Pointless Nostalgia: Steampipe Alley

Steampipe Alley 2.jpgWhile searching through the Vast and Dusty Scratchbomb VHS Archives, looking for something I hope to digitize and post to the site very soon (shh! it’s a secret!), I ran across not one, not two, but three full episodes of Steampipe Alley. They’re like the Dead Sea Scrolls of kids’ show camp!

Once I made this discovery, I did a quick tour of the interwebs and discovered–TO MY HORROR–that there is virtually no online record of Steampipe Alley‘s existence. THIS ENDS HERE!

If you didn’t grow up in the Tri-State Area and/or you aren’t of a certain age, you may have never heard of Steampipe Alley. It aired on WWOR, channel 9. Nowadays, it’s a “My” station whatever the hell that means, but back then, it was an independent station with Superstation aspirations that broadcast out of Seacaucus, NJ.

Once upon a time, every local TV channel had its own self-produced kids’ show with a goofy host, contests, sketches, and cartoons. By the 1980s, almost none of them did. In fact, by that time, there were very few independent stations left at all. Channel 9 was a rare outpost for ultra-local programming (and a budget to match), wedged in between Cosby Show reruns, old movies, and other syndicated fare.

In 1988, for some anachronistic reason, WWOR decided to produce its own kids’ show called Steampipe Alley. Info on the interwebs about the program’s origins (or anything else about it) is spotty at best. Here’s all you really need to know: it was hosted by Mario Cantone.

You may know Mr. Cantone from Sex and the City, or you may have seen him on a Comedy Central Roast or two, or you may have seen him do his standup act. But if you’ve seen him in any form, you know that he’s high energy, to say the least. And he loves campy, old timey references that he’s way too young to namecheck. He’s equal parts Robin Williams, Rip Taylor, and Charles Nelson Reilly.

Did he tone it down a bit when he hosted a kids’ show? I think you know the answer to that question already.


Continue reading Pointless Nostalgia: Steampipe Alley

Free Fonzie!

99_nldsgm4_fonzie.pngOver the weekend, Kevin Kernan of the New York Post wrote a brief, heartbreaking (to me) article about former Met Edgardo Alfonzo, erstwhile member of The Greatest Infield Ever. He’s been in the baseball wilderness since 2006, playing for the independent Long Island Ducks, the Mexican league, and the Venezuelan winter league. Last year, like his former teammate Benny Agbayani, he finally won a championship thanks to the Japanese baseball league, going all the way with the Yomiuri Giants.

But as thrilling as that was, he has one thing he still wants to do: he wants to retire as a Met.

My dream is to retire with the Mets colors. That’s my dream. That’s what I’m praying for, maybe it will happen, maybe not, but dreams sometimes come true, you know….I love the Mets and I love the Mets fans. I would like that dream to come true.

Fonzie thinks he still has some baseball left in him, and can be a good utility man. He’s hoping the Mets will extend him a spring training invite. If he makes the team, great. If not, he’s happy to retire from the majors wearing orange and blue.

Perhaps you’re not aware of how unusual this is. Most Mets leave town in a huff, or in disgrace, or embittered, or in some head scratchingly bad trade. Almost no player retires as a Met, and the few that do make little sense.

In recent memory, I recall Jeromy Burnitz and Todd Zeile playing their last seasons as Mets, both in their second tour of duty with the team. Neither were exactly returning heroes. Then there were random spring training invitees like Andres Galaragga and Bret Boone, who quit the game rather than fight for a roster spot on bad Met teams.

Even Tom Seaver barely retired as a Met. He got a token spring training invite in 1987, then hung up his cleats for good. He should have never left the team in the first place, but that’s a whole other story. Ask Dick Young about it, should you ever find yourself strolling through hell.

Edgardo Alfonzo says he wants to retire as a Met. I don’t think anyone has uttered those words in the last 30 years.

99_nldsgm1_fonzie4.jpgOf course, this is the man who, upon leaving the Mets for free agency after the 2002 season, used his own money to take out ads on top of taxicabs to thank Mets fans for their support. As The 1999 Project will attest, he had nothing but huge hits that year, particularly in September and into the playoffs. He was a Gold Glove caliber third baseman (I mean in the imaginary universe where Gold Gloves are handed out for actual fielding skills and not on legacy/popularity). But he moved to second base to make way for Robin Ventura, never uttered a peep about it, and played just as well there.

That was The Fonzie Way: quiet, dignified, workmanlike. He was constantly overshadowed by flashier players and the random course of events. Still–and I know that as a rational baseball fan, this is a borderline silly thing to say/write, but I’m saying it anyway–in a big spot, in a must-win game, there was no player I’d want coming up to bat for the Mets more than Edgardo Alfonzo.

As I’ve written on many occasions, the Mets (as an organization) don’t do right by their history. They don’t honor it, they don’t cherish it, and they barely acknowledge it. Alfonzo is not a legendary player, but he was a great one for a short period of time, and he was definitely a beloved one.

If we were talking about virtually any other organization, there’d be no question that he’d get a spring training invite. Maybe you strike gold, and Fonzie has something left in the tank. If not, it costs the team virtually nothing, you grant his wish, and pay him back for everything he did for the team.

