hardcore Red Sox fan who was at the game that night in Phoenix, took the celebration up a few notches. And our college buddy Paulie, a veteran of two Navy tours, hurled insults at a room full of shattered Yankees fans in a New York watering hole. We were all back to normal. Changed yet still the same. Life continues. That little girl walking around my house smiling while I wanted to cry in September 2001 is now a teenager. The puppy that danced with me in the kitchen after the Diamondbacks won the ’01 World Series is a tired old dog of 10 asleep at my feet. Ten years can go by fast, but I like to think it’s a decade that I have not taken for granted. And I try to neveThe r forget those who left us that day. Or the fact that I am one of the lucky ones. |
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September 1, 2011 Reflections of a Mets Life: 2000 “Imagine if the Mets and Yankees played in the World Series and it ended in a tie!” Sure. And imagine there’s no heaven. It’s easy if you try. The hell that the song said was not below us was actually all around us. Inside Shea Stadium. The last week of October 2000 could have been the greatest moment in Mets history, eclipsing the 1969 Miracle, 1973’s “Ya Gotta Believe,” and even the hysterical climax of 1986. And for a fleeting moment the prize was there for the taking. Then it was gone. I was there when Mike Piazza’s high fly died in center field, but I never saw it come down. The fool inside dreams the ball never descended and the World Series ended in a tie. Imagine. I spent October 1999 to April 2000 as the sole occupant of my father’s house an hour north of Kingston, New York. The area is a bit of mess at this instant, but in the winter of 2000 it was calm, serene—a little too serene some nights—and extremely snowy. My dad spent the winter in Florida. Always the smart one. I oversaw the final stages of a BAB—Big Ass Book, at 1,298 pages, Baseball: The Biographical Encyclopedia certainly qualified. I stayed each night until 10 at a lonely and infinitely vacant building that had housed thousands of IBM workers, almost a decade into their permanent furloughs. I went home to Connecticut on weekends. I’d been made associate publisher, picked up insomnia from the looming project deadline, and suffered loneliness at spending so much time away from my wife and infant daughter. Yet when the book was finally done, a lasting aura of accomplishment remained. A nice feeling for a new millennium. Whenever that began. By the time the book arrived in stores in May, the Mets had managed a nine-game winning streak, immediately followed by a 6-13 skid. And I watched the team from my new home. Two moving vans had packed the family lock, stock, and barrel at the expense of the parent company. Fortunately, they paid the movers in advance. The tech bubble burst a week after we moved. It ruined a lot of people’s dreams, and it ended the parent company’s incessant IPO nonsense and illusions of grandeur. With a lot of hard work, our division stayed afloat and made more books. The Mets helped take my mind off all this. Mike Hampton shored up the rotation and Al Leiter picked up where he left off the previous October (final NLCS start notwithstanding). The irreplaceable John Olerud left for Seattle, to be replaced by Todd Zeile, a pedestrian first baseman but a nice enough fellow. Otherwise, the team seemed like a continuation of the 1999 model, one that still couldn’t catch Atlanta but had enough power to zip by everyone else in the Wild Card race. Not that there weren’t a few bumps along the way. The patented Mets September swoon came early enough in the month to be overcome with relative ease. The slide even produced a Timo Perez out of thin air—though I’d still rather have had a Mora than a Timo. But Melvin had been dispatched to Baltimore for shortstop Mike Bordick. A broken arm forced Rey Ordonez to miss the last four months and then Barry Larkin refused a trade to New York, resulting in Steve Phillips sending Mora and three others to the O’s for Bordick. Orodonez and Bordick would be playing shortstop at the same locales in 2001 where they started 2000. The lateral move cost a homegrown All-Star that Baseball-Reference claims compares most favorably to…Edgardo Alfonzo. But back in May 2000, there were growing doubts than the Mets would reach October again. A four-city trip saw the Mets fall from first place to seven games out. That slump included four excruciating losses at San Francisco’s brand-new gem of a ballpark. If you’re going to get swept, it was a least a nice place for it to happen. Pac Bell was sensational, as I witnessed firsthand during a weekend trip that summer. Dusty Baker’s NL West champs thrived in their new surroundings. Tell me if you’ve heard of a stadium like this—a massive fortress that drove hitters crazy due to its distant elevated fences. The Giants had the pitching staff to utilize their new home as a weapon and possessed a slugger who could clear any wall any place. Ever hear the Giants complain about their ballpark? Come October, those Giants hosted the Mets in the Division Series. The Giants throttled Hampton in the opener, but the Mets incurred one of the most fortuitous injuries in club history. Derek Bell, an amusing if not useful right fielder, injured his leg and Timo took over. Perez, a 25-year-old Dominican outfielder who arrived in New York via Japan, hit .294 the rest of the series and knocked in three runs. The whole ragtag outfield put on a show that made the toothpick drop out of the corner of General Dusty’s mouth. Rookie center fielder Jay Payton pulled the Mets out of the fire by knocking home fourth outfielder Darryl Hamilton with the winning run in the 10th inning of Game 2 after Armando Benitez blew a sure Al Leiter win. In Game 3 the hero was the everyman underdog Benny Agbayani. B-B-B-Benny joined the Mets for the predawn March opener in Japan as a going-away present before being assigned to the minors, but his game-winning grand slam against the Cubs in Tokyo kept him from being demoted. Now it was October in the US of A and Benny’s mighty swing knocked the ball clear through a wall of wind at Shea in the 13th inning of Game 3. Bobby Jones gave the outfielders and everyone else the day off in the clincher the next day with a one-hit shutout for the ages. (For more praiseworthy prose of this grand 24 hours, go here.) The NLCS had a lot of pre-series hype, but this Cardinals team—unlike the ones that beat out the Mets in 1985 or 1987 (or 2006, for that matter)—was a clay pigeon. Catcher Mike Matheny’s birthday gift of a hunting knife resulted in a lacerated hand, making Cardinals fan wish that Matheny preferred golf to hunting. Somehow, though, the Cards caught the Braves napping in the Division Series, marking the first time the Braves had not reached the NLCS in a decade. Those people in St. Louis really are accommodating—even to pond scum—but the Cardinals had pitching problems as well as catching issues. Southpaw Rick Ankiel, who would be voted Rookie of the Year in November, simply lost it. Ankiel set a postseason record with five wild pitches in one inning in the NLDS opener in Atlanta. The Ankiel nightmare resumed in Game 2 of the NLCS, when 5 of his 20 pitches reached the screen in the first inning at Busch Stadium. While only two were considered wild pitches, the Mets seemed on their way to a laugher and a two games to none lead. The Cards twice rallied to tie the game, but once more Jay Payton bailed out the club with a tiebreaking hit in the team’s last at bat. Almost as newsworthy was Armando Benitez protecting the lead in a big game. Games 3 and 4 felt more like Wiffle ball contests than major league games, with balls flying everywhere. The teams split, thanks to a superb long relief effort in Game 4 by Phillips-find Glendon Rusch. The Mets were one win from the pennant. Shea was packed Monday night and a pennant was waiting to be had. Oh, and it was had. The Matheny-free and McGwire-less Cards (injuries limited Big Mac to three pinch-hit at bats) went down without a whimper. Todd Zeile’s bases-clearing double in the third was, I think I can say now, the apex of the Bobby Valentine era. Shea quaked and the Mets were up 6-0. Hampton was working on a three-hit shutout and the place grew louder with every strike. Rich Wilkins lofted a final fly and Timo Perez playfully jumped in the air while waiting for the ball. Shea shook again when he came down. The Mets win the pennant! The Mets win the pennant!! The Mets win the pennant!!! The Mets win the pennant!!!! Might as well celebrate now because it wouldn’t be worth much in a fortnight. I have not attended a Mets-Yankees game since Game 5 of the 2000 World Series. There hasn’t seemed much point. I rooted with all my might for a World Series with the Mariners and ’99 Mets Johnny Olerud and Rickey Henderson, but the M’s were not ready for prime time. And while the rest of the country gnashed its teeth about a Subway Series—a Cleveland radio station postponed an interview with me because of caller anger over trading 2000 ALCS MVP David Justice to the Yankees that July—every metropolitan area writer born before the Dodgers and Giants left town mused about the good old days and how this signaled the dawn of a new age of hyperbole. The pre-Series frenzy was almost fun, but nothing was fun once the games began. I died a little—a lot, actually—in the late innings of Game 1, as every historic Mets break now went against them. The Ball on the Wall became a Yankees’ thing with Timo Perez now playing Richie Zisk, adding his own fist pump. The Mets didn’t run out ground balls, runners on third held their ground instead of heading for home, conceivably reliable closers turned to jelly. The Roger Clemens Game 2 bat throw was surreal. The games at Shea were a nightmare. I would set up a link to the VHS tape Young Tom sent me of Duck and I cheering that was shown on Fox after Benny Agbayani’s tiebreaking hit in Game 3, but MLB would yank it off Youtube quicker than David Cone was removed in Game 4 after retiring Mike Piazza in a key spot. Fox showed Duck and I during the Game 3 rally not because we were stars of a new Fox show, but because we were the only people on the field level rooting for the Mets at Shea Stadium. Among the phone calls I got after the fact was from a close relative asking why I didn’t sell those tickets for big bucks. At the time I was aghast at the suggestion. I was at the pinnacle of my career as an, ahem, executive, and what good were raises and relocations and promotions worth if they didn’t allow a person with an obviously serious baseball problem a chance to sit along the left-field line in the World Series to watch a crosstown matchup that may never occur again. Apparently, no one else felt this way. Seemingly every other Mets fan with seats in that part of the ballpark sold out. A precious few Mets fans actually ended up with tickets there, including Peter Boyle and Matthew Broderick (evened out by the Yankees hat-wearing wifey Sarah Jessica Parker). And while waiting for ice cream Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld were escorted past us wearing Mets black. Star struck, struck down. After the Luis Sojo grounder broke the tie in the ninth in Game 5, I sat silent for 10 minutes. I’d know since the ninth inning of Game 1 that the Mets would never win this Series. Once they ended the Yankees’ streak of 13 straight World Series games won in Game 3, my concern had been just to get to Game 6. Let them celebrate in the Bronx. Allow me the dignity of simply turning off the TV. Through it all, though, I never once thought about selling my tickets. That’s why we’re here. Mike Piazza stepped up against Mariano Rivera. They tying run was on. Crack! The ball seemed to hang up forever, but like Ryan Church’s long fly out to close out Shea’s existence eight years later, I never thought it had a chance. The moment though, seemed to last an eternity. With the ball airborne, I turned and shook Duck hand and then Jimmy Jim’s, their eyes following the ball’s path. I tapped my wife on the shoulder and we left. Our back to the field, a sound of cheering mixed with utter despair filled my ears as I walked through the tunnel, down the ramp, out the gate, and into the night. I refused to look back, afraid to be turned to a pillar of salt as in the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah. Our car was in a chop shop lot. Bob Murphy was still on the dial. Just the sound of his voice was soothing as my wife took us the long way home. If Murph, who’d seen every last thing good and bad that had happened to the franchise, could make it through this, then so could I. The miles passed by. The years, too. |
