I saw the future of rock n’ roll and his name is Bruce Springsteen.”

In the fall of 2000, I’d become a recipient of periodic emails penned by Greg Prince that to me were instantly recognizable as the best stuff anyone had ever written about the Mets. I’d first Met Greg a year earlier after he’d invited me, sight unseen, to be his guest at a Mets game after he’d enthusiastically discovered an embryonic version of “Mets by the Numbers.” I was thrilled when he and Jason Fry launched Faith & Fear in Flushing in 2005, and turned those emails into a near-daily experience for “Met fans who like to read.” In Part I of a recent conversation I had with Greg, he talks about a few things that in my opinion, make his writing the best in baseball blogdom: Total recall, passion and dedication.

Tell me about the prehistory of Faith & Fear. What events led to its birth?
Basically it grew out of a decade of back-and-forth emails between me and Jason. We met on an AOL board in 1994. We had just gotten AOL in my office then, and I had used it for work. One day I was looking around and realized, Oh my god, there’s stuff on baseball here. There’s stuff on the Mets! And that’s where I found the Mets board.

I started posting early in the ‘94 season and Jason and I sort of sought each other out to tell each other we really liked the other guy’s writing. We went to our first game together in 1995 and became really good friends from there. We kept exchanging Mets emails as a matter of course and, as luck would have it, the Mets and the emails kept getting better. Even when the Mets went into the tank post-2000, the emails were still pretty good. A few years later, blogging entered our radar, so we decided to try it.

That was about this time three years ago. We read it, our wives read it, and I didn’t know who else would.

I got involved in some point in an email cell you participated in, which was also pre-blog.

That was a thing I got into during the 1999 and 2000 playoff pushes. I basically wrote to everyone I knew who was a Mets fan, and some people after that added their friends and it kind of grew from there. There were some people from the media who got involved, including a bunch at the New York Times. It was a great way to share the angst and the excitement and dwell on Todd Zeile. You asked out of it at some point later when it got, as you said, just too geeky [I don’t recall this, but when in doubt, trust Greg’s memory – ed.]. There are still about a dozen people in that cell. All of that set the stage for the blog, I suppose.

I wasn’t sure how a blog would do at first. I was familiar with some political blogs, but they were no fun – very edgy and angry. As it turned out we started at around the same time a lot of other Mets blogs had – MetsGeek launched around the same time, and Mets Guy in Michigan and Mets Walkoffs right after us, Metstradamus not much later. It’s like everybody got the bug at once.

I’ve argued that for Mets fans, blogging is sort of an updated version of Banner Day.
Expressing yourself is part of the Mets culture. It’s about taking it personally. I know that Cubs fans and Red Sox fans are said to suffer, but for Mets fans whether they’re winning, losing or collapsing, it’s a truly personal endeavor. A Mets fan wears his heart on his sleeve and takes whatever in his heart and puts it on a bedsheet. Or now, as you suggest, a blog.

Maybe there’s a whole community of Miami Heat fans out there I don’t know about that feels and acts the same way, but to me, being a Mets fan feels unique. It’s not just about “we won, we lost,” it’s about the emotions. By reluctant comparison, I remember somebody sending me an email chain that was going around from Yankee fans when they got Giambi in 2001 and it was so dry, no soul whatsoever. “Hey, I think he’ll be a good hitter. Hey, I think he’ll play first base.” That was when our Mets email cell was going hot and heavy and the Mets were on the verge of trading for Mo Vaughn. Vaughn’s long gone, but our correspondence was a lot more entertaining.

It just seemed to me then and seems to me now that it’s different for Mets fans, a different vibe. The players aren’t strictly movable pieces on the lineup card because our hearts aren’t changed that easily. Not that we don’t all want trades to make our team better, but I think, deep down, a lot of Mets fans – certainly our most hardcore readers – on some level wonder as much about how a trade will make them feel as much they worry about how it will help the Mets win.

Your blog has something new almost every day.

I was surprised to find that some bloggers didn’t blog everyday. It just didn’t seem right.

We try to have something new up every 24 hours. During the season we have something to say about every game, either late that night or the next morning. And in the offseason we get to do more of the historical stuff and the personal stories. I tend to be aware of dates and impending milestones and annual events. If it’s Tom Seaver’s birthday, I try to have something ready for him. For the Hall of Fame induction every summer – even Hall of Fame voting announcements – I might have Tom Seaver stuff for that, too. I like to write about Tom Seaver.

I try to think of myself reading the paper at the All-Star break when I was a kid, and how disappointing it was not having something to read about the Mets. They’d have a little about the All-Stars which wasn’t all that interesting, but nothing about the Mets the day before or the day after. In other words, I want Faith and Fear to be the cure for not having something to read about the Mets.

