G-Fafif

This was briefly a 7-7 ballgame. 1982 allowing runs just like Bambi's bullpen.

Justin's pitching lights-out at PSL and continues to be from Long Island.

A friend and I developed a new coverline for the 1982 yearbook by midseason: BY GEORGE, WE SUCK. It was as "New Mets" as things could get in the winter of '81-82, yet the yearbook clung to the old-timey motif that had lately gained favor among publication decisionmakers. Perhaps the hand of Wilpon was at work. The ad treatment he signed off on in 1980 featured Jackie Robinson and Ralph Branca (instead of Bobby Thomson) in print iterations. The TV commercials from 1981 showed Shea empty, save for the echoes of past triumphs. That guy really liked his old days. The nostalgic reverie for a tradition-steeped pastime is not a terrible idea (even if bringing Bamberger in to manage wasn't a great one), yet, as with 1980, the execution is local community center art fair. "Oh...I get it. They're both named George and they're on the Mets. How clever. How much? Three dollars? Sure. Happy to help the kids. Can you break a five? You can't? Wait, maybe I've got singles." Not that it looked any more prescient in hindsight, but the Mets did outdoor advertising in '82 focusing on Foster, Kingman and Valentine as a "new source of power". Those three gripping bats and scowling could have been a pretty intense yearbook cover for a couple of games. The Mets' traditional aversion to slugging has always made any evidence that they have players who can, in fact, hit balls over fences seem fairly exotic. Perhaps that explains why Todd Hundley's 41st home run takes precedent over Lance Johnson's 227 base hits or Bernard Gilkey's 117 RBIs as the focal point of the 1997 cover. You could have had all three gripping bats and scowling. Each member of the record-setting/tying triumvirate was responsible for nearly a third of all enthusiasm generated during the 1996 season and they were all returning. But they went with Hundley and they did it either innovatively or weird. I didn't really get the point of the Action Jackson business, but maybe the technology budget was bulging that March. I was impressed that the Mets paid homage to something specific, something that had just happened, something reasonably historic. (Man, that Hundley's gonna be our catcher well into the 21st century!) Todd wound up hitting more homers than George as a Met. His cover goes farther, too.

Early on, I heard it explained as some combination of grinding it out and spreading the offense around, the latter more suggestive of spreading rock salt. Anything like this, when it's attached to the Mets winning, is great. They just shouldn't get carpal tunnel from it.

So this is the middle of the road, where the latest early yearbook meets the earliest later yearbook. Appropriate, then, that it's a multicultural event. Let us reach across the diamond of time and shake hands with our younger and older selves. I'd never seen the Spanish edition of the 1989 annual before this tournament. It's a sharp presentation. Kudos for a whole other cover, unlike 1988's replica design. I like the dashboard gauge. The Mets weren't particularly Los Mets in 1989, so I don't know how they arrived on the players they featured. Surnames notwithstanding, Hernandez and Fernandez never came across as the least bit bilingual, but they were Met All-Stars, and that should be enough. Ditto for Strawberry and Cone. The first yearbook of the 1990s made a good, clean pitch, too. In those days, every five games was a spin through a veritable dream rotation -- and when it wasn't, specifically when Gooden went out in mid-1989, we messed around for only a few turns before going out and grabbing Viola. Two Cy Youngs striding tall, flanked by four other accomplished starters, leaving it to the Mets fan to ascertain what the cover was getting at. Pretty solid, much like the Mets' pitching depth heading into 1990 (yet somehow we fell way behind the Pirates and never put them away when we had the chance; so much for 75% of the game). I like both covers. I'll go with the specificity of 1990 over the randomness, as intriguing as it is, of 1989 en Español.

Partial right elbow UCL tear. Fuck. "May need surgery," according to Matt Ehalt of the Record.

D'Arnaud to D'L; Nido up (and will wear No. 3).

Note the obit says he was the last pitcher Casey Stengel removed from a game, Miller for McGraw, before Ol' Case went out on the town and broke his hip on Old Timers Weekend. In his 32 Met appearances across two years, he pitched in only three wins, though the last of them provided a memorable platform for a Met who'd be around quite a while. On September 16, 1966, a game at Candlestick in which lefty Miller pitched to one batter (walking Willie McCovey), Buddy Harrelson tripled twice and stole twice, the second of a theft of home plate. The kid also turned a couple of double plays and cemented himself into the shortstop job for next year and next decade.

