Do You Know Where You’re Going To?

In Bicentennial Detroit, when Mark Fidrych was in full flight, The Bird was the word. On TV in the 1950s, a duck delivered the $100 prize to contestants on You Bet Your Life who used Groucho Marx’s secret word. Frankie Valli ruffled few feathers when he informed us repeatedly in the summer of ’78 that “Grease” was the word.

For us lately, –ward has been the word. Not ward as in “the Mets have so many guys on the injured list they must have their own hospital ward,” but –ward as in the homophonic suffix that attaches itself to other words or word parts to form new words that indicate a direction something or someone is taking. Where something or someone is going is good information to have, particularly if we’re contemplating something or someone we care about.

Other than streaming to the IL, where the Mets were going was a question that demanded asking even if it elicited no lasting answer. This is why, as 2021 reaches its final week, Faith and Fear in Flushing chooses Trajectories as our Nikon Camera Mets Player of the Year, an award presented annually to the entity or concept that best symbolizes, illustrates or transcends the year in Metsdom. Where the Mets were going was of paramount interest to us who root for the Mets, yet elusive in terms of pinning down.

Or did we just not like the answers the duck dropped off? Let’s revisit some of the –wards where the Mets went in ’21 and try to figure this out.

UPWARD
It’s understood that the Mets ascended through the National League East standings fairly early in 2021, climbed into first place, and maintained their grip on the top for quite a while. Having spent 103 days in first place only to finish with a losing record — most ever for that distinction — became their calling card, much as the 1984 Mets are remembered for being in first place until the Cubs blew by them or the 2007 Mets are remembered for being in first place until they themselves plummeted with neither pause nor grace. Neither ending was optimal, but if you clear your head, you can recall the exhilaration of ’84 and, even if there was a lingering sense of discomfort all summer, the satisfying divisional hegemony of ’07. It was our year, we were pretty certain, until it wasn’t.

Was this one? “If you’re going to be in first place for a hundred days,” Steve Cohen said in November when asked about what he learned in his first year as owner, “try and do it at the end of the season and not the middle.” Nevertheless, most years with significant days logged in first place will leave an impression of how much fun it was until it wasn’t. If you remember the momentum the 2021 Mets projected or how we as their rabid supporters fed off their energy, you’re a better fan than I am, Gunga Din. I can look up on Retrosheet when we took first without letting go of it (May 8) and check our archives to see what I thought of their status (I called them “stealthy”), but less than eight months after it happened, I don’t have a strong recall of what it was like to stand back and say, “Wow, the Mets are in first place!”

I did it in 1984. I did it in 2007. I did it in the years the Mets actually completed the job of being in first place. I’ve done it almost any year by the second week of a season when the Mets led their division. But in 2021, the trip north from meandering beneath .500 in late April and early May to surging past their competition and then consistently fending them off was…oh, what’s that very complex term analysts use?

Meh. Yeah, that’s it. It was meh.

Despite preseason predictions that several enormous bundles of talent were going to battle it out at a high level, the whole division had revealed itself rather quickly to be rather middling. The Mets were the best of the so-so lot. It was better than not being better than Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington and Miami, but I don’t think it was capable of captivating us.

How many teams that stay in first place for multiple months without pause leave you waiting for them to finally get on a hot streak? The Mets, at their 2021 best, were perpetually lukewarm.

I’ll also allow for the possibility that I’m getting old and whatever that implies. Maybe I’m incapable of remembering every step in a season the way I used to. Maybe, after you’ve been around nearly six decades and living with your team more than five, things don’t pop the way they used to. I used to listen to Ralph Kiner tell the same stories about Casey Stengel in sparkling detail, yet, by his own admission, not remember what he had for breakfast that morning.

In February 1984, there was a spate of 20th-anniversary stories commemorating the Beatles’ arrival in America. Can it really be 20 years since 1964? One of the stations I listened to at the time, while I was in college in Tampa, featured an interview with Louise Harrison, George’s sister. She was local, living in Sarasota. Louise and the host marveled at what a time it had been two decades earlier, how it all seemed so vibrant, how it all stayed with them, not like today. Louise invoked 1978, which at the time was only six years ago, and asked rhetorically, who even remembers 1978?

