A Season In Five Games

The baseball regular season is winding down to an end, and today my team, the New York Mets, clinched a playoff spot despite an imposing number of injuries. On this cool, wet afternoon with damp, newly fallen leaves on the ground, I feel a million miles away from the April thaw and spring breeze. The baseball season is a long one, and with 162 games, it can feel like a journey of sorts. You remember the good times and bad, certain random games out of the 162 sticking in your mind. Right now I am thinking back at the five Met games I was able to attend, and how they tell a story of this improbable season.

April 30, 2016
Mets 6 - Giants 5
Mets record: 15-7

Every year my friend Jim gets a bunch of people to together for Metsgate, which involves intense tailgating in the furthest, least policed corner of the parking lot. I brought a small, behind the liquor store bottle of Maker's Mark with me on the Long Island Railroad wrapped up in the Saturday New York Times. This year, to save money, our group of tickets were in the top rows behind home plate. This was a sign of the Mets' resurgence the season before, which meant that they were actually a hot ticket again for the first time in years. The April winds blew hard that day, and I was freezing my butt off, despite the warmth of the bourbon in my blood. Going to games in April is a real roll of the dice. Jacob deGrom gave up three runs, but none of them were earned. Youngster Michael Conforto was hitting his stroke, and knocked in three runs in that game with three hits, including a homer. To avoid the wind we went down to the area behind the bullpen at the end of the game, and watched Jeurys Familia warm up, throwing hard with a satisfying *pow* sound every time his pitches hit the catcher's glove. The Mets hit 15-7 and I thought that they were on their way to a dominant season. Ah, the hubris of April!

June 21, 2016
Mets 2 - Royals 1
Mets record: 37-32

April's chill had more than faded by this time. It was a bright sunny day, and my last day of school for the year. Ending that blessed day at the ballpark was like a dream come true. I met my friend Guy at the stadium, and we got there so early that we had to wait in line for half an hour before they would let us in. He is a a great baseball companion who likes being at the park early, and is good at striking up interesting conversations with other fans. We went straight to the outfield bleachers for batting practice, and Guy even brought his glove. I really do love getting to the park early, drinking it in and attuning myself to the subtle rhythms of baseball. We actually got about seven feet from catching a ball hit in the seats during BP, but we weren't big enough losers to muscle out the kids scrambling for it. We had great seats for the game, on the first base line, although this meant the sun blasting our faces for the first three innings. This ended up being one of the most memorable games I'd ever been to. Bartolo Colon was pitching, and the first batter hit a line drive right off his wrist, driving Colon from the game. It was up to the Mets' bullpen to win an entire game without any time to warm up, and they actually did it. The fact that they managed to do it against the team that beat the Mets in the World Series made it all the more sweet. The Mets were faltering at this point in the season, with Duda on the DL and Conforto hitting a big slump. The guts they showed in this game made me think that they still had a chance.

July 1, 2016
Mets 10 - Cubs 2
Mets record: 42-37

I went to this game with my Dad, visiting from Nebraska, and my friend Matt, visiting from Georgia to root on his beloved Cubs. The Mets had been maintaining a holding pattern, a winning but not dominant theme. We almost didn't go, since the weather forecast looked pretty grim. There was a rain delay, but that afforded the perfect opportunity to get some spicy sausage sandwiches and beers in the concourse. That experience also showed the wisdom of Citi Field's architects, who designed concourses wide enough to hold fans during a rain delay without becoming as crowded as rush hour on the subway. As always, it was great to go to a game with my father. He has not stayed up on the current players, but has an amazing eye for the game itself. He notices the defensive shifts and predicts what kind of pitch the pitcher will throw next, and going to a game with him always reminds me that statistical analysis is only a one part of how to understand baseball. My father marveled at Jacob deGrom's dominating pitches, especially a high heater that tempted the opposing to swing and miss many times. The Mets looked really sharp, and they ended up taking all four games in this series. I actually felt bad for Matt, since he had made such a long trip to see his team in what is supposed to be a year of destiny for the Cubs. Little did I know that after sweeping the Cubs the Mets would began a long, slow decline, and the Cubs would prove themselves to be the most dominant team in the National League. Such are the twists and turns of the wide river that is a baseball season.

