Dana Brand’s Mets Fan Blog

Everyone who has rooted for the Mets for at least eight years knows what game was buried inside the game they saw this long, hot, muggy afternoon.  I recognized it as soon as I turned the game on and heard that we were behind, 5-0.  I feared it when I saw that we had caught up, and when we then fell behind, 8-5.  When we took the lead, 10-8, I did everything that would not actually get me committed to try to ward off my sense that the demon game was in there.  But it was in there, like a vampire, struggling to live on our blood.  I recognized it.  I saw it and it prevented me from ever thinking that the Mets were going to win the game.  I am usually a hopeful fan, but I never thought we would win.  I had been in this haunted place before.  Here it was again: the sixth game of the 1999 National League Championship Series.  The game after the glory of the grand-slam single.  The game in which we fell behind 5-0, with our backs against the wall.  The game in which we climbed back and fell behind and climbed back again and then lost our lead twice when closers who had been invincible all season could not hold the Braves.  We lost it right on the knife edge of fate.  Right on the border of happiness and despair.  Right where Kenny Roger’s pitch gave the 1999 National League pennant to Atlanta.

Philadelphia is not going to take it from us.  When they are not psyched because they’re facing us, their lousy pitching staff will revert to form.  But we have a pennant race now.  The odds were at least 32-1 against them winning five in a row as we lost five in a row. But it happened.  And here again we see an old Mets pattern that will not die.  The Mets have a very long history, when they’re very good, of coming a long way, then digging themselves a grave, falling into the grave, and then climbing back out of it. 

All you can hope is that this disastrous series in Philadelphia will give the Mets a sense of what they need.  I’m not talking about stuff only the general manager can fix.  I’m talking about the fingernails you need to climb out of graves and scratch someone else’s eyes out.  I liked the way the team came back today.  I liked the sense of their sweat, their defiance, their frustration, and their desperation.  I liked the ten runs.  Last year people wondered if the ease of the 2006 season had not prepared the Mets for the trench warfare of the playoffs.  St. Louis may even have beaten us because they were used to being a mediocre team that lost a lot of games and knew that they really had to turn it on to beat teams better than them.  We may not have known how to turn it on because we had been pretty much on all the time.

These 2007 Mets are not a great team.  We know that.  They know that.  But they can still go all the way.  They are not the 2006 team.  They are not the 1999 or 2000 team.  What they are is something like the 1997 or 1998 team in a universe in which there is no juggernaut in Atlanta.  This is a 1997 or 1998 team with the opportunity to win its division.  Good, but riddled with imperfections, and seven games in front only five days ago, they must now find whatever gave them 10 runs today.  Maybe something good and unanticipated will happen to make all the difference.  Maybe Carlos Delgado will go on a titanic tear, maybe Scott Schoenweis will bear down and give us a bullpen, maybe Pedro Martinez, having sat out almost the whole season, will put on his armor like Achilles and stride into battle and give us the games that will shape our idea of him forever. 

Maybe we will lose.  Maybe a team as hungry as the Phillies we’ve seen over the last five days will not be denied.  But I am beginning to think that the Mets will fight.  That’s all I want to see.  It would be great if they won.  But the important thing is that they will fight.  I will help them, as I can, from the powerless perch of my couch.  This is an epic unfolding.  You will never forget the game they played this afternoon.  You may never forget the next two months.  The Mets are down, hurt, angry, and headed into Turner’s Field.  The Phillies and maybe even the Braves are ready to bridge the moat and storm the citadel we have held for almost the whole season.

They shall not pass.
 

From the depths of my subconscious mind, from the reservoir of my earliest memories, the following metaphor emerges for the 2007 Mets season:

When I was a kid, you could still see on TV these black-and-white cartoons from the 1930s.  Anyone who has ever seen these cartoons (and you may have because Pee-Wee Herman showcased them on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse) knows that they are the best and most imaginative cartoons ever made.

