Dana Brand’s Mets Fan Blog

[This piece was originally published on Flushing University on March 28.  To see my latest Thursday column on that site, please click on the Flushing University banner to the right.] 

Every year, I buy the Sports Encyclopedia of Baseball. I love it. It is a rich and beautiful reservoir of facts. I can spend hours reading it, and it never takes me more than a few minutes to find something I didn’t know, something that genuinely surprises me, about the history of baseball, or about the Mets and their place in the history of baseball. 

Here, let me show you. If someone asked you which player who ever played for the Mets had the highest lifetime slugging percentage, who would you say? My first guess would be Willie Mays. Willie does in fact have an extremely high lifetime slugging percentage of .557. But it’s not Willie. Piazza would be my next guess. His lifetime slugging percentage is .551. So, it isn’t Mike. Who am I forgetting? Oh, wait. What about Duke Snider? The Duke’s lifetime slugging percentage was .540. Very impressive, but it’s not him either. So, who is it? It’s Carlos Delgado, whose lifetime slugging percentage currently stands at .558. 

Higher than Willie. Higher than Mike. Higher than Mickey Mantle and Henry Aaron. I knew Delgado was a great hitter but I never would have guessed that his slugging percentage was higher than all of these current and future first-ballot Hall-of-Famers. But there it is. Look at the list yourself. Did you know that? See, this is why the Sports Encyclopedia of Baseball is so great. You could learn this amazing fact in far less than an average bathroom session. 

Or how about this. Jose Reyes is 23 years old and he has hit a total of 40 triples, 17 in each of the past few years. Okay, let’s say that he were to average 15 triples a year for the next 12 years and end up with that as his final total. That would give him a lifetime total of 220 triples and that’s the most conservative estimate you could make. A less conservative estimate would give him an average of 17 triples per year for each of the next 15 years. That would mean he’d end up with 295 triples. If he holds up well, and even plays until he’s 40, Jose Reyes can easily clear 300 triples. So it is fair to say that barring any disastrous injury or personal collapse, Jose Reyes will almost certainly end up with between 220 and 320 triples. Where does that put him on the list of all-time leaders? You don’t have any idea, do you? Nobody pays attention to triples as a lifetime statistic. Well, look at the list of the 52 players who have hit more than 150 triples. Almost all of them are from the deadball era, before 1920, when the ball was bigger and deader, didn’t ricochet off the wall as well, was harder to throw with the same velocity (not to mention the fact that the old stadiums had all these far away nooks and crannies for a ball to get lost in). 

There are only two players on the whole list who have played since the Second World War: Roberto Clemente, who had a lifetime total of 166, and Stan Musial, the modern leader, with 177! There are only five others who have played since 1920 and the leader of this group is Paul Waner, who hit 190 triples between 1926 and 1945. So there is no question, no question at all, that Jose Reyes will become the first ballplayer of the post-1920 era to hit 200 triples. He has a shot at passing Musial before he’s 30. Does he have any chance at passing any of the titans of the prehistoric baseball era? Well, he does. 223 will take him past Tris Speaker, 252 past Honus Wagner, and if he can get to 298, which is not at all out of reach, he’ll have as many as Ty Cobb, who is second on the all-time list to Sam Crawford, the all-time triples king, who had 312 triples in a career that stretched from 1899 to 1917. Jose Reyes, our Jose, is going to be the best triple man of all-time and you can only appreciate the magnitude of what he is likely to achieve by prowling around this wonderful encyclopedia. 

There are lots of other things you can learn. You can learn that in 1963, Eddie Kranepool had 14 rbis in 273 at-bats for the Mets. That has got to be a record of some kind, an rbi every 20 at-bats. Oh wait, it’s not, at least not for the Mets. Tommie Agee, in 1968, had 17 rbis in 368 at-bats. Do you realize that no Met ever drove in 100 runs until Rusty Staub did in 1975, in their fourteenth season? And no Met would do it again for ten years, when Gary Carter drove in 100 in 1985? 

You know already, don’t you, that if Steve Trachsel had won one more game last year, he would have tied for the league lead in wins? You know that the Mets have had a lot of hard-throwing pitching staffs over the years, including 6 of the top 66 staffs in terms of strikeouts by a team. But would you have guessed that the six Mets teams with the most strikeouts per season were, in order: 1990, 2001, 1999, 2000, 2006, and 1971? Do you remember how the 1969 Mets pitched 28 complete game shutouts, tied for second in the modern era with the 1964 Dodgers and bested only by the 1968 Cardinals who had 30? Do you remember that the only Met to be best in the league in anything during the dark era after 1977 was Craig Swan, who had the best E.R.A. in the league and didn’t win 10 games? He shouldn’t complain though. Do you realize that in 1963, Mets pitcher Roger Craig had an E.R.A. of 3.78, not that much worse than Bob Gibson’s 3.39. Gibson won 18 games and lost 9. Craig won 5 games and lost …24. 

