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Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter: The Walrus Game

Two years ago, as Shea Stadium counted down its last days, I wrote a few posts on some of the best games I attended there. However, I never quite got around to writing about my absolute most favorite game ever at Shea. Let me remedy that error now.

The year is 1991. The Mets are in the midst of their first losing, uncompetitive season in many a year (and the first of many, until Bobby Valentine righted the ship). They would end the year 77-84, which, in a few years, would seem like Shangri-la in comparison. They’re on their last homestand of the year, playing a series against the Pirates, who have already clinched the division (yes, 1991 was indeed a long, long time ago). Manager Buddy Harrelson would be fired with seven games left in the season. The outcome of these games mean virtually nothing to anyone.

My older cousin was going to college near where I lived in upstate New York. Said college had a big block of tickets for the last game in this series. Would I be interested in attending with him, even though it was on raw, rainy September night? Yes, I would be, because I hadn’t been to a baseball game in a very long time. Also, I was 14 years old and hating junior high with a deathly dread, and I hoped that I would get home so late from Queens that my mom would take pity on me and let me stay home from school the next day (though I knew she probably wouldn’t).

We traveled down to the city in a school bus, no lights or anything. I brought a book or two to read on the trip, but that quickly proved pointless. I also finagled some dough from my mom to buy a scorebook, which was no small feat, because we had no money for such frivolities. But my mom knew that I scored every game I went to and indulged me this one luxury.

However, I didn’t have any money for food or drink. Mom plied me with a sandwich and probably a Capri Sun (shut up) in a paper bag. Only in retrospect does this seem vaguely sad to me. At the time, it was a state of affairs I was used to–i.e., being dirt poor and just happy to be doing anything out of the house, even if it meant I had to bring my own food and drink.

91mets_cover.jpgThe state of the Mets at the time should be apparent by the cover story on the aforementioned scorebook: Rick Cerone, a pudgy Newark native and ex-Yankee catcher who was just keeping the dish warm for up-and-coming prospect Todd Hundley (a September callup that year who himself was profiled briefly in the same scorebook).

I’ve scanned a few other gems from this scorebook for your viewing pleasure. Here’s a page dedicated to the Mets Radio Network, with a pic of a young Gary Cohen possessing a full head of hair. Here’s a page on the Mets’ minor leaguers of note, led by Jeromy Burnitz, Butch Huskey, and Fernando Vina; the Rookie League Sarasota Mets were paced in batting average and RBIs by a young’un reffered to as “Ed Alfonzo”. And here’s a saucy ad for WFAN, featuring a painting by Mad Magazine artiste Mort Drucker. Mr. Drucker rendered Don Imus a bit like John C. Reilly, and was a bit too flattering to Mike Francesa (ie, didn’t make him look like a house), though he nailed Chris “Mad Dog” Russo’s cockeyed stupidity.

Our seats were in the upper deck, which at Shea was a steep, intimidating place. You could look down the stairways toward the field and feel as if the whole deck was getting more and more vertical every second, like the steps would collapse into a ramp a la some James Bond villain trap. You were always one wind gust away from plunging to your death.

You especially felt this way if the upper deck was not well populated, which it was not this evening. In fact, other than the group from the college (which couldn’t have been more than 25 people), there was nobody in the upper deck. I don’t mean there were very few people there. I mean there was literally nobody there. If you were looking at it from field level, it would have seemed even odder, since this one populated patch was halfway between home and left field.

The rest of the stadium was not exactly jam packed, either, nor should it have been. The two teams didn’t exactly trot out their A squads for this game, as my scorecard will attest. (It will also attest to my insane desire to chronicle every bit of the game. I know if you read this site, it’s hard to believe I can be obsessive, but it’s true.)

Then again, the game I attended was actually the second half of a day-night doubleheader. The first game–a rainout makeup from the previous day–was a four hour and twenty minute, 15-inning slog that must have exhausted and angered every single person involved in it. The Mets rallied in the bottom of the ninth to tie the game at 2, then, after the Pirates took a brief lead in the top of the 14th, tied the game again in the bottom half thanks to Todd Hundley’s first major league home run (which I also made note of on my scorecard). But the Pirates scored again in the top of the 15th. The Mets couldn’t rally a third time, and lost 4-3.

In other words, nobody wanted to be on the field, and anyone in attendance would have been some stripe of insane.