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August 27, 2011 Cappy, Crappy Weather, and a Season Ticket Solution Little did I know that recalling Al Leiter’s season-on-the-line 1999 two-hitter might rub off on Chris Capuano, who had the game of his life a few hours after I finished my opus on the ’99 one-game playoff. Way to go, Cappy! Even garbage time baseball is sorely missed when a hurricane preempts everything else. Stay safe. And dry. Kudos to the Mets for extending the “kids go free” program, as I suggested earlier. And thank you for the “two-for-one” deal, which let me sit in the Champions Club with MBTN.net’s Jon Springer for two bucks plus one 2010 raincheck. While the Mets are playing generous with the ducats, how about taking care of your most loyal customers: the season ticket holders? They showed enough faith over the winter to pay full boat, but when summer comes the seats in front of them get filled by people who bought tickets through the club for below list prices. I no longer have even a partial plan, but friends of the site who have maintained season tickets this year have told me they feel they’re being taken for chumps. And while the team’s price slashing has been good for the populace, it has stalled the market so season ticket holders can’t get close to 50 cents to the dollar in-season for reselling tickets they can’t use. Here’s a solution. To help prevent another mass exodus of loyal customers in 2012, let season ticket holders pay one price for all 81 games in 2012 and let single-game ticket purchasers deal with your infernal variable pricing plan. And if the team slashes prices during the year, send those who paid full price a set of coupons via Mets.com for selected—read impossible to move—merchandise at the team store. A little good faith on both ends is needed to get everyone through this rebuilding phase. And maybe there’ll be enough in the piggy bank to even keep Jose. |
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August 26, 2011 Reflections of a Mets Life: 1999 When I think of 1999 a thousand different things come to mind. In terms of the Mets, it was one of the most exciting years ever. But excitement is bred by danger, the risk of losing everything with one toss—a roller coaster coming off the track, a pair of dice coming up two instead of seven, a single ballgame where the winner takes all. Baseball does not have a Super Bowl. The standings are decided by playing 162 games and postseason series are decided by five- or seven-game series. Even regular-season series consist of two to four games. Single-game roadtrips are generally only caused by rainouts. With one exception. A one-game playoff is played after two teams are tied for one playoff spot at the end of a season. Unlike football, there are no tiebreaker rules. You break MLB ties in the standings by playing a game—as even the NFL did prior to the 1970 merger. On the final day of the 1999 regular season, the Mets and Reds had identical records. And only one wild card spot. (All high-minded baseball purist disdain for this prize instantly evaporated with personal involvement.) In a span of two weeks, both the Mets and Reds had swung from mortal lock to historical choker. It was no time for the faint of heart. While I’ve written at length about the games on three straight October 1999 weekends that are numbers two, three, and four in my list of favorite Mets games attended, I’ve rarely talked much about the 1999 one-game playoff. Yet I don’t think I’ve ever been as nervous leading up to a Mets game as I was on October 4, 1999. Since it was a road game, there were no plans to fill the idle mind like getting down to the stadium, figuring out tickets, timing, the whole bit. There would be plenty of that to worry about—if the Mets won the game. If the Mets won the game. Sunday night the buzz was starting to wear off, though the sound of the Robin Ventura-inspired “Mr. Mojo Risin’” still rang in my ears. After the Mets had knocked off the Pirates at Shea, we drove from Flushing to Port Chester to watch, or as it turned out, not watch the Reds-Brewers game. Port Chester was where we’d grown up—not the town, but the strip of bars running the length of Post Road on the border of New York and Connecticut. It was like a comfort food we sought, feeling triumphant after the must-sweep of the Pirates. Yet we were still apprehensive that what we were pseudo-celebrating might not be worthy of celebration at all a day hence. Duck, Young Tom, and I were, after all, long-time Mets fans. Any show of hubris could serve as mere fodder for our eventual demise. All we needed to do was reflect on the previous year—the five-game losing streak that ended the 1998 season and put San Francisco and the Cubs in a one-game playoff at Wrigley. I still have a sheaf of unused Mets playoff tickets from 1998. Now it was a Sunday night, October 3, 1999. All was dark, wife and daughter long asleep, and I sat on the couch, still waiting for the Reds-Brewers game to start after a 5 hour, 45 minute rain delay—the longest delay of a game ever played. Once action finally started in the Milwaukee mosh pit, the Reds finally did what they were supposed to have done all weekend: Beat the Brewers. But winning the first two games from the Reds marked the only time I’ve ever been glad Milwaukee jumped to the National League. I still wore my outfit from what I already thought of as the Melvin Mora game at Shea, with my blue Mets cap and striped Brewers jersey bought during a great 1992 trip to Beer City in the waning days of the Jim Gantner Era. I watched the crucial 1999 Reds-Brewers game until midnight, flipping back to the local news repeatedly to catch highlights of Mora touching home plate to be engulfed in teammates. I awoke with a start on Monday. Duck had considered flying to Cincinnati for the game, but we deemed it to be for the best to let things run their course and watch it play out on TV. We’d save the dough and spend it at Shea over the weekend. We hoped. Oh, how we hoped. There was plenty of work to do. A book called Baseball: The Biographical Encyclopedia had been behind schedule from the moment I was handed the project in the spring. It was to include biographies of the 2,000 most important people in baseball history—2,000 for the upcoming year 2000, see what I did there? I was in charge of updating the bios we had, assigning the ones we didn’t have, and make the whole thing a massive book—with photos and color illustrations for every page—to be in stores for Father’s Day, 2000. I had an army of editors and writers, but I was still perpetually behind schedule. Things I thought would take an hour wound up taking a day. People I thought were capable, weren’t. And I was also supposed to permanently move to our company’s publishing HQ in Kingston, NY. For a year I’d commuted 120 miles two days per week: driving up in the morning, working all day, being put up at the Holiday Inn, working the next day, and then driving back home to Connecticut. I kept putting off the big move, prolonging it until baseball season was over. I was going to enjoy this last season of relatively short drives to Shea. By 3 p.m. on October 4, 1999, I could no longer wait. For baseball, that is. I turned on the FAN in my home office and succumbed to the prattle and predictions of “Mike and the Mad Dog.” I did paperwork while hanging on every word about the game. And then I missed the start. First Inning Eating dinner and putting the baby to bed must have taken considerable time because next thing I knew I looked at my watch and shouted, “Holy crap, the game is on!” I ran down the stairs, lunged for the TV, and there was Edgardo Alfonzo rounding third base in a home run trot. “The Mets are winning,” I mumbled. Two batters, two hits, two nothing. Oh, how I loved Fonzie! A quiet professional who does his job very well and very quietly. Alfonzo’s hit right after Mora’s in the ninth inning the previous day had set the stage for the intentional walk and the wild pitch that pushed the Mets into this game. Switching to second base to accommodate the arrival of free agent Robin Ventura, Alfonzo had a season like no second sacker in Mets history before or since—unless you want to argue about the .324 Fonzie hit the next year. Exactly five weeks before the one-game playoff in Cincinnati, he had enjoyed the only 6-for-6 day in Mets history, tying a club record with three homers and setting new marks with six runs and 16 total bases in one game. Now his 27th home run of the year knocked in his 106th and 107th runs. As thankful as I was to Fonzie for all he’d done, his blow in Cincy jangled a whole new set of nerves for me. All the nervous anticipation that had gone into this moment was now focused on not blowing the lead. OK. Only nine innings to go. And Al Leiter walks the leadoff batter. Al Leiter hadn’t made 1999 any easier. Deemed the de facto ace after his 17-6 season the year before—a win total no Met has reached since—Leiter was thoroughly mediocre in his second year with the team. Al was a great interview and probably had a postseason ESPN studio gig lined up for the next day if the Mets got ousted. Watching him pitch, however, could drive one insane. He was all over the place, channeling Tug McGraw’s emotions and Doug Sisk’s command—but when he was on, Leiter could indeed be an ace. And he was very much the ace that evening in Cincinnati. Pokey Reese didn’t move off first as Greg Vaughn went down looking to end the first. Second Inning After the Mets were retired in order by Steve Parris, a rookie with an 11-3 mark, Jeffrey Hammonds singled to left to start the Cincinnati second and bring the tying run to the plate. Leiter had a losing record until his win the last week of the year broke the club’s stupefying seven-game losing streak. Again he bore down, retiring the next three batters. Third Inning Parris lost his poise with two outs and nobody on. Alfonzo walked, John Olerud doubled to right, and Parris then walked Mike Piazza intentionally. Lefty Denny Neagle, a 20-game winner two years earlier, came on to face Robin Ventura—always dangerous with the bases loaded. Neagle went to a full count and then walked him. 3-0 Mets. Leiter walked another in the third but set down the Reds. Fourth Inning Leiter grounded out to end the top of the fourth, but that was all right as he then retired Cincinnati in order for the first time. Fifth Inning Someone must have told Rickey Henderson that he was leading off the game instead of the fifth inning because Rickey crushed a home run to left off Neagle to make it 4-0. The Mets loaded the bases with two outs and were just a base hit away from actually making me feel comfortable. Though Roger Cedeno whiffed to end the inning, Leiter retired the side in