Joe Keough, RIP: A Royal hit

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2019-09-16 JoeKeough

Joe Keough near the Royals dugout: “Those were some of the best times of my life.” (Kansas City Royals photo.)

Unless you’ve been a Royals fan since the day they were born, you wouldn’t recognise Joe Keough immediately. If you’re my age, you remember (maybe) that he was the kid brother (by twelve years) of longtime major league utility man Marty Keough. Or, that his nephew is ill-fated former Athletics pitcher Matt Keough.

But if you are a Royals fan since the day they were born, Joe Keough—who died at 73 on 9 September in Miami—is a name you should and probably do know. The Royals began life winning their first two regular season games, ever—both on walk-off hits. Keough nailed the first one . . . as a pinch hitter.

He became an Original Royal in the first place because the A’s made him available for the American League’s second expansion draft after 1968. He’d gotten a second-half call-up to the A’s and debuted in Yankee Stadium 7 August, in a game featuring one Hall of Famer approaching the end (Mickey Mantle) and another Hall of Famer (Reggie Jackson) who’d only just begun to wreak havoc.

Keough was sent up to pinch hit for A’s reliever Jack Aker against the Yankees’ respected veteran reliever Lindy McDaniel to lead off the top of the eighth. There are worse times to take your first trip to the plate in a major league game, but Keough made the most of it and headlines for it. He yanked one into the right field seats to tie the game at three. Sweetening it was the game going to extras and Jackson’s RBI single in the top of the twelfth holding up for a 4-3 A’s win.

A kid with a .590 OPS wasn’t exactly what the A’s seemed to have in mind, alas, so they exposed Keough to the expansion draft and he became a Royal. He made the Opening Day roster as the Royals began in Municipal Stadium, the former playpen of the A’s before their move to Oakland.

The Royals faced the Twins to begin their new life. Keough spent most of the game watching on the bench, until a three-all tie went to the bottom of the twelfth.”I came out of spring training wanting to start very badly,” he told an interviewer in 2011. “Our manager that year . . . decided not to start me and I was a little upset about that.”

On the mound for the Twins was Joe Grzenda, in relief of former longtime Dodgers relief bellwether Ron Perranoski, after former World Series hero Moe Drabowsky (he of the eleven strikeouts in relief in Game One, ’66 Series) retired the Twins in order in the top.

Former Angel Ed Kirkpatrick led off with a line out to Twins center field fixture Ted Uhlaender but former Red Sox Joe Foy singled and took second on a passed ball while Grzenda worked to Chuck Harrison. The Twins then elected to put Harrison aboard to set up a double play prospect with Bob Oliver, a rookie power hitter, coming up to the plate.

But Grzenda wild pitched Foy and Harrison to third and second, then the Twins elected to re-establish the double play possibility and put Oliver aboard with Royals catcher Ellie Rodriguez, generally a defense-first player with little power at the plate, due to hit next.

Enter Royals manager Joe Gordon—you guessed it. The same Joe Gordon who once shone at second base for the Yankees. The same Joe Gordon whom, managing the Indians in 1960, would be swapped, essentially, for Tigers manager Jimmy Dykes. The same season during which the Indians began life without slugging right fielder Rocky Colavito, whom their capricious general manager Frank Lane dealt to the Tigers for aging outfielder Harvey Kuenn before the season.

Gordon now decided he had a better shot if he inserted Keough, whose rookie 1968 produced a .590 OPS, to pinch hit for Rodriguez, whose cup of coffee with the 1968 Yankees delivered an OPS .085 points lower. And Gordon was right. Keough pulled a line single to right to send Foy home and win it, 4-3. “It was a very cold, cold day,” Keough told Fox4KC last year. “I got a good pitch to hit and I hit it.”

Maybe Keough put a little mojo into the Royals. Because they won the second game of their existence the next day in extra innings, too. This time, it took seventeen innings. And this time, the game-winning RBI single came through the courtesy of future Yankee fixture, World Series-winning Reds manager, and record 116 game-winning Mariners manager Lou Piniella.

The bad news is that’s about as far as the embryonic Royals’ mojo went, even if Piniella became American League’s Rookie of the Year. They finished 28 games out of first in the newly established American League West. The only reason it wasn’t bad enough for a cellar finish is because the White Sox (29 games out) and the Royals’ fellow expansion team, the Ball Four Seattle Pilots (33 out), happened to be much worse.

