Dana Brand’s Mets Fan Blog

I haven’t read the Mitchell Report yet (neither has Bud Selig apparently and he’s had it for longer than I have).  I’ve skimmed the executive summary and listened to the radio.  I will read it and I’ll say what I have to say after I do.

It’s a complete accident that I happen to be reading George Vecsey’s Baseball:  A History of America’s Favorite Game just as the Mitchell Report comes out.  Reading this book as all of this is happening, I’m struck by how typical a moment this is in baseball history.  It’s a typical moment in American history too.  And as many people have said in only slightly different ways, baseball is the best metaphor there is for America.

Scott Fitzgerald was one of the many who understood this.  After Nick and Gatsby have lunch with Meyer Wolfsheim (a character modeled after Arnold Rothstein), Nick asks Gatsby who Wolfsheim is.  Gatsby “coolly” replies that this is the guy who fixed the 1919 World Series.  Nick says he remembered, of course, that the 1919 World Series had been fixed, but the idea still “staggers” him:  “It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people – with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.”  “How did he happen to do that?” Nick asks Gatsby.  “He just saw the opportunity,” Gatsby replies.  Nick and Gatsby could be talking about the Mitchell Report.

In order to understand America, you have to understand why Gatsby is so cool and matter-of-fact when he explains that the man who fixed the World Series just saw an opportunity.  You have to understand why Gatsby has an imperishable dream and is indifferent to any scruples that could get in the way of achieving it.  You have to understand how Nick can manage to believe that he’s the only honest person he’s ever known even though you can see how dishonest he is.  You have to understand why journalists and a nation could get all sentimental about the damage the underpaid and exploited champion 1919 White Sox did to America’s innocence when they threw the Series.  You have to understand what was in the minds of the United States Supreme Court when they decided that baseball is a game and not a business and so it’s all right for the owners to keep all the money and treat the players like slaves.  You have to understand how baseball managed to keep African-Americans off the field for sixty years with hardly anybody complaining, even though it was no secret that some of the greatest players in the world were being excluded.  You have to understand how apparently intelligent people sitting next to you in a ballpark will wax lyrical about how baseball players used to care about loyalty and the game itself and now all they care about is money.  You have to understand why Roger Clemens ate a big breakfast this morning without anything interfering with his digestion.  You have to understand why you still take baseball seriously. 

We are a nation of suckers and we always will be.  This is our greatest strength and our greatest weakness.  It amazes me, and it amazes the rest of the world, how many times we can lose our innocence without losing our innocence.  We are a country of dreamers and innovators with a competitive and imaginative energy that has done the world a lot of good.  And yet, no matter what we do to gain our blessed “competitive edge” we are incapable of ever believing that we are corrupt.  No matter how many mistakes we make, we aren’t really capable of believing we have made a mistake.  We only acknowledge mistakes as an effort to limit damage, and then we have this peculiar tendency to explain and glorify the mistake by suggesting that it came from a noble excess of our desire to achieve our dream.  We are not a stupid people.  We know that cheating is rampant in our culture and in our games.  We know that there isn’t really much competitive balance in our competitions.  But once we get those stars in our eyes and those lumps in our throats, we never get them out. 

Because that’s what we are.  As Americans and as baseball fans.  I’m not saying I’m going to change or that you’re going to change.  We’re suckers. 

If they build it, we will come.
             
           
 

So I spent yesterday at the Magic Monikers Autograph and Memorabilia show at The Crowne Plaza Hotel in Secaucus, New Jersey.  I was selling and signing books at a table with Kathy Foronjy and Joe Coburn, the filmmakers who made Mathematically Alive, the newly-released-on-DVD film about New York Mets fandom as a metaphor for successful psychological adaptation to the trials of human existence. 

I sold and signed a few books and I had the pleasure of meeting several people who read my blog and had already bought and/or read my book.  This was wonderful, since it is really nice to know that people have enjoyed something you’ve created in the hope that people would enjoy it.  It was fun to get to know Kathy and Joe, as well as Donna and Marlene, two of the true Mets diehards who are profiled in the film, and whose loyalty to Mike Piazza in particular is one of the most moving things in it. 

I was also blown away by the scene.  Have you ever been to one of these things? 

We were sitting in an exhibition hall filled with tables of vendors selling baseball cards, framed pictures of ballplayers, memorabilia, and limited and numbered editions of god-knows-what.  The exhibition hall was one of these vaguely underwater-seeming 70s- looking, broad, vast, cramped windowless spaces.  People walked by in team jerseys, jackets, and caps clutching precious baseballs, bats, and posters that had been signed over in the distance by people you couldn’t see behind a bank of people in jerseys, jackets, and caps shooting flashing photos from cameras in hands raised hopefully high above everyone else.  Every once in awhile I would walk over and peer above the bank of flashing hands.  Against the blank and undecorated wall, you saw lunchroom tables and lunchroom chairs.  In front of the tables and chairs was an inner line of people in jackets, jerseys, and caps holding tickets and precious objects.  Beyond this inner line, sitting at the lunchroom tables were silent, unsmiling men writing on the objects, listening to and following instructions from the people standing in front of the tables. 