order again to allow me to smile in spite of myself. Sixth Inning Rey Ordonez started the inning with a walk—yes, a walk. Believe it or not, the unwalkable Rey-Rey drew 49 free passes during the year, hit .258, and knocked in 60. (By gum, every Met had their hitting shoes on in ’99!) Leiter sacrificed Ordonez to second. Then Fonzie drilled a two-out double to bring Rey-Rey home to make it 5-0. Did I say I loved Fonzie earlier? Yes, I did. But RBI 108 for a 5-0 lead in the first one-game playoff in franchise history pushes the love to a higher plane. Everything was working for the Mets now. Leiter got three flyballs, making it 13 straight Reds set down. Did I say how much I loved Leiter? Seventh Inning A two-out Mets rally goes for naught, but no matter. Cincinnati’s 4-5-6 hitters go down 1-2-3. Eighth Inning After going down in order against Danny Graves, the Mets took the field in the bottom of the inning with Melvin Mora in left field for defense. You could start counting outs now and not feel premature. And then Leiter walked the leadoff batter, the first Red to reach since the third inning. Aaron Boone then rapped into a double play. Best infield ever, don’t ya know. Ninth inning As the Mets failed to score despite a couple of hits in the top of the inning, I was working myself into a lather about the bottom of the ninth. Leiter had thrown a lot of pitches—110 through eight innings—but back in ’99 pitchers sometimes kept on pitching regardless of this newfound reliance on the pitch count. The guy has a one-hitter, for Christ sakes, of course he’ll pitch. But this game can’t get away. It just can’t. Who says Mets fans are insecure? I do. Pokey Reese, who would steal the Gold Glove from Alfonzo in the rigged balloting announced a few weeks later, led off with a double. “Take Leiter out!” “No, he’s only allowed two hits all night.” “He can’t be trusted.” “He’s got a shutout going. He can do this. Gooden clinched the division with a complete game in ’86. Darling did the same in ’88. It’s been a long wait. Let Al do this now.” “You sure?” “I’m sure.” “This is really important.” “Let it happen.” Too bad there was no one else in the room. My sanity failing, Leiter was rallying from a 3-0 count to retire Barry Larkin. He then whiffed Sean Casey, who broke the bat over his leg in frustration. A fan ran on the field. Bobby Valentine, who had been suspended the last time the Mets had been in Cincinnati as punishment for his earlier post-ejection sunglass and eye-black tape dugout disguise, cursed the timing of the Cincinnati miscreant. Bob Murphy called the intruder “some idiot.” I wasn’t the only one on edge. Coach firings, three months of .600 ball undone by a bad week, ill-timed Sports Illustrated remarks by Valentine... it had been a long year just to get to a game 163. Leiter walked Greg Vaughn on five pitches, yelling at himself as he put two runners on base in the same inning for the first time all night. The fans stayed in the stands, Valentine stayed in the dugout, Leiter stayed on the mound, and dangerous Dmitri Young approached the plate. He took a strike and then hit a line drive past Leiter. “Oh God, it’s going through, a run’s going to score, first and third, Jeffrey Hammonds up, followed by Taubensee. You don’t know if Benitez will have it when he comes in…” Fonzie ranged over and grabbed Young’s liner. Ah, scouting. Ah, Fonzie. It was over. The game. The season. It marked the only time other than ’73 that the Mets have won their last game to clinch a postseason spot. I was ready to celebrate. I cracked a little novelty egg filled with confetti and poured it over my head as I hugged my wife, who’d recently deemed the room safe for reentry. The dog even looked relieved. Duck called and I stood on the porch in the rain gasping between gulps of a mini-bottle of champagne that had been in the fridge since we’d moved in three years earlier. “Allow me to crack the bubbly.” I don’t know what I told Duck as the rain washed the bits of confetti from my hair. It was probably something like Bobby V. was saying at that same moment: “It’s a lot of emotions. I don’t know if I’m smart enough to tell you all of them.” There were great moments—plus a heartbreaking finish—in the weeks that followed, but in many ways it felt like the Mets were playing with house money compared to playing with the deed to the house on the table in Cincinnati. And in hand were three aces in Alfonzo, Henderson, and of course, Leiter. Plus a pair of kings in Bobby V. and the grateful Mets faithful. A good hand. A great team. |
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August 8, 2011 The Parnell Sunday News I should have known my concerns about a drawn-out, extra-inning affair were unfounded when Bobby Parnell came out for the ninth inning on Sunday. Three straight Sundays now he’s taken the loss. I won’t let the defeat to the Braves take away from what was a really fun day with the family at the park. Just before bed, when I asked my eight-year-old son who had won, he said, “the Braves.” For a Mets Kids Club member who has yet to come down with a true case of Mets fever, that’s good memory. As he fell asleep I whispered in his ear over and over: “Braves are bad, Atlanta is evil. Braves are bad…” Actually I didn’t do that last part, but now that I think of it—“Brainwashing: It’s All We Have Left.” In terms of honesty and ingenuity, that motto plastered on the side of the stadium is superior to “The Magic Is Here, Come See It.” While taking potshots at the Mets is something bloggers have become quite adept at since the blogosphere blossomed, let me commend the Mets on their “kids go free” program that ended Sunday. We got seats in the back row of section 136 in the lower stands in left field for $54 each, including fees and such. Still overpriced? Sure. But we only had to pay for two seats for the four of us. So it was actually a deal—at Citi Field! I wish more people knew about this, including the fellow who sat next to my wife with a kid on his lap who squirmed more than Dillon Gee in his five innings on the mound. But great job with the promotion, Mets. I initially was pretty annoyed that I couldn’t arrange for seats over the phone, but I did it on Mets.com and when I swiped my credit card at the kiosk out front of the park on Sunday, the four tickets suddenly appeared. Now that’s magic. Trust me, I'm not suddenly a shill for the Mets ticket department, but I want to give credit where it is due. And I also saw that the Mets have a great deal for high school and college students to go for $10. I’ve got a little time before my children qualify for that, but if they resume the “kids go free” promotion in September, I might even go through the four-hour travel ordeal once more with them to see the Metsies. If you can’t have meaningful games in September, how about meaningful savings? |
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August 2, 2011 Reflections of a Mets Life: 1998 Sure, we all know too well what it’s like now to go into the final day of the season needing a win to try to get into the postseason… and losing. But in 1998 that had never happened before to the Mets. And it seemed unlikely… until that final week. Yet 1998 was a Mets epiphany for many people. The 1997 turnaround hadn’t really gotten through to the masses, but the Mets suddenly appeared on everyone’s radar on May 26, 1998. General manager Steve Phillips was rolling the dice and coming up sevens in his “prospects-for-pricey-players” crap game in 1998. In three separate deals Phillps sent eight prospects to the dismantling Marlins for Dennis Cook, Al Leiter, and Mike Piazza, in that order. The only two who became major leaguers of note were A.J. Burnett in the Leiter deal and Preston Wilson for Piazza. Thirteen years later most people would do those deals again. The trades did, however, empower FrankenStevie through the years to keep trading more and more minor leaguers for lesser and lesser major leaguers, until the bullpen was full of old slop-throwing middlemen and the prospect cupboard was bare. But in 1998, that wasn’t a worry. In 1998 the worm had turned. Saving Private Ryan was the best picture of 1998, regardless of what the Academy of Arts and Sciences said, but the 1998 film I’ve seen more than any movie that year—and viewed more than any movie except for Caddyshack—was A Bug’s Life. It was the film my infant daughter wanted to see every day—kids can be that way, I learned. The wife and I even even enjoyed a pre-viewing and I post-viewed the tape plenty of times, with the other audience member plopped in my lap and giggling. It’s just about the best Disney effort since the Aristocats, which I’ve also seen a few dozen times thanks to kids and the miracle of the VCR, which still ruled the waves back in ’98 (and still does in our throwback house with the mountain of videotapes I’m not ready to ditch). Yet watching TV only held so much comfort for me in 1998. The early months of that year were a fog. My mother died Christmas night in 1997, kind of sudden, and a month later my daughter was born, about three weeks early. She was healthy, but I was far from ready for the sea change her arrival meant. But like the arrival of the best catcher in the game to Shea that year, I was able to get used to the concept pretty quickly. By then I had been moved to a home office at full salary by the parent company that bought Total Sports. I did the writing, research, and public relations required by my bosses, but I don’t think I could have done the office thing of pretending to be interested in everyone else’s stuff or talking about the latest news and gossip and what all. Sometimes I just came to after staring out the window for an unknown amount of time, lost in reminiscences after something made me think of my mom. Or I might just be zoned out from the sleep disruption that comes from an infant who wakes repeatedly to eat or cry or whatever she feels like doing. When an unexpected call came that we had a deal to do several team books with the NFL and I would handle the editing, I gladly threw myself into the project. When baseball season arrived I threw myself into that, too. Even with the books and baby, I met the Mets in person more often than I ever had before. The day Piazza debuted was the same day my daughter—not yet four months old—made her Mets debut. (To read about that game, number eight on my all-time favorite games witnessed at Shea, go here. The year began with a sultry 87-degree opener turned frigid as a scoreless game went into the 14th inning before an Alberto Castillo single mercifully ended it. Two weeks later I saw Rick Reed’s home run off Steve Trachsel beat the Cubs in the night portion of the two-team twinbill in Queens necessitated when a Yankee Stadium beam collapsed. The Yankees won a Shea matinee against the Angels, outdrawing the Mets handily. In June Reed outdid himself, tossing a perfect game until two were out in the seventh in the first game the Mets ever played against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Of course Reed didn’t get the no-no, but he did throw a three-hit shutout. We also learned nutcase baseball owner Vince Naimoli freaked out when the Shea scoreboard just read “Tampa” and not “Tampa Bay”—I know you no longer own the team, Vince, but we can still ship you Jason BAY C.O.D if that’ll make you happy. Tampa was one of four teams that came to Shea to face the Mets for the first time in 1998—five if you somehow don’t count Baltimore’s postseason trip to Shea in 1969. Also coming to town in ’98 were the league-swapping Brewers, the brand-new D-Backs, and this team from the Bronx that simply did not lose. I got to the first-ever Mets-Yankees game at Shea extra early and, sitting about a dozen