An outfielder whose habits included climbing the steep Municipal Stadium steps every day with a few teammates during homestands to help stay in shape (“It was a great workout for us”), Keough managed to keep his mojo working long enough to make the Royals’ everyday lineup in 1970 as their leadoff hitter.

He owned a .398 on-base percentage by late June. Then came the second game of a doubleheader against the Angels at home. The good news: the Royals turned a close enough game into a 13-1 blowout. The bad news: Keough’s mojo broke along with his leg three innings earlier.

Somehow a mini-legend has arisen over the decades since that Keough was injured trying to score a run the Royals didn’t really need by the time he scored it. Legends may be stubborn but those pesky facts are more so. Keough was on second in the bottom of the fifth, with the Royals having just taken a 2-1 lead, when their center field star Amos Otis rippled a single to right.

Keough gunned it home and collided with Angels catcher Tom Egan on the play, scoring the third Royals run but fracturing his leg and dislocating his ankle in the collision. The run put the Royals up by two; they’d score six in the eighth to finish what became the blowout. But Keough’s scoring injury killed his season and, for all intent and purpose, his career, just when it began solidifying.

He winced when reminded of the play during that Fox4KC interview. “Those are things you don’t want to remember,” he began, allowing himself a chuckle of regret, “but yes I do remember breaking my leg. It was a lot of pain. It changed my life, but it changed in a lot of different ways that’s good.”

Keough would play three more none-too-impressive major league seasons before calling it a career before the 1974 season. A northern California native, he raised four children and made a post baseball life out of Texas in marketing and real estate development for such companies as Fotomat, 7-Eleven, Burger King, PayLess Shoe Source, and EyeMasters, while enjoying golfing and cooking and his five grandchildren.

Fan friendly and rarely missing from events involving the ’69 Royals for decades to follow, Keough aged gracefully in retirement, looking more like a slim, composed, kindly small town storekeeper than a former ballplayer who ran the steepest stadium stairs to stay in game shape and never forgot his years on the Royals’ earliest teams.

“Those were some of the best times of my life,” he said with a smile.

Feud for thought

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2019-09-15 NoahSyndergaard

Noah Syndergaard isn’t exactly being a prima donna when he insists throwing to Tomas Nido behind the plate is both his preference and better for him.

One of the first baseball legends I can remember reading about as a child is the 1927 feud between Pirates outfielder Kiki Cuyler and manager Donie Bush in 1927. I read about it in a pulp early 1966 paperback called Baseball’s Unforgettables, which had the ink-painted heads of Willie Mays and Sandy Koufax on the front jacket and cartoon baseball images—several of also which illustrated the chapters—surrounding them.

The way I read it in that book, Bush “stubbornly and foolishly” held a grudge against Cuyler for refusing a lineup shift out of his number three slot to bat second. Not to mention that the feud between the two may have cost the pennant-winning Pirates the World Series. And neither is entirely true.*

In his first season as strictly a manager (he’d been a player/manager for the 1923 Washington Senators), Bush wasn’t thrilled about the usually mild-mannered Cuyler’s defiance. But if Baseball’s Unforgettables quoted Cuyler as pleading, “Don’t do it, Skip, it’s a jinx for me,” Cuyler himself had a different take: as The Sporting News quoted him in his 1950 obituary, Cuyler didn’t think his kind of freer swinger really belonged in a lineup slot demanding more precise contact hitting.

According to Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Blunders, the argument didn’t do Cuyler any favours with Bush, but it came to a head not over the batting order but over a potential double play. On 6 August 1927, running from first, Cuyler elected not to slide into second on a double play attempt because he thought he had a better chance of obstructing the relay throw to first by arriving standing up.

The Pirates lost the game and fell three behind the Cubs. Bush didn’t buy Cuyler’s reasoning over the running play. Maybe marrying that to the batting order dispute prompted Bush, at last, to bench Cuyler for the rest of the season (save one early September game) and the Series. Then, the Pirates traded Cuyler to the Cubs after the season.

The legend became that benching Cuyler cost them the Series. The legend is bunk. Cuyler wasn’t the Pirates’ best player in 1927; the Hall of Famer wasn’t even their tenth-best player. (The two best the Pirates had in ’27: Hall of Fame outfielder Paul Waner and pitcher Ray Kremer.) The Pirates went 34-18 after the Cuyler benching to win the pennant. But the only team on the planet who could beat the 1927 Yankees might be the 1998 Yankees, if not this year’s Astros.