Anyway, I seem to remember one cartoon in which a happy old man whose name I think was Grandpa Snazzy was driving a car up and down hills.  The car was pretty rickety.  It was not what anyone would consider a hi-class ve-hic-ule.  But it bounced along happily, if not entirely smoothly.  Then all of a sudden the car would stop and start, lurch and belch smoke, and then all kinds of things would get coughed up out of the engine and the radiator:  cats, caps, polka-dotted underwear.  Grandpa Snazzy would look distressed, but then, when enough things got coughed out, the car would calm down and start running smoothly again, or sort of smoothly.  It always looked as if although it was moving forward now, it was only a matter of time before it started to act weird again.  And sure enough, after some pleasant, happy driving by the pipe-smoking and humming Grandpa, the car would start lurching and stopping and starting again and there would be explosions and this time, out of the engine and radiator would come dogs and octopuses and Mahatma Gandhi.  Then things would calm down again and Grandpa Snazzy would continue on his journey, singing and whistling, until the next time the car would decide to act up. 

I don’t remember how the cartoon ended.  Maybe he drove into a town where there was a fair and everybody cheered him and kissed him.  Maybe the car leaped off the road after a big explosion and bounded down a hill and landed in the middle of somebody’s picnic table.  I don’t remember.

Anyway, this is what the 2007 Mets season reminds me of. 
 

Okay, I know, I know.  My point is look how close what I wrote below came to being true.  Does the fact that it is not true mean that the Mets won’t win it, considering that you would have been prepared to believe that they would have won it if a little dribbler went foul or if a not-that-wild catcher’s throw could have at least been knocked down? 

We are living on the edge.  We will still most probably win the division.  But then, with our talent and our flaws, we will crawl onto a knife’s edge and stay there for however long we stay alive in the postseason.  We may win it all this year and we may stumble right out of the box.  Tonight could have been the turning point of the season.  Tomorrow may still be the turning point of the season.  Or there may be no turning point.  And we may just win it anyway.  Forget the story we will one day concoct to explain how what happened at the end of this season was inherent in what happened during the season.  That story isn’t true and we haven’t even made it up yet.  Anything can happen this year.  There will be no rhyme nor reason.  There will be Mets indeterminacy, as there was in 1999 and 2000, where so little different would have made such a big difference in what we would remember. 

We are all together on this edge.  Let it please this time be a threshold, and not a ledge. 

Carlos Delgado’s bat delivered all of the offense the Mets needed yesterday as Tom Glavine turned in a commanding pitching performance, shutting the powerful Phillies offense down in their own park.  Pedro Feliciano, Aaron Heilman, and Billy Wagner held the lead in spite of an eighth-inning lead-off home run by Jimmy Rollins and a throwing error by Paul Lo Duca that allowed the tying run to get as far as third base in the eighth.  The Mets are now 6 games in front of both the Braves and the Phillies, with only 31 games to play.  There is very little chance that they can be caught.  In spite of all of the season’s disappointments, I guess we can finally put it in the books. 

I don’t know about you guys, but I am.  Dare I say that last night’s game may be remembered as the game that defined the season?  I’m not going to take this post down.  I’m leaving it up.  I say it.  It’s over.  The Division race is over. 

They have confounded you all season.  But the Mets are here.  They have arrived.  They will give us one of those memorable Septembers and you will be thrilled.  You will not remember any of the disaffection you have been feeling since the beginning of June.  You will forget you ever said that they didn’t want it, that they didn’t have fires in their bellies.  You will see that big pile of rbis next to the names of Beltran and Wright and Delgado (listen to me!).  You will see that neat row of .300 batting averages, those quite solid E.R.A.s and you will not remember anything.  Until I snap my fingers.  And I may never do that. 