rows from the field, watched the Yankees stretch and preen in front of me. As the hushed masses in their ugly Modell’s jerseys stared in awe at Derek Jeter, I broke the mood with a thunder-clapping yell of “Mariah!” A real shame that the shortstop and the drama queen’s tabloid romance was now a nomance. Derek and his pals got the last laugh. I was still livid about Paul O’Neill’s home run as we sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the way home. Smitty playfully bounced the football he’d brought to throw in the parking lot against the back of my head. I warned him not to do it again. Of course he did. And then did it again. Still stuck in traffic, I grabbed the ball and hurled it out the window. It bounced once—a perfect spiral—before disappearing forever in a wooded patch off the Hutchinson River Parkway. A la John Belushi after breaking the troubador’s guitar at the Delta House, I muttered, “Sorry.” I did subsequently buy him two new footballs. I should have charged them to Mariah Carey’s heartbreak posse. I was in a froth for the Sunday night game as the Mets tried to avoid the sweep by a Yankees team playing .743 ball midway through the season. (They did set a record for AL victories in a season that lasted all of three years with 114 wins, not 125 as it became fashionable to say—trust me, I put together the official encyclopedia of Major League Baseball that year and you don’t mix the regular season and postseason like it’s Chex party mix.) The Sunday night game was super tense as the score stayed tied in the bottom of the ninth. Carlos Baerga lofted a deep fly to bring in the go-ahead run, yet the runner on first, Brian McRae, somehow got tagged out after the game was officially over. The Mets won, but only after an argument. How I loathed B-Mac! When not attempting to give back a victory, McRae became the last player I ever booed at Shea. I was booing B-Mac a few weeks after the Sunday night game, telling everyone who would listen how much he sucked. Then lo and behold he crushed one of his 21 home runs of 1998. And there I was, forced to either continue berating him as he trotted or cheer him as he added a run on the board. I cheered, of course. He was, above all other things, a Met. And right then I promised I would never again boo a Met. And though I have been tempted, I have yet to break my oath. Because booing your own, as we learned the hard way in 1998, is stupid. Piazza had the best partial season in franchise history—and he was more productive than just about any Met over a full season between ’69 Cleon and ’84 Keith. Not only did Piazza hit 23 homers and drive in 76 in just 109 games, he put together a line of .348/.417/.607. The Amazin’ thing was that John Olerud was actually better. Johnny O. put up a .354 average and .447 OBP in 160 games, both still club records. Yet somehow Piazza was booed routinely in those first two months as a Met. There’s nothing so self-righteous as a newly-reformed booer and I wanted to chase down anyone guilty of such idiocy. Well, maybe not chase down, but say as loud as I could, “I hear Tim Spehr’s feeling better now, or how about Alberto Castillo?” Referring to the catchers the Mets had on the Opening Day roster. By midsummer, the Mets had another catcher back: Todd Hundley. Hundley, an All-Star the previous two seasons, was the reason the Mets originally weren’t going after Piazza. I’m still not sure if I’m willing to fully credit the sudden pursuit of Piazza to Nelson Doubleday, who chimed in after the original denial of Mets interest in Mikey P. (I’m certainly not giving credit to Mike Francessa, who belabored the topic for a week and then was besieged with thanks from Mets fans as if he had personally handled negotiations.) When Hundley was finally healthy in the second half, it was sort of like: “Great, you’re back, Todd. Now go get your shine box.” They tried Hundley briefly as an outfielder. He made Dave Kingman look like Garry Maddox. For Hundley, the son of an ironman catcher, it had to be pretty humiliating butchering balls in left field at Wrigley, where his dad Randy was an All-Star. Yet the Mets still managed to win a twinbill at the Friendly Confines in July. Even after the Mets lost close games the next two days to split the series, they were done for the season with Chicago, where Sammy Sosa was hitting home runs like he’d stumbled into the Gamma Ray extract that made him a scowling blue hulk. A similar elixir made Mark McGwire a happy red hulk, but I’m not here to talk about the past. The Mets and Cubs battled for the wild card until the final week. The Giants, the previous year’s NL West champs, seemed done. And when Cubbie Brant Brown dropped a fly ball in left field in Milwaukee that let three runs score in the ninth, it looked like the Cubs were done, too. But this wasn’t 1969. Carl Pavano, acquired in the Pedro Martinez deal the previous fall, blanked the Mets in the final home game of the year as the Mets were swept by the last-place Expos. The stands at Shea were as empty as our hopes had suddenly become. That weekend the Mets were skunked in Atlanta—at least that one time the coup de grace was performed by a playoff-bound team. The Giants played, and lost, the one-game playoff at Wrigley the day after the season. I could not watch. I did not even watch most of the final weekend due to a previous engagement... with baseball. A wonderful trip with the Mrs. and the little one to the Hall of Fame, my first such trip since 1976, kept me from looking directly into the eye of the desolation, but I knew it was happening. You can’t keep baseball secrets in Cooperstown. And if that town teaches one thing about the game is that it’s not fair—beautiful, but not fair. Like life itself. Years of too-intense study of baseball has taught me that the game evens out for the majority of teams—not for the Yankees, who won in ’98, and ’99, and… Yet everyone else may have to wait a lifetime for their moment. Or even longer, as the Cubs learned when they were dispatched by the Braves as easily as the Mets had been a few days earlier. Or your team may just have to wait till next year. <> <> <> But why wait to get to the ending, pick up New York Mets: The Complete Illustrated History and find out, as Paul Harvey liked to say...“The rest of the story.” |
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July 11, 2011 Reflections of a Mets Life: 1997 The Mets took me totally by surprise in 1997. A lot of things did. For one, the Mets played the Yankees. For real. Before we were bludgeoned over the head with it for two weekends per year, it was an Amazin’ novelty that even had a purist like me using the busy redial feature on my office phone to score eight tickets for the first game between the clubs in the Loge at Yankee Stadium for $21 each—oh, for the days of pre-Subway gouging. As eight of us took two and a half hours to drive 20 miles to the Bronx—my car only broke down once—our Robert E. Lee-like invasion commenced with the enemy already engaged. The Mets were on the scoreboard as I glimpsed my first view of Mets-Yankees baseball; a second later Todd Hundley stole home. Dave Mlicki pitched a shutout. Mets-Yankees would never get better from a Flushing perspective. The year would get even better. And quickly. After the Mets lost the last two to the Yankees during this earth-shattering midweek series—yes, it was actually held on Monday and Tuesday nights, concluding with a Wednesday matinee!—you worried that maybe they’d start sputtering after a dizzying 34-21 stretch. The Mets showed no ill effects with a four-game sweep of the Pirates at Shea, coming back to win two games in the series despite blowing leads in the ninth. The sweep was climaxed by Carl Everett, whose three-run homer capped a 12-9 win in 10 innings on Sunday. Coming home from a weekend with the guys in Vermont, I caught the last few innings on TV in an empty house. I couldn’t have been happier. Or so I thought. My wife came home just after C. Everett’s coup with news she hadn’t wanted to share over the phone. There was going to be another Mets fan in the family, the due date right around my birthday in February. There was dancing in the streets, Austin Powers style. It was 1997, but we were feeling cheeky and fab like it was 1967. I’d spent most of the previous fall and winter studying the Mets. I was a wet-nosed rookie with Total Sports empowered to pitch book ideas to every major league team. As I called and pestered all 28 clubs—as publisher of the official encyclopedia of Major League Baseball, access to the clubs was one of our few perks—it seemed clear that most of them weren’t big on history and even fewer were big on doing anything out of house. Believe it or not, the Mets were the one who bit on my historical book lure. It felt like a Dave Kingman blast landing in the parking lot. Total Sports produced a 128-page book called Total Mets as a giveaway to season ticket holders. The books were also sold at their concession stands (though they mostly seemed to gather dust at Shea—a few are still boxed somewhere in my attic). This was essentially the first sale of anything in my life (other than gasoline, if you count my pump jockey past). The Mets paid the company much-needed cash for the finished product, which I put together from existing material and by cranking out a lot of new stuff. Six months earlier I’d been covering high school baseball, now I was putting together a book on my favorite major league team. And that favorite team was good. That was as big a surprise as me making a sale. The Mets looked like dead club walking on Opening Day, an April Fool’s joke. On the afternoon of April 1, 1997, the Mets took a 4-0 lead into the sixth inning in San Diego—these were the days when MLB still pretended to care enough about the fans to have cold weather teams open against warm weather clubs. The Mets might as well have been playing in the arctic circle because California didn’t do them solid. The Padres put up an 11-spot in the sixth in the opener and took two of three. So did the Dodgers. And the Giants. The Mets lost games that lasted 12, 14, and 15 innings on that first excruciating roadtrip. So not only did the team have no luck, but their pitching staff was worn out nine games into the season. And then the home opener—scheduled for a Saturday so as not to conflict with the opening ceremonies for the world champion Yankees!?!