The worst thing the feud did was to alienate Donie Bush with the Pirates’ fan base. Cuyler was popular enough that Bush couldn’t recover his public image in Pittsburgh, and he resigned in August 1929. He’d have 65 years in baseball total before his death in 1972 while scouting for the White Sox.

My revisiting the Cuyler-Bush feud was instigated by the current apparent debate between Noah Syndergaard and the Mets. Syndergaard isn’t the first pitcher to think about having a particular catcher working with him or even about having a personal catcher. But the issue amplified Friday night.

That’s when Syndergaard took three shutout innings and a 1-0 Mets lead against Clayton Kershaw into the fourth, with Wilson Ramos behind the plate. After a leadoff groundout, Syndergaard and Dodgers star Cody Bellinger wrestled to a ten-pitch walk. Corey Seager singled Bellinger to third at once; then, A.J. Pollock singled through the right side of the infield to score Bellinger, and Gavin Lux, a rookie September call-up, smashed a three-run homer.

Syndergaard worked the fifth the better to keep Mets manager Mickey Callaway from having to turn to his rickety bullpen too soon. It didn’t keep the Dodgers from piling five more on at that bullpen’s expense. And it re-opened the question of whether Syndergaard should get to throw to his preference, backup catcher Tomas Nido, instead of regular catcher Ramos.

There were those who thought (and probably still think) that Syndergaard wrestling with the Mets over his catchers is going to be one more reason for the Mets to put him on the trading block at last after the season ends. There are those who thought (and probably still think) that forcing Syndergaard to throw to a catcher with whom he’s not comfortable may cost the Mets a by-now-too-slim shot at the postseason.

We’ll know soon enough whether the former proves true, but the latter? The Mets’ postseason chances went from new and much improved with that magnificent post-All Star break run to strikingly slim after losing one too many key contests despite a .600+ record in each of July, August, and September thus far.

What really ruined their postseason chances was their horrible, drama-dominant April through June. They looked like a Mess, acted like it often enough, and still have a few things from those three months returning to bite them in the butts just a little too often even in the middle of their second-half success.

Callaway remains under a white-hot microscope over his tactical missteps and strategic vision-challenges. Saturday’s next-to-the-eleventh hour shutout win against the Dodgers, 3-0, magnified it, when he was forced to pinch hit for one of his few relief jewels, Seth Lugo, with the bases loaded in the bottom of the eighth, where he could have double-switched Ramos out after the backstop ended the seventh and kept Lugo’s lineup slot eight slots away from arriving.

He got lucky with pinch hitter Rajai Davis, who hadn’t had a base hit since late August and took an 0-for-10 string to the plate. Davis yanked Dodger reliever Julio Urias’s 1-2 changeup down the left field line to clear the pads. And he said afterward that he didn’t want to leave the Mets without Ramos’s bat in the lineup.

There’s part of the issue. Ramos has been one of baseball’s hottest hitters since the All-Star break. Nido by comparison can’t hit with a hangar door. But have a look at how Syndergaard—and Cy Young Award defender and 2019 candidate Jacob deGrom—pitch when Ramos or Nido are their catchers:

To Wilson Ramos: G ERA BAA XBH K K/BB K/IP K/G
Jacob deGrom 19 2.68 .209 24 145 5.0 1.3 7.6
Noah Syndergaard 16 5.20 .258 32 97 4.4 1.0 6.1
To Tomas Nido: G ERA BAA XBH K K/BB K/IP K/G
Jacob deGrom 11 1.88 .202 18 91 7.0 1.2 8.3
Noah Syndergaard 10 2.45 .217 20 63 3.3 0.9 6.3

Syndergaard’s -2.75 ERA differential when throwing to Nido instead of Ramos bears out his argument in favour of Nido on purely pitching/defense terms. DeGrom’s differential is -0.80. DeGrom to Ramos still has a Cy Young Award-caliber 2.68 ERA. Syndergaard looks like a Cy Young Award-caliber pitcher with Nido behind the plate and like a Sayonara Award-caliber pitcher with Ramos behind the plate.

Syndergaard strikes batters out just a shard more often than he walks them with Ramos than he does with Nido—but he strikes them out a speck less throwing to Nido than to Ramos.

DeGrom is simply a better pitcher almost regardless of who’s behind the dish for him; you could send bullpen coach (and ex-major league pitcher) Ricky Bones behind the dish and deGrom will pitch like a Cy Young Award winner. If he’s striking out 8.3 hitters a start with Nido behind the plate, assuming deGrom’s average seven innings per start continues, he’s still striking out 7.6 per start with Ramos behind the plate.

