You will never see this again. These words were whispered at each twist and turn of the 1998 baseball season: the Yankees’ historic dominance, the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa home run derby, a National League Wild Card race that went down to the season’s final day and beyond. These are tough acts to follow. The 1999 season attempts a more contrived road to history on April 4 with an opening day matchup between the Padres and Rockies in Monterrey, Mexico. Though San Diego plays as the home team, Colorado third baseman and Oaxaca native Vinny Castilla wins the heart of the locals by going 4-for-5. A Monterrey newspaper compares him to an NBA legend with its headline “JORDAN MEXICANO.” 

The Mets will not begin the season quite so far from home. They will, however, start with seven road games against the Marlins and Expos, two teams whose modest records in 1998 belied their ability to play like All Stars whenever they faced the Mets. Last season, New York racked up a winning record against the Marlins by the slimmest of margins (7–5), even though Florida scraped together a pathetic 49 wins against all other contenders. Without a whisper left of the 1997 championship roster, the Marlins project to be no better this year, and are thus seen as an ideal tune-up opponent for the Mets to face in the season opener on April 5.

Befitting a still-young franchise, pregame ceremonies at the facility the Marlins share with the NFL’s Miami Dolphins—once called Joe Robbie Stadium, now known as Pro Player Stadium—borrows heavily from other teams’ legacies. Former Met Gary Carter and team co-owner Nelson Doubleday are on hand for the festivities, as are baseball luminaries Whitey Ford and Earl Weaver. For reasons known only to the hosts, the first pitch is thrown out by Cardinals legend Stan Musial. When Al Leiter exits the bullpen to make his first appearance in Miami since winning the World Series there in 1997, the home team shows its appreciation by playing “Born to Run” for the huge Springsteen fan, as the crowd gives him an impressive ovation. There are far fewer people on hand to see Leiter pitch on this occasion than at his last outing in Miami, as the Marlins have covered huge swaths of unsellable upper deck seating with tarp. For their own Opening Day starter, the home team chooses Alex Fernandez, a pitcher who hasn’t climbed a major league mound in over 18 months while recovering from rotator cuff surgery.

Though conditions are set up to hand the visitors a tidy victory, the Mets manage to fail in every imaginable way and drop a frustrating, error-filled slog. New York hitters strand 14 men while batting 0 for 9 with runners in scoring position. Robin Ventura does not play up to his Gold Glove reputation, as his sloppy play in the field giftwraps three first inning runs for the Marlins. Supposed ace Al Leiter allows five runs in five grueling innings and expends a whopping 124 pitches to make it that far. The Mets lose by the score of 6-2.

Those who care for perspective can look to the Opening Day results of other conspicuous offseason spenders and see the results have been mixed at best. Baltimore barely edges out lowly Tampa Bay, powered by their pricey new big bat, Albert Belle. Kevin Brown struggles in his Dodgers debut (five runs in five innings and change), but Los Angeles sneaks past Arizona regardless. The Diamondbacks are given a passable start from their prize offseason signing, Randy Johnson. The Angels sneak past the Indians but lose their big free agent signing, slugger Mo Vaughn, to an ankle sprain. Placed within this Opening Day context, the Mets’ stumbles are par for the course.

However, no one in the New York press is in the mood to apply such perspective. In the eyes of the media, the deadly losing streak that closed out 1998 has not yet been broken. One badly played game is sufficient cause to point out the Mets’ precarious grip on relevance, and how small their window is to accomplish anything. It is also sufficient for their general manager to fire a warning flare in the Times:

Unlike the Marlins, the Mets are built to win now. Their starting lineup averages 31 years of age, their starting rotation 34; their closer is 38. Phillips had talked before the game about his only expectation being that his players perform to their average capabilities.

If that happens, the general manager was asked, is this a playoff team? “It should be,” Phillips said, well aware that the Mets have not qualified for the post-season since 1988. “It better be.”

 With this rebuke in mind, the Mets rebound to take the next two games against the Marlins in convincing fashion. The victories come courtesy of the ageless bat and legs of Rickey Henderson, who first unnerves opposing pitchers on the basepaths, causing several errant pickoff throws, in a 12-3 drubbing, then belts two homers and two doubles to power a 6-0 victory. “I’d probably be the king of stealing runs and creating runs if they kept those stats,” he says later, employing his trademark immodesty. “Making them throw the ball away, I’d probably be the king of that, too.” Henderson struggled during spring training, causing some to whisper he may have finally reached the end of the line. The opening series against the Marlins proves this is not the case, to the amazement of everyone but Henderson. “Any time the bell rings, we’re ready to play,” he says. “It rang. I heard it solid.” He can’t remember having so many extra base hits in one game, but also admits, “I can’t remember half the things I do in this game.”

For the reporters who were so quick to doubt the team after a deflating Opening Day, Steve Phillips quips “We’re pretty good in must-win games,” and suggests the headline “Money Well Spent.”

From Miami, the Mets travel to Montréal for four games. The Expos finished a dismal 65–97 in 1998, yet won 8 of their 12 matchups against the Mets and handed them their first two losses in the disastrous five-game slide that closed out the season. Montréal’s record against New York marks the only success the team has enjoyed in recent years. In the post-strike years, as collusion gave way to extravagant spending, the Expos could no longer afford its brightest stars. Moisés Alou, Pedro Martínez, John Wetteland, and Larry Walker were all either lost to free agency or shipped away in money-saving trades. Each summer’s trade deadline brings another loss of an impact player whose price tag has grown to rich for their blood. Sick of losing games and marquee names, fans stay away in droves. Attendance at debt-ridden, claustrophobic Olympic Stadium ranks among the lowest in the majors year after year.

When the Mets arrive for Montréal’s home opener on April 8, rumors swirl that the team will be relocated, and that this may well be their last season north of the border. The Washington, D.C. area and Charlotte, North Carolina are the most often named destinations. In the face of such doomsaying, Expos fans make an impressive show of support. Almost 44,000 paying customers show up for the first game against the Mets. An attendance announcement during the eighth inning inspires the biggest cheers of the day. Amid this surprisingly raucous atmosphere, the Expos take advantage of a laboring Orel Hershiser, hanging five runs on him in four innings while also picking him off at second base to squash a potential rally. Les Expos go on to win, 5-1.

As attendance dips to more typical levels for the remainder of the series (around 12,000 for each contest), the Mets take the next three games from the home team, though each win is tempered with a sliver of bad news. In the second game, Mike Piazza knocks in five runs but also injures his knee during a pickoff play at second base, forcing him to leave the game. He flies back to New York for an MRI while the team holds its collective breath. Team execs fall over themselves to dismiss rumors that the injury will require season-ending surgery, even before they have any idea how badly Piazza’s knee is hurt. By the time the Mets complete a come-from-behind win in game three (the winning run knocked in by Piazza’s backup, Todd Pratt), the verdict is in: mild sprains to Piazza’s MCL and PCL. It means a trip to the disabled list that will put him out of action for the Met home opener, an outcome the team will welcome in place of the doomsday scenario of a year without Piazza.

With the Met lineup already depleted, the team’s pitching takes a hit in the series finale when Rick Reed suffers his own injury on the basepaths. While trying to leg out a double, he feels a violent pain in his heel and crumples to the infield in a heap. At first he fears he’s suffered a sprained Achilles’ tendon, a return of an injury he thought he’d recovered from during spring training. “It popped,” Reed says ominously. An MRI reveals a torn calf muscle, landing him on the disabled list and putting another strain on an already strained starting rotation.

Steve Phillips dispatches scouts to the four winds to hunt down reinforcements. Met officials are spotted in Seattle and Oakland, eyeing some of the same pitchers they flirted with from afar in the winter. Despite the injury to Reed, the Mets win their last game in Montreal to finish their first road trip at 5-2. The record looks good on paper, where injuries and crushing pressure are not registered.