That silver bar separating the artist's rendering of Citi Field from the rest of the 2009 cover is symbolic. It's there to tell us you need the correct ticket to ascend to the exclusive provinces of the new world class home of the New York Mets. Even the players who are taking that UP escalator toward the Ebbets Club are running into the barrier and needing to show they belong. That's my theory, anyway. I don't know what's graphically going on. Are the Mets lifting the curtain and revealing Citi Field? Are they rolling back the lid on a can of sardines? You have a new ballpark, a team full of players presumed ready to contend, a pleasing inaugural logo and the overtones of a less pleasing inaugural logo...and it's all Colorformed onto a cover that never accomplishes the simple task of welcoming us to our new home. The fetish with including fistfuls of Mets is a detriment year after year. What is the purpose? "I'm really on the fence about this experience, but that thumbnail of Mike Pelfrey is what's selling me." No doubt there are meetings about who to include, who to leave out, who is gonna have a stronger arbitration case if his agent can claim he's intrinsic to the team's marketing plans because of his spot on the cover of the last yearbook. The Mets included only one of their players on the 1971 yearbook cover and it was plenty. I can picture the action scene, the first (of precious few) the Mets have used, being illustrated for one of those early '80s "this is what baseball looks like romanticized" covers. The photo gets the image across successfully. I always liked shots at Shea that also included somebody just chillin' in whichever dugout is in the background. Sure Mota is sliding for his life, Grote is bracing for the worst and Crawford wants to avoid a futuristic replay challenge, but the real story is the Dodgers trainer or whoever he is not being moved to interrupt his daydream. It's an interesting shift from every previous Mets cover. Those spoke to Mets identity and Mets experience. This is Mets baseball. Come get a good seat for it. Read all about those who execute it inside this fine publication. It's the last yearbook (save for stray revised editions) that I don't remember from its season in the sun, but I picked it up thirty or so years later and was glad to have it. I'm glad to vote for it here. I'm glad to not vote for 2009. Citi Field is an old enough shoe now, but I still resent its rise. This cover brings back all those Shea-deprived sentiments. A great cover might have gotten my vote, but not my heart.

Fman for IGT President for Life!

1962 Mets: 1-9 after 10 games. 2018 Mets: 9-1 after 10 games. Yet it's the 1962 Mets yearbook that is off to the best start ever in this league. Ain't analytics grand?

Benjamin Grimm wrote: Is LJ Mazzilli forthright in his Christian faith? And has anybody seen John Christensen lately?

They kept Nimmo when they could have traded him for Andrew McCutchen. I think they like him fine.

Ceetar wrote: Yup, this is still the organization employing the 'christianity is my brand' guy. He's 31 and can't get above Binghamton -- tell me that's not about his religion!

Some goon caller to WFAN, prefacing his comment with "this isn't gonna be popular and probably a little politically incorrect," suggests Mets have it in for those who are forthright in their Christian faith, citing Murphy not being retained almost two-and-a-half years ago and Nimmo today. Oswalt, a known Satan-worshipper, couldn't be reached for a statement.

Oswalt gets No. 55. Nimmo gets playing time.

Nimmo down for Oswalt.

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: I inherited a Mullin original given to my Dad hanging right here next to me. Hard to shoot it without the window reflecting light on it. Fan-freaking-tastic.

Coleman is a lefty hitter and thrower. Hasn't advanced beyond A-ball after five professional seasons. .207/.309/.301. 245 strikeouts in 893 plate appearances.

L.J. Mazzilli has been traded to the MFYs for OF Kendall Coleman.

According to Willard Mullin's Golden Age of Baseball Drawings 1934-1972, the model for Baby Met was the artist's grandson, Ted Rhodes.

