Marci Canha Winter comes too early
I keep talking about things in conversations with people, publicly and privately, about things that are parts of why I launched Willets Pen, and it happened again Sunday night, as I was ambling about Astoria with my dog, Youppi…
That’s just to show you how cute Youppi is. And to explain that, as is so often the case, I didn’t see the end of the Mets’ season. I rarely do, when I’m not working — and now it’s not my job. I don’t like the feeling, the absolute downer vibes of the Padlocks Game, the one where you’re trudging out, and they’re shuttering everything in the ballpark for winter.
I was at the ultimate Padlock Game — worse than a Demolition Game, although Shea’s was assuredly iconic as a painful one of those — but a Moving Trucks Game.
In 2004, I attended the final home game of the Montreal Expos, with whom I had a special relationship over the final three years of their existence, owing to having tried to buy them as a 20-year-old college student with some of my newspaper friends when Nos Amours were threatened with contraction.
Details of that day stick in my brain like shards of broken glass, occasionally hitting a sharp point. The feeling of emptiness in the t-shirt shop on Rue Ste-Catherine, where the news broke on the radio that this was indeed the final homestand for the Expos, as I purchased a Quebec Nordiques t-shirt. The moment of a decision not to buy a Youppi! bobblehead, although I did get to meet the genuine article (and of course the dog’s namesake, he came from Quebec) a decade later. The sad drive home through upstate New York, listening to the Yankees play the Orioles in a hurricane.
I was at Shea a few days later, watching the final game in Expos history, which I can forever tell you ended with Jamey Carroll on deck, and which at the time was the most notable moment in Queens in the life of Endy Chávez: a 4-3 groundout, Jeff Keppinger to Craig Brazell, to end an 8-1 stomping out of the du Maurier butt of the Expos’ franchise.
Chávez, who threw out the first pitch before the Mets’ only win of the 2022 playoffs, obviously went on to greater heights at Shea. But that game was memorable for a lot of reasons beyond it being the end of the Expos. Todd Zeile started behind the plate in the final game of his career and hit a three-run homer off Claudio Vargas, himself of course later a Met.
In addition to Zeile, closing day in 2004 was the career finale for Wilson Delgado and Daniel Garcia… and Joe Hietpas, who made a Moonlight Graham-type appearance in the ninth inning. As a catcher, Hietpas did get to put his name in the record books and get in on the action with credit for two putouts on the strikeouts by Bartolomé Fortunato… his own third-to-last major league game, as the other live arm from the Scott Kazmir trade was out injured in 2005 and returned in 2006 to post one of the incredible lines in Mets history, 1-0 with a 27.00 ERA.
Getting to spend my spare time going down Baseball Reference rabbit holes — this game is incredible: just the substitutions in the bottom of the eighth: Francis Beltran in for Jon Rauch on the mound; Val Pascucci moving from right field to first base, replacing Brad Wilkerson and replaced by Ryan Church; Chávez entering in center field, Garcia pinch-hitting for Zeile (he singled in his final at-bat, and scored on a single by Delgado in his last trip to the plate, pinch-hitting for John Franco) — is part of why I launched Willets Pen, sure, but I’d spend spare time in my post-journalism life doing that anyway. It’s not the thing that came up while I was walking Youppi, but it flowed from writing a lead-in to the thing. Let’s try again.
Zeile, a major league Crash Davis, got to hit his dinger and hang ‘em up. It’s not quite the same for Garcia and Delgado, for whom it’s cool to get to say that they got hits in their last major league at-bats… but their lived experience is more minor league grinding after that and never getting back to the bigs.
Did I peak as a sportswriter in the mid-2010s? By a traditional definition of “peak,” I certainly did. I covered the Rangers for the Daily News, got hired away by Sporting News to be their national hockey writer, and then moved to baseball.
National baseball writer for The Sporting News, which it’s back to rightfully being called, is a hell of a mantle, carrying with it the weight and flawed legacy of J.G. Taylor Spink and so many who have had the job. From pulling over on a bike on the Golden Gate Bridge to interview Clayton Kershaw, to explaining how I’d ranked Alex Anthopoulos last among MLB general managers before the trade deadline — while presenting him with the Executive of the Year trophy — it was a blast. And it’s the reason I saw, and then wrote about, the Cubs’ victory in the 2016 World Series.
I’ve talked before about having an existential crisis the night that the Cubs broke their 108-year drought, wondering what I could see that would ever approach that. I haven’t talked much about the feeling of getting laid off a few days later, my solace being that I outlasted, by minutes, the guy who during the World Series had threatened to fire me over having tweeted pictures of racists in Cleveland, each simply captioned “Look at this asshole.”
