Quote:
Originally Posted by DeweyintheHall
According to The Sporting News, May 13, 1978, the Mets were planning on bringing Bill Greif up from Tidewater to get some action in the now-extinct Yankee/Met exhibition game to be held on April 27. I've tried unsuccessfully to see whether he actually was called up and active for the game, or whether he even might have played. I know it was only an exhibition, but for my 1978 project I would still like to include him if he did suit up, maybe with an asterisk. Does anyone out there know whether he was called to big club and whether he played? A box score would be appreciated as well. Thanks!
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Yeah, good luck with that. As a Mets fan who used to love the Mayor's Trophy game.....by 1978, the Mets were so bad that, literally, nobody gave a crap. I cared less about the rivalry than I did a chance to hear or see some of the minor leaguers in action. In the 60s and early 70s, you could catch the game on the radio, sometimes even on television. But, by 1978, the papers didn't even mention it, let alone print a box score. It wasn't on TV or radio. It might as well not have happened. 1978 was pretty much the nadir of the series. They couldn't even draw 10,000. The only reason anybody remembers it at all is because that was the extra inning game that Graig Nettles, according to Sparky Lyle's book, tried to "throw". They later said that was a joke and I believe them. Baseball took it seriously but they also accepted the explanation. Trying to throw a game that you end up winning? That was more the Mets speed. They were so bad by then that they couldn't win if they tried and they couldn't lose if they tried. If you knew one thing about the '78 Mets, you knew that, whatever they were trying to do, they'd screw it up. But the nature of the joke should not be lost in the shuffle. And that is that nobody from either side wanted to play the game anymore. The two teams were so far apart (Yankees winning, Mets losing) that it wasn't even good for bragging rights. The Mets in '78 had nothing to brag about. Sure, the Mets were bad in the sixties, but they were new and the Yankees, in those years, were not world beaters either. What you can find online would tell you only that Mardie Cornejo took the loss in '78 (and that Ron Hodges and Ed Kranepool played).
I tend to doubt Grief was up for the game. Officially, he was in Tidewater to "rehab". He made only three appearances for Tidewater before both he and the Mets concluded he was toast. I know he spent most of May on the DL and I think the last of those three appearances was in June. So my guess would be he wasn't called-up for the game as his arm was pretty much dead. If he had pitched in the Mayor's Trophy Game, I think that would have been mentioned in Bill's
SABR bio, which it isn't. He definitely pitched for the Mets in the spring, though, if you need an excuse to include him.