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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 22 May 2024 8:17 pm If things were going better for them, the Mets would have won a game in Cleveland, maybe two, possibly all three. I realize that’s akin to invoking the old saying that if Carlos Mendoza’s aunt’s frog had wings, then every day would be Christmas; there are a lot of old sayings tantamount to declaring things would be different if only they were. But you know how it is with baseball teams. Ones in a good groove make the most of their situations. If the Mets were currently inhabiting one of those grooves, the scattered positive trendlines detectable here and there would tie together, and suddenly defeats would be victories.
Alas, frogs are still bumping their behinds, dear old Aunt Maria isn’t Uncle Pablo, and Christmas Day still comes only once a year. It surely didn’t arrive on Wednesday afternoon, when the Mets finished their stay in Northeast Ohio packing coal-filled stockings as souvenirs. Despite some bats waking up and several innings appearing well-pitched, the Mets lost, which is something the Mets have been doing a lot of late, no matter who hits and who pitches.
For those who’ve stopped keeping track, the Mets have lost ten of their last thirteen, encompassing four series in which brief individual pulsations haven’t added up to a collective heartbeat. I’m tempted to say it’s one of the most deathly stretches of baseball I’ve seen in 56 seasons watching this franchise, though I know there are veritable dugouts full of orange-and-blue ghosts demanding I hold their dismal beer. It doesn’t really matter that the 2024 Mets are probably better than dozens of previous editions of Mets. It’s the Mets right now who almost daily make one regret an investment of time and commitment.
Thanks to the playoff system that bestows potential contender status on almost everybody on Rob Manfred’s green earth, the season isn’t near over in the figurative sense. Should the Mets find the groove that’s eluded them and start capturing the games and series that mysteriously keep winding up in somebody else’s win column, tunes are designed to be changed. This is where my instinct is to invoke that golden handful of campaigns in which the Mets looked awful before the All-Star break and then made a spirited run to the finish, the lesson being it ain’t over until you believe it is, or however that one goes.
 Yet it’s too early for that framing and there haven’t been enough substantive signs of life to imagine a meaningful turnaround. What would change the tune? Get into that groove. Be watchable for nine consecutive innings, then another nine consecutive innings. Make a habit of good baseball rather than the kind you’ve been playing. Do some actual winning rather than talking about how capable you are of winning and how surprising it is to you that you are losing. At this point, you’re the only ones who are much shocked by what you’ve been doing.
I’m still watching, but that’s not shocking. Questionable habits are hard to break.
by Jason Fry on 21 May 2024 10:53 pm When the Mets are behind, Keith Raad likes to convey the score to those of us listening on the radio or some radio-adjacent audio product by informing us that they’re chasing whatever the deficit is.
It’s a perfectly fine way to go about one’s business, and Raad has been a good addition to the narrator ranks. But I can feel a vein throb in my temple every time I hear it — because I’m hearing it so often these days.
On Tuesday night I heard it over and over again: “chasing three.” That was the score the Mets fell behind by in the third, when Adrian Houser‘s not bad beginning turned lousy in a fusillade of Guardians’ doubles, assisted by some crummy fielding by Starling Marte. The Mets chased down two of those runs in the fifth, courtesy of a Mark Vientos homer and a flurry of hits that drove fill-in starter Xzavion Curry from the game. (Curry at least spared us the thoroughly depressing spectacle of Houser vs. Carlos Carrasco in a matchup of exasperating fell-off-a-cliff Mets starters.)
Curry was replaced by Nick Sandlin, whom I never want to see again: Much as he did on Monday night, Sandlin walked the first enemy batter but then went to work, fanning Brandon Nimmo with the bases loaded, one out and a gimme run on the board, and then erasing J.D. Martinez. Chasing one … except Houser gave up a two-run homer to Jose Ramirez, and the Mets were immediately chasing three again.
Jeff McNeil had a two-run homer of his own to deploy, cutting the lead back to one. But in the sixth Houser gave up a leadoff single and was replaced by Jake Diekman, who gave up a homer to Cleveland supersub David Fry, no relation as far as I know. And so the Mets were … that’s right, chasing three again.
Diekman left to show a luckless water cooler who was boss; the Mets cut the lead to one yet again on a Marte homer and went into the ninth trying to make up that margin against deadly closer Emmanuel Clase. I didn’t have much hope, not so much because of Clase’s ungodly stats (though they sure didn’t help) but because I’d spent two hours watching the Mets doing this thing wrong and then that other thing wrong and I was pretty sure they had another shortfall in them.
To be fair, they tried in the ninth — none of the Mets’ current woes are due to a lack of trying. Harrison Bader ground out a good AB that ended in a groundout (ahem); Francisco Lindor reached on an infield single; and Pete Alonso smacked a ball to Josh Naylor, who started a nifty 3-6-1 double play to send the Mets morosely back to their hotel. The Guardians played tight defense and collected hits when they needed to, which is what good teams do; the Mets staggered around failing serially at various aspects of baseball, which is what mediocre teams do, and so the outcome felt almost preordained.
