We have a special treat for you today as beloved Mets historian, die-hard Mets fan and popular author Greg Prince of Faith and Fear in Flushing, was kind enough to answer some questions about his brand new book Amazin’ Again which went on sale March 15.
Amazin’ Again captures all the drama and magic of the New York Mets’ 2015 season that saw them capture the NL East from the Washington Nationals and then defeat the heavily favored Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs to win the National League pennant.
Greg answers a few questions from me and also takes some questions from Mets fans in our MMO Community. Please enjoy…
Joe – I’m so glad to have a true keepsake and treasure to remember the 2015 season with your new book. At what point in the season did you know this was something you wanted to do. Was there a moment in the 2015 season that clicked and became the impetus for your decision to chronicle this exciting year for the Mets?
Greg – The thought crossed my mind in late summer, and a few readers were kind enough to bring it up on their own, but it wasn’t really on my radar until an editor friend of mine got in touch and suggested his publisher might be interested in a Mets Win the World Series book, the catch being the Mets had to win the World Series. This was literally hours before Game One in Kansas City. It was going to be a “quickie” book, designed to be out ASAP after the theoretical parade and draw in fans who conceivably couldn’t get enough of their World Champion Mets.
Well, you know what happened where that was concerned. I thought the project — which I’d been working on between games with the great hope that I could finish it and that would come to be — was dead once Game Five was over. But in a come-from-behind story worthy of the 2015 Mets, I was given the thumbs-up to continue, to expand and, thankfully, to take a little more time to complete it. The thinking was it had been such a milestone season for the Mets and they had achieved plenty in winning the pennant, so why not?
Joe – They say every season has a turning point, but I believe the 2015 Mets season had a few turning points. Wilmer Flores’ wild walk-off was certainly one of them, what other defining moments like that stood out to you?
Greg – The perfect homestand in April reset expectations. In one ten-game stretch, it was as if the Mets stopped being that ridiculous team we’d all gotten used to and demanded to be taken seriously. If they clinched anything that early, it was a sense of self-respect, one that was contagious to us, the fans.
The other big moment, destined to be glossed over (except in my book), was triggered by the West Coast road trip that started July. They were teetering on the edge of oblivion, despite the great start, and weren’t hitting a lick. It was reasonable to expect they’d go to L.A. and San Francisco, face very good teams with, especially in the Dodgers’ case, extraordinary starting pitching, and scuffle. Instead they took two out of three in each series and then came home to sweep a pretty good Diamondbacks club. After all the flailing of May and June, they finished the first half on a 7-2 run and were within whispering distance of Washington.
Without that spurt, I doubt the Mets would have wound up in position to make the Flores home run or the National series matter.
Joe – What were your expectations for the Mets going into the 2015 season and at what point did you start believing that, “Hey, I think this team could go all the way?”
Greg – My well-honed cynicism, which dated to the Collapse of 2007, was willing to cede to the conventional wisdom that the Mets could break .500 in 2015. I thought the Wild Card was a stretch, but not out of the question. The 13-3 start really changed the stakes. The gradual separation of themselves from Washington in August, which culminated in the seven straight wins in Colorado and Philadelphia, made the World Series more a potential reality than a pipe dream.
Joe – 1973, 2000 and now 2015. All three years the Mets advanced to the World Series and lost. Can you draw any comparisons between those teams and which would you say is the best team in terms of talent?
Greg – It strikes me that the 1973 and 2000 teams were peaking within their eras.
Post-1969, the Mets were comprised of continually good pitching and hardly any hitting; in ’73, the stars aligned (several hot Septembers on offense, the legendary malaise of the rest of the N.L. East) to make that work. That group would turn over drastically after a disappointing 1974 and wound up, sadly, a shell of itself by 1977.
The 2000 team, I think it’s often forgotten, was the culmination of a great ascent: rise into contention in 1997, just miss the playoffs in 1998, come very close to the World Series in 1999, win the pennant in 2000. Then there was a precipitous dropoff the year after and another housecleaning that didn’t do much good.
We don’t know the next Met chapter that follows 2015, but what makes me believe this could be the start of something big is the pitching. How can you bet against a team packing three to five aces plus a legit closer? Throw in the signing of Cespedes and they go into 2016 far more solid than they did in 1974 or 2001.
If anything, the ’73 and ’00 teams had more proven talent, but that also meant the core members didn’t have many really good years left. That’s the difference between those years and 2015. Other than Wright, Granderson and Colon, you’re talking about core members who were and are getting better.
Just from a narrative sense, all three teams gave us great thrill rides. 1973 and the legacy of You Gotta Believe speaks for itself. 2000 is probably undervalued because of who the World Series was lost to, but that was one of the most satisfying regular seasons I can recall, not to mention we were party to a fantastic NLDS and awesome NLCS performance. 2015 had a bit more of the element of surprise when viewed from a preseason standpoint. It was crazy to think the 1973 Mets could win their division in August, but not in March. The 2000 Mets were coming off a playoff appearance and had added a top-notch lefty pitcher. Nobody was picking the 2015 Mets to beat the Nationals in March.
Joe – Terry Collins gets killed a lot by fans and critics. But here he is entering his sixth season at the helm of the Mets fresh off an improbable World Series run. Is it time for fans to embrace him?
