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ABOUT US

Greg Prince and Jason Fry
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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Ron Hodges Backed Us Up

I have a few overriding memories of Ron Hodges’s Mets career that aren’t his signature moment in baseball.

1) Memorial Day 1976: The Mets have won the first game of a holiday doubleheader against Pittsburgh. They’re being shut out by Doc Medich in the second game. Ron Hodges hits a home run in the ninth. They […]

Happy Holidays, James McCann

A former major leaguer who I watched pitch against the Mets once but who I can’t say I remember doing so tweeted something eye-opening this week: “In the entire history of baseball, only 22,860 have made it to the major leagues. That total easily fits into any MLB stadium.” An actor who portrays a former […]

Catching OF-3B Lightning in a Catcher

The year is 1970. Or it should be. That was the plan as we approached the third installment of our OF-3B/3B-OF series. We spent one segment focused mainly on 1962, because you can’t begin to understand the Mets’ signature position shuttle without delving into the start of something absurd; and we spent the next segment […]

Look at Him — He’s the Catcher Now

The Ages of Lo Duca, Schneider, Santos, Barajas, Thole, Buck, d’Arnaud, Plawecki, Mesoraco and Ramos (to say nothing of the intervals of more than a score of backups) have given way now to The Age of McCann. James McCann, that is, starting backstop for your New York Mets, a franchise that hasn’t fully filled its […]

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Catcher

Travis d’Arnaud once said something for de facto public consumption maybe only I caught. Perhaps Travis would appreciate my use of the past tense of catch in the previous sentence. He’d probably appreciate more “will catch” in the sentence that begins the next paragraph of his career, wherever […]

Wanna Have a Catcher?

Remember that bruise on Kevin Plawecki’s mitt hand from Wednesday night’s game, the one that was declared just a bruise once x-rays were reported as negative? You will when you look for Plawecki behind the plate and see no trace of him. The hand, we learned from the Post’s Mike Puma Friday morning, is broken from […]

The Pitcher Whisperers

Even in Little League I was a no-tool player: completely inept at hitting, catching and throwing. (I could run, but never had any reason to.) The only thing I could do, kind of, was play catcher.

To be sure, I couldn’t even do that. There was no stealing in our league and maybe one play at the […]

The First Met to Make It to 90

“I hit behind Yogi in one ballgame […] somebody threw him a fastball up in his eyes and Yogi banged it up the middle for a single and I was sitting there on deck going, ‘This is not a game for which I’m familiar…good god.’ To bat behind Yogi Berra, that was awesome.”
—Ron Swoboda

It wasn’t […]

‘Dude, Hit the Ball Hard’

Mike Piazza is a special instructor in Mets camp. He is among the most special of all Mets, so the title fits. Nice of him to swing by St. Lucie, just as it was good thinking on Jeff Wilpon’s part to invite him.

(We will now take the keyboard on which I’m typing out of play […]

This Week in Buck Ball

It’s the golden hour for John Buck right now, that fleeting interregnum when the journeyman is master craftsman. It is a time to be savored.

John Buck drives in nine runs in five games, four of them in his fifth game to propel the Mets to a Saturday victory.

John Buck draws a roughing the catcher penalty […]