Things can change and it’s still only May, but those things better change pretty thoroughly and pretty quickly to avoid the judgment that this is a team in an earlier stage of its transformation than the people who run it hoped. In which case, I wish the powers that be would get on with it already.
Mediocre teams can be watchable if you can see them turning into something better, even if it’s by fits and starts. But it doesn’t feel like the Mets are that kind of mediocre — it feels like most of these current Mets will be gone before that something better arrives. They’re not part of the future but fill-ins and seat-fillers, treading water and spinning their wheels, and watching them do that is as frustrating for us as it must be for them.
by Jason Fry on 20 May 2024 11:02 pm I’d like to put 6:10 pm start times on the list of things that I thought would be good, or at least novel, and turned out to be terrible.
First off, I completely forgot. I was doing something non-baseball-related, noted it was around 6:35 pm, and reflexively went back to what I was doing, because 6:35 pm is too early to be worrying about things that everyone knows kick off at 7:10 pm.
[record scratch]
Oh yeah, that’s right.
I got upstairs to find it was already 2-0 Guardians, with the Mets having done ill-advised things in the outfield. J.D. Martinez doubled and I had a brief happy thought that the worm might be turning: Several times in the last week I’ve arrived at my post with the Mets having made first-inning noise, only to get stage fright and decide further runs are beyond them. So that was nice, at least.
About 45 seconds later, Starling Marte hit a grounder up the middle that looked like it would elude Ben Lively, except Lively speared it and found Martinez between second and third. He was run down by various Guardians, with Marte moving up behind the play to take Martinez’s place at second once he was tagged out. Except — whoops! — Marte wasn’t on second but between first and second, and a moment later he was in the dugout with his teammate, presumably with neither one of them wanting to talk about what had just happened.
That was really it for the game. Tylor Megill pitched OK. Tomas Nido hit a home run. Josh Walker did well in relief. But the Mets looked sleepy and put upon at the plate, and even at 2-1 it didn’t feel like they were much more than the night’s designated opponent. The most noise they made came in the sixth, when Pete Alonso and Brandon Nimmo hit one-out singles. But Lively ended his night by getting Martinez to swing through a high fastball, departing in favor of Nick Sandlin. Sandlin walked Tyrone Taylor, who’d entered when Marte was tossed out for offering a purist’s critique of home-plate ump Manny Gonzalez’s undulating trapezoid of a strike zone, and so Brett Baty came up with the bases loaded and two out.
Sandlin … well, he eviscerated Baty. Two fastballs separated by a splitter, all at different eye levels, no chance. Pretty soon the game was over, only now I was confused because my baseball-oriented biological clock kept insisting it was an hour later than it was.
Honestly, the whole thing was misbegotten from the start. I’ve already done my best to forget this one — which pretty much ensures I’ll smack myself in the forehead at 6:35 pm or so on Tuesday and we’ll have to do this again.
by Greg Prince on 20 May 2024 12:26 pm In the top of the first inning on Sunday afternoon, the Mets scored four runs, with Tyrone Taylor driving in two and Harrison Bader driving in two more. As soon as the third out was made, I called the visitors’ dugout in Miami. Bench coach John Gibbons answered. Gibby, I said, it’s Greg. Hi Greg, Gibby said, whatcha want, we’re kinda busy right now playing a ballgame. Yeah, Gibby, I said, that’s what this call is about. I know you guys have a nice lead and all, but you had a nice lead and all yesterday, on Saturday, and when the game was through nine, you didn’t have a lead, and when the game was over, you had a loss. So if you could tell the team to do more than just let these four runs sit alone on the scoreboard, I’d really appreciate it. Gibby said he’d see what he could do, he had to go, bye.
In the bottom of the first inning on Sunday afternoon, Sean Manaea took the hill, gave up a two-out double, but then got a grounder to end the inning. I called the visitors’ dugout again. Gibby answered. I asked him to put Sean on the phone. Gibby handed Sean the receiver. Hey Sean, I said, you don’t know me, but I watched yesterday’s game, with the lead getting away and everything, and I wanted to thank you for setting a tone in the bottom of the first by not giving up a run, please keep doing that, and also, as long as you don’t have to think about hitting, maybe remind your teammates to keep scoring runs, just to be on the safe side. Sean graciously thanked me for both my appreciation and my concern and said he would pass along my sentiments about further scoring. I have no reason to believe he didn’t, but the Mets didn’t score in the top of the second.
In the bottom of the second inning, Manaea allowed a two-run home run to Dane Myers, immediately halving the Mets’ lead to 4-2. I could see where this might be going, so I changed strategy and called the visitors’ bullpen in Miami and asked for Adam Ottavino. Otto, I said, this is Greg. What’s up, Greg, Otto asked me. Well, I told him, I know you’re generally not busy in the early innings so maybe you could get a message to Sean to settle down — I didn’t want to bother Sean anymore — and maybe tell the batters fans like me would be a lot calmer after Saturday if they could pour it on some more Sunday. Even though pouring it on didn’t ultimately help on Saturday, I explained, the more Met runs, the better, right Otto? Otto agreed, reminding me that he, too, has always valued certainty, and he’d certainly get right on it.