“I do,” I replied in my head. I remembered Frankie Valli defining Grease as the word, and a thousand things besides. I was 15 years old in 1978. I suspected in 1984 that my youth was being memory-holed by my elders. I didn’t know how old Louise Harrison or the DJ on The Wave 102.5 were as they spoke, but it hit me that at some point this is what happens with everybody. There’s the stuff that stays with you, then the stuff that doesn’t stick quite as much, then less and less. I mean the Beatles were the Beatles, but if you were 15 in the summer of ’78, whatever was big then will have groove, will have meaning six or more years later.

Maybe baseball (and everything) gets like that for all of us. The Beatles can only come to America once. The Grease soundtrack can only dominate the airwaves once. The thrill of the Mets commandeering first place can only resonate with profound resonance so many times. After a certain point in a person’s life, maybe everything else just becomes noise.

But I don’t really think that’s the case here, for me at any rate. Give me what’s memorable and I pledge to remember it. I still have my AccuWeather certification when it comes to tracking the microclimates of a season. Honestly, that’s my Mets fan superpower. I can tell you, for example, what it felt like the dizzying July weekend the Mets blew an enormous lead in Pittsburgh on Saturday night; overcame an enormous deficit the next afternoon; then both allowed and scored tons of runs in Cincinnati the night after that. I can gripe with specificity about ice cold early August and tumbling off a cliff in Philadelphia. I can dwell for effect in the barren September faceoffs against St. Louis (0-3), Boston (0-2) and Milwaukee (0-3), each miserable series emblematic of how the Mets performed against playoff-bound teams as it became apparent they wouldn’t be one of them (5-22 down what passed for the stretch).

What I don’t remember so vividly is the part before the All-Star break when the Mets got on a roll and we rolled with them and everybody was smiling, laughing and bumping virtual fists over our wonderful first-place team. Probably because, Bench Mob heroics notwithstanding, it wasn’t much like that.

But they were in first place for a while. So there ya go.

WAYWARD
Diesel Donnie Stevenson. Rat or raccoon or a double play combo not exactly meshing. “Just smile and know that we got this.” Tweeting highlights of oneself in the minutes after a loss, having it noticed and then rather predictably crying poo-poo take at the reporter who dared mention the juxtaposition of personal celebration and collective defeat. Thumbs down.

To invoke another –ward, Awkward!

If we didn’t already love the Mets an entity/concept, these Mets would have made themselves hard to love. They did, actually. Hard to watch as they slid under .500 and hard to take as they, at various intervals, couldn’t handle not just their opponents, but their teammates, their chroniclers, their coaches, their loyalists and their reality. The lingering sweetness of 2019’s stirring if ultimately doomed Wild Card lunge — when the Mets were the team that I swore loved us back — dissipated by the end of 2021. Their best players (among those who were on hand, thus excusing Jacob deGrom) could be the toughest to take. I came to really dig the way Javy Baez played but questioned my self-esteem for doing so, which perhaps calls for looking inward. I really wanted to want Marcus Stroman back, but was not feeling jilted when he left. I went from adoring everything about Pete Alonso toward consciously separating his shtick from his bat. I’m not quite sure what to make of Francisco Lindor other than knowing he’ll be making whatever he makes here for quite a while. I’m not terribly invested in erstwhile All-Star Jeff McNeil being here or gone.

Bubble was a word Gary Cohen mentioned when the most telling if correspondingly goofy of the contretemps, the players booing their fans with their thumbs, flared. These guys, the announcer discerned, had been physically separated from those who covered them and had taken on a harsh us-against-the-world mentality that wasn’t playing well when they weren’t. Accountability was a word I read quite a bit after the season ended, and not because the Mets led the league in it.

WESTWARD
The Mets played the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers thirteen consecutive games in August. They won two and lost eleven. Many of the contests were close, but the difference between the elite of the National League West and the standard-bearers of National League East mediocrity couldn’t have been more stark. In “The Stranger” Billy Joel advised, “Don’t be afraid to try again, everyone goes south, every now and then.” The Mets won their season series against Miami and more or less held their own versus Atlanta. Going south in the literal sense was a better idea than getting involved with the West.

ONWARD
Even as the season oozed away what modicum of zazz it contained, damned if we weren’t still a part of it all. Fans stay. Some of my fellow fans love relish telling me in an almost boastful fashion once campaigns are all but mathematically lost how they’ve “checked out,” yet they keep coming by to confirm that they don’t care. There’s probably a little more caring going on there than meets the ear.