August 13, 2016
Mets 3 - Padres 2
Mets record: 58-58

When this game started, the Mets had a losing record. Guy and I managed to get tickets dirt cheap for a Saturday night game due to the Mets' decline. We went on what must've been the hottest day of the year, the sun just blasting down and waves of heat rising from the concrete of the parking lot as we each slammed an Old Milwaukee tallboy, more to quench our thirst than to get a buzz on. It was the kind of heat so intense that my usually profuse sweating no longer caused me embarrassment because everyone there was drenched. DeGrom was on the hill again, and yet again he pitched a gem, not giving up a hit until the fifth inning. However, the Mets' anemic offense could not give him the necessary run support. The Padres were down 2-1 when the ninth inning began, with the Mets' imposing closer Jeurys Familia there to close it out. After putting down the first two batters, he gave up a big blast of a home run that felt like a massive punch to the gut. It was a metaphor for a season when the Mets showed promise, and then managed to screw things up. I might've left the game in disgust at that point, but Guy and I attended this game in large part because Styx (remember them?) was giving a free concert afterward. Finally, in the eleventh inning, the Mets put together a string of hits, and won the game on that most anticlimactic of plays, a fielder's choice. Perhaps this game was another metaphor, the Mets as a team with its back against the wall that managed to scratch and fight its way forward. Gabriel Ynoa, just called up from the minors, managed to get the win in relief, just one of many players who would come out of nowhere to bolster the Mets as they contended with injury. We left the stadium feeling just a little bit of hope that the Mets could turn things around.

September 25, 2016
Mets 17 - Phillies 0
Mets record: 83-73

This game was my birthday present, and I attended it with my wife and my two girls, who were at their first Mets game. It was also the last home game of the season, and I'd always wanted to go to a last home game, since they can be such wistful moments. When we got the tickets a month before I assumed that the Mets would be out of contention at this point. It was right then that the Mets started catching fire, hitting the ball and scoring runs in torrents after the drought of the summer. Their starting staff was decimated worse than a regiment of North Caroliners at the bloody angle at Gettysburg. Harvey, deGrom, and Matz all went down, and Wheeler was unable to come back. The pitchers they called up from the minors, like Seth Lugo and Robert Gsellman (who started this game) somehow excelled. It reminded me of the third part of the Lord of the Rings, when the dead kings rise to joint the battle and win the day for the heroes. The weather at this game was damn near perfect, sunny, a little breezy, and exactly what you want out of a September afternoon. I also had the good luck to find out that an old friend from college was in town for business and attending the game, and so we got to have a beer and catch up on the concourse while my daughters dashed around our feet. I took it as a sign that this was not just going to be an ordinary baseball game. The Mets themselves seemed hellbent on giving their home fans a great sendoff in a game that was the team's biggest blowout of the season. We left in the eighth inning to get in line behind the stadium for the Sunday special promotion where kids get to run the bases after the game. It took forever, because the Mets tacked on six runs that inning. Running the bases was a special treat, and not just for the girls. We stood out on the warning track, waiting for our turn, and I looked out giddily at the lush green field where so many of my hopes and wishes had been directed through the long, long season. I felt a little silly for investing so much in a boys' game played by grown men, but on the way home, when my daughters said they wanted to go back to the ballpark again, I felt so happy that I can barely describe it.

The giveaway that last home game was a magnetic 2017 schedule. The cycles repeat. Winter will come, but soon spring, and then baseball again, and with any luck, more trips with my family to the ballpark.

Witnessing The Resurrection Of The Mets

Wilmer Flores hitting a walk-off a couple of days after he was almost traded, perhaps this team's defining moment

As I've written before, once I moved to New Jersey I decided to pull for the Mets.  Initially they were just my National League team (since I am a Chicago White Sox fan of long standing), but this year I found myself watching Mets games almost exclusively.  This team has really put its hooks in me, and this season has been one crazy, wild ride.

It's also been totally unexpected.  It is easy to forget just how it was only yesterday that the Mets were a crummy, perennially hapless squad incapable of drawing big crowds in the nation's biggest metropolis.  They hadn't been to the playoffs or even had a winning season since the Bush administration.  The Mets had a brand new stadium at Citi Field in 2009, but still hadn't managed to eke out even a .500 season there.  I'd been to many games before this season, and had liked the fact that tickets were cheap and trading up was easy because so few people were turning out.  Last season my father and I managed to go to a July game for $12 each while sitting in the lower level with the best seats I've ever purchased for a baseball game.