The Mets didn’t score in the top of the third, but Manaea didn’t give up another run. The same story for the top of the fourth, except with a couple of Marlin baserunners in the bottom of the fourth. As the fifth approached, I realized the Mets might need my help, so I called the dugout and asked for Brandon Nimmo. Brandon, I said, I know you’re about to lead off the inning, so I’ll be brief. I don’t like the pattern thus far: scoring in the first inning, then going silent, maybe you could do something about it, you and DJ and Tyrone, all due up here in the fifth. Brandon was brief but reassuring.
Nimmo, Stewart and Taylor all made outs, and the score remained Mets 4 Marlins 2 heading to the bottom of the fifth. I’m not sure Brandon totally got the gist of my meaning, so after Manaea got through the bottom of the fifth, I thought it best I go right to the manager. I called the visitors’ dugout, told Gibby I needed to talk to Mendy, and when Mendy got on, I was direct. Look, Mendy, I said, you can’t have two consecutive losses where you blow big leads, do something about it. Sean’s been OK through five, but he’s thrown 95 pitches, so I hope you have another pitcher ready for the bottom of the sixth. Also, please inform the lower portion of your order, all of whom are due up here in the top of the sixth, to make like they’re capable of hitting in the top of the order. Mendy told me he’s still kind of new at this, but he’ll try to process all this advice and have the team execute it. I said, Mendy, all I can do is ask. It was a pleasant conversation, even if only one single came out of it.
After Sean Reid-Foley pitched the bottom of the sixth, I figured I’d call the visitors’ dugout and congratulate him. I was surprised when Sean Manaea answered the phone. What’s up with that, I asked Manaea, I wanted Reid-Foley. Sean Manaea laughed and said this sometimes happens, what with two Seans on the team, and then you throw in that there’s a J.D. and a DJ, and a Bader and a Baty and a stream of Syracuse guys who come up for barely more than one game. Anyway, he went on, he was on his way to the shower and happened to be passing the phone, and when he heard it ring, he thought it might be important and, oh, the top of the seventh is about to start and he’s late for his shower and besides, they don’t really love us chatting away while the game is going on, thanks for calling, bye. I guess Sean Manaea really unwinds once he’s out of the game. I never got a chance to tell the other Sean he’d done well nor nudge the batters to put another run on the board. I worried that my lack of input might have an adverse effect on the remaining three innings.
Despite Francisco Lindor singling to begin the seventh, the Mets didn’t add to their total. Then Jake Diekman came in to pitch the bottom of the seventh and gave up an immediate home run to Christian Bethancourt to make it 4-3. Once Diekman escaped the inning, I figured I needed to have a word with him, but in my dialing haste, I got the home dugout in Miami instead. Hi, I said, who’s this? Bethancourt here, the voice said. This was awkward. Oh, yeah, you…hey, that was quite a shot you hit there, um, try not to damage any palm trees the rest of the way. I chuckled and hung up. Talking to a Marlin can be a bit disconcerting, especially when it isn’t your intention. I didn’t tell him to do more damage, did I?
As I settled in to watch the eighth, there was a knock at my door. It was John Franco. John, I asked, what are you doing here? Franco said as an official Mets Ambassador, one of his duties is to visit nervous fans and try to get them to relax when those fans seem as if they could use a little soothing. He’d gotten word from Miami that I seemed particularly anxious and they sent him over. I said why you, John? I mean, no offense, but you’re the last person I could picture representing relaxation in the late innings of a Mets game. Franco kind of stared at me and said I had to be kidding, didn’t I know he held the all-time Mets saves record, that nobody ended more Met games ensuring a win than he did? Gosh, John, I said, I’d never thought of it that way.
John Franco and I watched the eighth and ninth together. We watched the Mets not score in top of the eighth and Reed Garrett not give up anything in the bottom of the eighth. When I instinctively picked up my phone to contact Garrett — I was gonna ask Reed to put Lindor on after — John gently removed it from my hand. Greg, he said, the guys know you want them to win. More importantly, they want to win. It might be most helpful if you could channel your encouragement to general enthusiastic cheers, whether at the ballpark or following from home. It really helps them concentrate if you aren’t spreading your anxiety the way fans like you tend to do. You recognize my voice from me yelling at you, John, don’t you? Franco laughed. I’m just glad you didn’t have a cell phone in 1998, he said.
In the top of the ninth, the Mets finally added more runs to the four they scored in the first inning. Brandon whacked a two-run homer to make it 6-3. Hey, John, I said, I basically told Brandon to do that, many innings ago. That’s great, Greg, John said. Brett Baty added an RBI single. I hadn’t spoken to Brett. I kept that to myself.