I don’t have much faith in the Mets to do the right thing by Fonzie. But I hope this is enough of a no brainer that even they can make this happen.

1999 Project: Post-Mortem

Thumbnail image for mora_cedeno_rocker.jpgWay back in September, a reader emailed me and asked if I could collect all of the 1999 Project posts (so far) into a handy doc for non-web reading. So I did it, and in doing so discovered all the words I’d typed so far added up to 142 single-spaced pages in Word. At the time, the Project had only covered the regular season. I’m sure the postseason games I’ve chronicled since then would add another 25 pages to the total, bare minimum.

For a moment, I had a crisis of conscience. I still can’t finish my latest novel, and I haven’t seriously tried to get anything of mine published in traditional media since my daughter was born. And yet, I’d written the equivalent of 300 book pages on the 1999 New York Mets, a project with seemingly no purpose but to feed my own unquenchable nostalgic jones.

Take a peek at the sports section of your local book store. You’ll find precious little ink devoted to non-championship teams The 1999 Mets didn’t even make it to the World Series. Why did I waste so much time detailing the every move of a team that was ultimately a failure?

I suppose that depends on your definition of failure. In the sense of Sports as Warfare, a zero-sum game where there can only be one victor, then yes, the 1999 Mets were a failure. But by that definition, every team but the Yankees was a failure in 1999. To me, the idea that anything less than a championship is a failure is a Yankee organization/fan attitude. Is that who we should emulate, really?

I prefer to think of sports as entertainment, and seasons as productions. Some are more successful than others. Some are unbridled triumphs and some are flawed but courageous. Some are depressing, some are disappointing, and some are unadulterated shit-shows. But you can still love films that are less than perfect. If your favorite movie didn’t win any Oscars, do you have to stop loving it because it “failed”?

Of course, the difference between a movie and a baseball season is you can watch a movie over and over. You can’t really do that with baseball, not even a little bit (especially since MLB does everything in its power to prevent fans from posting/sharing old game footage).

Not to mention the ESPN-ification of sports coverage, wherein any game/season/sport is reduced to a few highlight reel plays. That format suits basketball and football well, but every baseball season–every baseball game–is a marathon, not a sprint. Distilling it down into bite sized chunks, and declaring only one victor, does the game a disservice. Whenever I see a game that I watched covered in roughly 90 seconds on SportsCenter, I see nothing but the glaring omissions necessary for such a cheap format.

Many fanbases have teams that didn’t win it all but are still beloved. Case in point: The 1982 Milwaukee Brewers. If you’re a cheesehead baseball fan, this is your favorite team of all time. Harvey’s Wallbangers are celebrated constantly at Miller Park. The Brewers still regularly wear the ’82 style uniforms. A documentary about them runs in heavy rotation on MLB Network. They lost the World Series to the Cardinals that year, but that almost seems beside the point.

The 2000 Mets were more successful than the 1999 version, in the sense that they went one step farther by making it to the World Series. But the 2000 team lacked a certain something. They had some awesome games that year, particularly in the NLDS against the Giants. Unfortunately, the Mets saw some key players leave the team after 1999 for one reason or another, and almost uniformly replaced them with guys who had decidedly less bite (a totally ephemeral quality, I realize).

They lost John Olerud to free agency and replaced him with Todd Zeile, another in a long line of players the Mets acquired for the sole purpose of making him play out of position. They lost Rey Ordonez to injury and replaced him with Mike Bordick, trading away Melvin Mora in the process. In Mora’s absence, professional malcontent Derek Bell patrolled the outfield for most of the season. And they traded away Roger Cedeno and Octavio Dotel to get Mike Hampton, who pitched them to the World Series, then abandoned them in the offseason because Denver’s schools were so much better than New York’s. (On the plus side, the compensation pick the Mets got when he left was used to draft David Wright.)

There’s also the fact that the Mets (as an organization) don’t respect their own history at all. They have only four retired numbers, and only one of those represents a man who took the field for them (Tom Seaver’s 41). They have a moribund Hall of Fame that has inducted no new members since 2002. They built a new ballpark but forgot to include any mementos of triumphs past. I went to CitiField a lot last year, but I didn’t see a single mention of the magic of 1999, not even on the scoreboard between innings (they needed that precious time for the Cascarino’s Pizza Pass contest).

So I guess I did this for the same reason that Greg Prince at Faith and Fear in Flushing often writes about the 1999 Mets: to keep that season from “disappearing down the memory hole”. As I wrote in my roundup of game 6 of the NLCS, even though the Braves won that game and were on their way to the World Series, the NBC cameras spent an incredibly long time lingering on the “losers”. Neither Bob Costas nor Joe Morgan would stop talking about them. Anyone who witnessed the 1999 Mets, at the time, recognized how special they were. I don’t want that to be forgotten.

For months, the Mets walked a tightrope between ecstasy and doom. Eventually, they fell, but they put on a hell of a show before they lost their balance. I don’t think I’ll ever see a better season, and if I do, it will have to be an even crazier combination of the monstrous and the sublime.

The 1999 Mets were a success. I feel sorry for anyone who’d think otherwise.