We spend a lot of time on a lot of Mets blogs and boards – and plenty of other baseball sites besides – and there are incredible number of amateur, semi-pro, and full-time bloggers covering our favorite blue and orange pastime. But now and then, we come across some really fantastic posts – writing and coverage that deserves more than just a quick link. So we’ve decided to kick off some (but not all) of these Sunday night linkfests with a new feature: post of the week.
And this week, that honor goes to a blog that we suspect will rack up a few of them over the course of a year. The A Train Mets Post of the Week belongs to Jason Fry’s elegeic and sentimental My Swoboda at Faith and Fear in Flushing – a tribute to Ron Swoboda that goes well beyond the back of the baseball card. Jason follows Rocky from the Mets bench in ‘65 to his late career sportscasting gig in New Orleans, and finds a player well-known for a single moment of defensive genius in the 1969 World Series and a man with a strong point of view about baseball and life.
We’ll give you a taste of this deep and fascinating post here, but please do yourself a favor and read the whole thing:
Swoboda managed the difficult and dubious feat of hurting his development as a ballplayer by alternately thinking too much and not at all. (Years after he retired, he admitted he still had nightmares about facing one of the great hurlers of the ’60s and not being able to get set in the batter’s box.) He wasn’t always popular with teammates, who were annoyed by his on-field mistakes and his off-field gift of gab. When reporters entered the clubhouse after a Met win, it wasn’t uncommon to hear someone yell out “Tell them about it, Rocky!” It should come as no surprise that one of his best friends on the team was the irrepressible, quotable Tug McGraw. (The other was Kranepool.) But Swoboda was pretty quotable himself: In ‘69, he was booed after striking out five times in one game, and opined that “if we lost, I’d be eating my heart out. But since we won, I’ll only eat one ventricle.”
And by the way, if you liked that post – buy the book of the same name by Jason’s blog partner Greg Prince (with a forward by Jason).
Elsewhere in RSS-powered Metland, spring training dragged along with crappy Mets starting pitching, stories of Jose Reyes working out and smiling quite a bit, a certain DWI arrest, and more discussion of the Metsies suddenly full basket of youthful – and near-ready – baseball talent.
At My Summer Family, coop has a brilliant post on Dwight Gooden, in trouble once again, and talks about Darryl Strawberry, Doc, and why fans still root for this mid-80s duo of unfullfilled promise. “Part of addiction is forgiveness. Darryl Strawberry asked for it, in his own special way, and we gave it to him.”
Meanwhile, our guy Jose Reyes is back and Andrew Vazzano has it exactly right about his training/playing regimen for the rest of the spring: “Wouldn’t you rather 150 solid games out of Reyes instead of hurrying to get back in time for Opening Day and risking injury or ignoring his health issues? I would.”
Will Chris Carter win a spot on the Mets bench? The guy’s a throwback, filthy uniform hustler who came over in the Billy Wagner deal last year and has won some hearts and minds – including GravediggerHebner at RealDirtyMets, who tells the Carter tale through links and quotations.
Finally (and we do mean finally), Mack makes his annual predictions, and the observations about the Mets are pretty brutal: “My second impression was how much talent separates the core of this team (David Wright, Jose Reyes, Jason Bay, Carlos Beltran, Johan Santana, and Francisco Rodriquez) from the rest of the staff. It really is two completely different teams, something you also usually see on a small-market team. Five or six great players followed by twenty minimum salary guys.” It gets worse from there – much worse. Pour yourself a stiff one before wading in. Cracked one commenter: “it seems like your next prediction should be something like human extinction.”
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