Look, you weren’t wrong.  Something was missing.  A lot was missing.  There was some sloppy play and some bad relief pitching.  There was not enough clutch hitting.  But not as much was missing as we felt was missing.  Our perceptions were all distorted.  By the expectations created by the wonderful 2006 season.  By the fact that Atlanta and Philadelphia were better this year than last year (don’t worry they’re still not very good).  And most importantly, by the fact that last year was full of novelties and revelations.  This year isn’t. 

But look at that ninth inning last night.  There are some novelties.  Milledge, Anderson, the ever-new Jose, and Castillo.  The new guys put it together.  And Carlos Beltran is renewed.  David Wright is finding his personal stratosphere.  Moises Alou is new.  We’ve won six out of seven.  We came back in the bottom of the ninth.  The season is new.
It will be a victory trot.  Those bozos can’t catch us.  I mean, look, we’re 71-53.  There are 38 games left.  If we play just as well as we’ve played so far, which everyone agrees is okay but not great, we’ll win 22 and lose 16.  If we do that, Atlanta would have to go 29-9 to beat us.  Philly would have to go 28-10.  If we just played .500 ball the rest of the season, Atlanta would have to win 26 and lose 12.  Philadelphia would have to win 25 and lose 13.  The season will only be lost if we go into total collapse.  If we stunk up the joint and won 14 and lost 24 (!), the Braves would still have to win 21 and lose 17 and the Phillies would still have to win 20 and lose 18 and that would involve, for both teams, playing above the level they have played at this season thus far.  It’s just not going to happen.  No way.

Let’s enjoy this.  Let’s have a few more come-from-behind victories, a few more weeks of several offensive pistons firing.  We’ve wandered in a desert that was in large part a hall of mirrors.  We’ve come through.  The season is ending well.  Be happy.  Listen to me.  This is not a perfect team by any means.  But I am calling it a team of destiny.  You will feel it, at the clinching, just as you felt it last year.  Do you remember all the losing before the clinching?  Do you remember all the losing after it?  Do you see what I mean?  You don’t remember that.  You remember David with his cigar and his champagne.  There will be cigars and champagne again.  There will be joy and relief that we’ve actually made it.  And then there will be a postseason.  The play of a renewed, surviving, celebrating team.  Who knows where it will lead?  I’m not going there.  I’m going far enough.  The Division race is over.  Wake up.  We’ve won.  Now let’s have some fun.

I don’t know how many more times I can write a piece about how weird it is that the Mets are having an impressive season but their fans aren’t sure whether they like them or not. 

For a while, I was blaming the fans.  I worried that the Mets fan base was becoming like the Yankees’, with expectations that were too high.  I marshaled all of these statistics to prove that this season is roughly as good as last season minus Pedro and that it only seemed to be worse because Atlanta and Philadelphia were better.  All of those statistics are still true.  This is still true.  But if we are in August and a lot of diehard Mets fans still aren’t excited about this team, something more must be happening than a psychological illusion as easy as this to figure out. 

I don’t now think that we are expecting too much so much as that we have absolutely no idea what to expect.  We are befuddled.  Nothing is clear.  I mean, is John Maine having a great year or isn’t he?  Is Oliver Perez still a surprise?  Okay, Wright’s numbers are right back up where they should be, but why did it seem as if we somehow missed that when it was happening?  Carlos Delgado has had an impressive couple of months now.  Why does everyone still think he’s in a slump?  There’s got to be a reason for this.  We’re not all just jerks who aren’t giving the players enough credit.

Greg at Faith and Fear in Flushing has the latest essay of this kind, an essay that I basically agree with.  Greg says it well.  They’re doing okay, but something is missing.  He attributes it to the fact that there’s nothing for us to psychologically grab on to.  Why not?  I still don’t know.

I mean, they’ve won some exciting ballgames, but maybe the problem is that the exciting ballgames they win are like the first two games they’ve just won against the Pirates (8/14, 5-4, 8/15, 10-8).  They win in exciting fashion, they do a number of impressive things, but games that really should be blow-outs aren’t.  They’re almost lost.  What is the season’s record for men left on base and how close are we to it?

