NEW YORK METS 2016 SEASON THREAD

Murphy continuing to play exceptionally well. D'Arnaud, Granderson, Lagares also contributing. Familia with the 4 out save. I'd love to see Cespedes, Duda and Wright start hitting again. Game 3 of the NLDS is what you get when the Mets start hitting.
 
Ended up dropping 140 for a 500 level seat tonight. Will probably do a bit of SRO with my buddy who is going as well. Can't wait, first ever postseason baseball game. Let's go Mets!!!!
 
Great game to go to, Thor pitched very well, nice to see the pen shut the game down.

Degrom in game 3 is huge, series is over if they could lock the next game down

Duda is doing nothing smh
 
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Beautiful win. Great performance by Thor. Thor just destroyed the same team that owned him on his debut.

It looked like Duda wanted to stay home. He didn't want to show up at all. :smh:
 
2 more boys!! Loved that the tying run never even came to the plate for the Cubs. Not sure my nerves could take it being in that building tonight.
 
Any one else find pedro a little annoying with his "Thor" screaming? Take off his chin hair and Pedro has no chin at all :lol:

But about those Mets.

Murphy is a legend now. Duda needs to pick up his skirt and get to work. I like Grandersons hustle. Cespedes throw at the plate was :x and :D but he needs to start hitting again.
 
DENKSSS said:
Hopefully Duda and cespedes bats wake up tomorrow.
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Cespedes almost hit one into RF yesterday and had a RBI single. I'm not worried about him. He just needs to shorten his swing. Duda, however, needs to wake up. He hasn't given them anything yet. At least Wright who is struggling has three RBIs to his credit.
 
TheRealRell said:
Cespedes almost hit one into RF yesterday and had a RBI single. I'm not worried about him. He just needs to shorten his swing. Duda, however, needs to wake up. He hasn't given them anything yet. At least Wright who is struggling has three RBIs to his credit.
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BIG RBIS
 
http://niketalk.com/t/287472/2014-2...-15-kc-2-tor-0-8-07-pm-et/53940#post_24360202

I posted about Noah's childhood yearbook picture in the MLB thread. A title of an article that got me curious. Long article but good read. Thought I'd post the article here.


The Met, the Myth: Searching for Noah Syndergaard’s Viking Roots in Denmark

By SAM BORDEN and TIM ROHANSEPT. 18, 2015

View media item 1753514 In Haderslev, Denmark, the house and church baptism record of Anne Sondergaard, a distant relative of the Mets pitcher Noah Syndergaard. Bottom right: A picture from an exhibition on Vikings at a museum in Jelling, Denmark. Credit Michael Drost-Hansen for The New York Times; Al Bello/Getty Images; Kongernes Jelling

HADERSLEV, Denmark — More than 120 years ago, Simon Hansen Sondergaard left this town in southwest Denmark for the United States. He settled in Iowa, along with four of his five siblings, where he farmed and raised a family.

Four generations later, his great-great-grandson was born in Mansfield, Tex. Noah Syndergaard — with a surname slightly Anglicized from his Sondergaard ancestry — would go on to become a budding star pitcher for the Mets, beloved by the team’s fans for his fastball and, in part, for his lineage. Syndergaard’s stature has grown this season, and some fans have worn Viking horns to games he has pitched. Others have carried hammers in tribute to his nickname, Thor. Expect some of that to be on display Saturday when Syndergaard is on the mound against the Yankees at Citi Field.

Here, though, the Syndergaard phenomenon has not quite taken hold. Even if he leads the Mets to a World Series triumph, this part of the world — his ancestral home — will not pay much attention. After all, October here is not so much known for being the end of baseball season but rather for being the early days of hockey season (as well as the beginning of the typically long winter).

View media item 1753515 A Mets fan wearing a Viking helmet during one of Noah Syndergaard’s starts last month against the Orioles in Baltimore. Credit Patrick Semansky/Associated Press

“They’re wonderful people here — very kind, very welcoming,” said Cory Quirk, an American hockey player who is a center for Sonderjyske, the local team here (and defending playoff champion of the Metal Ligaen, Denmark’s top hockey league). “They love their sports, too — but those sports are soccer and hockey.”

He added, “I’m not sure most people here have ever even seen a baseball game.”

Quirk may not have been far off. The pedestrian area in town is dotted with bookshops, clothing stores (most of which sell warm coats), cafes and an unusually high number of pizzerias for a European city, but the owner of one of the few sports bars said he had never heard of Syndergaard or the Mets. He also offered that no customer in his memory had asked to have a baseball game of any kind shown on television.