One game for me is a good reminder of how the current Mets dawn breaking over the baseball firmament was preceded by dreary, inky darkness.  On April 26 of last year I went with a work friend and some of his buddies to a game against the Marlins.  Even though it was a Saturday night game, attendance was sparse. It was a chilly, drizzly spring night, and we tailgated underneath the elevated 7 line to stay dry.  There were so few people that we still ended up getting hassled by the cops even though we were being as quiet and unobtrusive as possible.

We sat in the upper deck, looking at a half-empty stadium and a Met team that was just above .500, but had no business being so.  Looking at the box score, even though the game was last year it feels like it happened a million years ago.  The Mets sent out six pitchers, only two of them are still with the team.  Only five of the eight regular position player starters are still with the squad today.  The Mets were up 5-1 before their blew their lead in the 6th and ended up losing by a run in the 10th inning.  That run was given up by Kyle Farnsworth, just one of many players on that team whose best years were long in the past. At least grizzled veteran Bobby Abreu, playing in his last season, smacked an impressive home run.

I was watching a team with some young players who were not yet ready for prime time and a bunch of worn out journeymen trying to fill the gaps.  The once and future ace, Matt Harvey, was recovering from Tommy John surgery and nobody knew whether he could come back to being his old self.  Leaving the game damp and chilled to the bone, trudging over to the Long Island Railway station I wondered why I had chosen to root for such a crummy team.  The season brought some highlights, including the emergence of Jacob DeGrom, but the Mets still couldn't muster a winning record.  In spring training this year the young guys started looking better seasoned, and Harvey seemed like he could maybe go back to being his old self, but my prediction was an 82-80 season, and I thought that rather optimistic.

My attitude changed at my first game this year, on April 18, also against the Marlins.  The Mets were in the middle of an eleven game winning streak, and the stadium was packed to the rafters.  Fans stood up when the Marlins had two outs and a raucous atmosphere prevailed.  It felt like one big party, and that Mets fans had finally come home after living for a decade on a desert island.  After six years of going to Mets games in losing seasons I hadn't seen anything quite like it.  Among the Mets faithful the flame had still been kept, and they were waiting in painful anticipation for another opportunity.  Of course, in the middle of the streak the Mets suffered some freak injuries, including to captain David Wright.

Months followed of 1-0, 2-1 games.  The pitching was amazing, the hitting as pathetic as Lincoln Chafee's presidential campaign.  I remember the likes of John Mayberry hitting clean-up, and serious talk of Kirk Nieuwenhuis being the answer in left field.  At that point, in late July, the Mets made a bunch of smart trades, promoted Michael Conforto, and saw their injured players come back.  The rest is history. (Read Jonah Keri's reporting on the crazy week where the Mets got it back together.)

The next game I went to was on August 28th against the Red Sox.  I could barely believe my eyes.  Getting to the game was difficult because of the massive traffic, and the feeling inside was one of giddy happiness.  The last month had turned things around, and Mets fans were practically delirious with joy.  Even though there was a month to play, and the Mets lost that game, I felt like I the Mets were going to take the division.  They played with such confidence, and Harvey mowed down the opposition, even if he didn't get the decision.  It was also David Wright's first home game back after months of injury, and the crowd gave him a standing ovation when he took the plate for his first at-bat.  "Let's Go Mets!" chants thundered at various points in a stadium that a year before had been about as raucous as a church ice cream social.

I want the Mets to win the World Series, but if they don't I can take heart in the fact that in only a year they have gone from pathetic to powerful.  They are at the pinnacle, the Yankees are sitting at home.  Mark my words, the Mets will be the dominant team in the Big Apple for the years to come.

All Star Break Thoughts

Nomar Garciaparra was Mr Red Sock before a post-All-Star trade to the Cubs in 2004, the season that the Beantowners finally won, but without him

The all-star break is here, which is more than halfway through the baseball season in terms of games played, but spiritually marks the end of the first half of the season, since there will be a lot of intensity packed in for teams that are in contention.  The next month will basically decide who will have a chance to win it all, and who will be an also-ran.  Trades will come fast and furious as teams try to get that last piece of the puzzle.

If your team really sucks, they are already out of the game.  There's a reason that "June" and "swoon" are paired together so often by baseball reporters.  That month typically weeds out the crappy teams that might have had a lucky start, something I feared would happen to my Mets.  While they scored runs about as effectively as Comcast takes customer service calls that month, they managed to go into the all-star break on a four-game winning streak of inspired baseball.  I heard the last game over the radio as I was driving into New Jersey at the end of our two-week road trip, and cursed the Mets for making me care.  When your team stinks, it's easier sometimes just to write them off at this point, in order to avoid the inevitably bigger disappointments lurking in the future.

