{"id":862,"date":"2008-03-11T00:56:12","date_gmt":"2008-03-11T00:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beta.mbtn.net\/?p=862"},"modified":"2013-12-01T01:03:24","modified_gmt":"2013-12-01T01:03:24","slug":"its-not-just-you-the-greg-prince-interview-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/?p=862","title":{"rendered":"It’s Not Just You: The Greg Prince Interview (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I saw the future of rock n’ roll and his name is Bruce Springsteen.”<\/em><\/p>\n

In the fall of 2000, I’d become a recipient of periodic emails penned by\u00a0Greg Prince<\/strong>\u00a0that 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\u00a0Faith & Fear in Flushing<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0in 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

Tell me about the prehistory of Faith & Fear. What events led to its birth?<\/strong>
\nBasically 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,\u00a0Oh my god, there\u2019s stuff on baseball here. There\u2019s stuff on the Mets!<\/em>\u00a0And that\u2019s where I found the Mets board.<\/p>\n

I started posting early in the \u201894 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.<\/p>\n

That was about this time three years ago. We read it, our wives read it, and I didn\u2019t know who else would.<\/p>\n

I got involved in some point in an email cell you participated in, which was also pre-blog.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"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\u2019t recall this, but when in doubt, trust Greg’s memory \u2013 ed.<\/em>]. There are still about a dozen people in that cell. All of that set the stage for the blog, I suppose.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t sure how a blog would do at first. I was familiar with some political blogs, but they were no fun \u2013 very edgy and angry. As it turned out we started at around the same time a lot of other Mets blogs had \u2013\u00a0MetsGeek<\/a>\u00a0launched around the same time, and\u00a0Mets Guy in\u00a0<\/a>Michiga<\/a>n<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Mets Walkoffs<\/a>\u00a0right after us,\u00a0Metstradamus\u00a0<\/a>not much later. It\u2019s like everybody got the bug at once.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve argued that for Mets fans, blogging is sort of an updated version of Banner Day.<\/strong>
\nExpressing yourself is part of the Mets culture. It\u2019s about taking it personally. I know that Cubs fans and Red Sox fans are said to suffer, but for Mets fans whether they\u2019re winning, losing or collapsing, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"Maybe there\u2019s a whole community of Miami Heat fans out there I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 certainly our most hardcore readers \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

Your blog has something new almost every day.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was surprised to find that some bloggers didn\u2019t blog everyday. It just didn\u2019t seem right.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s\u00a0Tom Seaver\u2019s birthday<\/a>, I try to have something ready for him. For the Hall of Fame induction every summer \u2013 even Hall of Fame voting announcements \u2013 I might have Tom Seaver stuff for that, too. I like to write about\u00a0Tom Seaver<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d have a little about the All-Stars which wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But don\u2019t you ever sit down and find you have nothing to say?<\/strong>
\nIf nothing comes up I just don\u2019t write. There have been dead periods in the offseason, as many as a few days, where we don\u2019t have something new up but it doesn\u2019t happen often.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

It also helps that we don\u2019t limit ourselves, like a lot of blogs might, to wondering what a good trade package is for Johan Santana, or projecting what Jose Reyes\u2019 stats will look like. That can get a little tedious after a while and also, we just don\u2019t know that stuff. We\u2019re not experts. We\u2019d just be guessing.<\/p>\n

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?\u00a0<\/strong>
\nNo. I\u2019ve managed to fill my head with this stuff, maybe to the absence of anything else. But really, all my life I\u2019ve 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 \u2013 it was 37 then, through Nixon. It\u2019s just something I\u2019ve 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\u2019m a stickler for being accurate. I can be quite the nitpicker.<\/p>\n

\"\"I do keep a log<\/a>\u00a0in which I’ve recorded the result of every game I’ve ever attended. I started doing that after I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

What is your sense as to why readers have responded to Faith & Fear the way they do?<\/strong>
\nOne of my least favorite phrases in blogging is, \u201cMaybe it’s just me…\u201d 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\u2019t \u201cjust them,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

People like us are not the face-painters, y\u2019know? We\u2019re 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 \u201cI had no idea somebody else\u201d remembers this game or this player or this episode in Mets history in the same way, and that somebody else \u2013 in this case Jason or me \u2013 thinks about it or cares about it still.<\/p>\n

Baseball isn\u2019t 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\u2019ve 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\u2019s OK to feel that way.<\/p>\n

How do you see print journalism going?<\/strong>
\nTaking 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\u2019t do what they do without the Times, the Daily News, the Post and Newsday but I\u2019ve stopped buying them every day \u2013 and I was a lifelong consumer of papers, from age 6 on. Things happen so fast today, it\u2019s like beat writing has become an outmoded job description.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"\"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,\u00a0The Worst Team Money Could Buy<\/em>, wrote an absolutely insipid column not long after the season ended on why the Mets had to trade Jose Reyes for Johan Santana \u2013 all contingent on throwing money at A-Rod \u2013 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: \u201cThe 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.\u201d All praise Omar for not listening.<\/p>\n

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 \u201chere’s why the Mets need to be more like the Yankees\u201d thing, which is overbearing and, if you’ve checked October lately, rather futile.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0Greg Prince\u00a0that 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 … Continue reading “It’s Not Just You: The Greg Prince Interview (Part 1)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=862"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":863,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862\/revisions\/863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}