Dana Brand’s Mets Fan Blog

I wasn’t really happy when we got Tom Glavine.  It seemed to me to be a classic move of the Phillips era:  getting a great player for a lot of money at the end of his career to try to win something before Piazza and Leiter melted.  I always admired Glavine, as an intelligent man and a great pitcher.  And I had always enjoyed watching him pitch since  I love to watch great control pitchers even more than I like to watch guys who have “great stuff.”  But Glavine’s identity was already fixed.  He was part of the great Braves rotation of the ‘90s and to put it very mildly, that’s not exactly a Mets identity. 

I just didn’t see him as a Met.  And I have continued to have trouble seeing him as a Met.    His pitching has been on and off.  And although it certainly seems as if he is a clubhouse presence, he doesn’t fit into my idea of a Mets clubhouse leader.  My idea of a leader on the Mets is someone like Clendennon, or Hernandez, or Delgado:  solid, stable, older guys with some flash, some craziness, who are right in the mix, guys you could never mistake for the parent who goes along on the field trip.  Glavine was too grown up.  He was a great pitcher, but he was a dad.  And he will always be the guy who came after Maddux and before Smolz.

Well, Tom Glavine is a Met now.  And he is one for all time.  We desperately needed someone to do what he has done, after losing Pedro and El Duque.  And with his paternal strength and competence, he stood up for us and he has bailed us out.  The way a dad does, the way a grownup does.  He did it in game 2 of the NLDS and now he has done it in game 1 of the NLCS.  He has eased our worst fears and he has given us firm ground to stand on.

Beltran also did something important last night.  He knows he is a Met now, after the extraordinary season he had.  But he knew he needed to do one more thing.  He came to us after having one of the best postseasons anyone had ever had.  He needed to show he could win postseason games for us.  He did that last night.  No one can invent for him the kind of story that haunts poor Alex Rodriguez.  Carlos Beltran comes through for us when it counts.  Now if can only get him to hit over .250 at Shea, he will be perfect.

I loved Endy Chavez’s diving catch.  I love these great postseason plays with which bench players carve their name onto the Mets’ wall of memory.  I loved the way he stood up and smiled and how Carlos Beltran smiled and hugged him.  Endy has the best ear-to-ear smile on a Met since Jerry Koosman (Mookie’s smile is different, Endy’s literally goes from one ear to the other).  This is a smiling team.  Did you see the way Jose Valentin smiled after his amazing play in the ninth inning?  A lot of times players don’t smile after great plays.  They stare straight ahead, all macho, as if great plays were part of their job.  But I see something important in the way these players smile when they make great plays.  A team that smiles like this is more formidable and more dangerous than a team that feels the need to scowl.  

I really enjoyed Billy Wagner last night.  I like the way he wears his hat pulled down on his head, as if he was trying not to be noticed.  I like the way he doesn’t look like he can throw 98 mph but does.  I like the way he looks like a hillbilly (his word) Anthony Hopkins.  Particularly with the stubble.  Like Hopkins he can look like a distinguished scholar and he can look like Hannibal Lechter.  Perfect for a closer. 

Are the Mets growing beards?  They look it.  That can’t just be an effect of the special playoff lights and cameras.  What is this and what would it mean?  I think it’s great.   It’s a slightly unsettling way of showing off their solidarity, their brotherhood.  It would also mark them as the non-Yankees. 

Boy, this team is good.  Boy this team is happy.  They are not overconfident because they can’t be with the starting pitching as it is.  But they seem to feel that this is theirs and if they stay focused they can take it.  They have won eight games in a row.  This doesn’t mean anything, but I am beginning to find it difficult to imagine them losing.

Somebody left a comment on the site about how it’s awful how the old green fence is now blue.  I always sit in the Loge and to this day I refer to them, to my family and friends, as “the orange seats.”  I don’t really know when they stopped being orange.  I know it was a very long time ago, but I really have no idea when.  They’re still orange in my mind, as the field boxes are yellow and the mezzanine is blue.  I sat in the Upper Deck for the second game of the NLDS and saw that they were red, not green.  How do you like that?  When did that happen?

When you love something this much, you don’t see the changes in it.  In the minds of many of us, Shea is young and beautiful forever.  As time passes, I am increasingly aware of how difficult it will be for me to see it come down. 

I know that it has been a great season.  Our team has won 97 games and it is one of the most attractive, cohesive, and enjoyable baseball teams I have ever seen.  But nothing this season has been normal.  Everything that has happened has felt unreal. 

