Win one for Dad
Michele Catalano finds herself a Yankees fan suddenly pulling for the Mets this Father's Day; Roger Cormier stays positive; Colleen Sullivan casts lines on the Marlins
You may have noticed that we didn’t have a regular episode of Willets Pod this week, and we’re just as disappointed as you are, because we love to hang out and talk, and the schedule did not work this week, a thing that happens with four adults. The good news is that today’s Pod At The Park, with Jesse Spector and Roger Cormier at last night’s Mets-Brewers game, is a freebie. So, enjoy! Hopefully you enjoy it so much, you sign up for a subscription, which helps pay for more baseball tickets, which means more Pod At The Park episodes, which means less paragraphs like this because we’ll just make some of those episodes free when we can’t get toge—you are a grown up and get the point here. We want to do good stuff and not just send out half-assed content in the name of filling a schedule. There’s gonna be plenty here, it’s gonna be good, you can see that below, yadda yadda yadda, I mentioned the bisque.
Also, if you want to get our LFGM Pride gear by the end of June, the time to order is now. Not that it’s gonna go out of style once the month ends, of course, because it’s fantastic, and also we’re going to keep donating to the Ali Forney Center for every rainbow item we sell, no matter when we sell it.
We’re not responsible for the bag on the left, but we totally endorse it.
Let’s Go Mets!
By Michele Catalano
I was born the same year as the Mets, the same year my father threw his allegiance to the Dodgers away and started rooting for the team from Queens. Yet one of my earliest memories is one where I’m watching a Yankees game with my mother. She watched a lot of baseball, and I used to love to just sit next to her while she watched. She always had a pen and paper, and wrote down the lineup, and made little notes next to each player’s name as the game went on. I became a Yankees fan because of her, despite my father’s boisterous cheering for the Mets. I didn’t understand rivalries when I was young, and don’t even know if there was a great rivalry between the Mets and Yankees and their fans back in the 60s. I do know my parents never, ever agreed on baseball, and to this day it divides my entire family.
I think I gravitated to the Yankees over the Mets because of my mother and grandfather’s history with the team; the way they talked about the Yankees made them seem like royalty. The Mets had little history behind them. They were the new kid on the block and certainly not the stuff of legends like the Yankees.
So we became a house divided. My middle sister went the way of my father and chose the Mets. My youngest sister wisely followed in my footsteps and became a Yankees fan. Baseball season was always fun, the way gently sparring with your family can be. The older we got, the more biting the commentary between us became, verbal punches being thrown where we once just made a few disparaging jokes toward each other. But it was all in fun, right?
I grew to hate the Mets. Maybe it was my father’s fault. Maybe his hurled insults and bitterness served to put a huge, baseball shaped wedge between us during the spring and summer months. Maybe he drove me to Mets hatred. But it was the Mets themselves during the 1986 season that really drove home my intense hatred toward that team and its fans. There was certainly a rivalry then and it played out every night at the dinner table. My father was fond of telling me I was out of the will for being a Yankee fan. My middle sister would laugh, knowing that she would always be my father’s favorite because she wore the blue and orange. When the Mets won the World Series, my father was relentless. I took to avoiding him for most of November. He’s a terrible sports fan. I attribute that to him having the poor fortune of rooting for the Mets and Jets, but that’s really no excuse.
The baseball rivalry between my parents was pretty intense at times. During the 2000 Subway Series, my father used some duct tape and ingenuity to divide the roof of the house in half; one side had a Yankees logo that said “hers” and the other side had a Mets logo that said “his.” And never the twain shall meet, as it were. Then there was the year he put this in the front yard.
I took that rivalry to heart for a long time. It was an inherent part of sports for me. Hating the Mets and their fans was as natural to me as loving the Yankees. And that was all fun while it lasted. Rooting against teams can sometimes be as fulfilling as rooting for teams. Basking in the loss of a team you hate can be as satisfying as basking in your own team’s win. But there came a time — very recently — when I felt my hatred of the Mets waning. Maybe I was getting soft with age, I don’t know. But I just couldn’t work up that intensity anymore. I’d watch a Mets game with my father, and found myself rooting for them on occasion. I know, it surprised me, too. But I’ve adopted a “can’t we all just get along” attitude toward everything that has transcended life in general and worked its way into my sports fandom. I find myself switching back and forth between YES and SNY on game days; I have Mets scores as well as Yankees scores in my phone’s notifications. I’m probably going to get to a game at Citi with my father this year so we can sleuth out the brick we bought him.
