What You Can’t Make Up

Sheila York


I’m a Mets fan. It’s like being a writer. You spend time, love and hope on something that has every chance of breaking your heart. And it’s not like being a writer. In baseball, anybody with a keyboard or a cell phone and the talk show's number can declaim about you with the certainty of an expert. In writing, it’s anybody with a keyboard. 

But let’s get back to that time-love-hope thing. 

It’s been a long dry spell for a Mets fan. The last World Series they won – they’ve won only 2 in their 54 years of existence – was in 1986. They won a World Series in 1969, and lost in 1973 and 2000. And they got to what’s called postseason 3 other times, but not since 2006. (Of course, if you’re a Cubs fan, that sounds pretty good.) 

Then this summer, the team on which I have showered selfless affection through even the last several years of misery did more than I ever would have thought possible. 

The magical summer

In mid-July, the Mets were hanging on by their pitching staff’s fingernails to any chance at the postseason. Last Saturday night, they won the National League Eastern Division. 

They’re holding beer bottles because they sprayed
the champagne all over each other and the carpet.
I've never met a carpet I thought deserved champagne more than I did.
Photo credit: David Kohl/USA Today Sports

If you want to know how this happened, google Yoenis Cespedes Mets Miracle. This is the guy, after having launched another homer. Not sure what game. It happened a lot. 

Photo credit: Getty Images

On July 31, at the trading deadline – I mean, ten minutes before the 4pm ET deadline – the Mets announced they’d concluded a deal for Cespi (what we call him around our house). 


From that moment, the Mets went from 2 games behind in their division to win the East by 8.5 games over the experts’ favorite, the Washington Nationals. Google Papelbon Harper if you want to see what not living up to other peoples’ hype can do, and remember it when you’re tempted to say sports teaches teamwork. 

The Mets played .679 baseball. This means that in the last two months, they won more than 2 of every 3 games they played. Only one team in the majors (Toronto) won more in that stretch. 

My magical summer had one astonishing performance (please google Cespedes), but it was only possible because David Wright and Travis d’Arnaud came off the disabled list; the Mets acquired two solid bench players – Juan Uribe and Kelly Johnson – and Tyler Clippard for the bullpen; and they called up Michael Conforto from the minors. The rest of the team managed to hang in before those guys arrived. 

It’s a story you couldn’t make up. Well, you could, but people would roll their eyes. 

I’d like to share my 3 favorite You Can’t Make This Stuff Up stories. 

David Wright is too good to be true. Talented, humble, mature. And the hardest-working gifted player you might ever see. Diagnosed early in the season with spinal stenosis, a rare condition in which the channel that contains the spinal nerves and spinal cord narrows, he was on the disabled list for most of the season, learning to treat the condition – it cannot be cured – all the while knowing he might never play again. And he came back. And in his first at-bat (see below), he hit a monster home run. Cue the exploding light stanchion. Our captain. 

Photo credit: Bill Streicher/US Today Sports

Jeurys Familia. My vote for team MVP. He’s the closer. This means he comes in in the ninth inning when things are bad, and makes sure the team wins. His best friend on the team, Jenrry Mejía, was last year’s closer. Then Jenrry tested positive (twice) for a banned steroid so old-school a breathalyzer could have found it (the winner in the "you couldn’t make up somebody this dumb" category). Jeurys filled the role with power and poise at a time (pre-Cespi) when if the Mets scored 2 runs, it was a bonanza. He has saved 42 games. 

Photo credit: Brad Penner/USA Today Sports

Wilmer Flores. He’d never known any other team than the Mets, with whom he signed on as a minor leaguer when he was 16. Rumors hit social media on July 29 that he’d been traded so the Mets could get a bigger bat. The Mets front office wins the “clueless about social media” award for not realizing such a thing could be leaked and spread. Wilmer found out from fans in the stands. He was captured on TV wiping tears from his eyes while on the field. The trade fell through. And on July 31, the day they got Cespi, Wilmer hit the game-winning homer into the night sky in extra innings, and flew home clutching the Mets logo on his chest. 

Photo credit: Mike Stobe/Getty Images

The stuff you can’t make up has made up for a lot.



Copyright 2015 Sheila York

I Saw Jackie Robinson Play in Ebbets Field

When I was ten, I saw Jackie Robinson in the flesh play Second Base for the Brooklyn Dodgers in Ebbets Field. Now in my 70s, I saw Jackie in the movie, “42,” referring to the number on his baseball jersey. No comparison. On the wall I face when writing on my computer is a blown-up black-and-white photo in a cheap frame. Jackie’s in it alongside his brother 1950s Dodgers in uniform: ‘Pee Wee’ Reese, Gil Hodges, Carl Furillo, ‘Duke' Snider, Roy Campanella and ‘Preacher’ Roe. Like they just stepped out of the Dugout, exactly as I remember them.