* * *

Shea Stadium has had some work done since the Mets last played in Queens. Bobby Valentine pronounces himself anxious to get back to Flushing and inspect the clubhouse renovations the team performed in the offseason to the tune of $250,000. When he visits the ballpark upon his return from Montréal, he is stunned to find an enormous desk in his revamped office, leaving little room for visitors. Considering Steve Phillips’ propensity to drop by after games to discuss strategy, Valentine doesn’t consider this aesthetic choice a drawback. As for external improvements, a maintenance tunnel behind home plate has been covered over to accommodate 221 new high-priced seats. Tickets in this area, dubbed the Metropolitan Club, cost a whopping $35. New permanent box seats have been placed next to each dugout and a set of bleachers installed beyond the left field fence. These new revenue streams are intended to offset the cost of the Mets’ offseason spending in general and Piazza’s seven-year deal in particular. The infield, long a source of grumbling among those forced to play on it, has also received a facelift.

Most fans arriving for Opening Day in Flushing will never see the inside of the Met clubhouse or walk across the infield, nor will they ever come within 50 feet of seats behind home plate. But those satisfied with sitting in the nosebleed sections discover the cost of the cheapest upper deck tickets is now $9, up from $7 in 1998. They will also find the cost of a souvenir program increased to $4, a price that no longer includes a complimentary golf-style pencil with which to score the game. Fans outraged by this infuriating bit of miserliness on Opening Day place outraged calls to WFAN, where the radio hosts mine Average Joe frustration for precious broadcast hours. In the face of fan indignation, Met officials aver that scoring pencils are still available at stadium information windows. No one is aware of this, however, because that information is not disseminated to the Opening Day crowd of over 50,000 in any meaningful way. The team’s pencil policy will be quietly reversed later in the home stand.

It’s difficult to imagine another fanbase revolting over a lack of complimentary scoring pencils, but to Mets fans this is taken as another indignity heaped on them by the team they love. They already pay out the nose for other concessions at Shea, where a beer averages $5.50 and a regular hot dog runs you $3.75, prices ranking among the tops in the majors. A day at Yankee Stadium will cost you even more, but Yankee Stadium is The House That Ruth Built, host to the winners of two of the last three World Series. Mets fans must enjoy their pricey beers and hot dogs while sitting in a ballpark that, for all of its “improvements,” remains a relic from the multi-sport stadium era of the 1960s, and which has not hosted a playoff game in 11 years.

Griping in the stands aside, the home opener on April 12 goes swimmingly between the lines. Blue skies prevail. Renowned concert violinist and ardent Mets fan Itzhak Perlman plays the national anthem. Tom Seaver tosses out the first pitch to Mike Piazza, who receives it ably despite his balky knee. Mayor Giuliani attends and even dares to exchange his “lucky” Yankee jacket for some Met gear, though Steve Phillips notes of Hizzoner, “He looked like he was in pain.” Starter Bobby Jones holds the Marlins to one run and four hits in seven strong innings and even hits a home run in the fifth. Robin Ventura, whose two RBIs go unnoticed as a result, says, “It’s the first time I’ve been shown up by a pitcher.” Even prodigal son Bobby Bonilla, still hitting below .100 at the start of play, collects three hits and an RBI in the Mets’ easy 8-1 victory. 

The win is literally dampened when a sewer pump fails in the Mets’ shower room, filling the newly renovated clubhouse with a lake of foul-smelling water. Bobby Valentine runs into the clubhouse mid-game to fortify himself with a cup of coffee, only to find his new office flooded and his boxes of prized baseball memorabilia ruined. At the game’s conclusion, the victorious home team is forced to relocate to the former Jets’ dressing room. This facility is a remnant from Shea’s years hosting the NFL, one that hasn’t been used in 15 years and thus lacks running water. “It’s kind of like Little League,” Bonilla jokes. “You play the game and shower at home.”

Scribes can’t resist the temptation to compare the Mets’ home opener to the Yankees’. The first game in the Bronx began with welcoming back Yogi Berra, soliciting prayers for Joe Torre as he battled cancer, and, of course, hoisting another championship flag. Contrasting this with the scene of the Mets “sent fleeing from their clubhouse,” Harvey Araton of the Times notes “The Yankees played under an appropriately somber sky, in a persistent, divine rain.” The Mets can ruin a sunny home opener by forcing their players to wade through raw sewage at its conclusion. The Yankees can play under gray clouds and precipitation and still have the scene described as divine.

* * *

In the Mets’ second home game of the season, Orel Hershiser, Turk Wendell, and Armando Benítez victimize an overanxious young Marlins lineup and hand a 4-1 lead to John Franco in the ninth. This gives the longtime closer his first shot at his 400th career save. It proves an atypical Franco appearance for its utter lack of drama. The lefty strikes out the side to pass a milestone reached by only one other closer in baseball history. The all-time mark for saves was set by well-traveled fireman Lee Smith, who collected 478. Franco dares proclaim that mark “reachable.” Such hubris ignores the fact that he’ll turn 39 years old in September, and that fans are already agitating for Benítez and his electrifying fastball to assume the closer’s role. After the game, a joyous Franco distributes glasses of Dom Perignon in plastic flutes to his teammates, along with the promise, “This is the first of many celebrations, boys.”

Franco arrived in New York via a trade with the Cincinnati Reds prior to the 1990 season. He blew three key saves that September and pitched to a 5.91 ERA as the Mets stumbled and finished in second place behind the Pirates. The man he was traded for, fellow southpaw Randy Myers, became one component of the infamous Nasty Boys bullpen that powered the Reds to a stunning World Series title that very season, then went on to pitch in the postseason for Baltimore and San Diego. Franco has never made a playoff appearance, because the Mets have failed to reach October since he arrived.

John Franco has climbed the mound for the Mets for the entirety of the 1990s. His contract ensures, health willing, he will climb the mound for them into the next millennium. When he first donned orange and blue, those colors were worn by Darryl Strawberry, Doc Gooden, and Howard Johnson. All of those men are long gone. Many others have arrived and left since then. Only Franco has had to watch it all. He has endured the Mets of the Worst Team Money Can Buy, struggled through the bleach-and-fireworks days, bore witness to the debacle of Generation K, and contributed to the dreadful slide of 1998.

Throughout the decade, Franco has racked up saves but infuriated fans with his tendency to flirt with disaster. “I have a weird hate-love relationship with the fans,” he tells Sports Illustrated. (Note the order of the emotions.) While he agrees with the general fan sentiment that “when you stink you should get booed,” he adds, “there were a few nights when I thought I would need a ride home with the National Guard.”

John Franco and the fans understand one another too well to get along. Like many Brooklynites of a certain age, he paints his youth in Bensonhurst as some intersection between the Dead End Kids and The Honeymooners. He speaks of the toil of his father, a sanitation worker who literally worked himself to death to provide for his family, passing away of a heart attack at the wheel of a dump truck. He remembers the circuitous trips he took from the neighborhood to Shea Stadium along with friends named Bucktooth and Lumpy, exchanging coupons from Borden’s milk cartons for upper deck tickets. He worshipped Tug McGraw, another left-handed fireman with a penchant for making his save opportunities a little too interesting, who coined the Met rallying cry Ya gotta believe.

Franco could never bear to stray too far from the city. His years in Cincinnati are now a mere blip between college ball at St. John’s in Flushing and his return to the boroughs. Most ballplayers in New York relocate to New Jersey or Connecticut when they ink That Big Contract. When Franco got some pocket change, he traveled no farther than most other former Brooklynites who made good, hopping over the Verrazano Bridge to Staten Island.

Franco hails from a world familiar to many Mets fans of his generation, raised in a housing project, sustained by the city’s municipal safety net that employed sanitation workers, cops, firemen, court officers, inspectors, and the thousands of clerks to keep track of them all. A city job promised no prosperity but guaranteed you wouldn’t starve. For those who watched fathers and grandfathers work break-breaking hours for pennies, not starving was good enough.

This grasping for stability earned city workers the lion’s share of the blame when New York nearly tumbled into financial ruin in the 1970s, the presumed greed of public unions pointed to as the reason behind the city’s near bankruptcy, and the reason why it should be left to rot. The city workers weathered it all, barely, and endured the horrors of the 1980s too, though again by the slightest of margins. Franco echoes their feelings when he proclaims, “New York is the greatest city in the country, in the world.” Many of them arrived at this conviction despite not seeing much of the world, or America, or the horizon beyond a 10-block radius of their own stoops.