We got into first place on the third day of the season.  And that was that.  By June the Mets were like a runner in a dream, wondering why he was so far in front, wondering why no one was keeping up with him.

And so we spent the summer watching them win, waiting for the postseason to begin so that the story could continue.  This sounds like a good thing, but it isn’t entirely.  The Mets had done something like this in 1986 and we all knew how much fun that was.  2006 was the 20th anniversary of that greatest of all Mets seasons and so it was in the back of our minds all summer.   There was even a reunion, where the great ‘86 team, older and thicker, showed up to offer the ‘06 team some of their plentiful excess karma. But this didn’t help matters.  As good as it was, we knew the ‘06 team was not the ‘86 team.  This team was fine, but we knew it wasn’t perfect.  And we had all of July, August, and September to think of how it wasn’t perfect and what this might mean in October.

Maybe, we thought, when they finally crossed the finish line, it would all seem real. 

Did it ever feel real?  I think it did, on the night of the clinching.  On that night, we saw what a wonderful team we had.  We realized them and they realized themselves.  But even that was unreal.  It shouldn’t have happened at Shea.  If the Phillies or the Pirates had only lost one game that weekend, we wouldn’t have had the lovefest at home that for a brief loud moment made the season seem real.

When the Mets woke up the next morning, they pinched themselves.  They were alive and awake.  They had won the division title.  And then they went and had their first real slump of the season.  They recovered at the end, only to lose, in rapid succession, their two best postseason starters. 

Give this team credit.  They didn’t falter.  They came through and won three straight from the Dodgers.  Everything was all right.  They had to wait two days as the Yankees hogged the headlines with the manufactured stories about Torre.  Finally, this morning, all that had run its course.  The Mets were ready for their closeup. 

And then this happens.  This unbelievably sad and stupid thing, this real death of an actual person playing for the New York Yankees.  The rain comes.  The game is called just as the crowd is gathering at Shea, getting out of their cars and trains.

I really feel that everything is going to be fine in the end.  This team has so much character and so much focus.  But I am still waiting for things to be normal, for things to be real.

Joe Torre is interviewed by Mike Francesa.  Mike has the gall to say that “this town” is hit hard by what happened to the Yankees.  Joe talks about the depths of his disappointment.  No one has a problem with Steinbrenner saying that losing in the first round is “unacceptable.” 

At this point I want to tear out what hair I have left.  Neither of these men can conceive of the possibility that it might be immature to be devastated by losing in the first round of the playoffs when one has made it to the playoffs in eleven consecutive seasons.  Neither acts as if he knows that even the very best team does not normally have more than a 60% chance of beating another team good enough to have made it to the playoffs.  They act as if something really terrible, something “unacceptable,” has happened.   Have they given any thought at all to how this might sound to fans of the other 29 baseball teams?  Are they not even a little bit embarrassed?

I have said most of what I have to say about the mindset of the contemporary Steinbrenner Yankees in my essay “Yankee Hatred.”  The link is to the right.  I think that what these people are feeling has now advanced to the point where it is a very serious pathology.  All I can hope is that the fans of the Mets never act and feel this way.  If only winning is acceptable, if nothing short of the World Championship will make you happy, then you ought to turn around and run for your life and get as far away from baseball as you possibly can.                   

You don’t have to be a genius to understand that the Yankees are deliberately using this “story” about the uncertainty of Joe Torre’s status as a way of hogging the headlines at a moment when the Mets deserve those headlines a lot more than the Yankees do.  This is shameful.  Yet the press right now is allowing itself to be manipulated by the media strategy of that cynical and selfish franchise.  When are they going to call the Yankees on this one?  Enough is enough.

One of the things that’s so wonderful about these three days between the sweeping of one playoff series and the start of the next is that you get to sit back and contemplate how and why you love the Mets.  Sure, you have to spend too much time getting mad at the Yanks for trying to hog the limelight with all this Torre crap and you get mad at Mike and the Mad Dog for the reasons I have discussed below.  But the sanest part of each of us is just happy, and nostalgic, and filled with hope. 

You can see some of this sanity in the way in which, on the forums, there have been several threads about the original old “Meet the Mets” song.  This is our anthem.  To an amazing degree, with its old-fashioned corniness, this song sums up who we are and why we are like this.