—was rained out… after we stood under the Grand Central Park overpass for three hours. So the home portion of the season began with a doubleheader loss to the Giants on Easter. San Francisco completed the three-game sweep the next night. Since the Mets had traded Jeff Kent to the Indians the previous July, Kent had been traded again, to San Francisco, where he began a mission to become one of the greatest second baseman of all time. He went 7 for 16 in his first go ’round against the Mets, with two homers and six RBI. (For his career, Kent would hit 14 homers in 80 games against the Mets, with a .282 average and .363 OBP—and he’d also break up a Bobby Jones postseason no-hit bid). Back in 1997, a dozen games had been played. The Mets were 3-9. Is everybody happy? Well, yes, actually. The next night, frigid April 15, the Mets and MLB celebrated the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s breaking the color barrier. The place was packed on a Tuesday. Security was at an all-time high because President Bill Clinton was at Shea. Jackie’s widow, Rachel Robinson, was there. And—this made Fred Wilpon really excited—the Dodgers were on hand as well. Everyone from Jesse Jackson to Spike Lee to Joe Black to Ralph Branca came to Shea, along with several Hall of Famers and dignitaries. And they were all upstaged by mousy Bud Selig, who announced that from that day forward number 42 would be retired in honor of Robinson throughout organized baseball. Play stopped in the fifth inning—once the game was official. When the 35-minute proceedings ended, not only were the starting pitchers gone, but so were most of the 54,000 around me. Buster Olney reported in the New York Times that “only a few thousand fans stayed around to see the end of the Mets’ 5-0 victory.” The audience-challenged Mets would finish 10th in the 14-team NL in attendance and would not get within 10,000 of the Jackie Robinson Night crowd the rest of the year. The ’97 Mets were like a great restaurant that only you, your spouse, and a handful of others seemed to know about. Table for two, no waiting. The season really began for the Mets on April 15. From that night forward the Mets had the second-best record in the NL at 85-65, actually 1½ games better than Florida’s get-rich-quick (and get-poor-even-quicker) scheme. Unfortunately, the first 12 games of the year counted in the standings, so the Marlins would win the wild card—not to mention the World Series. The Mets, however, won back the hearts of a few disillusioned fans. The Marlins, whose fire sale of stars began shortly after the victory parade, only wish they could have achieved as much long-term goodwill. The Sunday after the Robinson Night, my wife and I took in a doubleheader against the Cubs on a sunny afternoon. We brought our own snacks and read the Sunday New York Times between games like the sophisticated New Yorkers that we were not, gabbed with people sitting around us about the Mets’ lopsided win in the opener, and stayed for every pitch—all the way to the last one thrown by Turk Wendell… the Cub. Wendell gave up a two-run double to Met Lance Johnson to make it a one-run game in the ninth, but he got the final out to end Chicago’s record 14-game losing streak to start the season. It was funny that Lance and Turk would be swapped for each other four months later in a deal that I have yet to understand by a general manager I still don’t know why they hired. Steve Phillips was a career Met. He’d gone from prospect to mediocre minor leaguer to slick front office guy. I thought GM Joe McIlvaine was doing a great job. Yes, he did let the team oversell Generation K and he traded Jeff Kent for Carlos Baerga, but I still think that evened out by trading Robert Person for John Olerud (and getting the Blue Jays to pay them $5 million). Joe Mac also had the onions to hire Bobby Valentine and promote Rick Reed. Joe Mac’s tenure dated back to the start of the Frank Cashen regime with a little prodigal son parable thrown in. He’d left New York for San Diego and came home when the Padres initiated a fire sale on his watch. McIlvaine had overseen the overhaul of the 103-loss Mets and put a lot of the pieces in place for the turnaround of 1997. Just after the Mets rallied from a 6-0 deficit in Atlanta to win their first series at new Turner Field on July 13, McIlvaine was fired. Why quibble? The ’97 Mets were pulling wins out of every orifice. They created one of my favorite mental exercises: What lineup will Bobby V. use today? The Mets were far from a star-studded club and Valentine mined the talent daily. He plugged the rotation with Babe Ruth ringer Brian Bohanon in place of Pete Harnisch, who’d battled depression since the Opening Day debacle. (That Valentine and Harnisch later got in a shouting match is another matter.) The All-Stars on the Mets were pedestrian Bobby Jones and bystander Todd Hundley, whose injury in midseason brought up another Joe Mac reclamation project: Todd Pratt. And I’m still convinced that McIlvaine would have found a way to keep Cory Lidle from being exposed to that fall’s expansion draft—to become a Devil Ray, whatever in hell that was. After Phillips was hired, the Mets—with needs in several areas—did not pull of a trading deadline deal. Eight days later they traded starting pitcher Mark Clark, infielder Manny Alexander, and single-season hits and triples leader Lance Johnson to the Cubs for center fielder Brian McRae and relievers Wendell and Mel Rojas. While it did net Turk, the trade essentially gave the Cubs an out for Rojas, a reliever they’d signed to a big contract who now couldn’t get anyone out—in Chicago or New York, it soon became apparent. Duck met me at Shea the night of the trade. Before cell phones became news providers, I came across him staring up at the scoreboard, saying, “Who is number 56 and why is he batting leadoff?” A scoreboard news flash that turned out better occurred on Keith Hernandez Day in September, a day after the Mets rallied from a 6-0 hole in the ninth on a game-tying grand slam by Carl Everett and a game-winning three-run shot by Bernard Gilkey two innings later. I had visions of the Mets retiring Mex’s number on the day he was inducted into the team’s Hall of Fame. That concept was quickly nixed when I saw number 17 batting seventh in that day’s lineup: the great Luis Lopez. I should have known better than to dream of two numbers being retired at Shea in one year. True to ’97 form, the Mets won when Lopez homered for the only run of the game. The lead was preserved in the ninth by a perfect relay from Gilkey to Ordonez to Pratt to nail ex-Met David Segui at the plate. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen a trainer run out to argue a play with an umpire and get ejected. You didn’t need a medical degree to know Segui was safe. But we took it. Fans never really got behind the Mets and their race against the Marlins. Attendance on Keith’s day was buoyed by a giveaway of tickets to Saturn owners throughout the tri-state area. The game in which they were eliminated at Shea in the final week of the season drew just 14,000—including me and the Mrs. WFAN had such a apathetic radio audience for the final Friday night game of the year that I was able to hit redial and get Eddie Coleman right back on the line after I blew the initial answer to his trivia question: “Who was the first Atlanta Brave to win a World Series game.” I flipped a few pages in Total Baseball, always open on my desk then, and gave the proper response this time: “Jim Clancy.” Eddie C. announced my name and I wound up with a year’s subscription to Mets Inside Pitch. It was a good promo because I have re-upped for that fine publication every year since then. But there were more consolation prizes to come. At the final game of the year, Duck, Smitty, and I tippled back a few beverages and were thrilled beyond words when Olerud homered off Atlanta’s Denny Neagle to push him over 100 RBI. A man and his young son next to us looked at us strangely. I thought he was going to reprimand our zeal. Instead he said: “They just announced ticket numbers for the team raffle. I didn’t win, but I think you did.” So I tottered over to the area where the prizes were and recognized the person who authorized Total Mets. I shoved a big wad of gum into my mouth and casually came over to say hello and show her my ticket. I thought she might give me one of those “prizes are not permitted for Mets employees or their licensees.” She said I’d get a game-worn jersey from one of the Mets on the field that afternoon. I studied the box score of that last game in the back of my new Inside Pitch. As the Indians knocked off the Yankees in the NLCS and the Marlins beat Cleveland for the world championship, I held out hope the jersey would be Johnny O. or Fonzie or even crazy Carl Everett, though he’d soon be traded because of a Mets-related child care incident that was about as bad as anything Frankie Rodriguez did in 2010. Which jersey would it be? The number of scrubs in that last game boxscore was ridiculous. Juan Acevedo and Alberto Castillo were the starting battery, for crying out loud, and the game also saw Shawn Gilbert, Roberto Petagine, Jason Hardtke (the runner up to Pratt in my Favorite Non-Playing Vote voting), plus some player I don’t even recall named Mendoza. Each time the Fedex truck drove through my neighborhood, I looked out to see if he was delivering any jersey-sized packages to my door. Finally, the Fedex truck pulled in the driveway. A white Mets jersey tumbled out of the Fedex bag. It was all-white like the team had gone to in 1997, it had the Jackie Robinson sleeve patch, and then I held it up to see the number… 23. Bernard Gilkey. Sure, he’d had a down year, but it could have been B-Mac. A few days later I was having lunch at home and the Fedex guy pulled up again. This package contained a small box made out to me… from WFAN. I opened it up and there was a Croton watch in a display case. It was gold colored and had a tag that stated its value at almost $300. Seems there was a prize beyond the Inside Pitch. FAN must have been getting rid of their inventory and I got lucky. I’m wearing the watch now. Keeps good time. Just like ’97—one hell of a good time. |
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July 14, 2011 All-Star Book Break: Reading Double With Francisco Rodriguez dispatched to Wisconsin (a salary issue the Mets simply had to deal with), let’s use the extra day of the All-Star break for a makeup doubleheader. Two books that came out last year and I read them this spring, when it was rainy. Now in hot and hazy July, I present a “Let’s Play Two” review. First Game Big Hair and Plastic Grass by Dan Epstein Having grown up in the 1970s, that decade is my touchstone. Though I appreciate the 1980s, especially, of course, the ’86 Mets, and I’m hip with what’s gone done since, I feel eternally connected to the 1969 and 1973 teams that I did not see in person but lived through vicariously thanks to the Kiner-Nelson-Murphy rain delay favorite World Series highlight films (please dig these up and put them on the tube, SNY!). I also appreciate the 1970s in general, mish mosh that it was of both culture and responsibility, like mixing a cocktail of Brady Bunch and Watergate. As a parent today, I almost wince at the freedom I had as a kid: riding bikes anywhere I wanted (no helmet, of course), playing baseball until it was dark, and making my own choices on the go. Calling home on a rotary phone from a friend’s house to ask to stay there for dinner when my parents had no idea where I was. And I was the spoiled and fretted over baby of the family! My brothers and sister, who experienced the ’69 Mets live, had even more freedom and more friends in our Baby Boomer neighborhood. But there was other stuff going on while we rode our banana seats around town to flip Topps cards and then pull off some minor vandalism on the way home. The world was changing. Dan Epstein’s wonderfully titled book, Big Hair and Plastic Grass, puts the 1970s in perspective for the baseball obsessed of that age—or any age. His storytelling technique makes you feel like there’s a bass rift going on in your head as background, or a song by War or the theme from Shaft. That’s good writing and good fun. At times the book is an overview of the year being discussed, and in others instances it gets down to some of the falling down that happened in the 1970s… like Skylab. Each year in the 1970s is covered in a chapter, and with every two years comes a bonus chapter covering some thread—or threads, because clothes made the man, or foxy lady, in the ’70s. I won’t give away what it’s all about, but here are those tweener chapter titles to enlighten you or re-invite you, for those who’ve read them already:
Ashtrays and Astroturf The Polyester Proliferation Chicken Suits and Cheap Beer Epilogue: The Party’s Over
Epstein, a journalist who is far from the maddening crowd, has the knack for headline writing, storytelling, and taking you back in time. If you haven’t read this book yet, do. It’ll blow your mind.