Teams that are in first place should have a lot of winning streaks.  We don’t.  We win our reliable four out of seven and lead the league.  But we don’t have any winning streaks to give ourselves a brief and temporary illusion of omnipotence.  Teams that are in first place should reliably win at home.  We certainly aren’t doing that this year.  First-place teams reliably beat up on bad teams.  Not us.

But we’ve been in the same place all year.  And Atlanta and Philadelphia stay where they’ve been.  What’s it like to root for them? 

This season has been one of the hardest ever to define.  But it is now August 15.  There are only six weeks left.  You know what?  Stuff is about to happen that will define it forever and mark it in our memories.  What will happen in the next six weeks is going to wipe away the eighteen weeks we’ve already lived through. 

You don’t know what you think about the 2007 Mets now.  In nine weeks, you will.  Events that will just happen will give you a sense that you’ve always known something that you haven’t really known, all along.  This is one of the secrets of baseball.  Did you know that Tug McGraw had a horrible season until the very last month of 1973 and no one ever speaks of, no one even remembers that?   Did you know that the Mets in 1969 were in third place, sinking to fourth, almost ten games out at just this point of the season?  Do you remember right now how hopeful you were feeling towards the end of August 2005 about that wonderful, wonderful break-out season? 

We’re about to go into the warp.  And we probably won’t remember where we actually were when we were sucked into it.

Mets Fan is back in stock on Amazon, available for free and immediate shipment. 

And I will be interviewed next Wednesday (8/22)  at 6:30 by Matt Cerrone and Anthony De Rosa on The MetsBlog Podcast.  This is a great show, with great guests (Ron Darling was on yesterday). 

And if you missed my 8/13 in-depth, hour-long interview on New York Baseball Talk with Mike Silva, you can listen to it right here.

Mets Fan was finally available for immediate shipment from both Amazon and Barnes and Noble on Friday morning, 8/10.  By Saturday morning, 8/11, it was completely sold out at both sites.  Resellers were able to sell a couple of copies at $10 more than the actual price.  While I should be happy that the book is selling so well, I am very unhappy because a lot of people who have ordered the book don’t have their copies yet and a lot of people who might want to read the book are being frustrated in their efforts to obtain it.  I hope it won’t take them long to re-stock.  I will keep you posted.

In the meantime, the best way to get the book as soon as possible, as long as you don’t mind not having free shipping, is to order it directly from the publisher, McFarland.

If you have read my book, or are waiting for it, and want to hear me talk about what it was like to write it and what I may have been doing in it, please listen to my interview this evening with Mike Silva of New York Baseball Talk.  The interview runs from 6pm to 7pm and can either be listened to live, or as an archive that will be available only 10 minutes after the show ends.

ESPN recently re-ran a rant by someone named Colin Cowherd (no relation to Cow-Bell man apparently) who had made fun of “Meet the Mets” and dissed the Mets media presentation.  He said:  ““Give me a break.  Step up Mets.  This is the most bush-league stuff I have ever heard in my life.  I mean, honestly, you turn on the Yankees and it’s regal – maybe it’s pompous, but it sounds New York…You turn on the Mets, it’s horrible – and as good as the Mets are, get rid of dorky Mr. Met, get rid of that stupid apple in center field after the home runs, your nine tacky uniforms…You sound bush league, and you’re not.  You’ve got Disney Land players and you sound like the traveling carnival.”

I only know about this because I read about it on Mets Blog, where 100 people leaving comments pointed out, with sufficient thoroughness, that this is stupid.  It is stupid.  The superiority of Mets broadcasting to Yankees broadcasting is self-evident and it is the only thing about the Mets that has been superior to the comparable component of the Yankees for all 45 years of the Mets’ existence.  I don’t want to write about what is self-evident.  What I want to write about is what this stupid comment makes me think of. 