 I love the original version of “Meet the Mets.”  If you don’t know what the full version sounds like, you can find a link to it on the front page of the Mets Fan Book homepage (see the link to that on the right).  I am so glad that people now sing the first verse of the song after the first inning at Shea.  I love the way the song sounds like something written to be sung by men and women with gleaming teeth.  I love the way “the time of your life” is “guaranteed!”  the way home runs are “those home runs!,”  the way we are all so happy that “everybody’s coming down!”   

“Meet the Mets” is so sweet and so tacky.  So Mets.  This isn’t a song with which you charge to the top of the standings, or celebrate triumph or a glorious tradition.  It is not a song for champions.  They must have figured this, when they wrote it.  You can hear in the song an understanding that an expansion team in 1962 could not get away with taking itself too seriously.  It would need to get by on charm.  It could not compel your respect or admiration.  It would just have to be nice and a little corny.  You would come and meet the Mets the way you would come and meet a nutty neighbor who put out a bowl of pretzels and a bottle of soda on a coaster on a table with too many magazines.  You knew that the line about “knocking those home runs over the wall,” was, well, not true.  

I love it.   And I love thinking about it as I wait for the first game of the NLCS to begin.

I made the mistake of listening to Mike and the Mad Dog today.  I was curious.  They had been exposed by the events of the weekend.  Rarely has there been a more dramatic example of how completely Mike and the Mad Dog distort the nature of the game.  Nobody can ever say what they said over and over last week:  that a team that has made it to the playoffs will probably not win a single game.  When it comes to something as unpredictable as baseball, nobody should ever have the fatuous certainty of victory that Mike Francesa had.  So how were they going to spin this?

Well, they began by joking.  Mike only wants to talk about football.  Hahaha.  Then he acknowledges that he was disappointed.  Not that he was wrong to be so certain.  He is only disappointed.  And so with the same pretense to wisdom and knowledge that he always has, he starts talking about what the Yankees should do.  As if that’s the goddamn issue.  As if it matters.  As if we don’t already know what they’re going to do.  They’re going to get rid of some people who don’t deserve to be gotten rid of.  And they’re going to hire some people who won’t deserve the contracts they will be given.  What else do they ever do?    

They sell their friend Joe Torre down the river, by acknowledging that there could be a reason to fire him.  And then they say all the things that Mets fans have been saying for months, about how unenthusiastic and uninvolved the Yankees seem.  They don’t have the spirit or the cohesion to win.  But had this ever occurred to Mike when his unbeatable Yankees began their series against the Tigers?  Was there any real sense in his mind that this was a powerful yet unhappy and flaccid team just waiting to be beaten?  I don’t remember him admitting this possibility. Do you?

I really loved what they did after bashing the Yankees for an hour, without even mentioning the triumph of the Mets.  They take Gary Cohen and Howie Rose to task for, get this, showing too much enthusiasm in some of the calls in the game in which the Mets beat the Dodgers to win their first NDLS series in six years.  They “went over the top.”  I guess this wasn’t really a legitimate cause for celebration.  It bothered them that Gary Cohen was so happy when the Mets regained the lead after blowing an original 4-0 lead.  Can you believe this?  Mets Fans of long standing, do you remember what we all felt when Mike Scioscia hit his home run in the 1988 playoffs?  Do you remember what it was like to deserve to win a pennant, to be ahead, to be so close, and not to be able to come back?  The Mets came back this time.  There was reason to be joyful.  Gary and Howie expressed our joy.  Mike and the Mad Dog, who have built their cartoonish personas to be over the top at all times, think that Gary and Howie went over the top.  I love it.

I marvel at them.  Especially since the theme of the previous hour had been how little spirit the Yankees had shown.  Didn’t it ever occur to Mike and Chris that the enthusiasm of Gary and Howie, an enthusiasm that unites this team, and its fans, and even its announcers, is exactly the reason why the Mets are in the postseason and the Yankees aren’t?  How could they be so dumb as to condemn this?  Being happy when your team pulls ahead in what all the rest of us think is a big game is what baseball is about.  Baseball, Mike, is not about pretending to know something you don’t know.  It is about being so happy when something you have been hoping for happens.

Hi, everybody.  My name is Dana Brand and I’ve written a book about being a Mets fan for 45 years.  The book is done, except for a last portion that will deal with the events of this season.  Please check out my website at metsfanbook.com. 

On this blog, I will follow the events of the postseason and whatever comes after it.  Please visit as often as you can and please let me hear from you.  Thank you!  And “Lets Go Mets!!!!!!”