You may think you know a lot about baseball, but this book shows you how much you don’t know. You keep coming face to face with how wrong your memories are, as you face documentary proof of the fact that two players you remember playing at the same time did not in fact play at the same time. It is a humbling experience. In a good way. This is the truth. And as fans and as geeks we will spend all too much of our lives trying to know as many little pieces of this great big truth as we possibly can. And I’ll bet you that no matter how much I study this book, things will never reach the point where it takes me more than 10 minutes to find out something I couldn’t even have guessed. 

What gives more pleasure than an honest-to-God rout?  We had everything.  They had nothing.  Beltran hit his two home runs, Reyes his home run and two-run double, Lo Duca, Alou, and Green all hit a bunch.  And John Maine is getting me to dream that he is the second coming of Seaver.  Like a true Met great, pitching a one-hitter.  No-hitters are vulgar.  Mets don’t do them. 

10-0.  Three games.  Three wins.  What more could one have asked from the opening series of the season?  What more can one ask of baseball than the vicarious sense of omnipotence that a game like this one can give you?  What hope!  What promise!  What a vision of happiness! 

Oh sure, it may not last.  But it sure looks good, doesn’t it?  Some starts of some seasons are so giddy and wonderful that they make it impossible for things to go wrong.  Maybe this season will be like that.  Maybe it won’t.  But they have me dreaming of one of the best seasons ever. 

Of course I’m happy about the first two games. You saw all the reasons why the Mets are likely to be great this year. You saw how they can score runs even when their best bats are still waking up. You saw wonderful things happen on the field and wonderful things happen at the top of the rotation. You saw us prove what we already know and what the Cardinals already know: that we’re the better team (for all the good it does us at this point).

But it’s funny how you realize things when meaningful games start that you just didn’t realize before. I realize that I wasted all my time this winter worrying about the starting pitching when what I should have been worried about was the bullpen. I didn’t even realize that I was worried about the bullpen until my stomach started to make noises when the bullpen had to protect a four and then a five run lead in the first game. Why did it do that? I think it was because I was still traumatized by the collapse of the bullpen in the 2nd, 6th, and 7th game of the NLCS, a collapse that cost us the pennant. I’d forgotten this trauma during the offseason. It came back as soon as meaningful games resumed. You realize that you have a baseball unconscious.

Now that what was unconscious has become conscious, I really have to wonder what I was thinking. Do I know enough about the guys who are supposed to give us what Mota, Sanchez, Oliver, and Bradford gave us last year? No. Am I comfortable enough yet, in my irrational depths, with Wagner and Heilman? Not yet.

So I’m worried, in my unconscious. My conscious mind tells me that everything is really really good. But I have dread, angst, and schpilkes in my depths and I’m not sure what will clean them out of there except getting to the World Series this year. Because the deep crazy part of me is saying that even if we have a great season this year, it can all go to hell in the playoffs. Just like that! Poof! I’m being terribly inconsistent. Remember I’m the guy who said we don’t have to get to the World Series for this to be a successful season:

 http://danabrand.com/blog/2007/03/02/world-series-or-bust-really/

I still believe that, in my conscious mind. But there’s some fool down in there who hears this and says “yeah, yeah.” Shoot, I don’t want to worry all season even if we’re doing well. I don’t want this kind of psychology, so selfish, so Yankee. Why am I feeling this? Somebody stop me.

The first game of the season was all it should have been.  You see what we have.  We have so much depth and strength in that lineup that we can score six runs even on a day when most of our best hitters are only so-so.  We have a superb defensive team.  You saw that catch by Alou, that throw by Beltran, and the dazzling play of Valentin.  These may have been the most revealing moments of this game. 

We know Glavine can pitch like that three quarters of the time.  We have a good bullpen that will scare us and come through for us for most of the season.  We were playing the World Champions but we were obviously the better team.  We won decisively but there were a couple of moments when it could all have fallen apart.  We had a couple of those bad moments in last year’s NLCS.  I’m not saying that that the Cardinal’s victory was a fluke.  It wasn’t.  But if those two teams played 10 seven-game series against each other, I wouldn’t bet on the Cards winning five of them. 

It was important to win this first game.  Because Mets fans are confident but scared.  They think the team will do well, but they can easily imagine a disaster.  One game doesn’t mean very much, but the first game can matter.  I still think that if the Mets hadn’t blown that opening day game against the Reds in 2005, they wouldn’t have started the season losing 5 straight and that very good season might very well have ended with a Wild Card.

So they should be cool and confident.  They’ll need it for these first three series.  It’s rare that the first three series are such a test.  The Cards.  The Braves.  The Phillies.  The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future.  We have something to prove to all three teams and all three have something to prove to us.  It doesn’t exactly feel like April.