The Almost Official Site of
Author Matthew Silverman
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There were only 2 thing TO DO in the whole book attend a Met Road game
and have you kids run the Mr Met Dash.
How about watch a Met practice during spring training.
Watch a spring training game or better yet watch the Mets play two games
in one day at two spring training parks.
The book was a good read but I was looking more for places to go or
things to do!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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?
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Dieand 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 Essentialat 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.
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 Metsup front in their profile on Rowan &
Littlefield, the publishing house of imprint Taylor Trade, which is
putting out the book.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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,
Loved your post regarding 2003. May I remind you that today is my 50th
birthday; so in 1961 my Phillistines finished with a 47-111 record. Now
THAT was a tough campaign in which to be brought into this world.
Of course, tying it back to the Metropolitans, Vince Coleman
also was born on 9/22/61. Nuff said.
Mike McNamara
------------------------
Mike!
As a Phillies fan, I guess you’ll always have one up on my clan because
my son was born on a night the Phils toasted the Mets in 2003. I’m not
looking it up, but I’m going to dare guess that the 111-loss ’61 Phils
lost the day you were born. [Oh, who are we kidding, of course I looked
it up on the site you were onto a decade ago.
The Philthies blew a one-run lead in the ninth to the Pirates at
Connie Mack Stadium.]
A very happy birthday
to you! Vince Coleman, on the other hand, can blow out his own (roman)
candle.
Best,
Matt
Oakland Revisited
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!
Marty,
Thanks for the note and your kind words about Baseball Miscellany. Now some kind words about your art.
I really enjoyed looking through your gallery and like the circle
trademark (for lack of a better term) in your drawings. Of course I
liked the Seaver drawing and I am familiar with the picture it was taken
from. I also especially enjoyed Pete Fonda, Dracula, Frankenstein, Henry
Fonda, Still Life #2, Jerry Kramer, Joe Rudi, and Rollie Fingers.
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.
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
enjoyingPan Amon 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.
On page 15, there is a table showing all the teams that have won
consecutive World Series championships. However, the Cincinnati Reds,
who won in 1975 and 1976, have been excluded from this list.
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
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.
I
turned on the Rangers-Rays ALDS in passing and who did I hear on the
radio but Gary Cohen. I was a little surprised they didn’t have him on
the National League beat, but Gary kept me listening.
Of
course, Ron Darling was front and center on TBS with Yankees-Tigers,
showing the nation and Yankees fans what a great announcer sounds like
with no need for shtick. Though he was a hated Brave, John Smoltz was
pretty good, too. If you're going to put the postseason on stations
that would otherwise be showing Andy Griffith re-runs-—not
that there's anything wrong with Ange and Barney—at
least TBS has good people calling the action.
What are the odds we ever hear Darling and Cohen do a Mets postseason
game? Or just see a Mets postseason?
Speaking of people we’d like to see working in a Mets postseason,
Bobby Valentine has been great on ESPN. He even called the Yankees
winning Game 4 with A.J. Burnett (a one-time Mets farmhand before he
was traded for Al Leiter), and he said Detroit would win the series in
the House That Taxpayers Subsidized. Always bold, and often spot on.
The
weirdest call was Robin Ventura getting the White Sox manager’s job. I
thought that was Terry Francona’s landing spot. Much as I think Terry
Collins did a good job, I’d have half a mind to bring in Francona to
manage. The guy is the first manager since before the U.S. entry into
World War I to win multiple World Series in Boston. If he could handle
the insane fans and rabid media there, I think he could handle
Flushing. Don’t think he’ll still be available when the Mets outgrow
T.C.
One
more thing about Francona... if, after all he’d done in Boston, he
managed all of 2011 without his option being picked up, why did
the Mets rush to pick up T.C.’s 2013 option a year early? Just asking.
And I’m just wondering what Detroit bauble I’ll pick up as a bounty
for their knocking off the Yankees and sending their fans away from
baseball for six months (Yankees fans don’t watch other teams play
baseball). My personal bounty system has a .733 success rate since it
was instituted minutes before Sandy Alomar’s homer off Mariano Rivera
in the 1997 ALDS. Oh and Joe Giradi-o, good thing you saved Mariano
from pitching the ninth in game 162 with a postseason appearance at
stake in your division. “The Great Mariano” is probably exhausted from
throwing 1 1/3 innings this October. Now he has all winter to rest.
Pull up a chair and join the rest of us.
Keep watching this October. It is a good
one. It will keep you sharp for the day when it really matters again.
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.
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.