While I was at it, I looked up the Mets’ other starters. Zack Wheeler’s ERA is 3.03 lower with Ramos behind the plate than with Nido. Marcus Stroman, who pitched his first truly quality start as a Met Saturday, has a -0.20 differential when throwing to Nido. It may not make a great difference if Stroman throws to Ramos.

(Where’s Steven Matz, you ask? Easy: Matz only threw to Nido once this season, in a relief appearance against the Phillies just before the All-Star break. You can leave Matz with Ramos behind the plate safely, especially with Matz’s turnaround second half. Matz in the second half has a 2.52 ERA and an 8.5 K/9 rate, both far above his first-half struggling. Matz-Ramos is one battery you don’t want to break up.)

Maybe we should look at the walks and hits per inning pitched (WHIP) when each catcher is behind the plate for deGrom and Syndergaard:

To Wilson Ramos G IP H BB WHIP
Jacob deGrom 19 114.0 87 29 1.02
Noah Syndergaard 16 97.0 96 22 1.22
To Tomas Nido G IP H BB WHIP
Jacob deGrom 11 72.0 53 13 0.92
Noah Syndergaard 10 66.0 52 19 1.07

It might have made plenty of sense if the Mets had spent more time reviewing the actual performance papers and decided that, yes, it would be smart to start Tomas Nido every time Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard pitch. And, with the need for Ramos’s live bat as profound as it is, switch Ramos into those games after lifting deGrom or Syndergaard.

Dreaming, you say? This season, Ramos is hitting .314 when the games are late and close—and he’s hitting a whopping .379 with a 1.003 OPS in high leverage. And, yes, that’s mostly thanks to his bristling second half at the plate. Now, try to imagine the outcome of more than a few games if Nido was sent out to start with deGrom and Syndergaard regularly, and Ramos got switched into those games after those two pitchers were lifted.

Curiously, deGrom pitched a gem Saturday with Ramos behind the plate and outpitched Dodgers Cy Young candidate Hyun-Jin Ryu while he was at it: three hits and eight strikeouts in seven innings; nineteen called strikes and eleven swinging strikes; and, a 2-to-1 ground ball to fly ball rate.

But remember that even with Ramos catching him deGrom pitches like the ace he is. Syndergaard, who’s almost as talented, needs every break he can get. You can say Syndergaard is responsible for executing pitches, and you’d be right, of course. But ponder this, as New York Post writer Joel Sherman does:

Kershaw is the best pitcher of his generation and when he was Syndergaard’s age, he insisted on throwing to A.J. Ellis, a light-hitting backup. A main task of a manager is putting players in position to succeed—and that is not happening currently with Syndergaard.

Syndergaard’s not exactly being a prima donna by insisting he’s better off with Nido than with Ramos behind the plate. Kershaw, a Hall of Famer in waiting, really, wasn’t the first to think about personal catchers and he won’t be the last. And a lot of pitchers have credited their success to one or another particular catcher.

Hall of Famer Whitey Ford once said throwing to Hall of Famer Yogi Berra made him the pitcher he became. And those pesky statistics also bear out that every Yankee pitcher not named Ford when Berra was the regular Yankee catcher pitched better throwing to Berra than at any other time in their entire careers.

(You want to argue success? With Yogi as their regular catcher, the Yankees won nine pennants and seven World Series including five straight despite pitching staffs composed mostly of pitchers who shone as Yankees but were comparative non-topics elsewhere.)

That’s not quite the same as the personal catcher concept, of course, but it’s not something to dismiss too readily.

Tim McCarver had a fine playing career but a lot of it included being Steve Carlton’s preference behind the plate. Charlie O’Brien and then Eddie Perez were a lot more valuable to the Braves because Greg Maddux preferred pitching to one and then the other when the one left as a free agent. Those catchers weren’t exactly in Berra’s league but a pair of Hall of Famers must have known and seen something, right?

You can’t really say that obstinance over who catches whom will sign the Mets’ 2019 death warrant if they don’t make even the wild card play-in game. Of course, if by some alchemy the Mets do sneak into the second wild card and play the likely first card-winning Nationals in the play-in game, they should be broiled and basted if they send anyone not named Nido out to catch either deGrom or Syndergaard in that game.

No Syndergaard-vs.-Mets feud will cost the Mets. Any more than a Kiki Cuyler-Donie Bush feud really cost the 1927 Pirates. Those Pirates won the pennant without Cuyler down the stretch, but they were done in in the World Series by an immovable threshing machine. These Mets will have done themselves in with a first half that, for all their second-half perseverance, still seems like the insurmountable burden.