When we got to the offseason in 2005, Jason and I discussed what we would do about continuing into the winter, and we concluded that it was best to keep it going. It helps to have something like this to get you past the terrible case of withdrawal that the end of baseball season brings. Thanks to blogging, it’s like baseball season goes on for 12 months a year…though after a year like 2007, you may not want it to.

But don’t you ever sit down and find you have nothing to say?
If nothing comes up I just don’t write. There have been dead periods in the offseason, as many as a few days, where we don’t have something new up but it doesn’t happen often.

When there’s no news per se, I go to a running list of ideas I keep on hand. Sometimes it’s just a phrase that popped into my head that I wrote down a while back and will want to explore later. Sometimes I start on a piece, put it aside and come back to it months later. It’s not like I don’t walk around thinking about the Mets all the time, so why not write about the Mets all the time?

It also helps that we don’t limit ourselves, like a lot of blogs might, to wondering what a good trade package is for Johan Santana, or projecting what Jose Reyes’ stats will look like. That can get a little tedious after a while and also, we just don’t know that stuff. We’re not experts. We’d just be guessing.

Your stories rarely fail to remind readers of a little detail or two they might have forgotten. Do you have some secret reference book you refer to when you write? 
No. I’ve managed to fill my head with this stuff, maybe to the absence of anything else. But really, all my life I’ve had a gift for recall. I know it’s a gift because others tell me it is. I didn’t think there’s anything unusual about retaining facts and dates. I assumed it’s what everybody does, but apparently it’s not. In third grade I decided to look up the presidents in the school library and I memorized them right there, one to 37 – it was 37 then, through Nixon. It’s just something I’ve always been able to do. And I am particularly good with dates. It helps to have Baseball Reference and Retrosheet out there now, because I like to be able to confirm what I recall and I’m a stickler for being accurate. I can be quite the nitpicker.

I do keep a log in which I’ve recorded the result of every game I’ve ever attended. I started doing that after I’d been to 15 or 20 or games and thought, I better start writing this stuff down before I forget it. But other than date and score and opponent and starting pitcher, the rest is memory.

What is your sense as to why readers have responded to Faith & Fear the way they do?
One of my least favorite phrases in blogging is, “Maybe it’s just me…” but one of the things that I think has made Faith & Fear work for so many of our readers is they learn, through reading what Jason and I are thinking, is that it isn’t “just them,” that there are at least a couple of people who take this whole Mets thing as seriously as they do, that there are others who let it define a great deal of their waking hours and that it’s all right. That it’s honorable, somehow. That you’re not in it alone.

People like us are not the face-painters, y’know? We’re not putting on wacky costumes and ringing cow-bells and whatever. But we are as rabid about the Mets as any of those types of people and we are paying attention, we are taking mental notes, we are feeling it. I think that’s why we get a lot of feedback along the lines of “I had no idea somebody else” remembers this game or this player or this episode in Mets history in the same way, and that somebody else – in this case Jason or me – thinks about it or cares about it still.

Baseball isn’t vitally important stuff, not like your health and your family. But once you get by those things you are sort of required to care about, you may as well allow the things you enjoy to be important to you. One of the things I think we’ve been able to do is to allow people to feel perhaps less guilty for taking as much joy in a win, or pain in a collapse as they do. It’s OK to feel that way.

How do you see print journalism going?
Taking nothing away from their skills and the hard work they do, I find myself less and less interested in what the beat writers have to say. Every blogger would tell you they couldn’t do what they do without the Times, the Daily News, the Post and Newsday but I’ve stopped buying them every day – and I was a lifelong consumer of papers, from age 6 on. Things happen so fast today, it’s like beat writing has become an outmoded job description.

I think just about every Mets fan has come to hate most of the general and national baseball columnists in this town. There is never any benefit of the doubt given to the Mets and they are the ones responsible for pushing the pointless comparisons to the Yankees. It doesn’t help that a lot of the national-baseball columnists used to be Yankees beat writers and that’s their point of reference for “the way things work” or should work.

The problem with trying to read a columnist today in this age of blogs is it’s obvious the columnist does not think about the Mets nearly as much as we do and goes on to show what an astounding lack of understanding he has for the subject. John Harper, who co-wrote one of the great books on the Mets, The Worst Team Money Could Buy, wrote an absolutely insipid column not long after the season ended on why the Mets had to trade Jose Reyes for Johan Santana – all contingent on throwing money at A-Rod – and he wasn’t going to let good sense get in the way of his narrative. Not to pick on Harper, but it struck me as a rather typical effort: “The Mets will never be as big-time as the Yankees, so they should let go of one of their few assets for somebody the Yankees want.” All praise Omar for not listening.

When I was growing up, sportswriters seemed to be on the side of the underdog. It was the era when New York had underdogs who succeeded, like the ’69 Mets. Now all they understand is success, which is where you get that whole “here’s why the Mets need to be more like the Yankees” thing, which is overbearing and, if you’ve checked October lately, rather futile.

 

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