This has less to do with the Mets than it does with my father. Despite his being a sore loser and a bad winner, despite his insults and bad sports jokes and house-dividing, I want them to win for him. I want my dad to feel that joy one feels when their beloved sports team wins a championship. I want him to experience something he hasn’t experienced in almost 30 years. Because even though he’s a fan of a rival team, even though he wrote me out of the will the day I declared myself a Yankees fan, I want this for him. He’s 82 years old. I would love to see him root for a championship team before it’s too late (the Islanders – a team we both love – are not helping here).
So I’m rooting for the Mets. Does that make me a bad Yankee fan? Perhaps. I’ll deal with that. Sometimes you just want to see other people happy, keep them from the dejection that every sports fan knows all too well. And although my dad might be a grump and say something like “we don’t need you to root for us,” I will, because he’s my father and what more do we all want but to see our loved ones smile. I mean, as long as it’s not at the expense of our own team.
Let’s go Mets.
Once again, pessimism was proven to be pointless
By Roger Cormier
The cognitive psychologist Amos Tversky made himself into an optimist. Tversky thought pessimism was "stupid,” because when you think the worst case scenario will happen and it happens, you lived it twice. (Jason Sudeikis attributed this philosophy to Michael J. Fox, but we know better.)
What I didn't register the first time I read Tversky's quote was that he worked at not being a negative person. It's really, really hard to not be a pessimist, especially when you're someone of high intelligence like Tversky was.
It's doubly true if you have been a Mets fan for more than a couple of years. (Triply true if you're an intelligent Met fan, I suppose.) Mets fans have been trained to assume the worst after a player comes up with a bruise. For years, the bruise tended to turn into a contusion, which morphed into a sprain, which escalated to 17 broken bones, at which point the Met was placed on the 15-day DL. Maybe. All the while, the owner's son, Jeff Wilpon, would help write the media releases about injuries, confusing everybody and creating trust issues that lined the pockets of many psychiatrists.
The thing is, this pattern stopped after the 2020 season when Fred Wilpon ceased to be the majority owner of the franchise. If, as Branch Rickey said, luck is the residue of design, then bad luck is the residue of Fred and Jeff Wilpon. It was Jeff that made Pedro Martinez pitch in a meaningless game despite an injury. It was under the Wilpon regime that Victor Zambrano was acquired in a trade, showed up hurt, then was not returned from whence he came, even though they could have reversed the deal. Ryan Church being allowed on two planes after suffering a concussion. Not giving a physical to a newly acquired J.J. Putz, who had a bone spur. Johan Santana hurting himself because of an unscheduled "angry bullpen" after ownership said he didn't do enough conditioning during the offseason. Noah Syndergaard being allowed to refuse getting an MRI, then tearing his lat three days later. Activating Yoenis Cespedes after two months on the shelf, for one game, after which he revealed he needed surgery on both of his heels. These were all self-owns.
Steven Cohen's Mets don't do that (so far). They have shown with the Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer injuries that they preach and adhere to patience and forthrightness. Yet, that inner skeptic lingers. When Pete Alonso and Starling Marte got hurt in last Tuesday's game against the Padres, fans rushed to announce they knew all along they couldn't have nice things. It turned out both avoided the IL, with Alonso missing only one game.
It's a lot easier to remember when you just missed the train then all of the times you reached the platform right as the train arrived. The Mets have been fairly lucky up to this point, if you think about it. Pete Alonso almost died in a car crash during spring training. The C-flap in his helmet saved him from taking a fastball to the face. Francisco Lindor only missed one game after accidentally slamming his finger in a hotel door. Early in the season, he was also saved by the C-flap and missed no time at all. The Mets capitalized earlier this season on a plethora of infield hits. Hitting coach Eric Chavez literally referred to that as good luck.