Nightcap Major League Bride by Kathleen Lockwood The late Dana Brand suggested this book to me, and through Facebook, I’ve been able to have some communication with the author, Kathleen Lockwood—wife of ’70s Mets reliever Skip Lockwood. The so-so 1975-76 Mets were the closest Skip really got to playing for a contender, but he was a competitor and a pretty good pitcher. His career took off when he joined the Mets in 1975 and was summoned from Tidewater in the waning days of the Yogi Berra regime. Roy McMillan, who is generally credited with very little in his two months as Mets manager, established Lockwood at the back of the pen and penciled callup Mike Vail into the sputtering ’75 lineup and watched him hit in 23 straight games. August and September that year might not have been meaningful, but it was kind of fun. Throughout the rest of the decade, Skip often pitched the eighth and ninth innings—and sometimes the seventh—trying to salvage what few wins the Mets could cobble together. According to the Baseball Encyclopedia, Skip saved 65 games and blew 18 leads with the Mets between 1975 and 1979. Nowadays, someone else would surpass that save total in two or more years, with fewer blown saves—such as the recently dispatched K-Rod (83 saves in 96 chances). Yet I felt safer in the late innings with Skip, who was paid a lot less and managed a much better relationship with his in-laws than K-Rod. Skip also didn’t complain about how he was used, even though he was one of the earliest experiments of reliever overuse in the managerial career of one Joe Torre. Lockwood pitched 94.1, 104, and 90.1 innings in his three full seasons with the Mets. And even in his two partial seasons with the club he averaged almost two innings per outing. If a closer goes two innings today to get a save, a medal is forged to pin on him upon the game's completion. But this book isn’t so much about Skip as it is about the life of a ballplayer during that time before free agency as we know it. In the first half of the 1970s Skip was a have-ball, will-travel ballplayer at the mercy of employers who controlled his every movement. From the time Massachusetts-bred Skip and Kathleen wed in 1970 until his career ended a decade later, they moved 35 times. He played for the Seattle Pilots, Milwaukee Brewers (the AL version), the California Angels, the Mets, and the Boston Red Sox. He started 26 or more games for three straight years with the Brewers—Kathleen also confirms that Wisconsin was as unbelievable a place to live in as I always suspected during my awesome visits to the state. The Mets stuff in the book is also a lot of fun. My favorite Mets story answers the question of how many Mets does it take to deliver a baby. In the days following the tumultuous Seaver trade in 1977, Nancy Seaver drove in-labor Kathleen to the hospital in the middle of the night in traded Dave Kingman’s car, which had just a thimble full of gas. Skip, meanwhile, was on a roadtrip to Chicago. Dee Matlack, a midwife and spouse of Mets starter Jon Matlack, came in to toss relief, staying with Kathleen when Skip could not. The families often had a stronger bond than the players. And it’s interesting how the friendships forged often had little to do with prominence on the team. The players did their jobs, but for every transaction, the wives and families had to start over, without a stadium full of fans to support them. The big free agent money did not arrive until Skip left the skinflint Mets of the 1970s and signed with the 1980 Red Sox in what turned out to be an abrupt end of his career. Any time I’m learning stuff about the Mets I didn’t know before, I’m happy. And Major League Bride kept me happy and entertained at the same time. Dana was always right on with his literature recommendations. Mrs. Lockwood is on the mark with her book that takes you back to the 1970s and shows what it was like to be young and athletic in the ’70s. These people turn out not to be so different from the grownups I knew at the time, they just threw the ball a lot harder. |
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July 11, 2011 All-Star Edition (by Subtraction) Yes, I know the above heading might seem grammatically incorrect, and I should be saying something about the first half season—.500, wa-hoo!-—but there's something about this All-Star Game that sort of irks me. Last year there were 82 All-Stars, I'm told. This year it seems like even more players have been selected to the team and turn down the honor as “All-Stars” come up with new, more ingenious, and even lamer excuses for not going to the All-Star Game. The All-Star Game is a who cares event to many people. Some years I don’t watch. But the selection and the pomp that goes into it is interesting all the way up until the first pitch. Then it gets old. Still, there’s a good game every now and then, like the 15-inning game a couple of years ago at Old New Yankee Stadium. Even last year’s game was pretty good, though I didn’t see Brian McCann’s big hit. Why isn’t the All-Star Game a big deal? I don’t know. But to those making millions a year playing the game, a reminder should be sent out that this is their occupation. Being an All-Star is a perk, not another excuse to be a jerk. It’s this kind of can’t-be-bothered idea that has eliminated Old Timers Day as an actual event in all but one stadium I won’t name. Fred Lynn was on the radio talking about how he hurt his arm from diving. Not in the 1983 All-Star Game in which he became the first player to ever hit a grand slam in All-Star competition and helped end an 11-year AL drought—but Freddie Lynn’s injury happened in Sunday night’s celebrity softball game. Lynn even explained how one year he missed the last couple of Red Sox games before the break yet still played in the All-Star Game because he had been voted in and felt it as an obligation to the fans and the other players in his league. I know Major League Baseball has essentially neutered the National and American Leagues, eliminating all differences except for the one glaring dissimilarity that actually affects the game on the field: the designated hitter. That they’ll have a DH in the NL park for the All-Star Game—a game designed for constant pinch-hitting—but not allow the DH in NL parks in interleague play or the World Series, shows how cock-eyed the MLB poobahs have become on the issue. And yet there is still no rule in place to prevent an extra-inning game from turning into a tie, or forcing David Wright and J.D. Drew, back when they were All-Star caliber position players, into pitching when the game reaches the 15th inning. There should be a taxi squad for each league equipped with three pitchers, an infielder, an outfielder, and a catcher set to play if the game goes into extra innings. These can be rookies, middle relievers, or players who have never made an All-Star team and would still consider it an honor. They won’t turn down the offer, especially if you toss in say $25,000 just to show up and wait until the game goes extras. There was a time when incentives weren’t necessary for the All-Star Game. In 1976 Tom Seaver threw a complete game the Thursday before the All-Star Game, he made a rare relief appearance that Sunday, he pitched two innings in the All-Star Game at Philly, and then he threw eight innings the Saturday after the All-Star Game. This just in: His arm did not fall off. A year later, with Seaver wearing a Reds uniform at Yankee Stadium, our dorm full of middle school-age boys at Ted Williams Baseball Camp stayed up late to watch the 1977 All-Star game—with the Splendid Splinter’s full support on that decision to bring TVs into the dorm. Even though watching Seaver pitch as a Red was painful and the Mets were fully ensconced in last place, when John Stearns was introduced, I felt like a citizen of Lichtenstein must feel when the one representative of his country is announced at the Winter Olympics opening ceremonies. You know you won’t win, but it doesn’t matter. Someone is there holding the flag for you, the only Mets fan in a dorm full of overbearing Red Sox and Yankees fans. And when the NL stomps the AL, 7-1, that’s not such a bad feeling, either. Now you feel that half these players are inconvenienced by this little game that dates back almost 80 years. Be that way. As Bobby Valentine suggested on Baseball Tonight, don’t let the skipping players pick up the All-Star appearance check in their contracts. Or shame them into giving the dough to support a local charity if they’re not going to support their city by showing up to represent them. If a ballplayer insists on being a jerk, let someone get something out of it. And I get the benefit of not having to see Jeter or A-Rod prancing on the field. Thanks for not coming. |
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July 7, 2011 Reflections of a Mets Life: 1996 In 1996 the preseason hype was that the Mets, brimming with young players, were just about ready to make their move. And they could even regain their place as New York’s baseball darlings, especially in the wake of George Steinbrenner’s mercurial firing of career Yankee Buck Showalter and hiring Mets retread Joe Torre to run the Bronx Bummers. Oh, how we laughed at the “Clueless Joe” headline in the Daily News. Oh, how we laughed. Generation K was going to start a thousand-year reign of Mets greatness. It would surely be a Seaver-Matlack-Koosman trio or Gooden-Darling-Fernandez triumvirate, only this time we wouldn’t wait until the pitchers actually did something. The buzz had long since begun. The Mets were managed by a former pitcher in Dallas Green, who’d been running the show at Wrigley when the Cubs turned it around, and who’d even taken the perpetually snakebitten Phillies to a world championship in 1980. As we slowly progressed through spring training and year six of the post-Davey Johnson era, a thought perpetuated about these Mets was echoed in the tour that year of one of my favorite albums, The Who’s Quadrophenia. The album was originally released, as the British would write it, on 19 October 1973, a date better known in Mets history as the day after the Mets took the three games to two lead over the A’s in the World Series. On that date the 1973 Mets stood only one day from greatness, or impending tragedy; a moment when they still could have penciled George Stone in to start… and who knows if that would have commenced the perpetual second guess of “How could you start Stone if Seaver wants the ball?” Only the Mets could make me put all this together in my head, a quarter century later: I pick up phones and hear my history I dream of all the calls I miss I try to number those who love me And find exactly what the trouble is. I could barely see as I sat at empty Shea Stadium on a sunny February morning in 1996. My wife had vacation at school and I was home from work for a second day because something had flown into my eye on a windy yet warm walk on Presidents Day in Fairfield. We got an appointment at the ophthalmologist conveniently located down the street from the house we were renting. He prescribed all sorts of exercises to help my eye get back to normal. I tried driving the quarter mile home as a test: If I could do that I could drive on I-95 to the daily paper where I’d started working in the waning days of 1995. I immediately backed into a pole. So I called in sick. My friend with the Mets tickets asked if I might go to Shea for him and look at the seats the team proposed for his upgrade. He was moving from the Mezzanine to the Field Level. The big move would land him on the outer edges of the orange seats. I wore a jacket and tie to act like I was a somebody. Whether you have clear vision or not, it’s hard to judge stadium seats when no one is sitting around you, especially at Shea, which often requires you to tilt your head toward home plate. I tried to get as close to the field as budget and