Into the Warp
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.
August 16th, 2007 at 5:46 am
I think part of the problem is that there is no consistency. You are right that there have been no 10 game winning streaks, and that none of the players has been consistently hot. They get small streaks, and then slump. The starting pitching is inconsistent, as is the relief (except for Wagner). Last year was like 1986, virtually no competition until the playoffs. You are right too that we don’t remember ‘69 before the black cat incident, and how mediocre 1973 was. Yet there was excitement before the season ended. I am looking on the positive side, that the Mets will have at least one hot streak of 8-10 wins. I am encouraged about Moises Alou. He seems to be the catalyst, and although these past Pittsburgh games were scary, I can see excitement starting to build. Here’s to an exciting end to the season, and continuation in the playoffs to the World Series.
August 17th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
I agree with Dana and Vicki’s observations. In addition, overall the problem is that many of the losses come from obviously flat, uninspired play. When you combine that with the fact that the Mets don’t have any rivalries right now that are really dramatic, and some of the dramatic wins have come against teams where the game should have been a laugher, those facts, combined with the fact that the Yankees have been somewhat more interesting from a “drama” standpoint as they try to do 1978 Redux, it makes for a season that is sort of frustrating to get pumped up about.
August 18th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
I was at RFK last night for a very nicely executed victory over the pesky Nationals. Mets fans made up at least a third, and maybe more of the crowd, and I can see a serious rivalry between us and Washington developing, which will make going to games here in DC quite interesting in the coming years.
And, yes, the lack of consistency has been frustrating. Not closing out with the sweep in Pittsburgh was maddening, but it says something about the club that they played so crisply only a day later. And I’m mindful of Dana’s observation about how intently and intensely the team played for Glavine as he approached 300 and how that might foretell how they’ll play into the stretch.
August 19th, 2007 at 3:17 am
I was really struck by what a loud Mets presence there was in Washington tonight. Something similar was happening in Philadelphia this year, and you’ve always heard a lot of Mets fans in Miami.
I am still not sure that, as many Mets fans have said, the play has been uninspired. I think that the problem is a genuine lack of consistency from all but three or four players. This is a good but inconsistent team with a small lead. The Mets have always been either a bad team, a good team chasing someone else, or a great team with a big lead. We are in unfamiliar psychological territory.
August 19th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Dana, I agree with most of your observations. I think, however, that the problem largely stems from the fact that right now the NL is generally lousy (especially the NL Central), and thus overall its not that compelling a league to follow. Many of the former rivals of the Mets, like the Pirates, threaten to be a permanent underclass. There are many many reasons why the AL is, by nearly every metric, a better league, some of which include the fact that the DH is now one of the highest paid positions in baseball, the fact that they seized on a “Moneyball” approach earlier, and (on the other side) the fact that the Yankees and Red Sox set the pace. Add to that the fact that (1) the flow of talent has often been older players past their prime heading to the NL while younger studs go to the AL; and (2) the NL has more late day expansion teams, and what comes off as a mediocre season at least has (in my opinion) a larger context. Which bugs me, because I’m still fundamentally a fan of the NL game. DH rule sucks.
JD
August 21st, 2007 at 2:58 am
Okay, I grant that the NL is not as good right now as the American League. That’s impossible to deny. But I also think that the NL is a somewhat more evenly matched league, with fewer outstanding teams and fewer bad ones.
August 21st, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Dana,
You know, I wondeed about that (whether the NL simply reflected parity across the board). That was my initial instinct but on closer inspection I’m not sure that it bears out. Overall the NL Central (MLB’s biggest division) is pretty awful, and that seems to have a ripple effect overall. In other words, if baseball’s largest division is packed with bad teams, I think it may have a ripple effect. In other words, you simply have more bad teams in the NL, although the worst bad team in the NL isn’t as awful as Tampa Bay. (But, that said, if Tampa Bay played in the NL Central rather than the AL East, who knows how they would do?)
For me, I think it is critical that baseball take a close and careful look at the reasons for the disparity between both leagues and try and come up with ways to improve things. Although I don’t like the DH rule much, at this point I think I’d accept it if it would help improve parity. What is slowly happening is that NL pitching records are getting, in the eyes of the media and public, an “asterix”, and the mark of a great pitcher will be whether they can succeed at the American League level. That will probabl have some effect even at the Hall of Fame level. And as for the WS, what we will hear is that even Tampa Bay has a shot against the Mets in a best of 5 or best of 7.
I have always thought these things were cyclical, but due to some other economic trends in the game, I’m no so sure now.
August 22nd, 2007 at 2:31 am
(Postscript to my post above. Tonight’s Mets-Padres game was about one of the most intense, fun games I’ve seen all season. )