In the bottom of the ninth, with a four-run lead of 7-3, I can’t say I totally relaxed, but I decided to trust Garrett and the defense. Sure enough, the Marlins went down without much of a fight and the Mets won. John Franco shook my hand and departed. I was glad I could be of so much help.
by Jason Fry on 18 May 2024 11:05 pm Believe it or not, the Mets did some good things on Saturday afternoon before decidedly not good things started happening.
Mark Vientos collected a pair of hits, drove in a run and played the kind of defense I didn’t think he could play. J.D. Martinez once again looked like he’s shedding the rust of his late start. The recently somnambulant bats of Starling Marte and Jeff McNeil were heard from. Even Tomas Nido made some noise at the plate.
And since I’m in the habit of sneering and/or snarling at the Marlins when the slightest opportunity presents itself, a tip of the sartorial hat to Miami’s City Connects. The Sugar Kings alts aren’t just a good City Connect uniform — they’re a good uniform period. Better, in fact, than anything the Marlins have sported in their aesthetically misbegotten existence. It’s a pleasure to see them, even when those wearing them are doing horrible things to the Mets.
Which they did. Oh boy did they ever.
This one had the feeling of a New Soilmaster disaster when the Mets failed to put the hammer down in the first, again when they let the Marlins creep back into it against Luis Severino, and — sad to say — when Edwin Diaz warmed up with only a four-run lead. Yes, you read that right, and yes, I thought that.
I’ll spare you the particulars because I don’t want to relive them, and the historical record will just have to be the poorer. Suffice to say that Diaz is a walking disaster right now: not enough life on the fastball, slider out to perform sabotage, the pitch clock in his head and zero confidence in his pitches.
This is 2019 all over again, except this time it’s even crueler. Then, we didn’t know Diaz and reacted to his failures with the visceral distemper of a shopper sold bum goods with a forged warranty. The first time around Diaz, to his immense credit, somehow gave a doomed New York sports story an unlikely second chapter, in which he was transformed from reviled bust into a folk hero. Then he got hurt, and somehow he and we are back at the beginning. He isn’t scorned this time; instead your heart goes out for him, because we’ve seen what he can do and we’ve learned how much things mean to him and we’ve seen how failure eats at him. It seems impossible that we’re back in creeping dread mode, yet we are. And that’s left us wondering if we can possibly go through this again.
Now, baseball is habitually cruel: To quote a key tenet of the Kanehlian school of philosophy, “the line drives are caught, the squibbles go for hits. It’s an unfair game.” But there’s habitually cruel and there’s Book of Job outtake stuff. That’s where Diaz is right now, and unfortunately we’re all strapped in for the ride.
What happens next? To him, to the Mets, to us poor observers living and dying on the outcome, which means mostly dying right now? I wouldn’t dare venture a guess, not with the narrative having turned so Gothic and dour. Things are bad enough without tempting the baseball gods to show you that you’re still too optimistic.
by Jason Fry on 17 May 2024 11:20 pm Baseball is always about momentum.
On Thursday night the Mets emerged from a terrifying game with the Phillies as the owners of a hard-fought win. It’s the kind of game that pulls teams together, that gives them a certain sense of purpose when they head for the next battleground, newly confident that they can, in fact, do this. The kind of game that …
Wait a minute, I’ve just been handed a dispatch from the Faith and Fear news desk.
On Friday night the Mets got steamrolled by the Marlins, 8-0.
OK, so baseball is sometimes about momentum.
The Mets were shut out, the defense wasn’t particularly crisp, and the Marlins did the annoying Marlin things that the Marlins do to the Mets at New Soilmaster. They made great catches, had balls carom off people right to them, were in the right place to intercept hard-hit balls, and were generally Marlinesque in their usual teeth-grinding way. If you’ve been laboring in the mines of Met fandom for even a few years, you know that you could pluck a dozen vagrants from one of south Florida’s near-infinity of dodgy byways, dress them in barftastic neon, and watch them beat the Mets at least one game out of three, probably by sneaking a ball through the infield in the bottom of the 11th to make it hurt worse.
The only good thing about Friday night’s game counts as an ever so slightly shiny silver lining, if you squint hard enough. Christian Scott, making his third-ever start (two-thirds of which have now been in his native Florida) reported for duty with his splitter nonexistent and his slider not to be trusted. Predictably, he got whacked around, with the first awooga-awooga of alarm a home run off the not particularly imposing bat of Nick Fortes. Fortes entered the night hitting .127; he went 3 for 3 with a trio of RBIs and is now hitting … .159.
(You’re wondering where the silver lining is, because this all sounds pretty terrible. Patience.)
The hint of something possibly metallic came in the bottom of the fourth. Scott, in trouble all night, found himself on the ropes after a Jeff McNeil error, a single and a walk that loaded the bases with nobody out. Scott was left out there to find his way out of trouble (or not), a necessary rite of passage for every young pitcher, and I looked up from grumpily being bad at Sudoku, mildly curious how he would fare, hoping that he’d keep it to an additional run or two instead of flat-lining and waiting to be rescued. (There’s a variant of this where you get your brains beat in and then throw your teammates under the bus by passive-aggressively musing about plays you could wish had been made; that’s known as the Full Niese.)
