Continued from Part 1.
In part 2 of my exclusive, explosive conversation with Greg Prince of Faith & Fear in Flushing, Greg discusses some of his blog’s greatest hits while I vainly try and determine how he does it.
What are your feelings on the Mets uniform?
They’ve given us a lot more to think about over the years. haven’t they? I suppose I get used to all of them after a while. When they first showed up in 1998 in all this black and orange, I thought they looked like Orioles and needed to get back to emphasizing the blue. Plus it was obviously a craven attempt to make a buck. But, y’know what? Last April, the first time they put the black unis on for the first time, I viewed them as a throwback to the ’99 and 2000 teams. Now when I see the Mets in black, it gives me a warm feeling — nostalgia, I guess, for the Bobby Valentine era when they wore them more frequently. I guess that’s the power of the baseball uniform in general.
That said, if they had to do only one uniform I guess I would hope they’d accurately recreate the 1969 jersey, perhaps without the 100th anniversary patch. But I’ve gotten used to the idea they wear different ones. It bothers other people way more than it bothers me.
Have you got a favorite uniform number?
I always wanted to wear 41 on my back – no matter what an insult it may have been to Tom Seaver – because he was my first hero. I’ve always been fond of 24, since it never fails to amaze me that Willie Mays was a Met. Today I like 7 for Jose Reyes and I continue to hold a candle for26 on account of Rico Brogna. It seems like if I like the player, I like the number.
Now and again when I need to fall asleep, instead of counting sheep I count uniform numbers: 1 for Mookie, 2 for Valentine, 3 for Harrelson. I always like to see who jumps to mind first. What’s funny is that whenever I get to 44, Bob Myrickcomes up. I’ve never been able to think of anyone else. And this was when Jason Isringhausen was hot stuff, when Jay Payton was here, right up to Lastings Milledge. 44 is Bob Myrick, and I barely remember Bob Myrick as a ballplayer. Just as 44 on the Mets.
Tell me about The Greg Commandments.
It’s just a bunch of things that had been stewing around in my mind as Mets fan. I’m not big on telling people they have to do this or do that, or to use one of those phrases I hate, “you gotta respect that,” but when it comes to the Mets I found a code of conduct, a way to comport yourself in the world as a Met fan and get the most of the Met experience. Things like not going too nuts when you lose or overboard when you win, and don’t be one of those people who likes both New York teams. Some of it was to help the reader enjoy their experience and some was just picky stuff on my part.
Was it something that came quickly or did you work on it a long time?
I’d actually been working on a list of things like that years earlier. And I found it one day after we started the blog, I stewed it in my head. It was the beginning of the second half of ’05, it just seemed like a good time to put it out there. That post helped put us on the map a little. We weren’t all that well-known before then. It was some thing I got emails about for a long time.
What other events helped put you on the map?
One of the things that drew people to us is we were able to do a lot on Mike Piazza’s last year. Jason wrote a great post about the 10 greatest home runs Piazza had hit as a Met and I had written something that got good response.
I had been to the ballet, of all things, a few weeks before, and it so happened there was a ballet dancer, the male primary dancer, named Jock Soto. And two women sitting behind me were going on and on about how it was Jock Soto’s last year in the ballet and how awful it was going to be to have to replace him. Can you imagine the New York City Ballet without Jock Soto? That kind of thing. And I’m sitting there just riveted to this conversation, thinking, this is exactly what I’m thinking about Mike Piazza. He’s our Jock Soto; and Jock Soto is their Mike Piazza. I wrote something about that and it turned out Jock Soto’s mother read it. She was very excited, saying they compared my son to a big baseball player.
Also at the time, we got a celebrity email from one of the team’s announcers, who’d actually read us, in response my saying I’d turned down the TV and listened to the radio when Gary and Howie were working together. He basically wanted to know what was wrong with them. That was one of several things we had going on in about a two-week period in July of ’05 when it just seemed like we achieved critical mass. We went from being a voice in the wilderness to something people knew about. If there was some way of calculating the percentage of all Met fans who know any bloggers beyond Metsblog, it’s probably infinitesimal. But among people who know computers can lead them to information and insight on your favorite team we established a foothold.
What particular things have you enjoyed accomplishing?
There are times where you think you’ve written something amazing and you get only two comments. I wrote about the 20th anniversary of the Terry Pendeleton game and everything that went wrong in the 1987 pennant race and I braced for a great reaction, but there was one comment. It felt lonely. It’s tough to write flashbacks in the middle of pennant race.