Near the heart of the town center, at the local sporting goods store (which was running a special on soccer balls covered in F.C. Barcelona crests), an employee said an American football and basketball were in stock — the basketball even had a Knicks logo — but he apologized because baseball equipment was nearly impossible to find.

View media item 1753516 Hans Peter Geil, the mayor of Haderslev, Denmark, does not think many of the town's residents have heard of Syndergaard. Credit Michael Drost-Hansen for The New York Times

“The name of the team is the Mets?” the man said quizzically. He paused and added, “We sometimes have Yankees hats, but that’s it.”

The mayor of the town, Hans Peter Geil, has a tricky citizenry to navigate because of Haderslev’s proximity to the German border and its history as a former German territory. Geil faced backlash in May, for example, when he added “Hadersleben,” the city’s name in German, to a sign at the town’s edge.

Yet despite the inherent schisms, Geil did not hesitate to cite a consensus when asked to estimate how many of his 56,000 constituents might have heard of Syndergaard. He simply paused for a moment, shrugged and then made a “0” with his thumb and index finger.

Even relatives are unaware. Anna Marie Dideriksen, 79, is believed to be the last living descendant of the Sondergaard line still in Denmark. Although she is Syndergaard’s second cousin twice removed, she had no idea about his success (or even existence).

“I’ve seen baseball on the news, maybe once,” she said at her apartment in Kolding, about 20 miles north of here. “We didn’t even play sports as children. Handball, O.K., but that was it. Baseball, we didn’t have it.”

Dideriksen did not even know she had family in the United States. Her grandmother, Anne Sondergaard, was the one sibling of Simon Hansen Sondergaard’s who did not emigrate. Anne remained in Denmark instead, marrying a blacksmith (and soldier) and settling in nearby Fjelstrup. Dideriksen, who smiled as she talked about visiting her grandmother, said there was never any discussion about what had happened to the rest of her grandmother’s family.

“We didn’t talk about it — never, never,” she said. “I did not even know about it until today. Our lives were here. That was all that mattered.”

In recent years, Dale Syndergaard, Noah’s first cousin twice removed, did some research into the family’s lineage and struggled to find any significant information about the line of Sondergaards that had remained in Denmark. Of course, Dideriksen said she had no idea anyone was looking for her — or information about her grandmother — and recalled Anne Sondergaard as warm and loving, the kind of grandmother who always wore an apron and once gave Dideriksen a tiny red suitcase to use with her dolls.

View media item 1753517 Members of the Aarhus club, one of three certified baseball teams in Denmark, getting a field ready. They play on a converted softball field that they share with cricket and archery clubs. Credit Michael Drost-Hansen for The New York Times

Anne’s personality was even more noticeable, Dideriksen said, in contrast with her husband, Nicolai Hinrik Hansen Petersen, who was much colder to his family.

“I remember he was always sitting by the radio, listening, and he didn’t like children,” Dideriksen said of her grandfather. “Whenever we would come in the door, he would snap, ‘Shut the door — you’ll let in the flies.’ ”

Sports were not a significant part of their lives as children, Dideriksen said, and there was a playground near their house, but it had only a single swing. The cold climate made for endless winters and prolonged time inside for children anyway.

“If anyone was going to play anything at that time, it was probably going to be handball,” said Bent Vedsted Ronne, the chief historian at the Haderslev archive. “There are not many records going back so far, but handball has always been the most popular sport here.”

View media item 1753518 The family of Noah Syndergaard (34) believes it is related to at least one Viking, on his mother’s side. Credit Al Bello/Getty Images

Handball’s popularity in Denmark has continued, and of course soccer has a strong presence, as in almost all of Europe. There are even a handful of American football clubs that have sprouted up in Denmark, and N.F.L. games, or at least highlights, can be seen with some regularity on television.

Baseball is far less developed. There are only three certified baseball clubs in Denmark — in Copenhagen, Aarhus and Odense — and the first regulation field in the country is set to open soon (though there have been some construction delays). The club in Aarhus plays on a converted softball field, with a portable artificial-turf pitcher’s mound it rolls into position. It shares space with a cricket club and an archery club, which is planning to move soon because it needs more room to accommodate its growing membership.

That does not mean there are no baseball fans. On a recent Tuesday night, about a dozen members of the Aarhus club gathered at their field by the train tracks — the team does not have a name — and played. Among them was Jesper Jensen, 41, who works in Internet security. He wore a Mets hat and grinned when Syndergaard’s name was mentioned.