If you looked carefully at the silent men, they reminded you vaguely of men you had always known about but had never seen except on screens or in photos or down on the flat green, distant plane of a ballfield.  They didn’t really look like these men.  They were smaller, and older, and wearing shirts and sweaters.  Eventually, I allowed myself to understand that these really were the men they seemed to look like, but their silence, the awkward ordinariness of the lines of people in front of them, the flashing of the cameras, and the dim, windowless room, gave me a sense that I was in Plato’s cave.  I wasn’t sure that what I was looking at was real.

As several of the men who had been signing at the tables finished their tedious yet absurdly well-compensated work, they would walk down the aisle where our table was.  I saw them close up, surrounded by people who were somehow attached to them.  I saw, in some sense, Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton, Eddie Murray, Ozzie Smith, Yogi Berra, Tom Seaver, Ron Guidry, and Don Zimmer.  I saw them, with my own eyes.  It was like a dream, which is the only other place you will ever see so many people you have mainly imagined.  It was also like a dream in that it was freaky that it didn’t seem strange that they were all there.  Somehow I don’t really think I saw them, just as I don’t really think that a signature on a baseball you’ve paid to get in a hotel in Secaucus is actually an autograph.

The high point of the day was a genuinely wonderful and strange encounter.  We were sitting at our Mets table and we saw a cluster of men coming down our aisle, an entourage that must have someone at its center.  As the cluster came closer, we saw the man at the core of it:  medium sized man in ordinary clothes and a black cap and glasses, whom you would not necessarily recognize on a sidewalk in Manhattan.  You had to overcome some significant doubt before you could accept the eventually undeniable fact that the man you were looking at was Reggie Jackson.  It’s been a deep, dark secret, but I’ve always liked Reggie Jackson.  I like ballplayers who are great and who get pleasure from the fact that they are great.  We watched him come closer and then we saw him stop and look carefully at the big poster blow-up of the cover of my book that I had set up in front of me.  “Mets Fan,” he proclaimed.  He looked at us.  “You folks are Mets fans?”  He stared at us and then asked, with a perfect sense of timing and emphasis, “WHAT HAPPENED?”  We laughed as his entourage waited patiently for him to have the moment he had chosen to address people he didn’t need to address.  We scrambled in our minds for something to say to him in response.  But we didn’t need to do this.  He had something to say and he wanted to say it to us.   “What was it, they only needed to win one more game?”  “Something like that,” we ruefully mumbled.  “You know,” he said as if he was giving us the benefit of hard-earned wisdom, “people used to call me egotistical, but I tell you, if I had been playing for them, I would have won that one game, even if I had to do it all by myself.”  “You would have,” we agreed, struck dumb by the fact that he had said this to us, that he had said anything to us, that he had chosen us, strangers who had not been his fans, to give us this idea of what he believed about himself.  He walked on and we were left, star-struck, with this to remember for the rest of our lives. 

How I wish I could hear more from these men who signed things at those tables.  How I wish I could hear what they thought about themselves, about the game that they played, about this phenomenon that made what they could write in a few seconds worth so much money.  I long for words from them that are not just an inscription, for a memoir that is not “as told to.”  I long to hear their actual voices.  I want to know what they’d say if they ever had the chance or the desire to stop and step back and look at themselves in the middle of all this.

This Saturday, December 8, from 9 to 3, I’m going to be signing, inscribing, and selling copies of Mets Fan (for less than on Amazon, no middleman) at the Magic Monikers Autograph and Memorabilia Show in The Crowne Plaza Hotel in Harmon Meadows in Secaucus, New Jersey. 

This is a big show.  Tom Seaver, Keith Hernandez, Gary Carter, and Yogi Berra are going to be there on Saturday.  Mike Piazza will be there on Sunday.  You can read about the whole lineup here, and you’ll also find out how much each of them gets for signing various items (don’t worry, I’m not charging anything for signature and inscription).  I’ve never been to an autograph and memorabilia show before and I think it will be fascinating.  I promise to blog about the scene. 

I’ll be at a table as a guest of Katherine Foronjy and Joe Coburn, the filmmakers who made Mathematically Alive, a film about Mets fandom which just won “Best Documentary” at the New Jersey film festival.  I’ve written a review of Mathematically Alive on my main site, which you can read here.  Their DVD of the film will be available for sale at the show and online. 