availability would allow. With my one good eye I peered out from several seats on both sides of the field. I eventually settled on seats down the left field side, $17 per. With others depending on my limited view, I got up and inspected the plaques of the box owners surrounding me. They were all owned by lawyers, accounting firms, and companies who wouldn’t be content with lousy seats. I compared that with some of the other seats in the same price range (back then Shea made figuring out the price of a ticket a lot easier than today). These seats were available because someone had given them up. Why would anyone give up their Mets seats? Maybe $17 was too pricey. Maybe the team wasn’t progressing to their liking. Maybe they didn’t know about Generation K. As I pulled into the Marina Lot on Opening Day, confidence was high. Lerno and Jimmy Jim—not to be confused with Dr. Jimmy and Mr. Jim from Quadrophenia—cooked out with me on a frigid, soggy day reminiscent of the weather conjured up by Pete Townshend in the dramatic scenes from that album. Though Pete’s best imagery still could not beat the snow that would blanket Clueless Joe’s first game in the Bronx. The rain and cold did make for a nasty start to the day at Shea, especially when the Mets fell behind 6-0 to the Cardinals in the fourth inning. The Mets clawed back, a verb that could also describe what happened when a foul ball landed near the new seats. A scrum ensued among the men—few women or children came out for this downer downpour—and just as Lerno’s hand grabbed the ball amid the melee on the steps below me, I clearly saw a work boot stomp on his hand. The ball fell free and another scrum ensued that we did not take part in. Boother rushed over from work just in time to see the Mets overtake the Cards with a four-run seventh, as new guys Lance Johnson and Bernard Gilkey knocked in crucial runs. Another new guy, Cuban defector Rey Ordonez showed us the type of highlight reel play we would come to expect in our new and improved view. Ordonez took a low throw from Gilkey, directly in front of us, scooped it off the wet grass, and fired from his knee more than 150 feet to Todd Hundley to nail speedy Royce Clayton. Still probably the greatest relay I’ve seen up close. The offense and Ordonez’s defense would indeed be special in 1996. It was the pitching that was uncharacteristically shaky. I came to this realization on the third day of the season. I had Thursdays off and took in the matinee with the Mrs. to see the major league debut of wunderkind Paul Wilson. And boy did he look good for the first four innings as the Mets went up, 7-1. The former number one overall pick departed after six with an 8-3 lead, but his teammates proceeded to sabotage him, surrendering five runs in the eighth and another in the ninth. With two outs against Dennis Eckersley, Gary Gaetti threw away a grounder to tie the game and the Brent Mayne singled in the winning run. It was an exciting finish, surely, but you also couldn’t help but feel a little worried that the Mets pitching might be a bit suspect. It turned out to be very suspect. A few weeks later, a nice trip to the ballpark with another couple was ruined by a John Franco meltdown and a loss to the Rockies. Following Franco’s 300th save at foggy, empty Shea, he did not appear in either soul-crushing loss that weekend at Wrigley. The first came minutes after Dallas Green had told Wilson to walk Mark Grace, to get Sammy Sosa for the last out of the game, and for good measure patted the pitcher on the butt. That ball is still rolling on Waveland Avenue. Sosa did the same thing in a tie game to Jerry DiPoto on Sunday. A return visit to Shea saw the Cubs rally from a 6-3 deficit after Green’s failed attempt to stretch out Dave Mlicki for a four-inning save on John Franco Day—Franco inconveniently ejected from the game for fighting. Rico Brogna pulled the Mets out of the fire with a home run. The Mets were never out of a game, but they never wrapped one up easily, either. And Generation K needed a new PR man, or at least a new pitching guru. This rotation of promise was, to be polite, inconsistent. It was also down a man. Bill Pulsipher, who had the most major league service time and preseason magazine cover time of any of the ballyhooed trio, was finished for the year just after spring training opened. Izzy and Wilson were mostly healthy but painful to watch in ’96. For every good outing, there were three bad ones. The pair combined to go 11-26 mark with a 5.05 ERA. To their credit, they did start 53 games, which was 39 more starts than the injury-riddled duo would make over the rest of their Mets careers. (Though Izzy would become an All-Star reliever elsewhere and come out of retirement to provide fringe benefits at age 38 as a 2011 Met.) The ’96 Mets slid deeper in the standings and further into the fringes of fringe contention. Veteran Mark Clark, acquired from Cleveland just before the season began, was the team’s most consistent starter. Pete Harnisch was overrated and Bobby Jones could not do it alone. Another young hurler, Robert Person, the first Met to throw a pitch—or absorb a defeat—in Mexico, was the only other starter outside of the five-man rotation to make more than two starts on the year. The historic trip to Monterrey made the Mets sick—Todd Hundley, especially so—but they at least emerged with one win. Person, who took the 15-10 loss in Mexico, also absorbed a 12-11 defeat at the next stop in San Francisco. Then the Mets went to Los Angeles, scored five runs in each game, and were swept. Mount Dallas erupted. “These guys don’t belong in the major leagues,” Green said of his kid pitchers. “That might sound harsh and negative, but what have they done to get here?” The resulting question turned out to be “What has Dallas Green done to stay here?” Never mind that the question was rhetorical, the response was “Bobby Valentine.” Back in 1996, Mets ownership liked the cut of Bobby V.’s jib. He was fiery, he was thorough, he was worldly, he had earned his shot to manage the Mets. With September approaching, the club was 13 games under, 23 games out, and looking more like a beat-up Mexican alley cat that stowed away in the luggage than a major league club on the verge of contention. So Valentine replaced Green. Valentine had become the first American manager in Japan, and when that didn’t go perfectly, he humbly—yes we’re using that word and Bobby V. in the same sentence—returned to the minors with the Mets, where he’d been a marvelous third-base coach before starting his managing career with Texas. His one-season stint with the Norfolk Tides was like a research grant. The 1996 Norfolk roster was dotted with players who would have brief stints in New York under the new manager: Juan Acevedo, Alberto Castillo, Joe Crawford, Shawn Gilbert, Jason Hartdke, Roberto Petagine, and Derek Wallace. That 1996 Tides team also yielded men who would play key roles in New York in the years to come under Valentine: Benny Agbayani, Matt Franco, Jay Payton, and Rick Reed. For the remainder of 1996, though, Valentine would have to make do with the roster as it was. The pitching was still brutal, but Valentine and former Met turned pitching coach Bob Apodaca helped the staff at least gain some level of competence. In the first 31 games of the Valentine regime, the Mets lost only twice when they scored six or more runs, as opposed to a dozen such losses under Green. The Mets still continued to hit at an astounding pace, setting marks the team hadn’t seen since their early years at the hitting-friendly Polo Grounds. Todd Hundley set a record for catchers and established an unsurpassed franchise mark with 41 homers. Bernard Gilkey tied a Mets record with 117 RBI and clocked 44 doubles, 30 homers, and hit .317. That was enough to get Gilkey a $20.4 million, four-year deal (beware career years in walk years). Hundley likewise got a big contract on the basis of his ’96 season. The best year of any Met, though, belonged to a free agent signed the previous winter: Lance Johnson. Even Jose Reyes has yet to match Johnson’s 1996 marks of 21 triples or 227 hits. One Dog also batted .333 and stole 50 bases, plus a steal in the All-Star Game, where he went 3-for-4 as a starter in place of injured Tony Gwynn to help the NL claim what would be its last Midsummer Classic victory until 2010. Imagine how good the offense would have been if they hadn’t traded the two best hitters on the team from 1995? Jeff Kent and Jose Vizcaino were sent to Cleveland at the ’96 trading deadline for Carlos Baerga. Despite the good intentions of getting the sour slugger Kent out of town for a proven All-Star in Baerga, Carlos was on the decline. Kent would become a star... and soon. The closest the Mets have come to having a high caliber second baseman since Kent left was when Edgardo Alfonzo manned second base, but the Mets wound up moving Fonzie to third base to accommodate Baerga. The Mets would have to be patient, even as the “gritty, gutty Yankees,” beloved “underdogs” of the media, got the benefit of one of the worst calls ever made by an outfield umpire in the ALCS against Baltimore and then came back after dropping the first two World Series games against Atlanta. I was even forced to portray the Yanks as comeback kids as an editor at Total Sports, where I had gone from part-time to full-time in 1996. I had mercifully been delivered from the newspaper trade to book publishing, where the deadlines were not always immediate, and the final product was placed on a bookshelf instead of used to wrap fish. And wrap fish is what you could do with the record-setting 1996 Mets season, the whole thing forgotten as soon as it was done, buried in the confetti and pomp from the Yankees’ parade. |
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July 1, 2011 Reflections of a Mets Life: 1995 If 1984 was my favorite year and 1986 was my favorite year where I parachuted in for the happy ending, then 1995 was my favorite losing Mets season in my experience. I began the year hating the team—and Major League Baseball in general—for their unnecessary and useless strike that wiped out a 1994 season that I had been enjoying, not to mention eliminating the World Series. It took a trip to Chicago and a May afternoon spent at Wrigley Field for me to tell myself, “Life is too short to stay mad at something you love.” Like the classic cuckold, I returned to my previous setting and acted like nothing had happened. By the end of 1995 I’d written so many thank you notes, I might as well have sent one to the Mets: “Thanks so much for the thoughtful gift of competency. It should come in very handy.” After playing miserable baseball and going 19 games under .500 in the first half, they put together a solid second half at 13 games over .500 while introducing two thirds of what would be the myth of Generation K. Hope seemed right around the corner. The story of 1995 began for me in the moments just after Old-Timers Day in 1994, which marked the 25th anniversary of the 1969 Mets. That Old-Timers Day must have been abhorrent to the Mets because they never held another. Actually, the official line from the caring front office was/is that Old-Timers Day requires too much effort for the organization, plus the fans don’t care anyway. Actually, the fans do care about the Old Timers. Things they don’t care about? Labor issues. The Mets, and MLB, ignored the fan’s wishes on that one as well. And that Old-Timers Day, on the first Sunday of August 1994, also marked the last time Shea opened its doors until the last Friday of April 1995. What happened that August afternoon at Shea would stay with me, and not just because it was the last major league game I would see for a long time. I had just moved to a new apartment and had no dishes or glassware, save for a few assorted bar glasses accumulated through the years as well as a few “You Got the Right