“I only started paying attention to baseball about 10 years ago, and I always liked New York, but everyone in the whole world likes the Yankees, so I figured I would support the Mets,” he said. “When I saw Syndergaard’s name for the first time this year, I said to myself right away, ‘He must be from Denmark.’ It’s pretty great to see.”

Rod Moore, an American who has lived in Denmark for several decades, is the head of the club as well as the president of the Danish Baseball Federation. He said that the sport was growing in popularity and that the Aarhus club had players from Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Cuba, among other countries. Many of the players have been posted in Denmark for their jobs. Some are students. Others are simply Danes who enjoyed playing their version of the bat-and-ball game known as rounders while growing up and wanted to try the next level.

The Aarhus club uses wood bats — “It can really sting if the weather is cold,” Moore said — and practices two or three times a week from April to October, snow permitting. The team plays about eight games per year (though Moore is always looking for other potential matchups) and imports its equipment from Italy, the Netherlands and, occasionally, the United States.

“We had 17 balls last week before we played a game,” Moore said. “There were a lot of foul balls. Now we’re running short.”

The quality of play at Tuesday’s practice was, as the Danes might say, ikke godt (not good). One player managed to make a diving catch in center field (which turned into an unassisted triple play because of some ill-advised base running), and there were a few well-hit balls as Moore tossed medium-speed pitches. There were also many fly balls that were missed altogether, and several players struggled to move athletically because they were wearing jeans, sneakers or, in a few cases, both.

View media item 1753519 A picture from an exhibition on Vikings at a museum in Jelling, Denmark. Credit Kongernes Jelling

At one point Jensen pondered, out loud, what it would be like if Syndergaard ever showed up and pitched to their club (“I don’t think there would be many hits”). He also laughed when relating to others how Mets fans had embraced the possibility that Syndergaard might descend from Vikings.

“A lot of people from Denmark think they are from Vikings, but is he?” Jensen said. Several local historians here said it was virtually impossible to know.

The Thor nickname, Syndergaard said, came from a fan when he was still a prospect in the Toronto Blue Jays organization around the time the movie “Thor” became popular. The fan saw his last name and his physique and apparently thought he bore some resemblance to the lead character, played by the Australian actor Chris Hemsworth.

Syndergaard and his family have wholly embraced the moniker. Noah has “Thor” inscribed on his glove. His mother, Heidi Syndergaard, sometimes signs emails as “Jord,” the mother of Thor. When Noah takes the mound, he pretends to pick up Thor’s hammer, a mental trick he learned from the Mets’ team psychologist.

View media item 1753520 The tomb of Gorm the Old, the first recognized king of Denmark, at a church in Jelling. Credit Michael Drost-Hansen for The New York Times

“It’s kind of a trigger point for me to lock in,” Syndergaard said.

His family believes it is related to at least one Viking, on his mother’s side. Tim Hartman, Noah’s uncle, said he had traced their lineage back to Thorfinn Torf-Einarsson, who was once the Earl of Orkney, an archipelago off Scotland.

He was known for a more chilling name: Thor the Skull-splitter.

But Hartman found him by taking a detour from the Hartman line and going back through his grandmother’s roots. “It’s down one of those other paths,” he said.

Dale Syndergaard conducted a lot of his research on his own, combing through parish records. He simply had a curiosity, and it was something to keep him busy in retirement. After more than 15 years of work, he put together a genealogy book centered around Hans Peter Christiansen Sondergaard, Noah’s great-great-great-grandfather, who was born around Haderslev in November 1837.

“They were mostly farming people,” Dale said. “Hard-working. Not rich.” He chuckled at that. Sondergaard translated to “South Farm.”

“You go back to the 1600s, and that’s when the records dry up,” he said. “And the Vikings would’ve been long before that.”

Morten Teilmann-Jorgensen, the project manager for an exhibition on Vikings at a museum in nearby Jelling, said that most families from the region had some Viking ancestry, but that there were also plenty of people from that era who simply stayed on their farms and never went to battle. Ronne, who oversees the Haderslev archive, said he had found some Norwegian heritage in a different side of Syndergaard’s family, increasing the likelihood that Noah has at least a bit of traditional Viking blood. Records from that period are difficult to come by, however, so Ronne was hesitant to make a proclamation one way or the other.

“The truth,” he said, “is that there is almost no way to know.”

Told that Mets fans might prefer a more definitive answer, he riffled through some papers on his desk and laughed.

“If the fans wear horns, I think that is O.K.,” he said. “My best guess? I think there is some Viking in his past, yes.”
 
Big game tonight, fellas. I feel confident with DeGrom pitching. I just hope our offense continues to score runs. Duda better start hitting though :x
 
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