When Franco speaks of this world now, he can sound like a man out of time. While he was pitching to more boos than cheers in the 1990s, his home borough was transformed by an influx of brownstoning homesteaders, bohemian types, and, amazingly, the uber-rich who discovered you could see Manhattan’s skyline a lot better when you didn’t live in Manhattan. Now, you can invoke the newest, well-heeled city dwellers by saying no more than Brooklyn, a place name that no longer stands for guys whose dads drove dump trucks, or who grew up in public housing, or who had friends named Lumpy.

Two weeks after earning his 400th career save, John Franco receives an honorary key to the city from the mayor in a ceremony at City Hall. In feting Franco, Rudy Giuliani declares, “The more pressure there is, the better he pitches.” The closer looks uncomfortable at this utterance, knowing it’s one with which few Mets fans would concur. The mayor follows by saying “He has never given Mets fans a dull moment,” a remark that relaxes Franco with its closer relationship to the truth.

The ceremony is packed with members of the press who have very little interest in the pitcher. They are here to grill the mayor on his latest controversy, in a year packed with them. Like the mayor’s favorite team, 1999 has not begun well for Rudy Giuliani. Most believe he is reaping what he sowed during years of making enemies out of friends and shutting out the media.

In February, four members of the NYPD’s Street Crime Unit mistook a Guinean immigrant named Amadou Diallo for a suspected serial rapist, pursued him into in his Bronx apartment building, and shot him in a stairwell 41 times. The public was horrified at the sheer number of shots expended to kill Diallo, and by the fact that the victim was both unarmed and running away from officers when he was shot.

Giuliani had always defended the NYPD without question, dismissing any error its members might commit with the fact that officers risked their lives daily to keep the city safe. He stressed that the police had made the entire city safer, nowhere more than in inner-city neighborhoods. Accusations of racism and unfairness sounded to him like the whines of ungrateful children. When a reporter asked him to respond to charges that he neglected New York’s minority communities, he countered, “They are alive, how about we start with that? You can’t help people more directly than to save lives.”

Those same communities saw things differently. To them, the goal of decreasing crime was the mayor’s justification for constant harassment at the hands of officers, who patrolled their neighborhoods less as a police force and more like an occupying force. To them, the Amadou Diallo shooting was so far beyond the pale that it warranted some sort of sympathetic response from their mayor. Instead, Giuliani tossed gasoline on the fire by making a speech in which he insisted the NYPD had “a right to demand more respect from the citizens of the city.” Protests raged throughout the city for months. Giuliani’s approval ratings, which had been trending downward ever since his reelection in 1997, fell off a cliff. Serious calls for his impeachment began to bubble up in city council. Years spent alienating allies in politics and the press resulted in few friends rushing to his defense.

It will take something quite incendiary to knock the Diallo news from the front pages. Giuliani finds it when, a few days prior to the John Franco ceremony, he proclaims the city’s school system “should be blown up.” The remarks are born of frustration over his inability to wrangle control of that system from the Board of Education, a futility that has enraged him throughout his years in office. His administration has managed to consolidate police forces, remake the welfare system in his image, and extract unheard of concessions from municipal unions, and yet the Board of Ed still eludes his grasp.

The latest speed bump is schools chancellor Rudy Crew’s stonewalling on the issue of vouchers for low-income families to attend private schools. Crew had been a vital ally during Giuliani’s reelection bid in 1997, allowing the mayor to use schools as campaign stops while shutting out similar requests from his Democratic challenger. But Giuliani demands unwavering loyalty, and now that the chancellor and the mayor disagree on a small point of policy, he insists Crew must be destroyed. Hence, the explosive rhetoric.

The record shows Giuliani has threatened to metaphorically “blow up” the school system for years, using those exact words in speeches even before he became mayor. This time, he uses these words less than a week after the school shooting horror in Columbine, Colorado. Two teenagers had murdered 13 people at their high school and would have killed even more, had the explosives they planted around the campus worked as planned. At this moment, placing the words school and blow up too close to each other feels uncomfortable at best, horrifying at worst.

John Franco’s big day at City Hall takes a back seat to a flurry of questions over the mayor’s poorly timed turn of phrase. Rudy Giuliani refuses to apologize and insists his rhetoric merely reflects his unrelenting focus on school reform. After six years of covering him, reporters find this ceaseless combativeness tiresome, if not baffling. The city has never been in better shape, it seems. The Dow has blasted past 10,000 for the first time and will leave that mark in the dust when it passes 11,000 less than week from now. The terrifying homicide totals of yesterday are gone. Real estate prices are skyrocketing in all five boroughs. And rather than celebrate these developments, Giuliani wastes his time picking fights as if the city were still a warzone. Former mayor Ed Koch—like Rudy Crew, an erstwhile Giuliani supporter—confesses he doesn’t care much for the schools chancellor himself, yet even he can only shake his head. “It’s like his goal in life is to spear people, destroy them, go for the jugular,” Koch says.

To which Giuliani might respond, Yes, exactly. The press sees transformed New York as one quirky Friends episode after another. Giuliani still sees it as the endless loop of Taxi Driver it once was, the state it could easily devolve back into if he lets up for one moment. Broken windows says attack the small crimes with the same strength as the big crimes because there is no such thing as a small crime. Mercy signals weakness. That’s why he fights the schools chancellor, squeegee men, and violent criminals with equal fervor. That’s why even before he’d ever heard of broken windows, he subjected insider traders to the same perp walks as mobsters. (Despite the soaring Dow Jones, Wall Street still hates him for it.) His favorite attack to launch against anyone who opposes or even questions him is to say they are being political. His aims are above mere politics, closer to a crusade. Everyone who opposes him an infidel.

Like John Franco, Giuliani spent much of his childhood in Brooklyn, raised with his generation’s almost religious belief in the city’s greatness. The price of greatness was the unending pressure to stay great. Surrender an inch and watch the other guy take a mile. That belief is perhaps why a kid who grew up in the shadow of Ebbets Field, at a time when greats like Duke Snider and Jackie Robinson patrolled that field, would nonetheless become the loudest and proudest Yankee fan of them all.

* * *

The series against the Marlins at Shea concludes with an embarrassing, error-filled loss and is followed by yet another series against Montréal. The Mets drop two of three to the Expos, appearing more eager to conclude the games than win them. After facing the Marlins and Expos 13 times to open the regular season—following a spring training that required 12 games against these teams—the Mets are desperate for a change of scenery. “I think they were sick of seeing us and we were sick of seeing them,” Valentine concedes. 

The Mets’ first look at the rest of the league begins on April 20 with three-game sets in Cincinnati and Chicago. The Reds play in one of the maligned multipurpose concrete bowls that dominated baseball’s landscape in the pre-Camden Yards years, though they have given one concession to modernity by selling naming rights to the place. Once called Riverfront Stadium (even though its enclosure prevented the crowd from seeing the nearby Ohio River, or any other feature of nature), it is now dubbed Cinergy Field. New York wins two of three in the Queen City as Al Leiter earns his first win of the year and Bobby Valentine has his first major run-in with the umps, complaining about a stingy strike zone he sees as stacked against Masato Yoshii in the Mets’ sole loss. The final game in Cincinnati marks the first time the Mets’ projected opening day outfield plays together, as Rickey Henderson, Brian McRae, and Bobby Bonilla have all missed some time in the season’s early weeks to nurse bangs and bruises. The reunion lasts all of one inning, as Bonilla is taken out of the game after driving in the Mets’ first run, ailing with the knee injury that has plagued him since spring training.

From Cincinnati, it’s on to Chicago to play the Cubs, the team that weathered the hoopla of the Sammy Sosa Traveling Home Run Roadshow and tied the Giants for the National League wild card spot in 1998. This season looks less promising, as the Cubs will trot out a lineup that’s a little too long in the tooth (biggest offseason acquisition: veteran catcher Benito Santiago), while its best hope for the future, young ace Kerry Wood, will miss the season with a torn elbow ligament.