Scott didn’t flat-line. He struck out Jazz Chisholm Jr. on a slider that actually did what it was supposed to, got Bryan De La Cruz to pop out to short, and coaxed a ground ball from Josh Bell. After which Carlos Mendoza wisely went to the pen, letting Scott depart on a relatively high note. Maybe it wasn’t much, not on a night when you got beat by more than a touchdown, but it counts as something.
* * *
How about a palate-chaser to send you off a little less down in the mouth?
The Mariners recently saw their 1,000th player go into the record books, and celebrated this milestone in a pretty wonderful way: Kirby Snead got a SNEAD 1000 jersey as part of an on-field celebration featuring appearances by Mariners 505, 644, 677 and 823, all of them Oh Yeah That Guys primarily of interest to people going for a rarity score in Immaculate Grid, and wearing signs with those numbers to indicate their less than routinely celebrated place in team history.
Isn’t that wonderful? How I wish the Mets had done that for their Mr. 1,000! Greg and I could have helped! (If you’ve forgotten, the milestone Met was Michael Conforto, back in 2015. The Mets’ tally now stands at 1,236, with the aforementioned Mr. Scott proudly occupying that particular cell in the Excel sheet.)
There was another Metsian touch to the Seattle celebration: They made not one or two or even three but four cakes for Snead’s party – a 1 and three 0s — and the guest of honor reported that he somehow didn’t get a single slice.
Somewhere, I imagine, Marv Throneberry hoisted a Miller Lite and smiled.
by Greg Prince on 17 May 2024 11:52 am The more straightforward aspects of a baseball game don’t require much explanation. Slugger Pete Alonso hit a home run. Got it. Starter Jose Quintana didn’t walk anybody. Got it. Closer Edwin Diaz blew a save. Got it, though we wish we didn’t. Still, protagonists gonna protagonize.
The aspects of ballgame that keep a person engaged beyond the obvious amid 162 of them are when you observe that because this happened, this didn’t happen. Or maybe one “this” subtly led to another “this” that could have or would have been a whole other “this”. A little of this and a little that can really add up, like what they say about a butterfly flapping its wings somewhere and god-knows-what occurring as a result.
On Thursday night in Philadelphia, there was enough flapping in the field and on the basepaths and at the plate and on the mound to determine the outcome of the Mets’ 6-5 eleven-inning win. It could have easily gone differently. The Phillies could have won by one. Or the Mets could have won by several. Or maybe the Phillies could poured it on. We got the final we got. We’ll take it, of course.
I don’t know what caused the stomach bug that scratched Brandon Nimmo from an already announced lineup, but I do know that if a proverbial butterfly didn’t flap its wings to sideline Brandon, that DJ Stewart wouldn’t have started in his place. And if DJ Stewart didn’t start in his place, Stewart wouldn’t have been batting and singling in the sixth inning. And if Stewart hadn’t gotten on as he did with two out and the Mets ahead by two, Carlos Mendoza wouldn’t have pinch-run Harrison Bader for him.
Bader’s pinch-running assignment added up to nothing at first. There were two out, and a moment later, there was a third. But now Bader was in the game, playing center and shifting Tyrone Taylor to left. Taylor rather than Stewart thus makes a throw home in the bottom of the inning that a) doesn’t nail the sliding runner and b) allows runners who might have been on first and second to advance to second and the third had Taylor aimed for the cutoff man. The man on third then scores on a sac fly to tie a game the Mets led by a pair a couple of moments earlier. Does Stewart play it by the cutoff book if he’s still in there? Does Nimmo if he’s healthy? Does the second Phillie run find the opportunity to register?
Go ask a butterfly.
But we don’t have to dwell on a Met misjudgment because we can enjoy some good Met fortune. This is in the eighth, after the Phillies have taken the lead (not all good Met fortune is unalloyed). Taylor reaches bases on an error and steals second. Alonso walks. After two strikeouts, Bader strikes…pitcher Jeff Hoffman with a batted ball, which allows Taylor to score, Alonso to go from first to third and Bader himself to reach second. Would have somebody else engineered such a stream of circumstances? While you ask another butterfly, notice Alonso crossing the plate on a wild pitch. The Mets are ahead.
In the ninth, Diaz isn’t the Diaz we thought we knew yet still (I hope) love, and the Phillies knot things again. No scoring occurs in the tenth. The 4-4 game, including its unearned-runner mishegas, moves to the eleventh. J.D. Martinez leads off with an RBI single, because that happens in extra innings. That much is easily understood since 2020. Martinez knocking in a runner from second is graspable, too.