I’m a chronic carer. I cared about the Mets in September. I cared that they still sort of, kind of had a shot entering the final month. I cared that if they could just do this, that and the other thing, and a half-dozen clubs cooperated on a nightly basis by not doing this, that and the other thing…no, they weren’t going to make a run let alone run through the tape and into Dodger Stadium to roll the Wild Card dice…but I couldn’t be absolutely sure they wouldn’t. So I kept caring and kept watching, and even when mathematics took over, I kept caring and kept watching.

What the hell else was I going to do — not care and not watch?

FORWARD
In 2015, the most successful year the FAFIF Awards Committee has ever had to consider for Nikon purposes, we warned against getting too hung up on precedent. Similarities can be noteworthy, but the distant past isn’t retroactively predictive of the future. Which isn’t to say noting noteworthiness can’t be fun — or eerie. With that grain of salt poured, consider that, in retrospect, Mets years that end in “1” seem to take place because they have to. Mets years that end in “2” are then constructed in immediate response to obliterate what we just saw in Mets years that end in “1”. The Men in Black would appreciate how efficiently the Mets attempt go about it.

Every season that has ended in a “1” has been a major disappointment. The Mets dropped out of contention in 1971 after logging time in first place with much the same team that had won the World Series two Octobers earlier. Nascent signs of life were doused by a severe lack of talent in 1981. The imperial phase of Mets baseball abdicated for good in 1991. Defending league champions in 2001 spent nearly five months indulging in pacifism. In 2011, the Mets showed up just long enough to disappear. The collective reactions of the franchise that let us down on the 1s was to cut loose by one method or another Nolan Ryan, Lee Mazzilli, Gregg Jefferies, Robin Ventura and Jose Reyes, to name a handful of Mets who were sacrificed on the altar of erasing our memories of very recent sour times. Here came Jim Fregosi, George Foster, Bobby Bonilla, Roberto Alomar and Frank Francisco with the ambition of raising expectations. Managers would change. General managers would change. Records tended to stay static. At least when we turned the calendar from 1961 to 1962, we eventually picked up 40 wins.

The reboot has come around again. Goodbye manager Luis Rojas, every coach but Jeremy Hefner, acting general manager Zack Scott, 2021 stalwarts Stroman and Baez, MVM Aaron Loup, old friend (who was totally stoked to return until he wasn’t) Noah Syndergaard and — probably for certain once the lockout is lifted — erstwhile 2015 pennant-winners Michael Conforto and Jeurys Familia via free agency plus 2016 playoff-push godsend Robert Gsellman, non-tendered just before the Hot Stove gate slammed shut. Goodbye to a whole lot of the 77-85 Mets of the year past. We used 64 players last year. Fitting them all into another team picture would require a lens too wide.

The year that ended with a “1” and a thud is history from a baseball sense. The year that will end with a “2” is antsy to shove it aside. New players like Mark Canha, Eduardo Escobar, Starling Marte and Max Scherzer, the latter with, among other distinctions, a Tigers pitching ledger more astounding than even that of Mark “The Bird” Fidrych. A professional general manager in Billy Eppler. And a manager, Buck Showalter, who’s been around the block a few times and seems raring to take Seaver Way by storm. Showalter met the media anew a few days ago via Zoom. He held up a Mets jersey, donned a Mets cap and talked Mets like he’ll be watching everything and caring more than we do. He used phrases like “magic sprinkle dust” (he doesn’t have any) “spongeable” (he soaks up information) and “connectivity”. Buck will seek to connect all the assets of the organization and create a winner. We, despite the desire for a fresh start, will connect what we see to what we’ve seen.

We long to see something spectacular, something we will remember without remorse, something that will continue to catapult us forward rather than having us trudge along through our own intense personal histories with this team. It looks promising. Years ending in a “2” always do before they start. One of these years ending in a “2” is bound to follow through and deliver.

FAITH AND FEAR’S PREVIOUS NIKON CAMERA METS PLAYERS OF THE YEAR

1980: The Magic*
2005: The WFAN broadcast team of Gary Cohen and Howie Rose
2006: Shea Stadium
2007: Uncertainty
2008: The 162-Game Schedule
2009: Two Hands
2010: Realization
2011: Commitment
2012: No-Hitter Nomenclature
2013: Harvey Days
2014: The Dudafly Effect
2015: Precedent — Or The Lack Thereof
2016: The Home Run
2017: The Disabled List
2018: The Last Days of David Wright
2019: Our Kids
2020: Distance (Nikon Mini)

*Manufacturers Hanover Trust Player of the Year