The series in Chicago proves rocky for the Mets, in every sense of the word. It begins inauspiciously with a rough ride out of Cincinnati that Valentine calls “The Knuckleball Express,” as the Mets’ plane dives and dodges through brutal turbulence. Conditions barely improve once they touch the ground. Game time temperature for the series opener on April 23 stands at 44 degrees, with 36 mph winds swirling around Wrigley Field. Robin Ventura, who played on the South Side for nine years, calls such weather “mild” for a Chicago April while Brian McRae, a former Cub, considers this “a nice day” compared to some he’s experienced. Few others share these opinions, least of all Cub starter Steve Trachsel, who has the cap blown right off his head in the second inning. Ditto Jermaine Allensworth, starting in right field in the place of the injured Bobby Bonilla, who loses one run-scoring hit in the sun and slips in the outfield mud while trying to field another.

Despite Mother Nature’s best efforts, the Mets rally to overcome a deficit, take the lead in the top of the ninth on a pinch hit sac fly from Rey Ordoñez, and prevail, 6-5. The shortstop’s mild heroics come after sitting out the two previous games. His first day on the bench arose from his paltry .172 batting average. His second day on the bench was prompted by the temper tantrum he threw after the first benching.

In his career, Rey Ordoñez’s inability to hit with any consistency is matched only by his infuriating lack of maturity. He goes out of his way to annoy teammates, sneaking up on them to make buzzing sounds right next to their ears and mugging neabry while they are being grilled by reporters. His taunts directed at younger players often go far beyond the realm of good-natured ribbing. Luis Lopez, a benchwarmer who plays shortstop on Ordoñez’s rare off days, has complained about such taunting, to no good affect. His immaturity is reflected in his discipline at the plate, or lack thereof. In 1998, he worked a grand total of 23 walks in 548 plate appearances, a shocking lack of patience for a major league hitter.

Ordoñez almost compensates for all of these considerable drawbacks with his wizardry in the field. He opened eyes in his major league debut on Opening Day of 1996, when he scampered to the left field line to field a relay from the outfield, then fired a perfect throw from his knees to nail a runner at the plate. Since then, he has established himself as the best defensive shortstop in the game, a dynamic fielder who can make difficult plays look easy and execute them with the grace of a ballet dancer.

Decades ago, any team would have been thrilled with a Rey Ordoñez at shortstop, long considered a position where fielding ability trumped all. Then along came Cal Ripken and Robin Yount, shortstops who won MVP awards more with their offense than their defense. The 1990s brought a flurry of bat-first shortstops such as Derek Jeter, Nomar Garciaparra, and Alex Rodriguez. In 1997, Ordoñez was featured in a photo shoot for Sports Illustrated along with this new breed of shortstop, the players stripped shirtless as if the point of the feature was to humiliate him and him alone. The other shortstops had weight room physiques that made Ordoñez look like the proverbial 90 Pound Weakling in comparison.

Being overshadowed was a familiar feeling for Ordoñez. As a player for the Havana Industriales, a top Cuban squad, he found it difficult to break into the starting lineup because his team already employed the man considered his nation’s best shortstop. A slot on the national team offered Ordoñez an opportunity to prove himself, but he took it as a chance to defect instead. In 1993, he snuck away while the national team was preparing for an exhibition in Buffalo, New York. Soon after, he signed with the Met organization, becoming only the second Cuban baseball player since Fidel Castro came to power to defect and attempt a career in the American major leagues. Compatriots of his soon followed, however, and most of them garnered much greater acclaim, such as Orlando and Liván Hernández, who each became superstars by winning World Series rings with the Yankees and Marlins, respectively. Ordoñez remained a mere slick-fielding shortstop, as anachronistic as the Eisenhower-era Fords on the streets of Havana that he left behind.

Many Cuban defectors send money and other aid back to their impoverished homeland. Orlando Hernández even managed the Herculean feat of bringing his wife and children stateside, with some help from New York archbishop John Cardinal O’Connor. Rey Ordoñez has sent no such help, according to relatives polled by a New York Times reporter who made a trip to Havana to ask them, not even to the wife and six-year-old son he left behind. The Times captures the scene of his son, Reynaldo, showing off a brand new fielder’s mitt he believes was sent to him by the major leaguer himself. In truth, it was a gift from family in Miami who hoped the ruse would make the boy feel better about growing up without his father. “He has never taken any interest at all in the boy,” Reynaldo’s mother said. When planning his defection, Ordoñez had made vague promises to send for his wife and child. Once in the states, he remarried instead.

That Times story is set to hit the newsstands in a few days after Ordoñez’s game-winning plate appearance in Chicago. He is surely aware of this; if so, it would explain why he reacts to being benched with such childish fervor. The shortstop, like many players before him, complains that Bobby Valentine is exiling him from the rest of the team, isolating him because he has hit a rough patch. “He’s the boss. He’s the one who gives the orders. I’m the only one he does it to. Maybe it’s because I don’t talk to him or say hi.” He sounds almost hopeless when discussing his relationship with the manager. Si no gana, empata, he says of Valentine: If he doesn’t win, he ties. “You can’t beat him.”

Valentine responds, “I like when guys are upset about not playing—in a very professional manner.”

* * *

Ordoñez’s pinch hit heroics are the zenith of the Mets’ trip to the Windy City, as they drop the last two games of their set at Wrigley Field. Mike Piazza returns from his knee injury for the series finale but brings no luck with him, and the team escapes the Midwest with a disappointing .500 record against teams not from Florida or Montréal. After a brief detour to play an exhibition against the triple-A Norfolk Tides, the Mets return to Shea for a nine-game home stand. The first opponents to arrive are the reigning National League champions, the San Diego Padres, sacrificial lambs for the Yankees in last year’s World Series.

Little more than the name remains from the team that won the National League pennant in 1998. The Padres lost ace Kevin Brown, Gold Glove centerfielder Steve Finley, and slugger Ken Caminiti to free agency, then traded away their most powerful bat, Greg Vaughn. The dismantling began in earnest after their loss in the World Series, but not before San Diego voters approved a new downtown stadium ballot initiative, which received a huge boost in the polls from the team’s playoff push. Taxpayers now feel they were sold a bill of goods, that the Padres’ surprising competitiveness last season was but one piece of a developer’s long con. Sports Illustrated goes so far as to dub San Diego “Marlins West” in their season preview.

In other words, they should be another soft opponent for New York, which a pathetic performance against San Diego all the more galling. When the Mets drop the series opener on April 27 to the downsized Padres, some fans choose to vent their ire on Mike Piazza, who strands seven runners on base all by himself. In the minds of the press, Piazza’s momentary failures bring to mind the struggles he experienced when he first arrived in New York last year and the charges of “bad leadership” that chased him out of Los Angeles. The local sports radio airwaves chime in as well, reasoning the Mets’ poor play since Piazza returned from the disabled list—all two games of it—has to be more than a coincidence. Almost a year into his tenure in New York and he still has too much of that California Cool to suit the taste of Gotham. Can’t he look like he cares more? “It would be a nice addition to the 30 homers and 100 runs batted in that Piazza is bound to compile this season if he also tossed in a couple of dozen smiles and waves to the mezzanine section,” Jack Curry writes, capturing talk radio rage in Times timbre. Upon the conclusion of his awful night at the dish, Piazza finds a bouquet of yellow roses waiting for him in the locker room, sent from an unnamed admirer. “She sent them before the game,” he notes. “I don’t know if she would have after the game.”

The Mets look poised to rebound the next night, thanks to seven innings of one-run ball from Al Leiter. With a slim 2-1 lead heading into the top of the eighth inning, the call to the bullpen goes to Armando Benítez, who proceeds to walk the leadoff man before ceding back-to-back doubles, transforming the 2-1 lead into a 3-2 deficit, the first hiccup in what has otherwise been a stellar start to Benítez’s career in Queens. Once again, the Mets have left a small army of men on base—12 in all, after they eschew more scoring opportunities in the bottom of the eighth. There is little reason to think they will fare any better in the ninth, because San Diego owns a historic steak of 181 straight games in which they have not relinquished a lead after the eighth inning. This is due in large part to Trevor Hoffman, possessor of a wicked changeup and one of the best closers in the game. Hoffman saved 53 games for the National League champs in 1998 and is so sure of his abilities he’s spent much of this season confronting baseball writers who dared leave him off their Cy Young Award ballots.

