Cardinals inspire murder, yet again?
Plus: Some site news, soccer's boa constrictor of the soul, Travis d'Arnaud in Atlanta, and the Mets' home opener
Call this newsletter a mullet, because it’s business up top and party in the back. Or don’t call it that. Probably don’t. Anyway, business leading off, scroll down past this note from the editors for today’s content, also written… by the editors.
LAST CALL: This is your last chance to get into the Willets Pen 2022 over/under predictions pool. You can win a pizza party in your honor, Willets Pen merchandise, or a refund of your $0 entry fee.
EASING IN: It’s been a lot of work to get Willets Pen off the ground, edit a couple of newsletters, and record a podcast, so Jesse is taking a vacation. Okay, so Jesse had the vacation book before Willets Pen was a fully-formed concept, let alone something that was going to come together so quickly and become not only an ebook (if you’re not already getting one as a paid subscriber, preorder now for as little as $5 and get a free month of premium Substack), but also this newsletter, which is now going to feature book and movie reviews, and a podcast for which “unpredictable” is an understatement.
There’s a lot going on here! And we’re just getting started. But being away next week, Jesse’s not going to be able to do as much here, and it’s really the following that we’ll start to really see what we can do here, with a few of our other contributors also seeing their schedules free up as April draws down.
What we’re doing so far, and the next week, feels a bit like a soft launch, and as such, we’re not putting anything behind the paywall until the end of April. Knowing that, here’s what we’re going to do, to reward you, the person reading this now (unless you are in the future and going through our archives, in which case skip to the main part of the post already, jeez):
Paid subscribers (and anyone buying in before the end of April) will get an extra 90 days tacked onto their subscription.
Free subscribers who are with us by the end of the month will get 30 days of premium access once the paywall goes up.
Tweet your paid subscription receipt (remember to cover up your address, credit card info, and whatever else), and tag @WilletsPen, and we’ll give you another free month.
If you’re a paid subscriber, and you refer someone else who becomes a paid subscriber by the end of the month (email admin at willetspen dot com for details), you’ll each get 30 bonus days tacked on.
Good? Good. Oh, and our merch store is coming soon, which is good because dang that logo is still so cool.
FINALLY: We’re having lots of fun with the live game chats in our Discord, and it’s also the place where you can submit mailbag questions for the newsletter or podcast in the #AskWillets channel. Come join us! It’s free whether or not you subscribe, the rule is just be cool.
Thanks for being patient with all this housekeeping! And tell your friends, because the more folks we get on board, the closer we get to being able to do our ebook, which you may remember is the main reason we’re here!
Trivia question: Today is the Mets’ 14th home opener at Why Do They Still Not Have Citibike There Field. Who pitched a five-hit shutout in the Mets’ 14th home opener, including putting an 0-for-4 on 23-year-old Cardinals first baseman Keith Hernandez?
Go Birds
By Steph Driver
One way that my brother and I are coping with an ongoing family trauma is becoming far too attached to our backyard birds. I moved to Georgia last year from Philadelphia, so the entire wildlife scene down here is brand new to me. Cardinals are my current joy — I have a mating pair I feed every day that I have named Holly and Rooster. I think it’s respectful to give them names, especially if you’re seeing them every day! My brother also has a mating pair — I named them Dottie and Elmo.
I never really considered myself a Bird Person, I’ve always been attached to animals of all kinds, but birds just seemed a little too foreign for me to really understand. Migration patterns, bugs and seeds, nests, CLOACAS (Google at your own risk), eggs – it just seemed too much. Then, a little male barn swallow decided I was his family, and for the entire four years I owned a house in South Jersey, he would bring his mate to my front door, build a nest, and raise their chicks together. I was Aunt Steph to over a dozen baby barn swallows in those four years, and we only lost one!
The cool thing about barn swallows is that the whole family sticks around, even when they are mature. So, by the end of the four years, my summer sky was full of these beautiful birds, swooping low to eat all of the bugs I didn’t want anywhere near me. That’s all it took, one nest outside my front door. I roped off the area every year, no one came in or out that door, all deliveries had to be left by the garage, and everyone knew my rules. We don’t mess with the birds.
In Georgia, I have three bird houses, two bird feeders, and two bird baths. It’s now become an issue for my cat to hang out in the sun because I’m worried about my birds. I’ve identified a red-shouldered hawk and a barred owl in my yard, so maybe it’s best she stays inside anyway.
Now that I have cardinal friends, my next goal is the neighborhood crows. If I’m being honest, my own personal murder of crows has always been the goal, but I feel like I’m getting close.
Cool Corvid Fact: Corvids (ravens, crows, rooks, bluejays) are able to use tools without being shown how. For example, you can place the bird in an enclosure with a stick and a box where they have to use the stick to get a treat out of a box. Other animals need to be shown how to use the stick to get the treat, and they will then mimic this action. Corvids do not need the explainer, they will figure it out themselves. This marks them at an intellectual capacity higher than elephants, dolphins, and great apes.
Old Friend Alert
Let’s check in on Travis d’Arnaud,
Remember when the Mets traded d’Arnaud for… no, you don’t remember, because they didn’t even dump him in a bad trade. They released him.
Ninety Minutes’ Hate
By Jesse Spector
Having been a sportswriter for a long time, there isn’t a lot that I haven’t seen, so I was excited to join my cousins – visiting from Seattle as the Sounders coincidentally happened to be playing NYCFC in the CONFACAF Champions League semifinals – on a Wednesday night trip to Harrison, N.J., home of the New York Red Bulls, for something that I knew would be unique in my experience as the second leg in a soccer tournament was brand new to me.
What I got was something much more intriguing than just a different format for competition. I got a particularly rare kind of game, one that’s hard to categorize other than that it’s a big game where hardly anyone wants to be there at all.