Then we’re back to Bader, the pinch-runner for the left fielder who wouldn’t have played if not for the left fielder with the stomach bug. Bader doubles. It’s at least as big as Martinez’s single, even though it doesn’t knock in a run. It might have had there been a pinch-runner available, but the Mets were playing with a three-man bench, and all Mendoza had left to run for Martinez was his backup catcher, so no dice. Yet it was critical that J.D. got to third, which Harrison made happen, because after two more Met strikeouts, Phillies reliever Jose Alvarado uncorked a wild pitch, which was enough to bring Martinez home with a second eleventh-inning run. Connoisseurs of contemporary extras comprehend two runs in the top of an inning after the ninth is exponentially better than just one run.
In the bottom of the eleventh, Jake Diekman gave up one run — but not two. One we could handle, thanks to what the pinch-runner did with the bat twice. Sometimes a player comes off the bench and does something outstanding. Bader came off the bench to do one thing and wound up doing two things that had nothing to do with that one thing, and it made all the difference.
The previous pinch-runner to make an offensive impact with his lumber rather than his fee, if you can think back this far, was Nimmo, on Sunday. What Bader did, while not as definitive as Brandon’s Esix Snead-style walkoff homer, was pretty rare in Met annals. Only seven Mets have entered a game as a pinch-runner and proceeded to connect for two hits and drive in a run or more. The only one to knock a teammate home twice was utilityman extraordinaire Bob Bailor. On June 3, 1983, Frank Howard’s very first game as interim manager (directly after George Bamberger quit to, as Bambi put it, go fishing), Hubie Brooks started at third at Los Angeles. He led off the visitors’ sixth with a single, but had to leave the game with a bruised knee after tripping over first base.
Enter Bailor, who promptly stole second, advanced on Darryl Strawberry’s groundout to short, and came home on George Foster’s single to right. That’s really all you can ask a pinch-runner to do. But Bob wasn’t done doing. He singled in a run in the seventh, then another in the ninth. With Bailor involved as much as he could be across four innings, the Mets won, 5-2, and got Hondo’s managerial tenure off to a successful start. And, one might wish to infer, incumbent Dodger manager Tommy Lasords witnessed all Bailor was capable of and began hatching the germ of an idea that became trading Sid Fernandez (and Ross Jones) for Bob Bailor (and Carlos Diaz).
Fast-forward a little, and who’s that on the mound shutting down the Red Sox in the middle of Game Seven of the 1986 World Series? “Hey, ease up on the cause and effect,” a butterfly just texted me. For one night, it was enough that pinch-runner Bob Bailor came to the Mets’ rescue in ways that transcended running for Hubie Brooks. And for another night, let’s be glad Harrison Bader was the right Met in the right place at the right time.
by Jason Fry on 15 May 2024 11:44 pm At least the Mets seem to be accepting that some things aren’t working. They reported for duty in Philadelphia without Joey Wendle, mercifully DFA’ed in favor of Mark Vientos, and recalled Joey Lucchesi while sending Jose Butto down to presumably find coaches to help him tame his sudden bout of wildness.
And, hey, the plan looked pretty good for an hour or so. Vientos cracked an early double off Ranger Suarez, who’s been invincible in 2024, and Lucchesi looked solid for four innings, his record blemished only by a Bryce Harper home run over the left field wall, which we should remember is about 195 feet away in this ballpark and so deserving of an asterisk.
But Lucchesi came apart like a dime-store watch in the fifth: walks, an ill-advised throw to third on a bunt, a bases-loaded HBP and consecutive hits that plated three. Vientos would pick up another hit but at times played third base like he was being chased by bees. The Phillies did cruel things to Grant Hartwig and Adrian Houser, there were Met errors, and that’s not even addressing the various dopey and/or inept things contributed to the proceedings by the winning team. Or the fact that the first few innings were played in a gloomy murk that made you want to reach inside your TV with a rag in hopes of making a clear spot.
This was some poor soul’s first-ever baseball game; I hope someone told him or her that they’re not all like that.
Before bringing this recap to a merciful conclusion, a last thought, one that I’ve been tugging this way and that for a couple of weeks: There’s a case to be made that Vientos should have been the DH all year, with J.D. Martinez employed by someone else. The Mets are thoroughly mediocre and it feels like the gap between them and the playoffs is a fair bit bigger than J.D. But this isn’t a surprise — it felt that way in March too. If that’s the case, why is Martinez here? Vientos, like his maybe-platoon partner Brett Baty, clearly has things to learn, but he’s not going to learn them in Syracuse. To have a shot at mastering those lessons he needs to play at the big-league level, and play regularly.
But it’s also true that Martinez has a sterling reputation as a student of hitting and an excellent teammate, and that may be part of the equation here. A decade or so ago I would have dismissed that as an unquantifiable Just So story, but now I’m not so sure. This isn’t the start of a stemwinder about intangibles, which really are Just So stories, but an open question about the value of mentors on a team with young players. There have been a number of relatively recent Mets who didn’t do much in our uniform but were later exalted as teachers — Jose Valverde and Jose Bautista are the names that come immediately to mind.