On this night, however, Hoffman retires no one. Leading off the bottom of the ninth, John Olerud reaches on an infield single aided by a shortstop’s bobble. In the clubhouse, Al Leiter watches the game on TV with fellow starters Rick Reed and Orel Hershiser, both of whom want to return to the dugout once Olerud reaches base. Leiter, superstitious in the manner ballplayers have been ever since there have been ballplayers, forbids them from moving, lest they disrupt the flow of good luck. This is a good spot, the lefty insists.

Up steps Mike Piazza, who has gone 1-for-13 at the plate since returning from the disabled list and stranded 10 men all by himself in the first two games against San Diego. Hoffman makes the grave mistake of offering him a high, outside fastball clocking in at 86 mph, the kind of pitch Piazza has made a career of rocketing to the opposite field stands. This is exactly what he does, depositing Hoffman’s offering into the Met bullpen for a two-run game-winning homer. His teammates flood the field, anxious to mob him once he touches home. One day, joyous pogoing at home plate will accompany every walk off win by champs and cellar dwellers alike, but it is not a common sight in April of 1999. The ending of the Padres’ streak, and the presumed ending of the abuse Piazza was subjected to by the press and his own fans, deserves such a celebration.

After the Mets win the last game against San Diego, the press instructs them that the next team arriving at Shea, the San Francisco Giants, will prove their first real test of the season. Though the season is young, the Giants are their first opponent with expectations of contending this year. San Francisco is a chic pick to make the playoffs, with a lineup powered by Barry Bonds and former Met Jeff Kent. “It’s never too early to beat one of the teams that will be a rival for that extra post-season slot,” counsels Murray Chass in the New York Times. As if Mets need reminding it’s never too early for to be pressured about anything.

While his charges battle their counterparts from the Bay Area, Bobby Valentine will have to battle the opposing manager, Dusty Baker. At the moment, Baker owns a reputation quite different from Valentine’s. While the Mets collapsed and missed the postseason altogether at the close of the 1998 season, the Giants surged to win four of their last five and tie the Cubs for the wild card berth. They lost a one-game playoff at Wrigley Field, but in rallying to get that far, the Giants displayed grit and determination. The Mets, in losing their last five games of the season, displayed the exact opposite.

The New York papers fill with glowing profiles of Dusty Baker, who has transferred the hard-nosed personality he exuded as a player into the clubhouse. Baker is well liked by all his players, the papers tell us, in stark contrast to the man in the Met dugout. His admirers believe Baker possesses a gut-level managing acumen that Valentine, for all of his technical knowledge of the game, does not. Mike Piazza calls Baker a “players’ manager,” while an unnamed assistant general manager for the Diamondbacks sings his praises to The New York Times, proclaiming that Baker can motivate his players to overachieve. “Similar comments are not heard about Bobby Valentine,” the Times notes tartly, while also insisting the Mets must put up a good fight against San Francisco this weekend “for their confidence at least.”

As the series unfolds beginning on April 30, the Mets don’t put up a good fight so much as take advantage when the Giants put up a poor one. San Francisco starter Shawn Estes, a promising but wild young lefty, loses his cool when called for a balk by Bob Davidson, an umpire known to see balks where no one else does. Estes has to be restrained by his catcher and does not regain his composure when returns to the mound, allowing more damaging hits and uncorking a wild pitch to plate four runs before the dust settles. The Mets accept the meltdown and go on to win by a healthy margin. The next day, San Francisco launches one threat after another to break the game open against an erratic Orel Hershiser (who sums his performance with a succinct, “It stunk”) but never lands the knockout punch, thus allowing the Mets to rally for a victory.

The series finale brings an unlikely pitchers’ duel between Giants hurler Kirk Reuter and Masato Yoshii. Yoshii has pitched miserably to this point in the season and was booed off the mound in his last start after giving up four runs to an anemic Padres lineup in less than five innings of work. After that outing, Bobby Valentine insisted Yoshii’s rotation spot wasn’t in jeopardy. When this was interpreted as less a vote of confidence than a concession to the dearth of alternatives, Valentine bent over backwards to protect his pitcher’s ego. He claimed Yoshii’s struggles were all his fault, not the pitchers. At his urging, Yoshii had moved toward the first base side of the rubber, an adjustment he now realized robbed the hurler’s trademark shuto (a reverse slider, more or less) of its effectiveness. Valentine was so impressed by his own discovery he demanded that the Mets’ press corps watch video evidence of his find, replaying tape of Yoshii over and over as if it were the Zapruder Film while bemused reporters feigned interest.

Valentine’s discovery proves less laughable when Yoshii turns in six scoreless innings in the last game against the Giants. There is still no score when Rickey Henderson strides to the plate with two outs and pinch hitter Matt Franco on first in the bottom of the eighth. Henderson, who’d drawn the crowd’s ire by hitting into two double plays and manning the outfield with his usual indifferent approach to fielding, receives more boos when he hits a towering pop up between shortstop and center field. The Giants play their home games at windy Candlestick Park, a place where pitchers have been blown off the mound mid-windup by angry gusts, and yet they are unprepared for the conditions that act upon Henderson’s fly ball. Shortstop Ramon Martinez can’t quite track the ball and makes a desperate lunge to snare it at the last moment, but the ball clanks off the heel of his glove. Matt Franco, a Shea Stadium veteran, is quite aware that a ball hit above the uppermost rim of Shea Stadium often comes down in a different spot than where it left. This is why Franco never stops running, a hustle that allows him to score all the way from first. In the ninth, John Franco gives a typically heart-stopping John Franco performance, loading the bases before inducing a game-ending double play. 

If the Giants were a test, the Mets aced it with an impressive sweep. The press responds by insisting their next series, three games hosting the Houston Astros, is the real test. Houston—winners of 102 games in 1998, their lineup powered by the bats of Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, and Moisés Alou—have a number of unresolved issues with the Mets from last season. In late September, New York took three out of four games in a dramatic series at the Astrodome that helped them keep pace with the Cubs in the wild card hunt. Houston won its only game of the series when Astro outfielder Derek Bell launched a walk off homer in the bottom of the twelfth and admired his shot a bit too long, mouthing “oh my god!” for good measure. This was par for the course with Bell, a known showboat whose histrionics are more playful than antagonistic. Nonetheless, baseball’s unwritten rules demanded Bell receive a retaliatory plunking by the Mets the next day. The same unwritten rules dictated the Astros issue a retaliatory plunking for the retaliatory plunking, and so on back and forth for the remainder of the series. The bad blood carried over into their spring training meetings this season, the threat of retribution hanging in the air whenever the two teams crossed paths.

When the Astros travel to Flushing for the first time in 1999, Met reliever Turk Wendell insists all is well between them. But ask Houston’s star second baseman Craig Biggio (who is something of a local, being a New Jersey native and Seton Hall alum), and you will hear a different take: “I don’t want to comment on it….There’s been some stuff that’s happened here. Baseball usually takes care of itself.” 

As Biggio predicts, the baseball does take care of itself, mostly in favor of the visitors. The Mets take the first game behind Rick Reed, fresh off the disabled list, only to drop the final two. The last loss is especially galling, as Armando Benítez allows a long go-ahead homer to Jeff Bagwell that proves the difference in a 5-4 loss. The Mets’ latest stay at Shea should have been a successful one, and on paper it was, but the sting of the final game appends it with an ugly coda. For the Mets in 1999, it is not merely how many games they win, but when and in what fashion, a sliding scale set by the men paid to judge them.

* * *

The deflating end to the Houston series carries over into the Mets’ next road trip, a disastrous swing out west that begins with a stop in Phoenix. Determined to shake off expansion team growing pains in record time, the Arizona Diamondbacks engaged in an offseason spending spree that left New York’s in the dust. The acquisition of superstars like Randy Johnson, Todd Stottlemyre, and Steve Finley transformed the team from awkward freshman into a contender in record time. When the Mets arrive at Bank One Ballpark on May 5, the Diamondbacks stand one game over .500 and are poised to take off in a big way. Arizona’s ascent to the stratosphere commences by launching off of the Mets, as the home team deals them two defeats in this three-game series, both by blowout margins. 