The definitive post for me was the day they announced the new ballpark. I didn’t know they were even doing it that day but I flipped on SNY and there they were in the Diamond Club showing off the drawings and the model for the first time and how great it’s going to be, and it struck me – isn’t this so odd they’re doing this inside Shea Stadium? They’re going to obliterate Shea Stadium. And it crossed my mind it must be a bad day to be Shea Stadium. It was one of those things that just took off. Fortunately I work at home and had the flexibility to put everything else aside and write it right then.
It started as a straightforward piece where I was just going to state my opinions and instead I started write it as a conversation between a ballpark that had no idea it was going to be replaced – a loyal employee but a little slow on the uptake – and Fred Wilpon giving him his notice. It takes him a while to get it and then he’s very disturbed by it. Shea finally stands up to him, and is speaking for me toward the end.
That was also a touchstone in how I view Shea and how I write about it. Because until then, I was ready to throw Shea away. I’d been to 30 ballparks and wanted our own Camden Yards in my lifetime. I recall writing something on opening day ’05 how they had all winter and couldn’t get the escalators to work. Jason was thrilled because for years he was like “Where’s the detonator?” But I’d come over to the dark side.
Then I realized, this was it. It was a stadium we’d grown up with and grown older in. I did a 180. I was like those superdelegates changing from Hilary to Obama. I went from “Let’s get the new ballpark in here!” to “How dare you?”
I worry about turning into a caricature of myself. I don’t want to be a good-old-days blogger. I don’t want to dwell on the idea of “Wasn’t it great when Jane Jarvis played the organ and Karl Erhardt held up the signs and box seats were $4.50 and Tommie Agee led off every game with a home run?” I want the 2008 season to start. But defender-of-Shea-to-the-end has become a sort of calling card for me. And Jason is laying low on the point because he knows I’m sensitive to it. I can feel him rolling his eyes.
It brought out in our readers a lot of the same feelings. They’d bought that line that it was time for Shea to go. I think they saw someone saying what they had been suppressing: Hold on a second. I like this place too. It’s all going to amount to nothing because Shea is going away but this wasn’t a movement like STOP CITI FIELD. This is not like the Tiger Stadium Fan Club grasping hands around the ballpark. Nobody is doing that Shea.
What’s distinguished about the site is your ability to bring your own personal self into it whether you’re talking about meeting your wife or your mother dying and things that, I imagine, would be difficult to write about and send to an unknown audience. Do you struggle with that at all?
Not that much. In June of ‘05 when the Mets played their first series with Oakland since the World Series of ‘73 I had this reaction to it I wasn’t expecting. I put it on the TV and it suddenly brought me back to 1973 and specifically, a suppressed memory that I’d had a fight with my mother who told me, you can’t watch the last two games of the 1973 World Series.
Yeow.
I mean, come on! How often do the Mets get into the World Series? I hadn’t thought of that much. But I think today maybe one of the reasons I indulge myself as a fan is because I didn’t indulge enough as a child. Anyway, I had just begun to write a simple expository post of how this had reminded me of the 1973 World Series, blah blah blah, and it became one of those dialogs, me talking to a psychiatrist, and I recall bringing up really intense feelings I’d had about my mother, why the hell wouldn’t you let me watch the godamn world series? I was angry writing it!
There were some from our limited audience had a good response to that, it was a hill to get over. Because up until then, I was going for a tone, thinking, this is what a blog is supposed to sound like. It took me a few months to write the way I wanted to write. I don’t know if anyone who reads that could tell but I can.
But as for writing the personal stuff, it just seemed very natural to go there. The 1990 flashbackwas an interesting one for me to write because that was the year my mother died. It was an area I’d never really explored before. In my mind, it was a stressful year. But at the moment where somebody else would have said, “Oh, I can’t follow the Mets,” I’d followed them more closely than I’d had since 1986. They deepened for me. They were my anchor.
I wrote something a few weeks ago about the one game I went to with my father, who’s not a baseball fan. My parents sort of fell into them when they were good, from 1985 to 89, but after my mother died, they just fell away from him. It was like, I don’t do that any more. And it took me some time to realize it. The point was, thank god there’s football because without it my father and I wouldn’t have much to talk about. But going to a game with him as a terrible experience. The comments you get from that tend to be incidental. If I wrote a foul ball landed near me a reader might write, “Hey, I once caught a foul ball.’ Maybe we’re intruding here. Maybe we shouldn’t be reading this on a baseball blog.
But that’s not hard for you to reveal to people?
Not really. If I can use an incongruous word here, I’m brave enough to do it since I know my father and my sister don’t read it. My father’s like, “What’s a blog?”
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