* Baseball’s Unforgettables also managed to get the spelling of Donie Bush’s name wrong—the book spelled it “Donnie.”

Born Owen Joseph Bush, his original nickname as a Tigers shortstop was Ownie, which teammate Ed Killian got changed to Donie based on Killian describing a pitch on which Bush struck out as a “donie” pitch, “donie” happening to rhyme with Bush’s original nickname. Teammates picked up on it—and began calling him Donie Bush.

Defiance yields dividends

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2019-09-13 Mets911Shoes

You can do anything but lay off the Mets’ 9/11 commemorative shoes . . .

Baseball’s unwritten rules are ridiculous enough. Some of the written or at least known-to-be rules are even more ridiculous. Which is why Mets rookie star Pete Alonso’s 9/11 defiance ennobles and should elevate him and shame baseball’s government.

When the Mets played their first home game following the original 9/11 atrocity, they wore hats brandishing NYPD, NYFD, and other first responders with their uniforms. They defied baseball government then, too. And ever since, baseball government has shot down subsequent similar bids to honour the rescuers and the fallen. And others.

As the Mets pondered violating the edict on 9/11’s tenth anniversary (they ended up obeying baseball government orders for nothing more than an American flag on their caps), the Nationals had ideas about wearing Navy SEALs caps during a game around the same time, honouring those SEALs killed in Afghanistan that August. Baseball government said sure—pre-game only. During the game, don’t even think about it.

Alonso—a first grade Florida kid when the World Trade Center was attacked on 9/11—wasn’t having any of that nonsense.

If baseball was going to shoot down his original idea for custom hats featuring New York police, fire, and assorted first responders* and others, Alonso was going to shoot his own weapon—he got his teammates’ shoe sizes and footed the bill himself for Adidas, New Balance, and other top athletic shoemakers to make special 9/11 commemorative game cleats.

“I’ve just been thankful and gracious for this opportunity,” Alonso said to Yahoo! Sports‘s Mike Mazzeo, referring apparently to both his surrealistic rookie season and his chance to do honour to 9/11’s victims and responders.

“For me, this season has been an absolute fantasy. I just want to give back. I want to help. I don’t just want to be known as a good baseball player, I want to be known as a good person, too. And I just want to really recognize what this day is about. I don’t want it to be a holiday. I want it to be a day of remembrance of everything that happened. It was an awful day.”

Baseball government at least had the Mets, the Diamondbacks, and other teams wear patches on their caps showing MLB’s official logo converted to an American flag backdrop, a red-white-blue ribbon behind the logo, and “We shall not forget” embroidered into one side of the surrounding blue circle. Royalties from replica sales will go to three national 9/11 memorial groups.

That’s something commendable, but the idea that Alonso—who gave ten percent of his Home Run Derby prize money to two 9/11-related charities, the Wounded Warriors Project and the Stephen Stiller Tunnel to Towers Foundation (Stiller was a New York firefighter killed during 9/11 rescue efforts)—should have had to defy his game’s governors to honour those killed in America’s arguably worst single-attack atrocity, is grotesque.

Maybe the Mets being one and all on board with Alonso’s footwear helped keep the Manfred regime from slapping the team with a fine or other disciplinary measures. Or maybe the sense that fining or otherwise disciplining Alonso and the Mets for it would bring the regime more negative publicity kept it on its better behaviour.

And maybe the Mets’ defiance delivered them a little favour from the Elysian Fields gods.

First, they flattened the visiting Diamondbacks Wednesday, 9-0—nine runs on eleven hits including a five-run first. Then, as if to prove that some good deeds go unpunished, the Mets finished a four-sweep of the Snakes Thursday with an 11-1 battering.

Again, the Mets used eleven hits, including a single-game team record six clearing the fences, including center fielder Juan Lagares doing it twice, while Marcus Stroman nailed his first genuinely quality start on the mound since becoming a Met shortly before this year’s new single trade deadline.

Lagares’s first blast was only the biggest blow. Todd Frazier’s second-inning leadoff blast against Diamondbacks starter Alex Young and J.D. Davis’s two-out RBI single in the third off Young opened the game 2-0 Mets. A base hit and a walk loaded the pads for Lagares in the third when he wrestled Young to a full count.

Then Young threw a fastball arriving under the floor of the strike zone, and Lagares picked the perfect moment for his first career salami, hitting the equivalent of a five-iron shot into the left field seats.