Slowly, the other folks who’d come down on the trip (who I don’t think my cousin knew well, if at all) drifted away from their seats, either to get beer or hot dogs or relocate. By the time the second inning ended, my cousin and I were the only people in the upper deck. We didn’t notice it happening, but all of sudden we realized we’d been abandoned. We had an entire tier of Shea to ourselves. It was awesome and terrifying, as if we’d been made captains of a ship that was just about to go careening over a waterfall.

My cousin suggested we travel downstairs. There were clearly plenty of seats to be had. I reluctantly agreed. I was totally happy to be one of two people in the upper deck, as scary as it felt. Because at this time in my life, I was as play-by-the-rules as Hank Hill. I would not break rules under any circumstances, and felt extremely guilty even contemplating doing so, even for a victimless crime such as this.
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Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter: “1986: A Year to Remember”

One year, for my grandfather’s birthday, my brothers and I “bought” him (despite not having any money at all) “1986: A Year to Remember”, an hour-long highlight video of the newly minted world champion Mets. Grampa–who lived next door to us–had a VCR, and we did not. So we invited ourselves over to watch it with him. Even if he wasn’t home. Every day. For two years. That is not hyperbole. I will swear on the holy book of your choice that this is true.

I can probably recite every word in this video, from beginning to end. I acquired a not-at-all legitimate copy on DVD a few years back, and I still watch it every now and then. It is wall-to-wall awesome, pure and simple. Watching it over and over again at an early age did permanent damage. It is probably the biggest reason why I became such a huge baseball fan.

Why? It’s hard to say, because it’s ingrained in my consciousness so much. I can’t identify why this video is so great any more than I can comment on the greatness of The Beatles or a sunset. But maybe we should start with the musical montages. They are many and varied. This video contains:

  • A segment about the team’s hotfoot pranksters, like Roger McDowell, to the tune of Emerson Lake and Palmer’s “Karn Evil 9”
  • The leadership of Keith Hernandez and Gary Carter, as exemplified by
    Bob Seger’s “Like a Rock” (a good decade before it was adopted as
    Chevy’s anthem)
  • A montage of “partners in grime” Wally Backman and Lenny Dykstra set to Duran Duran’s “Wild Boys”

As you might expect, the video does not allude to the Mets’ hard partying ways, and it glosses over controversies like the Houston bar fight and George Foster’s carcinogenic clubhouse presence (though a doc about 1986 produced by SNY a few years ago does). But who wants downers like those when you can watch a chock full of unbelievable clips from an insane season?

Though not commercially available, a body can track down this video in one form or another on the interwebs. If you just want to view it, it’s still available in streaming chunks on the Mets’ official web site. Just point your browser here and pick a month from the drop-down menu in the lower right corner.

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter: “The Numbers Game”

The Numbers Game by Alan Schwarz is on my shortlist for best baseball books of the last 10 years. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of any that can beat it. The main reason: while so-called traditionalists deride or dismiss the sabermetric approach to baseball, Schwarz’s book shows that stat obsession has existed as long as the game has. He even makes a convincing argument that baseball’s number-rich nature is the main reason it became America’s pastime in the first place.

The book is a brief history of baseball statistics: how they began, how they evolved, and who pioneered what. Schwarz points in particular to one largely unsung founder of baseball as we know it, Henry Chadwick. As early as the 1840s, newspapers published rudimentary “abstracts” about baseball games. It took Chadwick to refine these abstracts and turn them into the box score that we still use today.

In Schwarz’s estimation, the simple comprehensiveness of the box score meant that it could (a) be printed in the newspapers without taking up too much real estate, and (b) give the reader a concise but thorough sense of what happened in the game. So the average working stiff (who lacked the money and free time to go to a ballgame) could follow a team even if he could never attend a game in person. It is probable the biggest factor in turning baseball from a game to a sport.

Chadwick also became an evangelist for baseball, and tried to develop and perfect the way it understood itself through stats. Some metrics he developed caught on, others never did, and still others would wait 100-plus years until the game understood their merit.

Schwarz also shows that every era has had its own Nerds vs. Jocks debate. He traces the roots of fantasy sports all the way back to the 1940s, and highlights a few lonely Bill Jamesian figures throughout the game’s history who have, for the most part, been completely ignored by the MLB establishment and statheads alike. And he also shows that Billy Beane and his methods of team construction didn’t appear out of thin air.

In short, Schwarz shows that the history of baseball’s stats are really the history of the game itself. It is a thousand times more interesting than a book about math has any right to be. You can easily plow through this book in a day or two, and you’ll wish it lasted longer.