Oh, and in the time between the World Series and getting laid off, Donald Trump got elected president. So, a lot changed in a hurry, not unlike when I ended three and a half years of freelancing… and a week later the world shut down because of the novel coronavirus, which I happened to get during that time, also changing everything, even more than I realized at the time.
It was during my freelance years that I became the host of Locked on Yankees, with part of the plan being to build that website with written content, and with the promise of ad money. I recruited a few writers and other podcasters, and worked way too hard myself, and the money didn’t come in as expected.
I’m thrilled that my replacement Stacey Gotsulias is closing in on 1,000 episodes, I learned a lot from the experience, and I’d like to think the other folks involved had a positive experience overall. The only regret that I had was the big one of having had other people work alongside me and not get paid what we expected.
Maybe that’s part of a new endeavor, part of building a network, but I also didn’t like the part of waiting for ad money, waiting for someone else’s endorsement. That’s part of why the model here is making money from the things that we do: it’s subscriptions and merch sales. And since sales at bigdumper.xyz are soaring, we’re going to lower the subscription price. Really, we are, although the idea is more to fund ourselves with ideas like boroughofdreams.com … but hey, people love the Big Dumper, and why wouldn’t they?
This also, of course, was Mark Canha Summer, and I was not prepared for the fun to end. Not like this. Not so fast. Not with the starting pitching being the Mets’ undoing. Not before we even had a chance to dream about our breakout favorite Met doing Subway Series promos because he not only wears our Pride shirt, but rode the freakin’ subway.
Mark Canha Summer might be a forever vibe, but now it’s hoodie season.
None of this was part of the plan, and Marci, if you’re somehow reading this, my Not A Football Podcast co-host Grace McDermott is also a Notre Dame person who can tell you that I am deeply enthusiastic about incredibly dorky things and extremely niche sports humor, and really a delight to never meet in person. One of our other co-hosts, Brittany Huber, was one of the writers I recruited to Locked On Yankees, and I’m thrilled that I finally am getting to really build something with her, on our terms, for money that we make from our work, as part of a real collective.
Also, that wasn’t the tweet.
This was the tweet.
I was done with the hamster wheel, both in the broad sense of being in media (if you’ll permit me to refer to myself as some kind of talent), and in the sense of my interaction with sports. I got into this a little bit on the Game 1 Pod At The Park with Addy Baird.
I’ve seen so much baseball, and studied so much baseball, and taken baseball so seriously, that my mind tries to break it down at every point, to figure out which of the games I’ve seen before — or which of the games I haven’t seen before — the game I’m interested in might be like. Analytically, I’m driven to search for those similarities. And there are more than 2 million different ways that a perfect game — only between a 1-0 game and a 10-0 game, nothing too crazy — can be different, just by adjusting a few variables.
I think Buck Showalter’s brain operates in at least a somewhat similar fashion (sorry, Buck) in that he’s seen and studied countless hundreds and thousands of baseball games, with far more wisdom and acuity than I’ll ever dream of having, and it’s why he’s prepared for every situation.
And sometimes, like Britt wrote just the other day, it just doesn’t matter. There’s nothing in the playbook for “Max Scherzer gives up four homers” or the Joe Musgrove Hot Sauce Committee and seven innings of one-hit ball.
There’s going to be a lot of finger-pointing and yelling and commentary that truly misses the point over the next several days, because that’s the other thing about the end of the season: it’s time for every genius to unveil their plan of how to fix a 101-win team based largely on the sample size of the past six weeks.
It’s fair to focus on the Mets’ shortcomings when talking about their need to improve, but you know the difference between legitimate criticism and sports radio bellowing, and it’s the latter that mostly fills social media in the days after a team’s season ends in disappointment. Especially when it ends like this Mets season, 101 and done.
There are a lot of reasons that I launched Willets Pen. I’m glad that it’s a place where, in the coming days and weeks, we’ll say stuff about the Mets that isn’t just off-the-cuff venting and frustration, but interesting and different. And we’ll keep branching out into more stuff, including the piece I was initially thinking of writing in this space, a generational yarn wound around baseball, probability, and chocolate chip cookies.
In the meantime, thank you for reading all this Mets season, thanks to everyone at Willets Pen for taking the leap of faith to be part of Willets Pen, and thanks in particular to Roger Cormier for tweeting through all the games, all year, win or lose, with all the Buck HBP reactions along the way.
The end of the season is always hard because the hamster wheel of baseball’s industrial complex will take its annual hot stove spin. We’ll never be in our first season again. Nor will the Mets be a pleasant surprise — they’ll have expectations, big ones, in 2023.
I got out of my old job to escape a series of unending and destructive cycles, and put a heavier focus in my life on… the Mets? Yes. Because of what I’ve already learned from Britt, from Buck, from everyone over the last six months about how to make baseball, and sports in general, fit into a different life in a different way. And what we do next is up to us.