The center fielder joined the long ball party in the bottom of the fifth, too. Aging second baseman Robinson Cano opened the inning with a line drive into the right field bullpen at Snakes reliever Robby Scott’s expense. Michael Conforto drew a one-out walk and, a strikeout later, exit Scott, enter Jimmie Sherfy, and exit another Lagares launch, this one landing in the seats near the right field foul pole.

Mets catcher Tomas Nido—the backup to Wilson Ramos, and the receiver half the Mets’ starting rotation seems to prefer throwing to (the Mets’ team ERA with Nido behind the plate: 3.68; with Ramos: 4.46), but who doesn’t hit enough to enable them to cement that preference—batted next. He didn’t give Sherfy a chance to breathe after Lagares’s second blast, lining one off the back left field wall above the thick orange line marker that denotes a home run.

Two innings later, and after pinch-hitter Ildemaro Vargas doubled home the only Arizona run in the top of the frame, Conforto punished reliever Kevin Ginkel for a third straight four-seam fastball, driving the down-and-in service into the upper deck in right.

Nothing, however, made even half the impression Alonso’s defiance in tribute to 9/11’s fallen and heroes made. The rook plotted the subterfuge for weeks and, by all known accounts, got the Mets’ team leaders including defending Cy Young Award winner Jacob deGrom on board with the plot.

Threats of fines or other disciplinary measures against Alonso or the Mets have proven unfulfilled, so far.

The fact that such a threat was made or implied and even had to be taken seriously tells you plenty of what you need to know about why baseball’s government has such a rotten public image while the game itself and most of those who play it have one of simple beauty.

Thus does baseball remain very much like its country—our government has a rotten image that’s very well deserved, but our country and most of those who call it our own have one of simple beauty.

* In my college years, briefly, I dated a Long Island nursing student named Kathy Mazza. It never became serious between us, but we had a few pleasant dates including a couple that ended with an all-night hunt for bialys—they differ from bagels in being smaller and based in flour, not malt—which I remember were a particular favourite snack of hers at the time.

Kathy eventually became an operating room nurse turned Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police officer whom, her eventual police officer husband once swore, became a cop to show him how policing was really done. In due course, she became the second woman to earn captain’s bars on the PAPD and the first to command its police academy.

Her achievements there included convincing the Port Authority to install portable heart defibrillators in the airports it oversaw and training the 600 PAPD officers posted to those airports on how to use them. She also taught emergency medical procedures at the PAPD academy.

And, she died in the 9/11 atrocity.

Joining PAPD responders at the North Tower, she shot out the glass walls of the North Tower’s mezzanine enabling hundreds to escape; the tower ultimately collapsed while she and fellow PAPD officers tried leading more out of the tower. Her body was found a month later, I believe.

Kathy Mazza was one of 37 PAPD officers including its then-chief killed on 9/11. She’s still the only woman ever killed in the line of duty on the PAPD, which suffered the largest single-event loss of life of any single law enforcement agency in history on 9/11.

This column is dedicated to her and their memory.

9 (runs) 11 (hits)

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2019-09-11 MetsCleats

The commemorative cleats the Mets wore at Pete Alonso’s instigation Wednesday night (shown on the feet of J.D. Davis); Alonso didn’t tell anyone outside the team what he was up to, and good for him.

The voices of the Mets’ broadcast team—Gary Cohen and 1986 Mets alumni Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling—wavered emotionally as they spoke of the 9/11 atrocity eighteen years earlier. Cohen then acknowledged the “awkward transition” from commemorating the atrocity to address the baseball game about to be at hand.

Assorted New York first responders lined up along the foul lines with Mets and Diamondbacks players for a playing of “The Star Spangled Banner” before the game. The Mets found a way to defy baseball government’s arbitrariness and wore specially made commemorative cleats, instigated by their Rookie of the Year candidate Pete Alonso.

The cleats featured American flag striping, the initials of first responder agencies, a small image of New York firefighters raising an American flag at Ground Zero, and a silhouette of the Twin Towers. (All teams playing Wednesday night wore commemorative 9/11 ribbons on the right sides of their game caps.) Alonso paid for every pair of the special cleats himself.

He cooked up the plot knowing the commissioner’s office has refused to let the Mets wear first-responder hats in commemoration for every home game played on 11 September. So he did the next best thing. He gathered his teammates’ and manager’s and coaches’ shoe sizes, arranged for the special cleats to be made, and kept his trap shut to MLB.