One, Baby, Uh-Huh” Diet Pepsi glass from the Ray Charles ad campaign (what can I say, my mom loved diet soda). I did have a few plastic cups I’d collected at the various ballparks I’d been to in recent years. So as people started filing out of the seats following Old-Timers Day 1994, my girlfriend started picking up the Mets plastic cups left behind. She said she’d put them in the dishwasher in her apartment and bring them over to my place. There were cups with Mr. Met and Jeff Kent—one always smiles and the other is a jerk (for confirmation, just check out the “sponsor” of Kent’s baseball-reference page). That became my eureka moment. To put my affection into Met-ese: In the year and a half since we’d met her, I’d been able to laugh off the memory of “The Worst Team Money Could Buy,” pooh pooh the only 100-loss Mets season is my memory, and survive a cataclysmic baseball strike. No glassware was broken—even when I had some at my disposal—during any of these frustrating seasons. She and I had also attended numerous Mets games together—far too many for someone to fake baseball enthusiasm—and when I saw her gathering up not one, not two, but stacks of cups to fill my bare cupboard, something in me clicked. “Marry this one,” came a voice that actually made my head turn. It wasn’t the usher, who was doing his best to ruin the moment by telling us to hurry up so they could shut this place up good and tight for the next eight months. I realized the voice was like the one from Field of Dreams. “Go the distance.” I didn’t share the voice in my head with anyone, but it made perfect sense. The weekend the World Series would have been happening—the Expos vs. the Yankees, everyone likes to speculate—I proposed on a Sunday afternoon, October 23. The wedding was set for a Saturday in late July, as steamy as one could imagine, but the only weekend the church had left before school started—she was a teacher and I a journalist covering the scholastic beat, so summer had to be the season. By then I was doing everything I could to find a new job. After lunching with CBS broadcaster Jim Nantz for a Westport News profile, he gave both advice and inspiration about how to change my lot in life. Tapping a reserve of energy I did not know I had, I volunteered to cover ballgames for a radio station in Greenwich, WGCH, where I knew the sports coordinator, who himself was trying to move out of the humdrum life of small-time sports writing. I worked for the station a few times per month, but I did the drill often enough to know that I really didn’t like it very much either. But it was better than waiting for luck to find me or imagining myself spending Thanksgivings until the end of time on a high school football field, jotting down every carry and taking never-ending notes for an occupation I no longer enjoyed. As the radio guy I went to station, picked up the cumbersome and outdated equipment, arrived at Shea early, stood around for batting practice, ate the tasteless yet free buffet for press, sat in the press box—the open-air auxiliary press box for us low-tech radio types—watched the game, descended to the locker room after the game, and then returned to the radio station and strung together quotes and commentary for a few 45-second sound bytes for the morning drive. I rarely even heard the reports since the low wattage station couldn't even be picked up at my place at the other end of the county. I collected innocuous quotes from anyone I felt wouldn’t bite my inexperienced head off. Mets featured in my WGCH radio reports included Bobby Jones, Doug Henry, and Tim Bogar—though manager Dallas Green, who definitely could bite, often had the best quotes. I also interviewed Jim Leyritz of the Yankees (yes, I went to Yankee Stadium, too—day games only) and Steve Avery of the Braves (John Smoltz darted to a back room while Greg Maddux officially blew me off after the season finale at Shea). Most of the rest of the time I stood silently with my large tape recorder in front of a subject while a beat guy like Marty Noble or John Harper fired away with insightful questions. Sometimes the queries were angering—you do not want to be standing a foot from Dallas Green, a mountain of a man prone to fury, while others prod him from across the room following a one-run loss. The radio gig also enabled me to blow off many wedding-related events where my presence was required only as a courtesy. Instead of picking up my fiancée after her bridal shower and making nice with the ladies, I was standing near the Yankees showers trying not to get caught in the tractor beam of Derek Jeter’s frighteningly blue eyes after his first big game as a fill-in. I couldn’t believe they would send Jeter back to the minors in favor of 1993 Mets dog Tony Fernandez. Jeter would be well past 3,000 hits by now if they hadn’t demoted him. And maybe they wouldn’t have lost the last three games to Seattle that fall in the Division Series. Oh well. There was never a chance of the Mets playing in the postseason. They blew three leads in the season opener, a game I refused to listen to because of my lingering anger about the strike (pre-Wrigley meditation). That opener was a glass-smashing 14-inning disaster that christened Coors Field as the worst stadium in baseball for a visiting team. (All these years later the 26-39 Mets mark at Coors sounds better than it should be given the horrors they have endured at altitude). The Mets quickly sunk to fourth place and there they stayed—until my honeymoon, when they dropped into the basement. It was then that I vowed to forgo the Mets for the rest of the trip. Letting two-day old Mets scores in the newspaper anger me was no way to begin married life. It wasn’t until the flight home, when I stumbled across a Sunday Daily News on the plane, that I got filled in on all the dirt. And then the in-flight movie was Tommy Boy. Holy Schnike! Bobby Bonilla and Bret Saberhagen had been traded for spare parts and five-tool bust Alex Ochoa. Shortly after I got home—and just as the Dodgers arrived at Shea—the Mets traded Brett Butler to Los Angeles. Then the Mets swept L.A. Jose Vizcaino was on fire. Rico Brogna was suave. Carl Everett was just sane enough to be dangerous. Joe Orsulak, one of the few elder statesmen on the team, was a 1990s ballplayer who played the game like it was the 1890s. And the team’s youngster, 20-year-old Edgardo Alfonzo, showed promise even if he was slow and rarely pulled the ball. Man, could he field. The pitching was still nondescript, but it got better quickly. The Mets brought up two kids with long names and power arms: Jason Isringhausen and Bill Pulsipher. Izzy won 20 games all told between the majors and minors while accruing 223 innings at both levels. Pulse threw 218 innings all told. Izzy had been ranked the game’s 37th best prospect by Baseball America before the year; Pulse was number 12. Another kid in the minors, the previous year’s top overall draft pick, was ranked number 16. After his second year in the minors he shot to number two, behind only Andruw Jones of the Braves. But it wasn’t just some far-off future that Mets fans could latch on to. It was happening now. The Mets finished 1995 with a 27-15 flourish and climbed into a tie for second place—albeit six games under .500 and a 21 games out of first place. And that was after sweeping the final homestand from disinterested division champs Cincinnati and Atlanta. Those clubs would fight it out for the pennant, with Atlanta winning the NLCS and beating Cleveland for the world championship to reverse the 1948 World Series result and spoil the Tribe’s first trip to the Series since their last October date—two franchise shifts and 47 years ago against the Bravos. So Atlanta won the World Series. Big deal. Actually it was kind of a big deal for me because the Total Baseball people, whom I’d stumbled into a couple of years earlier because of an interview with Westport resident and Diamonds author Michael Gershman, called to ask if I would contribute biographies for the books Total Indians and Total Braves, being produced post haste for Penguin Books and Major League Baseball. The same people had asked me to also create content for the website AT&T interchange. It taught me that with a little time and effort, my work could stand next to these “big-time” sportswriters who were also involved in this project. It also taught me about this here thing called the Internet, which I’d barely heard of previously. Ah, naïve ’95, back then we still did our procrastinating the old-fashioned way: with the radio at my side and hands-on reading material. From here on in, I’d be killing time with the whole world wide web (or what there was of it in ’95) a mere phone call away. |
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June 24, 2011 Reflections of a Mets Life: 1994 By my 20th season following the Mets, I understood one thing about this franchise: They started thinking about the fans when they were worried about losing them. And after 1993, there was plenty of reason to worry. The 1993 Mets had insulted, the city, the press, and the fans. The Yankees, after a few down years, had a slew of young players who could not only play, but were in the final stages of completing a takeover for the heart of the baseball fan. Easily-wooed New York fans no longer rooted for the Mets out of default as they had since the mid-1980s. The borderline fan again considered the Yankees their team. The Yankees cruised to the AL’s best record. At Shea in 1994 a Nickelodeon theme park materialized beyond the wall in center field, complete with children screaming and running around. I even stuck around one Sunday for 20 minutes to watch the kids run the bases, not appreciating the 90-minute drill this little dash becomes once you have an actual youngster or more in tow. Back in Queens for the first time since the 1970s was Mr. Met. Or maybe it was Mr. Met’s evil cousin, Comrade Met, a sinister looking, even-bigger-head-than-you’d-expect-on-a-giant-baseball-headed-man. He wasn’t the Mister Met who’d first appeared on the 1963 yearbook cover and seemed no relation to the fella who’d gone all bicentennial with that kooky tri-corned hat in ’76. This colossal-headed personage was scarier than a team that stole just 25 bases in a season with John Cangelosi—Sports Illustrated cover boy (for fighting)—leading the team with five steals. Jimmy Jim and I delighted in a Sammy Davis sing song “The Cangey Man” whenever Cangelosi sauntered to the plate. It was almost delicious that the Cangey Man, perhaps frowned on by manager Dallas Green for being too short—or too fast—should get released in early July yet still becoming the Met with the fewest steals to ever lead the club in that category. Of course, that he wound up leading in steals and the team never surpassed the 1973 club’s record-low 27 steals was because the 1994 season came to a crashing halt on August 11. But I’m not here to talk about the strike. I didn’t care what players and owners were quibbling about then, and I don’t care now. My only concern is that they never, ever, never, never, ever, never have another strike in my lifetime. Ever. Are you listening NFL? Sometimes My Mind Plays Tricks on Me Still, it was a great summer. The Mets were watchable again. And by watchable I mean watchable for people who don’t go to 20 games per year and catch almost every other game on TV or go to pains to listen in on the radio. Or who treat a Darryl Kile September ’93 no-hitter against the Mets at the Astrodome like a death in the family. I had lived away from the Mets for most of their run to greatness from 1984 until their sudden drop like a rock in ’91. I spent the first and last months of the season out of contact with the team while purportedly studying in Virginia, or later spending all but a few Shea weekends in Massachusetts churning out copy on the selectmen in Buckland or the Saturday n |