Those stories tend not to be told until later, sometimes popping up when no longer so young players talk about their own development and the guys who helped them along their path. Much later, sometimes: I don’t recall hearing about Mike Torrez helping a very young Dwight Gooden until Gooden’s number-retirement ceremony was upon us.
I’m not saying that’s the answer, or that those who grouse that Vientos’s development is being stunted are wrong — I’ve thought that myself. I’m just saying it’s something to think about. And maybe even a little comfort when you can’t bear to look at the scoreboard.
by Greg Prince on 14 May 2024 8:19 pm The Mets ain’t too bad when they wear either their classic home pinstriped uniforms (10-7) or their road grays (9-8). They’re godawful when they wear anything else. Four losses with no wins in the City Connects. Two losses with no wins in the fade-to-blacks. And now, with the belated arrival of the white pants that enabled them to don their blue jerseys, they’ve been unable to win in another shade.
The Mets put on their blues Tuesday afternoon and immediately came down with a fresh case of them, falling to the Phillies, 4-0. Aaron Nola pitched a shutout. I wasn’t rooting for him to prevail, but once it became intrinsically apparent the Mets weren’t going to conjure one of their intermittent last-out revivals, I perversely hoped the Seaver-tying bastard would go the distance. You’re gonna lose, you might as well lose to a single pitcher rather than a parade of relievers.
The Mets seem to embrace alternate jerseys and the 0-7 karma that comes with them. Not losing would be a better alternative. No doubt the winlessness when they dig deep into their closet is a coincidence. Still, the sample size has gotten larger and my desire to pick apart another loss that involves the Mets not coming through in any aspect of their most recent game is minute. So let’s pull on these threads.
The Mets introduced the blue tops in 2013. I was at the holiday luncheon at which Ike Davis and R.A. Dickey modeled them the preceding December. Dickey was traded soon later. Maybe that’s why I’ve never fully cottoned to those shirts. I should, I guess. They’re royal blue and the orange is prominent. Can’t say they don’t evince Metsiness. Yet something about them tries too hard. Look! Fun! Really! Matt Harvey really enjoyed wearing them when he was on the mound, including the night he carried his own shutout into the ninth inning in the World Series. Yet another association that works against them.
Despite the dismality inherent within the latest incarnation of black Mets jerseys, I wasn’t fire-and-brimstone traditionalist during their initial dark reign; I was super happy to see them in the first years of the new century and think of Robin Ventura grand-slam singling. I agreed with the consensus that they were tired by the time Shea Stadium gave way to Citi Field and didn’t miss them once they were altogether deleted in 2012. I was OK with their nostalgic return in 2021. The new ones should go down a black hole.
The City Connects, which display a certain sharpness from just the right angle (like when one of the caps is hanging on a hook by a player’s locker during an interview and I’m taken by the purple button), bug me mostly for the “NYC” on the chest. I referred to New York City when I was eight years old. My father, who could claim a tangible connection to four of five boroughs — born in the Bronx, raised in Queens, spent the first decade of his married life in Brooklyn, built a business in Manhattan — corrected my usage: “It’s New York. Only tourists say New York City.” Good enough for me. Unless I’m humming lyrics belonging to Odyssey, Lou Reed or Climax Blues Band (or requesting I’m Doin’ Fine Now), I keep my New York references to two words.
 The only “NYC” I dig. Instead of “NYC” and the whole bit about how we have subways and sidewalks, I would have led with “NYM” as the wordmark and made the requisite storytelling about something more than the city, because the Mets and New York connect to so much more than the city limits.
Get a celebrity whose voice is easily identified as genuinely Metsian. Have that person read something along the lines of…
***New York. The Metropolis.
Biggest city in the country. Most mammoth Metropolitan area, too.
We’ve got boroughs. We’ve got the longest of Islands. We encompass three states.
The beautiful part of being from here, moving to here, or simply loving it here is how much you get to choose from here. The best food, according to YOU. The fashion you decide looks best on YOU. The field that is indisputably YOUR field. You decide who you want to be and what you want to be about. You are an individual among millions.
Yet just because you don’t go along with the crowd doesn’t mean you’re all alone here. In the New York Metropolitan Area, you’ve got neighbors; you’ve got community, you’ve got teammates.
The passion belongs to you.
And you.
And you.
There’s nothing quite like knowing you’re in this thing together…and that your team isn’t only YOUR team.
(Interject with a few fans.)
My team.
My team.
My team.
(Back to our celebrity v/o.)
You connect with your team, your teammates, and the entire Metropolitan Area. If you happen to be in a hurry — you are, after all, in and around New York — you can express that feeling in three quick letters.
NYM.
We know what that stands for.
Our home. Our team.
Just let somebody try to tell us different.
***“NYM,” I believe, would have spoken not just to a wider geography, but a relevant mindset. It would have spoken to Mets fans, the people who are your primary audience for whatever is being placed on shelves. I suppose there is some research showing the vaguer the Met link, the better the chance that somebody on another continent who doesn’t know or care what the Mets are will wear what is being sold. Perhaps there’s research indicating “NYC” is the best play for non-baseball merchandising.