That's the way it's been for my White Sox this season, whose recent winning ways can't change my mind about their crappy performance this year.  I still remember the point in mid-June where I realized that their "slow start" had gone on so long that it was now actually a "bad season."  This despite the addition of several high-powered players in the off-season.  It goes to show that the games have to be decided on the field.  Take the Mets, for instance.  Their lineup and bullpen have been so injury-prone that at times the team on the field was more fitting for the Pacific Coast rather than the National League.  Team captain and public face David Wright has not played for months now.  By some kind of miracle fans have practically forgotten about him and their spotty lineup in the avalanche of amazing young pitching that the Mets have put on display this year.

This now puts the Mets in a conundrum during the trade deadline that they haven't faced in years: whether to take a risk to get a needed component via trade, or to stand pat and hope things work themselves out.  This is usually an agonizing thing for a hardcore fan to contemplate, something I know full well as White Sox fan.  For several years before their 2005 title, they would have okay teams who played in a weak division, tempting ownership to make a move to get them over the top.  Often they would make a move, and then the team would just get bad.  From 2001 through 2004, the Sox had records of .500 or above, and finished in second place three times and third place once.  Rooting for a team that's good enough to contend but not good enough to win is a nerve-wracking experience, especially when it happens four years in a row.  It's especially bad if a team trades good players for others who fail to realize their promise.  Last season the Oakland As, a team that usually stuck to its moneyball formula, decided to finally go for broke and ended up falling apart about as fast as a Gary Busey reality show.  I remember back in 2001 when the Cubs picked up Fred McGriff down the stretch, and long-suffering fans rejoiced as if the solution to their woes had been found.  They ended up in third place after a losing record in the second half of the season.

The Mets, also carrying forward a tradition of mediocrity, haven't had a winning season since the Bush administration.  They are owned by the Wilpons, who despite having a team in the nation's biggest media market, throw around nickels like they're manhole covers.  Much of this has to do with them taking a bath on the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.  (They made money, but had to give over $162 million in the settlement.) As you would imagine, people who invest millions and millions of dollars in Ponzi schemes might not be the most astute and financially capable people in the world.  The Mets have finally started spending money on free agents, but on over the hill, overpriced players like Michael Cuddyer and Curtis Granderson.  (Would have loved to have had them in 2009!)  Originally I wanted the Mets to make a big move and even to trade one of their array of young arms to get a big bat in the lineup.  Then I remembered that would probably add yet another aging slugger who was a whole lot better five years ago.  Such are the anxieties when you root for a solid but not great team with a history of losing.

Of course, what if your team really and truly is completely out of it?  What do you do then?  What I've done is to stop following my team, and to start following baseball as a whole.  I pore over the stats a few times a week, listen to more baseball podcasts, watch random games on mlb.com, and generally immerse myself in the drama of the pennant races.  It's a lot more enjoyable than watching a bad team I love get crushed on a daily basis.  This year I won't have that privilege, and will likely be spending the next two and a half months steeling myself for the inevitable Mets collapse.  Why do I do this to myself again?

Why the Mets' 20 Inning Loss on Saturday Made Me a Believer

As I mentioned recently, I have decided to adopt the New York Mets as my local baseball team.  In that spirit on Saturday, after coming home from the local Portugese festival, I turned on the game to be the accompaniment of playing with my twin daughters on the carpet.  It was tied in the 8th at the time, and I hoped the Mets would pull it out.  It hit extra innings, and I kept putting off things I had to do so that I could see the end.  The innings kept passing, and the Mets kept getting runners on base, but they couldn't get their feeble bats to hit any of those runners home.  Finally, in the 19th, I had to get up and walk the dog, who was desperate to go the bathroom.  When I got home, it was all over, and the Mets had lost.  I was glad to have been spared such a frustrating moment, but strangely enough, I felt attached to my new fandom more strongly than ever.

That might sound kinda weird, considering the team I have committed myself to showed, yet again, its penchant for incompetence and futility.  There is something endearing, however, in such grandiose and extreme futility.  Any team can lose 2-1 after failing get runners home, it takes a special team to lost 2-1 in 20 innings while squandering an amazing relief pitching performance.  The Mets seem to have a real penchant for this kind of stuff.

