It Isn’t Fair (looking back before looking forward to the new season)
[In a few days, I’ll be posting my thoughts about the start of the new season. To create some context, I’m reposting below what I wrote on this blog on a dark Sunday night in early October of 2007. Whatever happens this season, it will always be viewed through the prism of the last 17 games of 2007. By the way, I’ll be appearing next Saturday, March 22 on the Author’s Panel of the meeting of the Greater New York (Casey Stengel) branch of SABR on the sixth floor of the mid-Manhattan branch of the New York public library at 5th Avenue and 40th Street, diagonally across the street from the famous building with the lions. My panel runs from 1:30 to 2:45, though there’s a whole day of wonderful panels and forums that will be of interest to anyone who loves baseball and New York baseball in particular. I will be available to sign discounted copies of my book, Mets Fan.)
It isn’t fair that you live through 162 games and are left with this.
It isn’t fair that after that golden spring and that irritating restless summer filled with good things and bad things, all you have now is this.
It isn’t fair that you got to have that warm September Sunday with a seven game lead and Pedro on the mound. It isn’t fair that you got to have that now impossibly distant day before this one, when it looked as if everything might be all right and the heavens opened up and we had 13 runs and 19 hits and almost our first no-hitter.
It isn’t fair that after all of the pleasure and excitement of comebacks and renewals, after all of the promise of a baseball season that was always on the point of redeeming itself, all we have now is this thing that can no longer change or be redeemed. See, it’s hardening already into an unpleasant memory. It might have lived. One third of an inning different today and we could have had one last historic game, that we might have won, that might even have led to the World Series. But we’re done, one game out of the NL East, one game out of the Wild Card. And we’ll always look back on this exciting, exasperating season through the dirty glass of this rotten Sunday.
2007 will always be like a love affair or a marriage that had its ups and downs, but that had lots of wonderful moments, even though all you can remember now is one awful final argument. It’s like a wonderful productive life of a friend whom you can’t remember without thinking of the awful circumstances of his death. 2007 will always be like any good and hopeful thing that is stamped forever by the awfulness of its end.
Years from now you won’t want to think about this thing that made you so excited this morning. It’ll be like 1988 and 2000, such wonderful seasons! But it will be much, much worse. It won’t just be a disappointment. It will be something shameful. Because we didn’t even make it to the postseason, having been in first since the middle of May. It was something we had and we lost. It was like something solid that turned to sand and our fingers couldn’t hold it.
One reason we love baseball is that the death of a season is not really the end. The Mets, like the earth, come back to life in the spring. The Mets, weirdly enough, are eternal. But each season is mortal. And each is preserved in a numbered box in our closet. Some boxes we open and look at over and over. And some never get opened.
This one won’t be opened much. Even though it had its treasures. The emergence of Perez and Maine. The return of Pedro. The magnificence of Reyes in the first half and Wright in the second. The steady brilliance of Beltran, the aging grandeur of Moises Alou. All these great things, and the last things that passed before our eyes today. Is this the last time we’ll see Tommy Glavine, or Paulie LoDuca, or Shawn Green? What happens now? The Mets who come to life in the spring will not be the Mets we’ve known this season, nor should they be. What will come back to life will be different. It will be new. But it will also be old. And we will follow it to the end of its arc across next summer’s sky, just as we followed this one.
So there it is. Say goodbye to it. It was a good season that ended horribly and the future will always be unfair to it. Give it a last kiss. And remember that you once loved it, just as you’ll remember forever how and why you hated it. There it is pale and cold on that slab. Isn’t it pitiful to see it like that?
