The Flushing Review
A fun (and personal) community project, plus those assholes from Philly
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Last but not least, the clock is ticking, but our 2022 season picks pool remains open for entries until first pitch of the Mets’ home opener, 1:10 p.m. on Friday. Grand prize is a pizza party in your honor, which I happen to think is the grandest prize of all.
Thanks for your patience in getting to today’s newsletter, and thanks for your support. Here’s hoping that by the time you’re reading this, you’ll be even more pumped up to be on the ground floor with us. Enjoy this rainbow. It’ll make more sense in a minute.
Trivia question: On April 11, 2007, the Mets played the Phillies at Shea Stadium, and lost, 5-2. The save that night at Shea went to Tom Gordon, whose son, Dee Strange-Gordon, scored the tying run against the Mets on Sunday in Washington. The losing pitcher from that 2007 game, meanwhile, is still an active major leaguer. Can you name him?
Rainbow Connection
By Jesse Spector
The first rainbow, obviously, is from outside the parking lot in Flushing, and it sticks in my head now, and probably will forever, because of the circumstances.
It was Bobby Bonilla Day in 2020, a special Bobby Bonilla Day for me because my Bobby Bonilla Day feature — one of my favorite pieces I’ve done for Deadspin — had dropped the night before, because we needed to capitalize on all 24 hours of Bobby Bonilla Day SEO traffic. Whatever, like I said, it was one of my better ones, and nice that it actually did get the numbers that stupidly serve as validation in our industry, as if there’s any regular correlation between most of our best work and work that does numbers.
I was driving on the Grand Central Parkway, on my way back to Astoria from making deliveries for The Connected Chef, which I say not to brag about volunteering but to get you to go check them out. What they’ve done for Queens, starting during the worst of the pandemic, is incredible, and even better that they’re continuing to make food security a reality for our neighbors. Driving for them is the one time I’ve felt like having a car in the city was good.
I had my dad on the speakerphone, talking about Bonilla as I drove, and I saw the rainbow out the window. And it was at my side, and at my side, and at my side as I came up along Meadow Lake and past the LIE interchange. We started talking about the rainbow, and finally I got to where I hoped I would, the roadway that’s in Flushing Meadows Park but kind of not, looping outside the parking lot — you see the picture, if you’ve been there, you know it, and if you don’t, wow, a picture really is worth a couple hundred words. But in this case, the “See you next time!” on the parking lot exit sign really was worth a whole lot more, because at that point we didn’t know when we would see Mr. Met next time. But I saw that rainbow, talked to my dad, and had one of the better days of the pandemic.
We’ve been through two years of varying degrees of uncertainty and trauma and sadness and stress. During that time, I’ve lost my dad, and that brings us to the second rainbow, the skyline rainbow.
I moved to a 30-story apartment building in Brooklyn Heights in 1985, rather obviously with my dad (and my mom, too. Hi Mom! Thanks for subscribing!). So, I was pretty spoiled when it came to views. I’m still something of a fireworks snob from all of the July 4s spent on that 27th-floor roof deck. That rainbow on Saturday afternoon jaw-dropping, and I was so glad that I happened to decide to go up to the roof on this occasion before heading back to Queens. And if the rainbow wasn’t enough, I also got a really good sunset.
The reason I felt like I needed to go to the roof was that this visit home was pretty heavy, as our family comes up on one year without my dad, who in addition to a lifetime of wonderful memories also left behind a truly staggering amount of books. Not just the wall of shelves in the living room, the hallway-long waist-high shelf, or the two taller-than-you towers in the master bedroom. There are some boxes that never got unpacked after we had to move out for seven months because of a fire in 1995. There are some boxes that still have not been unpacked from when we first moved in when I was 4-years-old.
There’s so much stuff, and a storage cage downstairs, and it wasn’t until later in life that I understood that I grew up in a place with an above-average amount of raw tonnage of stuff (including my own books, and my closet full of baseball cards). Now all of my dad’s stuff is still here, and he’s not, and it’s daunting. It’s been daunting for almost a year.
My dad was a writer, like me, and like his own dad (there are also boxes of his books in my parents’ apartment). He just wasn’t employed to do it, like my English professor grandpa or his sportswriter son. Still, my dad wrote probably the most famous thing written by anyone in our family, even if it doesn’t have a Spector name on it, when he was working in public relations for a bank that was opening a branch in our neighborhood in 1998.
I was going to save this for Jackie Robinson Day because of that connection with my dad, but that’s also the day of the Mets’ home opener, and I know that other writers have stuff planned for that day. The purpose of this website is for me to stay out of their way and all of us to enjoy their work, so I’ll get out of the way in a moment and do that by letting you read Colleen Sullivan’s always excellent Behind Enemy (Base)Lines for the Phillies series.
Thank you for reading this much background, but it’s personal and special to me and a big way that I want to honor my dad, so here we go after 800-some words of buildup.
We told you that even though we’re doing a Mets ebook, we’re not going to just be a site about the Mets. And when I brought this idea to some of the awesome members of this team that I’m just over the moon about, they were as enthusiastic about it as they were when I first asked them to be part of this project, so, let’s do it.
I’m going to mail books from my dad’s library to anyone on the Willets Pen team who wants them, with two requests.