I was recently rereading some old Roger Angell pieces (mostly because he's the best baseball writer ever), and found an amazing article he wrote in the mid-1960s comparing the Mets to the Yankees.  The Yankees were still the premier franchise in baseball, and the infant Mets were closer to their epically disastrous debut season than to their "Amazin'" World Series title in 1969.

Observing some spring training games, he heard a Yankees fan berating his team, and wrote this:

"I recognized the tone. It was knowing, cold, full of contempt that the calculator feels for those who don't play the odds. It was the voice of the Yankee fan...Over the years, many of their followers have come to watch them with the stolidity, the smugness, and the arrogance of holders of large blocks of blue-chip stocks. These fans expect no less than perfection. The cooly accept the late-inning rally, the winning homes, as their only due. They are apt to take defeat with ill grace, and they treat their stars as though they were executives hired to protect their interests."

That pretty much sums up my inability to root for the Yankees.

Angell had this to say, in turn, about the Mets and their (at the time, at least) rabid fans:

"Suddenly the Mets fans made perfect sense to me. What we were witnessing was precisely the opposite of the kind of rooting that goes on across the river. This was the losing cheer, the gallant yell for a good try -– antimatter to the sounds of Yankee Stadium. This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me."

I heard that "foghorn" Saturday, and it agrees with me as well.

My Stupid, Sentimental Decision to Become a Mets Fan

One issue I've had with settling down here in New Jersey so late in my life is that I come here with well-established sports allegiances from my Midwestern homeland.  Knowing that I am going to be here for a long time makes it difficult to not be a fan of one of the local teams.  While I have adopted the New Jersey Devils, hockey does not hold nearly as important a place in my heart as baseball.  The White Sox are still my one true baseball loyalty, but this season I have decided to officially take on the Mets as my second, National League team.

From a sports fan point of view, this is not the smartest decision.  My other option would be the New York Yankees, the most successful sports franchise in American history, winner of 27 World Series titles.  I've seen Yankees caps all over the world, testament to their prestige and winning ways.  For a brief moment I flirted with the prospect of Yankees fandom, but managed to avoid the temptations of the baseball devil.  Like all die-hard non-Yankees fans, I knew that they stood for everything bad and wrong, and that I should not let my desire for the easy path lead me down the road to the dark side.

That, of course, left me with the Mets.  Where the Yankees are mighty, the Mets are lowly.  Their current lineup couldn't hit water if it fell out of a boat.  The ownership of the Mets took a bath on Bernie Madoff's pyramid scheme, which means they don't have the necessary cash to replace the current rogue's gallery of banjo hitters with some true sluggers.  The Mets' new stadium is soulless, mostly empty, and its lobby is embarrassingly full of Dodgers iconography, as if the Mets' history was too pathetic to be praised.  It's located in the no-man's land of Flushing Meadows, Queens, with no bars or restaurants nearby.  The vast majority of Mets fans are born into it, or make the fateful decision when they are still too young to realize the consequences of their actions.  My voluntarily taking on a sad-sack team when I could be rooting for a winning juggernaut seems like a pretty crazy thing to do.

Perhaps it is, but I have my reasons, even beyond Yankee hatred.  In the first place, I can't abide bandwagon jumpers, a constituency well-represented among the Yankee faithful.  I also have a tendency, perhaps reinforced by my youth as an unpopular kid at school, to want to be contrarian in my tastes.  Instead of slavishly trying to win acceptance by joining up with the in crowd, I prefer to stick with the unloved and underappreciated.  (This also helps explain my love for the White Sox, 19th century German history, and New Jersey.)

More sentimentally, I have some positive childhood associations with the Mets.  The 1986 baseball season was the first that I followed as a true student of the game, rather than as a kid who liked to play baseball in the back yard.  I paid attention to the players and the stats, and watched the Mets' thrilling World Series against Red Sox.  I liked the Mets' brashness, exemplified by the likes of Gary Carter, Keith Hernandez, and Darryl Strawberry.  When we played baseball on the schoolyard during recess or gym class, I would take on the persona of one of their players based on where I was on the field.  In fact, I can still reel off the entire Mets starting line-up and pitching staff.  This is partly due to the fact that 1987 was the first year I collected baseball cards, and I spent countless hours studying the statistics on the back of them from the prior season.  The Mets were a powerhouse team in those days, the Yankees a declining former power going to seed.

In a lot of ways, by rooting for the Mets I'm just jumping on the bandwagon 27 years too late, which makes me a great fit for this star-crossed bunch.