“I feel like if Major League Baseball kind of got their hands on it, it may not have been approved,” said the first baseman who handed $50,000 of his Home Run Derby prize money to the 9/11-related Tunnel to Towers Foundation. “But I’m really happy that we kind of banded together here in the clubhouse and made something cool happen.”

Those who remember when baseball returned following the mourning period over the World Trade Center atrocity remembered the Mets’ homecoming in long-gone Shea Stadium, after baseball took a break to mourn. They remembered the visiting Braves embracing the Mets pre-game in empathetic grief, and the Mets wearing first-responder police and fire department hats during the game for the first and, thanks to commisioner’s office edict, last time in a live game.

They remember especially the bottom of the eighth that night, with the Mets down 2-1, when Hall of Famer Mike Piazza electrified the stadium, the television audience, and the country with a mammoth two-run homer that flew right into a television camera posted on a special scaffolding behind the center field fence, and put the Mets up 3-2 to stay while Piazza was at it. That bomb just so happens to be the last entry on Piazza’s Hall of Fame plaque.

Then, after all the pre-game commemoration Wednesday night, this edition of Mets—who’ve seemed like crisis junkies one minute and hell on wheels the next, and who’ve managed despite some recent hiccups, bleeps, and blunders to stay within two of the National League’s second wild card—did something even more extraterrestrial than Piazza’s 2001 surrealism.

They shut the Diamondbacks out with . . . nine runs on eleven hits.

Who says the baseball gods in the Elysian Fields watching over Citi Field didn’t know something about doing atrocity victims and their families anniversary honour?

The Mets shook off Diamondbacks left fielder Tim Locastro’s seeming habit of trying to take one for the team, positioning his way into a first-pitch plunk from Mets starter Steven Matz in the first, chased Diamondbacks starter Robbie Ray with a five-run first. The fun only began when Ray thought back-to-back sliders to open against Mets shortstop Amed Rosario was a clever idea but Rosario thought it was even more clever to yank the second down the left field line for a leadoff double.

A strikeout (to Alonso) later, Mets second baseman Jeff McNeil took a first pitch plunk for the team, and—with Ray starting Mets catcher Wilson Ramos with yet another breaking ball—Rosario and McNeil pulled off a nifty double steal with no throw coming up from the plate to set up second and third.

Ramos nudged Rosario home with a bounce out to second and the train kept a-rollin’ when left fielder J.D. Davis shot an 0-2 single on a high line to left that Locastro could have speared on the fly but for an inexplicable hesitation and resulting short hop, scoring McNeil.

Third baseman Todd Frazier shifted the local to the express when he drove Ray’s dangling curve ball into the left center field seats, with Brandon Nimmo—playing right for the Mets, and having missed most of the season on the injured list—busting a speed limit on the rail by hitting Ray’s next pitch into the right center field bullpen. Nimmo ran it out fast enough to tempt you to put him up in a race with the Lexington Avenue Express.

Center fielder Juan Lagares finally ended Ray’s extremely brief evening mercifully with a followup double to the right center field fence before Matt Andriese relieved Ray, shook off a wild pitch, and struck Matz out for the side. Matz himself would cruise for the most part through six innings, other than walking the bases loaded in the top of the second with nobody out, before he ended the prospective disaster with a strikeout and an inning-ending step-and-throw double play.

He was aided and abetted by McNeil hitting a first-pitch, two-out bomb off Arizona reliever Taylor Clarke in the second, Frazier abusing Clarke with a first-pitch, one-out bomb in the third, and—with Alonso aboard and two out—McNeil abusing another Snakes reliever, Yoshihisa Hirano, for (you guessed it) a first-pitch, two-out, two-run bomb.

Led by Alonso’s 47 and Michael Conforto’s 29, Frazier and McNeil hitting their 20th each gave the Mets four 20+ home run hitters in a season for the fourth time in their franchise history. Even in the year of the apparent juiced ball that’s a remarkable achievement.

And the Mets’ too-often-dicey bullpen kept the Diamondbacks from getting past second base the rest of the way. Jeurys Familia had to shake away first and second and two outs to nail pinch hitter Abraham Almonte with a seventh inning-ending ground out to first, and Taylor Bashlor had to shake away first and second and one out in the ninth before he got Jarrod Dyson to fly out to right and pinch hitter Ildemaro Vargas to ground out on the first pitch to end it.

In between those two, Paul Sewald, a veteran but inconsistent at best, got two swift fly outs and a strikeout to make the eighth look like the invisible inning.