“NYM” would have been about the Mets and the mindset of those who’ve chosen to forge their bond with this franchise and its other acolytes. They could have done the purple and the gray and whatever. I would have changed one letter. It would have been ours. We would have been happy to share.
***I wonder if I ever thought more than in fleeting terms about uniforms before I first read Paul Lukas’s Uni-Watch column in the Village Voice in 1999. I know I’ve never looked at uniforms the same ever again. Paul invented the concept of covering the aesthetics of athletic apparel as a beat unto itself. A lot of us watched games and thought “that thing they’re wearing is kind of interesting.” Paul thought it, wrote it and committed to learning more and more about it. Uni-Watch grew in scope, but never lost sight of its mission. Paul and the people who have supported his enterprise — both as dedicated Uni-Watch staff and readers he’s indirectly trained to eyeball every last detail of every last pants leg — created a world of their own, one that opened its gates to anybody who “gets it” in his words. The only perspective that’s out of fashion at Uni-Watch is dismissing the topic of uniforms as not such a big deal.
 Abyssinia, Paul. Uni-Watch turns 25 later this month, meaning Paul’s been on his beat for a quarter-century. He’s decided that’s enough monitoring stirrups for now. Paul will retire from the everyday of Uni-Watch, handing the keys to his friend and collaborator Phil Hecken. I’ve met Phil and read Phil and know he’ll keep a great thing top-notch. But I’m gonna miss Paul in the realm he’s constructed because he’s one of a kind. He’s provocative, evocative and authentic every time he posts. His 2020 column for the New Republic, on what he calls blue collar “cosplay” by professional sports teams, stays with me. Every time some announcer (including those who announce Mets games) lauds a player as “blue collar” because he went from first to third on a single, it gets on my nerves, as if anybody who ever worked wearing anything else is a lollygagger. My dad put on a suit and took a very early train into New York — just New York — every morning for decades. He came home kind of late and was usually tired. What was his work ethic?
That’s not exactly the point Paul was making, but he really nailed something that had been irking me forever about sports. He’s done that so often, all while delivering news nobody before him considered news. Plus, based on the several times we’ve crossed paths, he’s a helluva sweet guy, unfailingly kind to this correspondent and this blog. Mets fan, too. He once told me that when he was a kid going to Shea, he rooted for the Mets, on those occasions when they were winning in the ninth inning, to blow their lead so he could stick around for extras. I found that a little nuts, but knowing he’s ending his regular Uni-Watch role, I sort of wish somebody would mandate that he has to keep playing in his field.
Really, I hope Paul Lukas enjoys himself and his next endeavors. But he should know he’s incredibly appreciated for what he’s created.
by Jason Fry on 13 May 2024 11:08 pm The game wasn’t lost when Edwin Diaz gag-jobbed the save, though Diaz’s slider has been MIA all season, his command was horrific again, and some of us have been sounding the alarm for some time now.
The game wasn’t lost when Whit Merrifield was inexplicably given a free base after clearly swinging through a 3-1 Diaz slider, even though this umpiring crew was an embarrassment and yet another flashing red indicator that balls, strikes and all the other decisions MLB umpires get serially wrong need to be taken away from them posthaste. (Though when this finally happens we’ll get another idiotic challenge system that shoves baseball closer to the numbing bureaucracy of football, because baseball’s custodians are business-school vandals who shouldn’t be charge of anything, let alone humanity’s highest achievement.)
The game wasn’t lost when Kody Clemens singled off a noncompetitive Diaz slider, or later when he made a leaping catch to rob Francisco Lindor, but it should be noted that Kody Clemens is the son of a war criminal and so should have grown up a lonely exile in some forgotten place, destined to become a schoolyard legend in the annals of Elba, St. Helena or the Ross ice shelf.
The game wasn’t lost when Joey Wendle bunted Jose Alvarado‘s second pitch of the 10th in a polite little arc to Alec Bohm at third, though one wonders what the point of Joey Wendle is, since so far this year he’s demonstrated that he can’t hit, can’t field, can’t be trusted to make sound decisions and has now shown that he can’t bunt.
No, the game was lost a lot earlier. It was lost in the third, when the Mets took a 3-1 lead off Cristopher Sanchez on a J.D. Martinez walk that left them with the bases loaded and nobody out. That’s a gimme run there at least with a second in reach; good teams get something out of those situations even if they don’t manage another tally. What happened? Brett Baty struck out, Harrison Bader struck out and Jeff McNeil struck out. The Mets didn’t stretch the lead to 4-1, 5-1 or break the game open; instead they went down meekly against Sanchez, let the Phillies stick around and eventually the roof caved in.
Mediocre teams lose games in this fashion all the time — blowouts don’t materialize but turn into close games, which turn into losses. The highlight-grabbing plays are the ones that get recorded as the heartbreakers, but it’s not really the case. The real heartbreakers come and go with a lot less notice, when something needs to happen and it doesn’t.
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