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:
Half the games I saw were day games—four of them on weekdays. I like
day games.
I
didn’t see Mike Pelfrey in person all season.
I
didn’t see K-Rod. I only saw three saves all year—one by a Met.
For
$25 we joined the Mets Kid Clubhouse. Our free tickets were two lower
deck seats plus Promenade Club access.
I
saw Mike Nickeas’s first, and to this point, only career home run.
Ditto for local boy Mike Baxter.
I
had three rain checks from last year that I used for a total of eight
tickets, all in prime locations because of various two-for-one ticket
promotions.
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
Date
Foe, Result
Mets Rec, Pos
MS Rec
Win
Loss
Save
HRs /by
NYM
Who hit the HRs
Note
8-Ap
Was, 6-2 L
3-4, 4th
0-1
Zimmermann
Dickey
0
A ho-hum opener and
the start of a brutal year when playing in front of the home folks.
21-Ap
Hou, 9-1 W
6-13, 5th
1-1
Capuano
Happ
3
Davis, Nickeas, Wright
Three homers in one
game! This also kicked off the longest 2011 winning streak (6).
1-Jun
Pit, 9-3 L
25-30, 4th
1-2
Correia
Capuano
1
Turner
Tell me if you've heard this: Cappy
throws six great innings and then gets hammered.
17-Jun
Angels, 4-3 L
35-36, 3rd
1-3
Piniero
Capuano
Walden
0
Another Cappy start, another
crappy game.
19-Jul
StL, 4-2 W
48-48, 3rd
2-3
Gee
Lohse
Isringhausen
1
Berkman
Titanic HR by Berkman. Gee and Parnell
solid with Izzy back in save mode.
21-Jul
StL, 6-2 L
49-49, 3rd
2-4
Westbrook
Niese
1
Pujols
Boxscore said 90 F.
Lie! It was 100. Last Beltran home game (better exit than Jose).
7-Au
Atl, 6-5 L
56-57, 3rd
2-5
Venters
Parnell
Kimbrel
3
Heyward, Constanza,
Gonzalez
The Mets lost both Reyes (for the
month) and Murphy (for the year) yet still gamely battled back only
to see Parnell get lit up.
11-Au
SD, 9-5 L
58-58, 3rd
2-6
Harang
Dickey
0
After consecutive comeback wins
vs. SD, the Mets drop sloppy game despite 15 hits.
15-Sep
Was, 10-1 L
71-79, 4th
2-7
Millone
Schwinden
0
Losing four straight at home to the
Nats commenced Terry Collins to yelling.
28-Sep
Cin, 3-0 W
77-85, 4th
3-7
Batista
Volquez
1
Baxter
Batista’s
Figueroaian gem. But the lasting memory: He who bunts and runs
away...
2011
Home: 34-47
3-7 in '11
Cappy, Gee, Batista
Dickey, Cappy 2
10/5
No power, no pitching, and 13 games
under .500 at home. I was 7-under. Yow!
Since '09 opening
122-121
26-24
Santana 4
Pelfrey 3
K-Rod 7
79/42
Wright 5
Imagine how bad Mets pitching would be
if they brought in the fences? Crazy to think it.
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.
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?
Willie Harris: I’m not really a fan,
but he broke up a no-hitter on Opening Day, won the next night’s game
in extra innings and got that tiebreaking single against the Cards in
that great ninth-inning spoiler comeback in St. Louis last week. At 33
he is a little older than most FNP candidates, and he wound up playing
more than anyone could have imagined. Yet Harris put himself in the
award conversation.
Scott Hairston had a couple of big hits
after a brutal beginning to his Mets career, though I’ll say right now
I’m rooting for Evans to take over this role next year.
Ronnie Paulino spent too much time as
number one catcher to qualify for the FNP list—and the judges also
take a dim view of players suspended for banned substance use. But
despite just two homers, he’s shown pop; on Sunday he easily cleared
the wall that launched a thousand whines.
Mike Nickeas: I like the cut of his jib
and he calls a good enough game where he may yet earn his backup
catcher’s union card. He just didn’t hit enough (.189) to merit the
FNP prize. Though I do appreciate that his lone ’11 homer came in one
of the two wins I’ve witnessed in person.
Chin-lung Hu and his .050 batting
average were never in the conversation—though his lone RBI to bring in
the tying run in Washington in April may have been the most stunning
Mets development this side of a six-run ninth. It should also be noted
that Hu’s 23 Mets plate appearance matched the number by former top
prospect Fernando Martinez (though F-Mart had a pinch-hit homer that
sparked a comeback win in Houston).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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