It was Ray’s shortest start ever and the shortest for the Diamondbacks since T.J. McFarland got battered for seven Twins runs with only one out on 20 August 2017.

And it almost took a complete back seat to Alonso’s rather daring end-run around MLB’s strictures against commemorating certain tragedies with on-field, in-game apparel. Baseball government elected not to fine the Mets for the gambit. How big of it.

“It just comes from a place where I want to show support to not just the victims but the family members as well because no one really knows how deep those emotional scars can be,” Alonso told reporters. “I just want to show recognition to all the people who are heroes–just ordinary people that felt a sense of urgency and an admirable call of duty. This is for all those people who lost their lives and all of those people who did so much to help.”

Even the Mets know it can never be enough, truly. Not even on nights they defy a capricious commissioner’s office and logic alike, or honour the victims of a terrorist atrocity and their survivors, with nine runs on eleven hits.

Onward, Christian’s soldiers?

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2019-09-11 ChristianYelich

Christian Yelich hits the deck after his foul-off fractured his right knee cap and ended his season—and the Brewers’ postseason hopes, very likely.

Gut punch? For a night? How about a possible gut amputation? For the season?

The Brewers had enough trouble keeping up with the Cubs in the National League wild card competition, or on the edge of the NL Central race, without losing their and the league’s arguable best all-around player for the rest of the year.

And it’s worse when you lose him to a freak injury. But that’s what happened to Christian Yelich Tuesday night, against the Marlins, when he fouled one off his right kneecap in the top of the first, dropping at once, in a game the Brewers went on to win, 4-3. He whacked the ball hard enough for it to fracture the cap.

Without him, the Brewers might as well be kneecapped.

“This is a guy who has carried us in a number of ways the last two years,” said general manager David Stearns after the game ended. “He could have been two and a half weeks away from a repeat most valuable player award. I think that’s where our thoughts go first. From a team perspective, we have a lot of guys in the clubhouse who will hurt tonight. This is a gut punch for a night.”

When you lose a player whose 7.7 wins above a replacement-level player are four full ahead of the next man on the team list (pitcher Brandon Workman) and 4.4 ahead of the next position player on the list (third baseman Mike Moustakas), and whose own WAR account for a third of the entire roster’s total WAR, it’s not just a one-night gut punch.

When you lose a man whose 2018 breakout was questioned as a fluke, until he raised his slugging percentage 74 points over last year’s and carried a Brewer offense that went backward when it wasn’t being injured otherwise, it’s not just a one-night gut punch.

When you lose a man with a .736 real batting average (total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifices divided by plate appearances) who’s leading the Show in total bases, slugging, OPS, and runs created, it’s not just a one-night gut punch.

(And did I mention that Yelich has a 94 percent stolen base percentage and a 53 percent rate of taking extra bases on followup batted balls?)

When you lose a player like that who takes as much of the sting as Yelich took out of the Brewers being 22nd in the National League in runs scoring off runners in scoring position—while Yelich himself posted a .327/.462/.693 slash line with runners in scoring position and a .384/.460/.791 slash line in high-leverage situations—it’s not just a one-night gut punch.

It’s practically the end of their season as the Brewers knew it. And they seemed to know it, for all their pull-it-together talk about moving forward regardless. Barring any heretofore unseen eruptions from anywhere else in the lineup or off the bench, the Brewers don’t have enough depth (and certainly not the pitching) to withstand a loss like this.

Think of the NL West-clinching Dodgers losing Cody Bellinger with three weeks of regular season yet to play. Or the first wild card-owning Nationals losing Anthony Rendon. (And they might, not to the injured list but to free agency after this season.) Think of the NL East-owning Braves losing Ronald Acuna, Jr. or the resurgent Josh Donaldson. Think of the American League West-owning Astros losing Alex Bregman. Those teams have the depth to survive.

The Brewers may even have to ask the question they surely don’t want to ask yet: Yelich will recover from this injury, but will it prove to be the injury that turns him from a difference-maker and team carrier to just another guy in the lineup who might yet be above average but won’t be the guy the other guys don’t even want to think about anymore?

“To get that kind of news during the game, guys were down in the dugout,” said center fielder Lorenzo Cain, who’s also fought injuries this year but isn’t the player he was during those prime Kansas City seasons, after Tuesday’s game. “We’re going to miss him. Those are big shoes to fill and it’s going to be hard to replace him.”

It may be even harder for Yelich to come to replace the Yelich that’s been.