At the center of Mets-ness are three things:  “Meet the Mets,” Mr. Met, and the Home-Run Apple.  These three things share an essence.  They establish an atmosphere that is the permanent atmosphere of our team.  Yes, Mr. Cow-whatever, it is a traveling carnival atmosphere.  It has none of the pre-packaged corporate sterility one might associate with Disney Land (or the New York Yankees, for that matter).  It is tacky, corny, and sweet.  It is actually very New York, as Jerry Seinfeld, the quintessential Mets fan, has demonstrated to the world.  The holy silliness, the happy sixties-retro tackiness of Mets-ness is the same quality of loving irony that so many New Yorkers have, New Yorkers who love what is familiar to them even when they know it is ridiculous:  things like Pez dispensers, Superman comics, or the ordinary diner where you always hang out.  We love what we love because it is familiar, because it is what we have always had and always will have.   We don’t love it because it wins championships and prances around in pinstriped self-importance.

We are the other side of New York, Mr. Cowchip, the side that doesn’t take itself quite so seriously, the side that has given the world some of its greatest humorists, and some of its finest recorders of simple, ordinary, humble, and ridiculous detail.  When “Meet the Mets” was written, and when Mr. Met was conceived, the new franchise struggling to climb out of last place would have looked stupid with dignified, triumphant theme music.  It would have seemed humorless without a silly mascot.  It had no choice but to try to charm fans with good-natured nuttiness.  We grew to love that nuttiness.  It has become indispensable.  It is what defines Mets fandom more than anything else.  We Mets fans can’t live without it.  We won’t live without it, however good the team becomes.   

If they don’t want to bring that apple from Shea to Citi Field, I will offer to bring it over myself.  I’ll get some of my buddies from Flushing University and we’ll get a lot of rope and station wagons.  I love the thing.  Nowhere else is there an apple that comes out of a hat.  I love its bigness, its creakiness, its goofiness when it climbs out and flashes the Mets logo on its proud red chest.  I don’t want some clean, fancy, animatronic new one.  I want the old apple, like a kid wants his old Teddy bear.  I want the people of the new century to see that part of being a Mets fan is being loyal.  It’s loving the old neighborhood, for all of its drawbacks.  It’s wanting to win but being able to cheer for spirited losers from time to time.  It’s loving your parents even when they’re being neurotic and falling apart.  This is what New York really means, Mr. Cow-poke, not the regal pompous stuff you think it means.  New York Mets fans will want to have the Home-Run apple forever.  Because it is what makes us us, and it is what distinguishes us from them. 

As of this morning, August 9, Mets Fan is in stock and available for immediate shipment at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.  This means that you can get free shipping and applicable member discounts at these places.  Demand has been greater than expected and the book is now entering its third printing.  I hope there won’t be any more problems and I apologize to everyone who has encountered problems with availability.  If you are one of the many who has ordered from Amazon and not gotten your copy, you will be getting your copy soon.   

On Monday, August 13, between 6 and 7 pm, I am going to be interviewed on New York Baseball Talk with Mike Silva on Blogspot Radio.  You can listen live or you can hear it any time you like if you click on this image. 

I’m really looking forward to this.  An hour-long interview about a book is something that a lot of authors dream of.  You’re not just limited to a sound bite or a plug.  You can actually talk in an interesting way about something you’ve written, something that really means something to you.  I think Mike is a terrific interviewer and I’m looking forward to what he will be able to bring out.  I’ll keep a link to this interview on my main site (metsfanbook.com) so that readers who might be interested in this can come back to it when they want.

Please visit Save the Apple

This is a grassroots organization whose goal is to convince the Mets to move the original apple to Citi Field.  There are mumblings that the old one needs to be replaced and is too fragile to move.

Please sign their Petition to Save the Apple.

And please read my reasons why I think Citi Field should have the original Home Run Apple