I want to repeat what I’ve said before.  Mathematically Alive is genuinely terrific and I am not saying this because I’m friends with these people or because they’re letting me have space at their table.  I hardly know them.  But they sent me a review copy of their film when I agreed to introduce them at the film festival.  I was blown away by how good it was, how moving and how meaningful it was as a representation of the psychology of the Mets fan.  It filled me with happiness and pride.  The DVD would make any fan a great holiday gift and I am hoping that this wonderful film will get some theatre distribution or some attention from the Mets or SNY.  Trust me.  My critical credibility means a great deal to me.  Anyone who is reading this blog or who has read my book would love Mathematically Alive. 

So if you’re anywhere near Secaucus (and most people are), please come by our table at the Magic Monikers show.  We’ll be happy to sell you (and sign!) some things that may give you more Mets fan pleasure for the dollar than the signatures that the other people at the show will be selling.  We’ll also probably have more time to chat. 

I hope to see you there.  If you come to the show, stop by and say hello!

Okay, I’m not happy about the Milledge trade, but of course I don’t know any of the things that may be known by the people who made it.  To me, Milledge was cool.  He was young, bright, interesting, and brash.  I thought he looked as if he could develop into a great hitter.  He was what we used to call colorful, a bit unpredictable.  He had imperfections that made him an interesting story to pay attention to.  Not enough modern ballplayers are like that.  He was fun.  But what do I know?
 

So we trade him for Schneider, who is supposed to be a really good defensive catcher.  That could be interesting to watch.  It’s been awhile.  And we also get Ryan Church, whom I was beginning to get excited about.  A double every ten times up?  There were some reasons to feel hopeful when you looked at his stats.
 

But then I’m reading my blogs yesterday and I run across this item on Faith and Fear in Flushing and The Ed Kranepool Society.  Apparently Church subscribes to some traditional teachings of the Christian religion that most modern forms of Christianity have moved away from and that several modern forms of Christianity have not.  He believes that if you don’t accept Christ as your Savior, you’re damned.  Apparently Church was compassionate enough to worry about what this was going to mean for his Jewish ex-girlfriend (with whom I am sure he engaged only in activities sanctioned by the traditional teachings of the church).  Apparently, Church was stupid enough to share such fears with a Washington Post reporter investigating a Pennsylvania evangelical group providing unpaid chaplains to baseball teams. 
 

Now I have to tell you that if you gave me a choice to root for someone who danced in celebration of a home run before he got into the dugout and someone who sincerely believed that no one could possibly go to heaven unless they believed in Christ, I would unhesitatingly choose the former. 
 

But I don’t like having to make that choice.  I know this sounds harsh.  But I really don’t want to know what baseball players think. 
 

Why not?  They’re people.  They have a right to their ideas.  Haven’t I been pleased at points to learn that Mets like Tom Seaver, Tug McGraw, and Carlos Delgado agreed with certain political beliefs I myself had.  Yes, but I am willing to forego the pleasure of this to avoid the pain of learning that a ballplayer I will forever love to the bottom of my heart can possibly compare the execrable fool and demagogue Rush Limbaugh to George Washington. 
 

I don’t want to know what they think.  I don’t want to take the risk.  I need to have some control over what these players are to me, in my head.  It’s different with artists, writers, etc. because what they believe is an important part of what they create.  With baseball players it’s different.  It’s not that I have any trouble with baseball players being religious.  I deeply and sincerely respect their religious beliefs.  I have no problem with the devotion of someone like Pedro Martinez.  So, yeah, it’s okay for them to express themselves.  As long as what they say isn’t divisive. 
 

Look, I’m a decent enough guy.  Yeah, I have a Jewish heritage, and yeah I’m an agnostic (I don’t know if there’s a God, but I kind of believe that if there is one, he’s not going to take the trouble to want to torture me for eternity because of my sincere and even respectful doubt).  How do the people who still believe in this ancient understanding of salvation and damnation think it makes me feel for someone to say that a giant concentration camp awaits me after my death because of who I was and what I believed?  I know that Anne Coulter doesn’t care about how I feel.  But if someone is going to get my love and my cheers and play right field for me, I want him to care how I feel.
 

Oh, but why should he?  There are millions who still believe this and they don’t care.  Still I want baseball to be different, an island of possible unity in a sea of harsh division.    I root for a team that was also loved by Richard Nixon and is now loved by Bill O’Reilly.  I want the Mets to be a place where I can share a beer with these men.  I want to stand around with them and Tim Robbins, and Susan Sarandon, and Jon Stewart and have us all talk about the ’86 Mets.  Baseball is like a truce, but in order for the truce to work, there have to be ground rules.  Guys, think what you will, but watch what you say.  Keep it unifying, even if that means keeping it innocuous.
 

So now I’m stuck with this Church guy.  He comes with this baggage.  You think Milledge has baggage?  This is baggage.  Part of me feels that I should give him a chance to win me over.
 

Maybe he will.  But don’t hold your breath.