On weekday mornings in summer, we would gather at the corner of Nassau and Bedford Avenues in Greenpoint, to take the Streetcar (a/k/a the Trolley), running direct to Ebbets Field and beyond, all the way to Sheepshead Bay and the Ocean along a pair of iron tracks hammered into the pavement up Bedford Avenue, the longest street in Brooklyn (10.2 miles). Took awhile to get there because the trolley ran through three sprawling neighborhoods, I remember—Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Flatbush. There were always four, five, or more of us. Most had money from home to buy a couple of ‘franks’ (with everything on it, please), a coke, and the price of admission (75 cents). Bleacher seats. Good as any because the stadium was among the smallest in the National League. The right field fence was only 275 feet away. What saved us was the fact that most home-run hitters hit from the right side of the Plate. The only thing that stood between a strong lefty hitting the ball over the fence into Bedford Avenue was Brooklyn pitching and Carl Furillo, roaming right field with his rifle right arm. We never stayed put in the Bleacher seats, anyhow. After a few innings, we’d sneak down one level to the Grandstand’s reserved seats in sections so empty that the ushers (old guys with Irish faces) would let us stay.

From those seats it felt like I could say something to Andy Pafko in Left Field and he’d hear me, but I’d have to yell to be heard by Duke Snider in Center. Of course, we knew all our Dodgers: Big Gil Hodges at First Base, Harold (Pee Wee) Reese at Shortstop, Jackie Robinson on Second, Billy Cox on Third, Roy Campanella (Campy) behind the Plate, Elwin (Preacher) Roe on the Mound, and Carl Furillo (‘the Reading Rifle’) in Right. We were nine or ten years old, from the same block, McGuinness Boulevard, named for the long-dead Alderman, Pete McGuinness (who incidentally had lived in the tenement next to mine). It was rare for a neighborhood boy to be anything but a Dodger fan, but two of our number were disloyal. Alan Cebulski was a Giant fan, who played chess on his stoop and, most galling of all, Peter McAllister, a Yankee Fan, whom we all razzed: Go live in Manhattan! but tolerated because his dad was a New York City Police Sergeant, so what could you do?

It was one of the greatest pleasures of the game to see Jackie run the bases: so quick, so smart , taking longer leads off the base than anyone once he got on. He gave the opposing pitchers fits, having to watch him constantly to thwart his running on a pitch to steal a base. I remember the way he ran: quick, almost mincing steps, then quick as a scared cat. He had a unique stance at the plate. Feet close together, bat held high, knees bent, corkscrewed. The movie never got that right. It was mostly about his troubles from being the first black man to play Major League baseball when he was signed by the Dodger General Manager Branch Rickey in 1947. I have to take off my hat to Harrison Ford for a fine gravelly performance as Rickey; he even looked like him. It hardly registered on us that Jackie was black; back then he was the heart and soul of ‘The Bums’ as we—in fact, all of Brooklyn—referred to our team.

The best thing about being in Ebbets Field on a summer’s afternoon in a bleacher seat was the lazy feeling of being suspended in time and space, as only a ten-year-old could know. Sounds came to me from Home Plate and the First Base line across the field in waves of soft murmurings. You could just about make out the announcer over the PA system but Ms. Gladys Gooding belting out the Star Spangled Banner at the start of the game was not to be shushed. The Seventh Inning Stretch loosed all that pent-up feeling in whoops and roughhousing on your friends. Game over, we’d descend to the ground on the winding cement exit ramps that girded the Stadium and always made me think, unaccountably, of the Great Wall of China.

I had the misfortune to go to a New York Mets game at the old Shea Stadium some years ago and also a Yankee game at the old Stadium (both times to shepherd out-of-town friends, baseball fans). The electronic din was unrelenting; lazy, murmuring summer afternoons were long gone. By 1954, I had left Brooklyn behind for a boarding school on the North Shore of Long Island. By 1955, I was still on Long Island and in the grip of a slow-growing amnesia, so that when the Brooklyn Dodgers, my once-upon-a-time native team, won their first ever World Series by beating their nemesis, the New York Yankees, I was indifferent. And when Walter O’Malley took the Dodgers to L.A., it was over: the romance of Brooklyn baseball and my childhood.

© 2013 Robert Knightly