The beleaguered Met pitching staff is abused even further at their next stop in the frigid atmosphere of Denver, where game time temperatures hover in the mid 40s each night and one game is nearly delayed by a snowstorm. The mile-high elevation of Coors Field boosts offense to such a ludicrous extent that the bar for acceptable pitching performances within its confines is set quite low, but the visiting hurlers find a way to crawl under that bar as they are pounded in the first two games. When the Rockies torch Bobby Jones for eight runs on May 11, it continues an ignoble streak of three straight games in which a Mets starter allows the most runs of his career. Following Jones’s ugly outing, Met starters have accumulated an 11-14 record and an ERA of 5.30.

Starting pitching was envisioned as one of the team’s weakest links, but this stat line proves more ghastly than anyone’s worst nightmares. Pitching coach Bob Apodaca all but throws up his hands when he compares this dreadful stretch to “a contagious disease that no one can be immune to,” as if he believes the only cure is for each pitcher to pass the bug to the next so the staff can build up resistance. In the colorful words of the Daily News, the Mets’ pitching staff “continued to possess the hue and smell of sewer water.” The smell only abates on May 12 when Rick Reed, fresh off a bloodletting in Phoenix, pitches on two days’ rest in place Orel Hershiser and allows a mere five runs at Coors Field, practically a no-hitter by that facility’s handicapped standards, and by the low standards set by Met pitchers of late. New York outslugs Colorado, 10-5, then scurries out of town, tail between legs. 

Though his starting rotation is in sorry shape, Bobby Valentine wishes that was his only worry. While Met pitchers serve up gopher balls, the Met outfield crumbles bit by elderly bit. Rickey Henderson’s health has been an off-and-on proposition all year, with the veteran often removed late in game for pinch runners and defensive replacements in deference to a troublesome hamstring. During the series against the Giants at Shea, Henderson suffers a nasty fall, dealing him a knee injury that lands him on the disabled list. This turn of events all but forces the manager to start a barely mobile Bobby Bonilla in the outfield during the Arizona series, and he watches helplessly as catchable fly balls zip right over Bonilla’s head. At Coors Field, Rockies pitcher Pedro Astacio hits Bonilla in the same left knee that’s ailed him since spring training. The outfielder makes a few menacing steps toward the mound before thinking better of it and taking his base. Bonilla soon joins Henderson on the disabled list, resulting in a dire need for reinforcements.

This prompts the callup of Benny Agbayani, a desperate measure borne of desperate times. The native Hawaiian has languished in the Met system for years and drawn little attention to himself, held in such little regard by his own organization that he wasn’t invited to major league camp during spring training. He is already 27 years old, an age at which an outfielder who can’t earn a spring training invite might want to consider pursuing another line of work. His only saving grace is the fact that Bobby Valentine, a former manager at Norfolk, remembers him fondly.

At first sight, Agbayani’s most glaring shortcoming is his weekend softballer’s physique. Once circumstance forces Agbayani into the everyday lineup, however, he makes the opposing pitchers look like the beer leaguers. He belts his first major league home run during the series in Denver, then crushes 10 more before the All Star Break in only 96 at bats, a Ruthian pace.

Benny Agbayani isn’t the only one who takes advantage of sudden job openings in the Met outfield. Acquired in the three-way deal that netted Armando Benítez, Roger Cedeño appeared only rarely in the season’s initial weeks, until Rickey Henderson’s injury makes left field a permanent question mark. Cedeño first raises eyebrows with a Henderson-like performance against the Astros on May 3, stealing two bases, scoring two runs, and turning a single into a double against a Houston outfield unprepared for his speed. But his true breakout performance comes when the Mets slink out of Denver and touch down in Philadelphia. During the first game at Veterans Stadium on May 14, Cedeño victimizes the Phillies with four stolen bases, scoring three times.

He is well suited for the task of replacing Rickey Henderson because he spent his youth idolizing the all-time steals leader. Growing up in Venezuela, Cedeño did not have many opportunities to watch American baseball, but always made sure to catch as many games featuring Henderson as he could. “He was the Man in so many ways,” Cedeño gushes to Sports Illustrated. “When I was younger, I told my brother, ‘I want to be just like Rickey Henderson.’ Here we are—in the same place.” For a lineup packed with slow-footed plodders, Cedeño proves a godsend. “He should go every time he gets on,” Bobby Valentine says, advice Cedeño takes to heart. “Roger is in a groove. I don’t think they can throw him out on a pitchout.”

Valentine is grateful for the unexpected dividends of Benny Agbayani and Roger Cedeño, talking up their abilities at every chance he gets. This enthusiasm prompts regular queries from the beat reporters about who will receive the bulk of playing time once Rickey Henderson and Bobby Bonilla return. The two outspoken veterans are unlikely to accept part-time roles quietly. Will youth be served or will Henderson and Bonilla’s experience—and hefty contracts—dictate the starting lineups? Every time Agbayani or Cedeño power the Mets to victory, one of the first postgame questions the manager must field is, who will play when the veterans return. Valentine deflects these queries as premature, on one occasion snapping back at a reporter, “Don’t ruin a good day with a silly question.”

* * *

Questions, silly and otherwise, continue to nag the Mets. First, they drop the final contest in Philadelphia, thanks to a costly error by Matt Franco (pressed into service as a leftfielder, when his more natural position is pinch hitter). Then, they return to Shea Stadium and drop the first two of a four-game set against the lowly Milwaukee Brewers, both in gut-punch fashion. The series opener against Milwaukee on May 17 brings a 7-6 loss in which Bobby Jones turns in another poor outing despite receiving an extra day of rest. Repeating a gripe he has sounded often over the years when his pitchers struggle, Bobby Valentine eschews criticism of his starter and focuses instead on an inconsistent strike zone, grumbling that Milwaukee pitchers benefitted from wide strike calls that were not afforded to Jones. The manager seethes well into the night over a called third strike that ends the game with the tying run on third, a pitch most observers would call questionable, but a call that would have proved unnecessary had Jones pitched better, or had Met batters executed more effectively earlier in the game

Valentine receives more fodder for complaint in the second game after Brewer manager Phil Garner demands the umpires examine Rick Reed’s glove, suspecting the pitcher might be doctoring the ball. Though they find nothing, Reed fumes over the accusation in self-deprecating fashion. “If the guy thinks I’m cheating,” Reed growls, “he’s getting the wrong stats because I had a seven-and-a-fucking-half ERA coming in. If he wants to come out early tomorrow, I’ll teach him how to throw it.” Valentine believes Garner’s true intent is to rankle his pitcher, pointing to Brewer hitters stepping out of the batter’s box for extended periods as further evidence for his conspiracy theory. Garner denies the charges; “I don’t play those games,” he sniffs, unleashing the unspoken accusation that Valentine does.

The frustrations bubble over in the bottom of the eighth when Valentine argues a Met baserunner was interfered with during a rundown play. When the umpires refuse to discuss the play among themselves, Valentine asks to play the game under protest. The umps refuse this request as well, so the manager goes ballistic and earns an ejection. “I’d love to have even the people that say I’m an idiot say where I’m wrong on this one,” Valentine challenges his public, with an angry point at MLB’s official rule book on his desk, a tome he has vigorously thumbed through within the last few minutes to jog his memory. As for the game itself, an excellent outing by Reed is wasted when Armando Benítez allows a three-run homer to Marquis Grissom in the top of the eighth, leading to the Mets’ ninth loss in their last 13 games.

A rainout necessitates a doubleheader on May 20, which also enables Robin Ventura to achieve a curious baseball milestone by becoming the first player in history to hit one grand slam in each half of a twin bill. Apart from this historic anomaly, however, the proceedings are not pretty to watch. In the first contest, Al Leiter struggles with his control and exits after five innings with six runs to his discredit. The Mets slug their way back, thanks in large part to Benny Agbayani, who clubs two home runs, drives in four runs, and elevates his batting average to .519 since his callup in Colorado. Ventura’s first slam of the day, and the rest of the Mets’ potent offense, victimizes Milwaukee pitchers to the tune of 11 runs. The bullpen does its best to hand the Brewers a comeback, however, and a ninth-inning Brewers rally only falls short when the man representing the tying run loses a shoe on the basepaths and is thrown out at the plate for the final out of the game, a suitable end to an unsightly win for the home team. The nightcap features another offensive outburst from the Mets with no counterpunch from Milwaukee as Masato Yoshii limits them to one run over seven innings. Ventura’s second grand slam of the day in the bottom of the fourth makes the rest of the game a mere formality, and the Mets sail to victory.