Greg – Terry Collins is as subject to first-, second- and third-guessing as any manager in the game, but he deserves the benefit of the doubt on the whole. You can pick apart certain decisions from last year (and I do in the World Series chapter) but you have to admire how he handled his players. Five seasons in and I can’t recall any One Met Said criticism making it into the media. Keeping 25 men happy or at least not grouchy all year long is probably as big a deal as who pitches the seventh on a given night.
And now some questions from the fan base…
Dark HelMet – In your long history of Mets-fandom, have you ever experienced such a seismic shift of a season than the week around the trade deadline where everything changed so dramatically for the Mets?
Greg – All in all, probably not. I’ve seen Met teams turn on a dime in the standings and I’ve seen Met teams make a flurry of moves, but I’ve never seen it all sync so quickly and so well. In one week, they bring up or in Conforto, Johnson, Uribe, Clippard and Cespedes and as soon as they do, they go off on a tear that completely flips the order of things in their division and sends them rocketing to the playoffs. You can’t ask for a bigger, better turnaround.
Kevin M. – There are a lot of fans that are of the opinion Alderson didn’t expect the team to be in the position they were in around trade deadline time. It’s said by some that if not for the Nats underachieving, Sandy wouldn’t have made the moves he did. So the question is, if we were 1.5 or more games back, instead of 1.5 ahead, do we still acquire help, and make a push, like we did to hold on to the lead, or are we sellers, and preparing for 2016?
Greg – One can never speak with certainty to unknowables. We do know that in July 2015, the Mets were hanging close enough so that the GM saw the merit in making moves, whereas in previous Julys, they were, at best, on the perimeter of maybe having a chance. If the Mets were a little further from first place or a playoff spot when the trading deadline came around last year…who knows? But I kind of doubt Alderson would have been as active. I think he said something to that effect along the way.
BarnRat – Other than the Pennant, what do you judge as the greatest achievement of 2015, and other than not winning the World Series, what do you judge as the greatest disappointment of 2015?
Greg – The best team achievement was psychological. They stopped being “the Mets” as we knew them. You know, the whole #LOLMets thing. It doesn’t exist any longer as an organizing principle of our fandom. In tandem with that, the Mets are no longer the “other” team in their own city. I don’t know that they “own New York,” but I do know that as we speak, the center of baseball gravity around here has shifted to Flushing. It happened so matter-of-factly that it feels less than momentous, but I believe (assuming they keep up the good work) it will mean a great deal, particularly to the generation of fans just coming of age. I’ve always told anybody who’d listen that this stuff is cyclical, and it is. The last cycle lasted 20 years was all, thus it was considered a given that the Mets were always “the little brothers” or whatever. As someone who lived through much better Met times, I knew that wasn’t the case.
Individually, the continued development of deGrom, the emergence of Syndergaard, the hint of Matz and the return of Harvey — none of which was in place a year ago — was collectively enormous. It’s easy to take this kind of pitching for granted now that we’re used to it, but wow…this kind of pitching!
Disappointment? Though it didn’t stop them from getting far, I’m sorry we didn’t get a full year of Travis d’Arnaud. I thought he was on his way to the All-Star Game when he game out of the gate as he did in April. I hope his progress continues. I suppose it’s also a downer that Juan Lagares has gone from key piece to outfield afterthought. He looked very good in the postseason and perhaps he will find his way back to the forefront for 2017 and beyond.
Greggofboken – The push to the pennant seemed to be the result of several factors: the acquisition of Cespedes (as a third choice), the strengthening of the Mets depth at the trade deadline, the return of key injured players, and the Nats’ failures due to injury or under-performance. Which of these, in your eyes was the single biggest determinant in our finish, how do your own conclusions differ from what you believe to be popular sentiment, and if you were to weight them how much of the Mets’ pennant was due to skilled planning vs. circumstances that broke the Mets’ way?
Greg – To win a pennant, almost everything has to go right, and I think that’s what happened. The Mets, even at their offensively lousiest, never sank more than 4½ games behind the Nationals. If Washington had played as hyped, it might very well have been a different story. But they were more human than thought, the Mets were a little better stocked than predicted (particularly once everybody was off the DL) and moves that couldn’t have been foreseen were made. Cespedes’s acquisition was clearly the axis on which 2015 tilted, but he didn’t do it alone.
Gus L. – We kept hearing and seeing how the Royals were relentless. However, it’s hard to believe that pitchers such as Volquez, a player that three teams gave up on and has a history of control problems, Cueto, a pitcher that down the stretch was so fragile and horrid that the Royals wouldn’t pitch him on the road, and a classic journeyman in Chris Young were able to shut down the Mets offense with such success. Did the Mets seem, or were they, psyched out over the grandness of it all?
Greg – I am tempted to say it was simply their year more than it was our year. Given that we led in every World Series game, that might be too handy an explanation, but if they didn’t seem unbeatable, they just seemed a little more — to use a Keithism — on point. They made enough plays that needed to be made and the Mets didn’t. I had a bit of a bad feeling about the long layoff between the NLCS clincher and the World Series opener, but I don’t want to put too much blame there, because I surely enjoyed the Mets sweeping the Cubs. I don’t think the Mets were psyched out. In the end, they just got beat.
It certainly sets up a way more fascinating season-opening series than anybody could have otherwise dreamed up for this year.
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You can purchase your hard cover copy of Amazin’ Again on Amazon for less than $15 bucks! I’ve already got mine and added it to my Mets book collection!