The 2018 Mets are one of the most beloved teams in franchise history, of course, and someday the eight slanted Mets might float into legend like the three heads of 1969. Then again, the 1969 heads can't beat the 2011 cover, so probably not. Just knowing that digitally Metted Todd Frazier was probably rounding the bases after hitting a home run for the MFYs corrupts the cover's integrity. To a lesser extent, deGrom with short hair pitching in Citi Field long before deGrom with short hair ever pitched in Citi Field creeps me out, too. I know this happens all the time, and I'm just as thrown off by Spring Training pics mixed in with regular-season action shots, but let's have a little innocence in our baseball. Can't get more innocent than Baby Met. Then again, I've read the face Mullin drew drew its inspiration from the Original Mets' original manager, who hadn't been a baby for 71 or so years. So if that kid is related in any way to Ol' Case, he knows what he's getting himself into. "New York National League Baseball Club" in case you're not sure. I love it. I love all of it. What a way to get started. The 2018 cover is inoffensive enough (and I do appreciate the first three guys on each level facing the guy on the right, and the guy on the right facing them right back). But the 1962 cover makes a statement: we're here, we're Mets, get used to us. To use a phrase you didn't hear much back then, the 1962 Mets win easily.

I see no need for anybody besides Fman to ever start another IGT.

The inflection point floating through my mind is the twelfth game of 2006, when Pedro Martinez won his 200th and the Mets separated themselves from the floundering second-place Braves by five games. It set a record for largest divisional lead after a dozen contests, which meant 150 games remained, but the guard felt resolutely changed. Pedro was in his second Met year, but everybody else who had a big hand in the win -- Delgado, Lo Duca, Nady, Sanchez and Wagner -- was an off-season acquisition, conveying the transformation from getting beat by the Braves to beating the Braves. The last out was Wagner's K of Braves veteran backup backstop Todd Pratt, which somehow also felt appropriate, that we were on to an era when the Wild Card wouldn't be sate our division-sized appetite. The Mets lost the next two, but never fell behind the Braves or anybody else. The closest thing they had to a showdown series was mid-June in Philly, when we swept them (at the end of that glorious 9-1 road trip that wound through L.A. and Phoenix), but those Phillies never felt like legit competition. 2006 remains the only regular season to hold a candle to 1986 in terms of blowing away the field. 1988 was won by 15 games, but the Pirates and, to a certain extent, the Expos stayed close until late August. There've been no other April-to-October blowouts. Man, this is so much better than invoking 1979, 1993 and 2017.

Mets had ten games in the books when they went to St. Louis, have only eight having finished in Washington. Small sample sizes either way, but 1986 felt close to clinched when we left town. What made it resonate was how and where 1985 ended, the Mets coming so close to knotting the Cardinals with three to play and just missing. With no Wild Card, it was all about catching, passing and burying the Cardinals as 1986 came into view. And we did it in a blink. We were 11-3, they were dead. Because the Cardinals held such an outsize place in our psyche, and because the Phillies were the team that delayed us from making it official in September (and finished a very distant second), it tends to get lost in the larger retelling that the Expos were the only club that stayed close enough to eat the Mets' dust for a while. Entering the evening of May 24 (they'd won at Candlestick, we'd be playing at the Murph), Montreal crept to within 2 1/2 of us. We'd been phenomenal, yet they wouldn't go away. After one season neck and neck with the Cubs and another with the Cardinals, feeling anybody's breath on the back of our necks was discomfiting. Padres trailed, 5-4, in the ninth, got their first two on versus McDowell. Davey went to Orosco, who retired the next three (Bruce Bochy as the third out) and it never got any closer in the NL East. Obviously, the Mets shook the 'Spos off like they shook off everybody, yet as late as June 24, the spread was "only" eight games following two Expo victories at Shea. The finale, a midweek matinee, actually bordered on critical. Montreal jumped out to a 2-0 lead, but the Mets stormed back as the Mets tended to do and won, 5-2. I warmly remember the sentiment from Expos shortstop Hubie Brooks: seven games back (which they would've been had they swept) is close to five; nine games back (which they were) is close to ten. With that disappointment publicly uttered, I knew the race was over. I wish I could say the same of the dynamic between the 2018 descendants of the Mets and Expos. Can't yet, but it's pretty good as is.