The offense stays hot for a moment when the Phillies come to town for a three-game weekend set, as the Mets hit early and often to take the series opener, only to be stifled in a blow out loss the following afternoon. The series finale on May 24 is preceded by a two-hour rain delay, but Met management is terrified to cancel the game outright with close to 35,000 tickets sold for a Sunday afternoon giveaway (kids’ jersey day). The two teams wait out the raindrops, but the Met bats stay in hibernation long afterward, stymied by the wizardry of pitcher Curt Schilling.

The Phillies’ ace pitches like a man on a mission, a reflection of the battle he’s been waging against his own front office. Philadelphia’s CEO Dave Montgomery spent the offseason slashing team payroll down to $26 million, among the lowest in the majors. With no money to spend, general manager Ed Wade made shrewd trades for players like Bobby Abreu and Doug Glanville, low-cost moves that have elevated the Phillies a mere game behind the Mets in the standings before this Sunday matinee. Philadelphia Daily News columnist Bill Conlin has taken to calling them “the best little poorhouse in baseball.” Despite this early success, Wade is rumored to be shopping the team’s biggest stars—namely, Schilling and third baseman Scott Rolen—while their stock remains high. Amid such rumors and belt-tightening, the team still had the nerve to hike ticket prices by an average of 21 percent for the 1999 season, resulting in many no-shows at charmless Veterans Stadium. Prior to the Mets’ recent visit to Philadelphia, the marketing department took the stunning move of openly inviting New York fans to come to Philadelphia and fill its many empty seats.

Like many Phillies fans, Schilling wants to see his team spend more money to compete. In 1997, he had signed a modest contract extension rather than seek bigger bucks in free agency. This was a display of loyalty fans forever sought from players but rarely saw in action. Schilling had hoped this loyalty would be rewarded by Phillies’ ownership purchasing some backup with all the money they weren’t spending to keep him. But in the two years since Schilling left a ton of money on the table, the Phillies had not spent a dime more than they had to, and it was clear that the team would continue this trend as long as they possibly could. This season, a fed up Schilling had become increasingly vocal with his gripes. Right before the Phillies arrived in Queens, he told an interviewer unequivocally that if Philadelphia wasn’t willing to spend the money necessary to compete, he’d prefer to play for a team that was. Ed Wade isn’t pleased about the restrictions placed on him by penny-pinching ownership, but he’s even less pleased that Schilling has taken the conflict public. “Every fifth day, Curt has the opportunity to go out and be a horse on the mound,” he tells reporters. “Unfortunately, on the other four days, he tends to say things which are detrimental to the club.”

The New York Times is much less critical of Schilling. Murray Chass fetes him in a glowing profile published the day of his start at Shea. The profile mentions the technophile’s method of preparation for each start, consulting his laptop for notes on opposing batters that he has meticulously kept for eight seasons. But Chass is far more impressed by Schilling’s old school stamina and stubbornness:

Whether he is fairly paid or underpaid, Curt Schilling earns his money. No, he more than earns it. He works overtime, both on days when he is supposed to work and on days when he is supposed to be off. In an era of pitch counts and pitcher pampering, Schilling is the square peg in the round hole. He just doesn’t fit.

The dean of the Phillies’ attractive young team, Schilling is the reincarnation of Robin Roberts, the team’s pitching star of the first half of the 1950s, a player who more often than not finished what he started.

On this occasion, Schilling does indeed finish what he started, though not in the manner he would have liked.

Schilling has a reasonable 107 pitches under his belt and a healthy 4-0 lead to his credit as the bottom of the ninth inning begins, his eyes on yet another complete game victory. When he allows a leadoff single to Mike Piazza, it is only the fifth Met hit all day. Robin Ventura will later say Schilling had lost nothing on his fastball by this point, but this doesn’t prevent Ventura from clubbing a two-run homer to cut the Phillies’ lead in half. Here is a warning flare that Schilling is tiring, yet no one stirs in Philadelphia’s bullpen. The team’s closer is not available today, and even if he was, manager Terry Francona has no intention of removing his ace. “Regardless of who was available, that was his game,” Francona says later.

One out later, a pair of singles sandwiched around a hit batsman shaves the Phillies’ lead down to one slim run. Still, Schilling remains on the mound. It looks as if he might escape danger when Roger Cedeño hits a ball right back to the pitcher. Schilling tosses to second for a force out, but the speedy Cedeño beats the relay to first to prevent a game-ending double play. Cedeño then swipes second to put the winning run in scoring position. The Phillies oblige him by not offering a throw to halt his progress.

Schilling attacks the next hitter, Edgardo Alfonzo, pitching him hard and inside and backing him into a 1-2 count. But he pitches too aggressively inside with a ball that grazes Fonzie on the forearm, loading the bases. It is the second hit batter of the inning by a pitcher who hadn’t hit any in his previous 81 innings.

“That’s the game,” Schilling concedes afterward.

Momentum has swung so far in the Mets’ favor by this point that what follows is a mere formality. John Olerud lines Schilling’s first offering into shallow left field for a single. The tying run scampers home and Cedeño follows right behind, beating a throw to the plate by a hair. A sure 4-0 loss has turned into a 5-4 win, a stunning five-run ninth inning rally executed against one of the best pitchers in the game.

“We sit around for an hour and some people started saying: ‘Should we even play this game? We should issue an executive edict and miss Schilling, and maybe he’ll be in the American League the next time we meet them’,” a stunned Bobby Valentine says after the game. “There was a lot of that going around. And if we didn’t win that game, there would have been a lot of second guessing.”

The Mets are permitted to revel in the joy of their comeback win for a few moments before the cruel light of reality intrudes. Bobby Jones was the team’s most reliable starting pitcher at first, but for weeks each start he’s made has been worse than the last. The reason for this is starting to become clear. After his atrocious outing at Coors Field, Jones reveals he’s been pitching through elbow pain for some time. Bobby Valentine finds an extra day of rest for Jones prior to his next start against the Phillies, but he still is forced to leave that game early due to discomfort. This time, it is his pitching shoulder that bothers him, accompanied by the affliction of an ill-timed “dead-arm” period. Jones is placed on the disabled list and informed he can’t even throw a baseball for eight days, a proscription that does not inspire thoughts of a speedy recovery.

Shortly after the bad news about Jones drops, Bobby Valentine discloses that Al Leiter will have his next start pushed back a day to accommodate a sore left bicep, an injury that may have resulted from overcompensating for a left knee strain he suffered during spring training. The lefty has insisted he feels fine after each of his starts this season, chalking up his indifferent performances to bad weather or poor field conditions or early season rust. Injury is one of the few excuses Leiter has yet to offer himself.

This quick succession of blows to the Met starting rotation adds up to a disaster. It is fitting that the team will now turn to Jason Isringhausen, a man well acquainted with disasters. All the members of Generation K have seen their careers stall in one way or another, but Isringhausen remains the most star-crossed of them all. Izzy missed all of 1998 recovering from elbow surgery and has made only 33 major league appearances since a promising rookie campaign in 1995. When not on the shelf due to pitching-related woes, he’s been felled by bad decisions—like punching a dugout garbage can, an act of frustration that led to a broken wrist—and almost Biblical bad luck, as exemplified by the case of tuberculosis he acquired while toiling in the minors. Isringhausen failed to make the team out of spring training this season, and while he has put up decent stats with the triple-A Norfolk Tides so far, his tortured history gave the front office pause at the idea of calling him up. Now, a perfect storm of calamity forces his recall to the big leagues to start the opener of a brief three-game road trip to Pittsburgh on May 24.

Isringhausen’s first major league pitch in 20 months is knocked for a double, followed shortly thereafter by a three-run homer. He recovers from this shaky start and pitches six innings while striking out seven, but also allows another home run and five runs overall, creating a deficit his teammates can’t surmount. Cognizant of Isringhausen’s struggles to stay on the field, Bobby Valentine softens his assessment by proclaiming the pitcher made only two mistakes during his outing, “and both ended up in the seats,” while pitching coach Bob Apodaca compares Isringhausen’s velocity to Curt Schilling’s.