Please review it for us
Please then pass it along (or another book if you want to keep it) to someone else
I think my dad would absolutely love the idea of books from his collection being reviewed by other writers, and thinking more about it, it’s the kind of series of reviews that his dad would have written for. The second part of it is my own spin. These books have been sitting, some not even on shelves but in boxes, for a long time. They yearn to be opened, to be read, to share what they have to offer inside. That is, they might if they had feelings. Or they might scream in agony because they are highly allergic to oxygen. There are an infinite number of parallel universe where all of this is true, and where none of it is true.
My dad also had a ton of DVDs, and we’re gonna review those, too.
Behind Enemy (Base)Lines: Philadelphia Phillies
By Colleen Sullivan
Some people like teams based in Philadelphia, and everything about these people can be explained through their worship of mascots designed by people on massive acid trips. No one knows what Gritty and the Phanatic are but rest assured they are not creatures found in nature. (editors note: we love our demon garbage mascots thankyouverymuch)
2021 Phillies: 82-80-0, 2nd place in NL East
Since the exit of noted weirdo, legendary gay icon, and should-be-infamous alleged sexual assault cover-upper Gabe Kapler to San Francisco, the Phillies have been a bit happier all around. I imagine it’s hard to take someone who doesn’t eat the breading on chicken nuggets seriously. It’s not like Joe Girardi has been some kind of magic maker, bringing the Phillies out of some pit of despair, but at least he that World Series ring he won at the Phillies’ expense in 2009 to point at, to prove he knows (somewhat) what he’s talking about. He got his 1,000th win as manager in 2020 against the Nationals, which was also the same season the Phillies had their worst ERA since 1930.
2021 also saw Jake Arrieta and Brandon Workman leave for the Chicago Cubs and J.T. Realmuto re-sign after a lot of interest in free agency. Didi Gregorius, and his body made of peanut brittle, also re-signed in Philly to continue to fester at shortstop… when the oldest 31-year-old you ever saw isn’t injured. The 2021 Phillies posted a 10-9 record against the Mets (how?) and finished right behind the Braves in the division, eliminated from playoff contention with three games left in the season. Bryce Harper still plays for them, as he is now fully leaned into the “good player on a crappy team” legacy.
2022 Phillies: Still meh but with offense
The Phillies neededa bullpen update in the worst way, and… they signed one-year contracts with Brad Hand and Jeurys Familia. Did they see any 2021 Mets games that they themselves were not in?
Next up, was to add notable goon Kyle Schwarber who fits in brilliantly now that the National League has a designated hitter, and then the Phillies also won the free agent derby for Nick Castellanos, who fits in brilliantly now that the National League has a designated hitter. For those who care about such things, the addition of Castellanos put the Phils over the luxury tax.
For how god-awful the defense is shaping up to be, the offense is going to give pitchers a rough ride. The lineup is likely to consist of some shuffle of Schwarber, Rhys Hoskins, Harper, Castellanos, Realmuto, and Jean Segura followed by Gregorius and a variety of new talent in Alec Bohm, Bryson Stott, and Matt Vierling. Former No. 1 overall pick Mickey Moniak broke his right hand at the end of spring training, or he’d be in the mix, too.
Adding Castellanos to the line-up was without a doubt one of the best moves that the Phillies could make. He has an excellent eye at the plate, and ended 2021 slashing .309/.362/.576 (in Cincinnati but still). He’s been knocking at the door of a .300 average for a while now and was a force to be reckoned with as a member of the Tigers.
Meanwhile, 2021 was the best season that Schwarber had in his career, but his eight-year line of .237/.344/.494 means more of a cautiously optimistic feeling for Phillies fans. He isn’t the second coming of Jim Thome or anything like that. Thome, in the five years at the end of his career where he played for six different teams, hit .255/.370/.509.
The Phillies, like the Mets, had their dream of a perfect season end on Sunday, and Monday (Taijuan Walker vs. Ranger Suarez) will be Philadelphia’s National League opener, after they took two of three from the A’s. Zack Wheeler gets the ball against his old team on Tuesday, opposed by Tylor Megill, followed by the marquee matchup of the series, Aaron Nola vs. Max Scherzer. Nola pitched the opener for the Phillies, and is 1-0 with a 6.00 ERA because Girardi left him in for three batters in the seventh inning, and after having given up one run over six, Nola surrendered three straight hits, including a Seth Brown dong to turn what had been a 7-1 game into 7-4 (the Phillies won, 9-5). Nola is super good but serves up taters, Girardi’s bullpen management is dreadful, tale as old as time, and one we’ll see plenty all summer long.
Trivia answer: The list of active players now who were active in 2007 is pretty short, but also if you’d asked someone in 2007 which players would still be active in 2022, and anyone said Oliver Perez, you’d have said, “Yeah, sure, and Donald Trump will have been president, impeached twice, publicly admitted - nay, bragged about - attempting a coup over an election he lied about being fraudulent, weirdly was forever flaunting his friendship with war criminals, and still will be the leading contender to be the Republican nominee in 2024, with entrenched minority rule in Congress and the Supreme Court likely in place to allow the host of The Apprentice to rule as a proto-fascist strongman backed by white supremacist theocrats. As if.” And, well, the answer is Olver Perez was the losing pitcher for the Mets on April 11, 2007, because he walked SEVEN BATTERS in 2.2 innings, giving up three runs on one hit.
PS: We’re planning to record our first podcast episode tonight. Watch for it (listen for it) (watch for the notice that you can listen to it) in the middle of the week.