Batting a Thousand

From the Department of Milestones You Didn’t Realize Existed: tonight — barring calamity (or rain) — will be the 1,000th consecutive Mets game recapped by Faith and Fear in Flushing.

I don’t know that you can call them recaps in the traditional sense. That’s why somewhere amid our text we link you to the ESPN.com Mets site where the AP game story is published. Of course you don’t need to come to a fan blog for a recap in the traditional sense. If everything you needed…if everything we needed was being provided by those accredited to cover Mets games, then maybe this blog wouldn’t have begun. Not that we started FAFIF to fill a market void. Jason and I just liked talking about the Mets. E-mailing about the Mets is more accurate, I suppose. Anyway, we’d write about them to each other even though print journalists and radio reporters and TV crews brought us all the details. The Mets may for long and perilous stretches be nothing to write home about, but we were overcome by the urge nonetheless. E-mails became blog and here we are.

Day after day after day, starting with the first game of the 2005 season and continuing every day through that campaign. Same for 2006, which came with ten bonus games tacked on at the star-crossed end. The ups of 2007, the downs of 2007, the downs of 2008 (along with its mostly forgotten ups), the total pits of 2009, the near total pits of 2010 and whatever we’ve been exposed to thus far in 2011…we’ve written something reflecting every single Mets game in that time period, 999 to date, across 517 Mets wins and 482 Mets losses.

It may not be Cal Ripken territory, but it has continued uninterrupted. With four digits at hand, it seemed worth noting.

Sometimes we’ll be very analytical abut what we all just saw; sometimes the games serve as backdrops for prevailing Mets storylines that transcend a given night’s result; sometimes we focus on something that in no way appears in the box score; and sometimes our link to the AP story on ESPN.com serves as our obligation to say “a game just took place but I want to tell you about something else altogether.” The viewpoints of two fans who are not contracted by a media outlet to Who, What, Where & When you means you’ll be offered a little How and a lot of Why.

Why? Because we like that baseball happens every day. Even 2011 Mets baseball. It never fails to amaze me how daily this thing gets over a six-month span. It doesn’t go away for the longest time, so you have to stay on top of it. You want to stay on top of it. Have there been late-season, lost-season games I wasn’t dying to write about when they went final? I won’t say there weren’t, but man, does a lousy baseball game beat the ultimate alternative.

So every year, from whenever the Mets start playing to whenever the Mets stop playing, Jason and I do our recapping. Sometimes we each do one for the same game. Once in a while, particularly for a doubleheader, we’ll fold two games into one piece, but every game has been present and accounted for in FAFIF fashion since the first on April 4, 2005, through the most recent, on April 19, 2011, and it will continue, weather and respective personal existences permitting, after the action scheduled to commence tonight, April 20, 2011. Once we hit that milestone of 1,000 games, we will go for 1,001 and whatever comes next.

Thank you a thousand times over for coming here to read them.

Please join us at McFadden’s Citi Field, Thursday, April 21, at 6 P.M., prior to tomorrow night’s Mets-Astros game when Faith and Fear invites you to Buy Tug a Beer. It’s all part of our ongoing efforts to help Sharon Chapman raise funds for the Tug McGraw Foundation’s battle against brain cancer and other insidious diseases. Details here.