Even this muted encouragement is darkened when Isringhausen experiences elbow pain during his next throwing session, casting the date of his next start in doubt. When the team returns to New York, a doctor reassures him the discomfort stems from nothing more serious than torn scar tissue, but the scare gives him an unpleasant reminder of his tenuous grip on health—as if he needed one. 

The Mets win the last two games in Pittsburgh, but all the talk around the team continues to center around the mounting injuries in its MASH unit of a starting rotation. Valentine announces that Al Leiter’s next start will be pushed back not just one day, but two, in deference to a strained knee that refuses to heal. Down on the farm, one of the Mets’ top prospects, Jae Wong Seo, will undergo Tommy John surgery and miss the next year of action. This whittles the number of possible pitching reinforcements from the minors down to one. Octavio Dotel, the Mets’ sole minor league starter of any note who remains healthy, strikes out 17 batters and comes within an out of throwing a no hitter in his most recent start for Norfolk. The front office remains reluctant to rush Dotel to the majors, however, as Steve Phillips’s approach to roster construction prefers grizzled veterans over the promise of youth. He would rather exhaust all other possibilities than rely on an untested rookie like Dotel to see the Mets through a summer-long pennant chase. Soon he may have no choice.

And then there are personnel issues of a different kind. These, to the surprise of no one, stem from Bobby Bonilla. When the season began, Bonilla’s efforts to rehabilitate his image appeared genuine, as he deflected skepticism about his abilities and intentions with self-deprecating humor. The outfielder endures boos during the Mets’ first home stand when he misplays one ball after another, including an especially ugly game against the Expos when four straight hits elude him, each of which could have been snagged by a less stationary outfielder. Bonilla laughs off the boos by insisting, “That was a light day from what I’m usually used to.” His manager does his best to shield Bonilla from the slights, first with a few lessons in acoustics. “When someone is doing the booo thing with their mouth,” Bobby Valentine counsels, “it’s a whole lot louder than 10 people clapping.” When Bonilla receives a rare start during the Mets’ series against the Astros and is again booed—in each of his at bats, no less—Valentine suggests, “Maybe they’re saying Bobby Bo and it sounds like boo.”

Sonic reinterpretation doesn’t track with fans or the press, so Valentine switches to denial. To all observers watching the game Bonilla starts in Arizona, he once again allows several catchable hits to sail right over his head. Observer Valentine chooses to dispute the catchability of those balls. “Maybe you’re seeing something I’m not,” the skipper insists. “What balls could he have gotten to?”

Then Bonilla heads on the disabled list, and the whispering begins. Bonilla’s trip to the DL, though preceded by a knee injury, is widely interpreted as a painless means for the Mets to bench him and his anemic bat. The front office denies these charges, but they don’t appear to be too anxious for Bonilla to return, either. By the time the Mets conclude their series in Pittsburgh, Bonilla is eligible to be reactivated, but the front office says it would prefer give him a few rehab starts in the minors first. Rather than endure the discomfort and humiliation of minor league travel, Bonilla believes the Mets should fly minor league pitchers to New York to face him. The Mets accommodated Mike Piazza in this fashion when the catcher was recovering from his own knee injury, and Bonilla believes he deserves equitable treatment.

This revelation leads to a published report of a “rift” between Piazza and Bonilla. The outfielder reacts poorly to this accusation, blowing up at reporters before threatening the silent treatment. “Every time I try to be nice to you guys,” he growls. “Now, I’m just going to play ball. I’m not going to even talk about it anymore.” In a media counterattack, unnamed friends of Bonilla vent their suspicions the Mets are shopping the ailing outfielder. Team officials deny they seek to trade Bonilla away, an unnecessary denial considering that his hefty contract and many issues have rendered him all but untradeable.

One thing is clear: The New Bonilla is gone. In his place, an unwelcome return of the I’ll show you the Bronx Bonilla of the Mets’ ugliest days. To many in the media, Bonilla’s mere presence on the roster prevents the Mets from scrubbing away the stain of the early 1990s. Wallace Matthews of the Post—one of New York sports media’s most ardent scolds—compares the team from Queens unfavorably to the Yankees thusly: “The fact that Bonilla is still a check-cashing member of the New York Mets is all you need to know about the class gap between this town’s two ballclubs.”

* * *

As the end of May nears, the 1999 season has proven more eventful than anyone dared dream. Offensively, the year has gotten so such a roaring start it makes the fireworks of 1998 look like deadball era stuff. Not only are home runs flying out of the ballpark, but even more runners are on base when they do. On April 23, Fernando Tatis of the Cardinals does Robin Ventura one better and hits two grand slams in the same inning, both off the same pitcher, luckless Dodger hurler Chan Ho Park. So many grand slams have been hit in the majors thus far that, at the current rate, the league will more than double the total hit in 1998. If this run-scoring pace is maintained for the rest of the season, it would lead to the highest tally in the majors since 1930. The Indians seem determined to break the league’s historic offensive records all by themselves, as a Cleveland wrecking crew headed by Jim Thome and Manny Ramírez is on pace to score 1,149 runs, which would shatter the high water mark of 1,067 set by the 1931 Yankees.

All the long balls do wonders for attendance and ratings. They do far less for the pitchers, and for teams that rely on pitching. The offensive explosion, combined with a directive from the commissioner’s office for umpires to redefine the strike zone, has saddled Atlanta’s formerly unimpeachable starting pitchers with a collective ERA a full run higher than they logged in 1998. If the mighty pitching staff of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz is not immune to the pain, then no one is. Most hurlers simply shrug their shoulders and take their lumps. Others find their own means of leveling the playing field, like Brian Moehler of the Tigers, who’s caught doctoring the ball with sandpaper during a game against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays on May 1. Moehler is ejected and receives a 10-game suspension.

Some fans are less concerned with the inequity between offense and pitching then they are with the growing gap between baseball’s haves and have-nots. When the Yankees visit Kansas City for a series beginning on April 30, some 2,500 fans make their own statement by staging a walkout, leaving behind fake dollar bills and signs proclaiming SMALL MARKETS ARE DYING. Those who remain turn their backs to the plate whenever the visitors are at bat and display signs with unambiguous pronouncements such as THANK YOU STEINBRENNER FOR RUINING BASEBALL. Most fans of small market teams show their displeasure via the old fashioned method of not showing up at all. In small-market Montréal, once the glow of opening day fades, the Expos paid attendance dips to an average of 9,000 per game.

If it’s any consolation to these fans, many teams who spent big in the offseason have little to show for it. Baltimore has been sapped with so many injuries they are almost out of contention already. The Dodgers, another checkbook champ during the winter, aren’t far behind the Orioles in the categories of underperforming and hours lost to the disabled list. The Angels have struggled as well, as their biggest offseason acquisition, Mo Vaughn, has been injured most of the year. This rash of bad luck for big spenders has had no effect on the most havingest of haves, however, as the Yankees are right where they should be, neck and neck in the American League East with the surprising Red Sox.

As for the Mets, despite a torrent of injuries and the grousing of Bobby Bonilla, they have plenty of reasons to accentuate the positive. Benny Agbayani and Roger Cedeño have picked up the slack in a hobbled outfield. The infield has remained healthy while transforming many a potential hit into an out, and nearly every member of that infield is hitting the cover off the ball (Rey Ordoñez the lone exception). His knee injury and the occasional slump aside, Mike Piazza has been Mike Piazza. Masato Yoshii has rebounded from the awful start to his season to become the team’s best starter. The starting rotation’s deficiencies have been made up for, and then some, by a lights-out bullpen. Apart from a few hiccups, Armando Benítez has been lights out as the eighth inning man. Benítez, Dennis Cook, and Turk Wendell have formed an impregnable bridge to John Franco, who, amazingly, has converted all of his save chances so far.

As the Mets return from Pittsburgh and May slips into June, the team, its fans, and even the media can dare to feel good about the team. Within a week, no one will.

Next Chapter: Chapter 3: The Pretender