You see it in best-of-seven series from time to time, particularly in the NBA, where a team maybe steals Game 1 on the road, but they lose Games 3 and 4 at home, and now it’s 3-1 going back to the home of the better team, with all the momentum. But there’s also a fait accompli to that from the start. Nobody blows 3-1 leads in the NBA, and insert your 2016 Golden State joke here, but that Game 5 is a different kind of don’t want to be here.
What I’m talking about, I most closely saw an analogue to in the 2012 Stanley Cup Final. The Devils had been down 3-0 in the series to the Kings, came back to make it 3-2, and started thinking that maybe, just maybe, it would be historic comeback time. But Steve Bernier took a boarding major halfway through the first period of Game 6 in LA, the Kings scored thrice on the power play, and the Devils probably would’ve happily gone home at the first intermission. But the Kings very much wanted to be there, as much as they didn’t want to have had to come home without the Cup after Game 5.
This was still different, because the Sounders came east with a 3-1 lead on aggregate, so all they really had to do was not give up three goals. And if they could manage a goal of their own, all they’d have to do was not give up four goals. And NYCFC has scored multiple goals just once in five MLS games this season, against Montreal’s league-worst defense.
This was the Sounders having to fly all the way across the country, in the middle of the week, to play against a team whose ass they just summarily kicked in the first leg, and they don’t even get to go to New York because not only are the Yankees at home, blocking NYCFC from playing in the Bronx, but they can’t play CONCACAF games there anyway because the field is too narrow.
So NYCFC and its fans had to travel across the Hudson River, to the home of their most loathed rival, with the Red Bull signage taken down for the night to reveal bare concrete walls that matched the vibe of the entire affair. NYCFC did get one goal back after Seattle’s opener, but it was far too little, too late, and when the hosts-away-from-home didn’t score in a flurry of activity over the last 10 minutes before halftime, everyone might as well have headed for the exits.
And nobody wanted to be there less than NYCFC, the New York team forced to go to Jersey, for a 9:00 start in a game where their chances of success were practically nil if Seattle, on its dour business trip, maintained any base level of competence. And the Sounders showed up, choked the life out of their opposition, and were mostly happy from then on to — wait, no, nobody was happy with anything, except the kids with their sodas, that’s the whole point. The Sounders showed up, choked the life out of their opposition, and could not wait to get on a plane and the fuck back home.
So they just started beating the shit out of each other on the field. Challenges flew everywhere in rage, time was wasted, and injuries faked. It was quite entertaining to see that the medical staff had a real injury stretcher (a hard plastic board to stabilize a patient), and a fake injury stretcher (a litter that looked like it came off a World War I battlefield, and shamed players to get up and jog off to the side). There were scrums and barking at the refs and flops and the NYCFC supporters section chanting “Fuck Seattle” and still more in light blue yelling homophobic slurs in Spanish. It was all just a few clumps of mud away from being the classic opening scene of The Damned United.
And I sat there, giggling. I giggled at the delight of experiencing this brand of shithousery in person for the first time, and I giggled at being delighted by experiencing this brand of shithousery in person for the first time. What can you do when you go to a game that just has impeccably awful vibes from top to bottom? At least the 1-1 draw left my visiting family happy, some of the only people in the stadium who were. I didn’t expect it going in, and that made it even better, the surprise of going to a seemingly big game and getting an absolute barrel of slop that’s fun because you haven’t experienced that particular kind of terrible game before.
And someday I can go back and witness a true CONCACAFing.
Trivia answer: Before we get to the actual identity of , enjoy the Monday Night Football theme somehow being part of this 1977 Mets film, the year of the 14th home opener at Shea.
In case you don’t want to spend half an hour never getting the answer to the question of who the pitcher of the 1977 home opener was, it’s an incredible production that doesn’t even touch on the defining moment of the season until just after the halfway point, with the first half including highlights of Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio, plus John Stearns was labeled “handsome and useful,” like the folder the Mets gave out for 1977 Back To School Day. No, this is not a joke.
He’s alright, but he’s no Travis d’Arnaud. Anyway, another ex-Met, manager Joe Torre, goes on to seriously say that Steve Henderson is “a Willie Mays type player to me.” No pressure, Steve! Good for him that he did go on to a 1,085-game career, but Torre said that in the same breath as being he was saying, presumably at management’s behest because somebody had too justify the Mets having traded, 16 minutes into the 1977 season highlight film, the best player in team history, his own teammate until earlier that year, and an already known future Hall of Famer, Tom Seaver (you didn’t overthink it, did you?).
“Tom Seaver’s the best pitcher in the game right now,” Torre says, in an absolutely… okay, you wanna talk about handsome and useful?
Sexy Outdoors Turtleneck Jean Jacket Mets Manager Joe Torre was a real thing. Damn, the ‘70s were something.
“But Tom Seaver is one person pitching once a week for a club that needed more help than Tom Seaver,” Torre continues. “So we got a Pat Zachry, we got a Doug Flynn, we got a kid for the future in Dan Norman, and maybe the immediate future, because Steve Henderson, to me, and all these guys, are gonna be the future of our ballclub.”
Zero clips of Seaver are shown in the video. Doug Flynn, who complained in the team video about not being able to afford a New York apartment, retired with a -6.9 career WAR, worst in major league history. At least there’s talk – albeit no video – of the game when Lenny Randle was at bat and the 1977 blackout struck.
Anyway, on Opening Day in 1977, Seaver not only steamrolled the Cardinals in an hour and 59 minutes, he did something that Chris Bassitt assuredly will not do in the 14th home opener of this ballpark. Tom Terrific belted a bases loaded single, driving in two runs in the second inning for a 3-0 lead after John Milner’s homer in the first provided the only support The Franchise would need.