But the Mets are blowing their division lead. Look: divisions don't mean anything anymore anyhow. Six teams in each league make the playoffs. That's basically everyone. The top two division winners get a bye, but having an extended layoff isn't a huge incentive — just look at the Mets when they had themselves a vacay between the 2015 NLCS and World Series. The Mets are 4-0 all-time in division series. This year's first round is a best-of-three, and if those aforementioned five-game division series were best-of-three the Mets would have been…4-0. And in none of those seasons did they have both Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer in the same rotation.
Maybe deGrom and Scherzer won't be healthy in October. Maybe, but does it do any good to assume the worst? What if you predict that the two aces would miss significant time and you were proven right? Would it give you comfort? Will you have slept better, thinking you were clever? Or would you have lived through the bad news twice?
Behind Enemy (Base)Lines: Miami Marlins of Florida
By Colleen Sullivan
Well, that Brewers series was something else. Lorenzo Cain is thankful he already has three kids after getting hit in the jewels, and the Mets tried to fuck around on the basepaths against Hunter Renfroe only to find out (pro tip to remember for September: Renfroe has a good arm and you shouldn’t run on him).
Now for the weekend ahead, the artist formerly known as Florida Marlins is in town. The Marlins are 12 games out of first and have a 13-19 record on the road. They’re 3-3 so far on a 10-game road trip, having taken two of three in Houston somehow, then dropping two walkoffs in Philly. That weird Pythagorean W-L record tells us that the Marlins “should be” 33-28 thanks to their plus-22 run differential, but alas, they’re 28-33. This further proves that nonsense cannot take the place of actual baseball playing (FWIW the Mets “should be” is 39-26 and they’re actually 42-23). There are rumors floating around that the Marlins are trying to get Ramón Laureano, and as much as I like Laureano he isn’t the long-term solution for whatever they’re trying to solve, and corner outfield is where the Marlins already are paying a big chunk of their payroll to Avisaíl García and Jorge Soler.
Outside of the dreary realization that Don Mattingly has now managed in Miami for longer than he did in Los Angeles, the Marlins really should focus on better things. Like Jazz Chisholm Jr. having a shot at a 30-30 season and his awesome personality being able to grow interest in the game, something MLB is badly in need of. A very awkward notes column entry by Jon Heyman hints at trouble in paradise. The short paragraph had a lot of awkward undertones that usually come up around players like Chisholm, Manny Machado, Tim Anderson, and Fernando Tatis Jr.
Something along the lines of “not playing the game the right way,” in this case: “teammates apparently aren’t always as enamored as fans who love the style and sizzle.” It’s not a great scene when one of Chisolm’s defenders in the piece compares him to Dennis Rodman, but the person who anyone should care about getting it is Marlins GM Kim Ng, who brushed it off and said, “He’s good.” It’s her job to get rid of anyone who can’t get on board with that.
We heard a bit on the SNY broadcast last night about Sandy Alcantara having a career season for the Marlins. In 91.1 innings he’s got a 1.68 ERA – an even stingier 0.81 over his last seven starts, in which he’s averaged just a tick under eight innings. The Mets already had enough trouble with Alcantara – last year, he struck out 20 of the 58 batters he faced in two starts against them.
Wayback Machine: 2021 Mets vs. Marlins
The Mets play the Marlins a lot. Just about as often as they play the Nationals, Phillies, and Braves – amazing how that works! Somebody seems to have forgotten to tell MLB that, though, because this is the first Mets-Marlins series of 2022.
Starting tonight, 19.6% of the remaining schedule is made up of Mets vs. Marlins, which last year was a season series that went to the Mets, 10-9, in a year when both teams sucked. Now only one does.
The final game of last season’s NL East M-nickname rivalry series on September 30 was also the final game at Citi for Michael Conforto. He capped off the season with by going 3-for-5 with a double, two RBIs, and a spectacular ninth-inning catch that led to a standing ovation. Incidentally, that was also Luis Rojas’ final home game in a managerial capacity.
The Mets took that final game 12-3, helped along by Conforto, Pete Alonso cracking two home runs, and a grand slam from Francisco Lindor. Rich Hill finally got a win after 13 appearances for the Mets since July, when he joined the team.
It had all started so brightly, too, with Conforto’s salute to Homer Simpson for a walk-off in the home opener.
Those were two of the Mets’ 10 wins against Miami last year. They lost nine of the other 17, with a big scoop from that whole “could have been a lot worse” territory.
Like most of last season.