Dana Brand's Mets Fan Blog

Mike Francesa’s new thing, in these past two days, is to throw as much cold water as he possibly can on the idea that Daniel Murphy is worth getting very excited about.  Mets fans, Mike says, are comparing Murphy to Hall-of-Famers after only 150 at-bats.  This is crazy, he sagely observes.  But it’s not the dumb Mets fans fault.  Omar Minaya and Jerry Manuel are responsible.  They are over-hyping Murphy.  And he goes on to observe, they are doing him a disservice because they are raising expectations to an unrealistic level.

For years I’ve listened to Francesa because there was nothing else on.  He was never illuminating, but he could be entertaining with Mad Dog in the way that it can be entertaining to watch two kids arguing with each other on a beach.  Now I’ve had enough.  I want WFAN to bring in someone else.  They owe it to us.  We Mets fans have had to listen to this guy for longer than Eddie Kranepool played.   

Maybe Mike is smarter than he seems.  Maybe he is just cynically going about his business, getting people riled up because he can’t entertain them in any other way.  I don’t think he really believes that there are Mets fans who honestly think that it is likely that Daniel Murphy will be a Hall-of-Famer.  I’m sure he knows that Omar and Jerry haven’t said anything that would suggest that they would put him in that category at this point.  But it hardly matters to Mike what Mets fans and Mets management actually say or think.  He’s made his man out of straw and that’s all he needs to put his torch to. 

What these people are doing, Mike, is hoping.  Hoping is something you do when you want something but aren’t sure if you are going to get it.  The pleasure of hoping is a great one.  It is the key to being a baseball fan.  Fans from Pittsburgh to Kansas City are hoping their team does well this year.  That’s what’s wonderful about April.  I remember hoping for the Mets to do well in the early ‘60s and the late ‘70s.  I remember hoping, as you pointed out this afternoon, that Victor Diaz and Alex Ochoa and Tim Leary would be great someday.  But you know what, Mike.  I don’t want back any of the hope I lavished on Rod Kanehl, Ron Swoboda, or Pat Zachry.  I enjoyed hoping for those guys.  I enjoyed hoping that the 1965 Mets and the 1978 Mets would do well.  You may think I’d feel ridiculous for doing that, but I don’t.   Because I also remember hoping that Tom Seaver, Dwight Gooden, and David Wright would turn out to be good.  I remember hoping that the 1969 Mets and the 1984 Mets and the 1997 Mets would surprise everyone.  I know that most dreams don’t come true.  Every human being knows that.  But I know that some dreams do come true.  I know life would be dreary without dreams.  And I know that without the fun of dreaming of the improbable, there would be no reason to be a baseball fan. 

One more thing, Mike.  When you have improbable dreams, when something about an eager talented kid reminds you of something you’ve seen in a Hall-of-Famer, what you want to do is share your enthusiasm and your hopes with other like-minded fanatics.  You already know the reasons why your dream will probably not come true.  But the reason you spend so much time on a game is because it gives you the pleasure of hoping, without the consequences that broken hopes can have in life.  You don’t understand this, Francesa.  You’ve never understood this.  You don’t understand baseball. 

Yesterday, I drove down to New Jersey to watch the first Mets game of the season with my mother.  I was excited.  It was Opening Day.  The first day of spring, of the earth smelling and colors returning, and the outside world existing as something you could walk into and enjoy.  It was a rainy, crappy day, but there was baseball on the radio so everything was going to be fine.

I planned to listen to WFAN the whole way down to NJ, to get psyched up.  I just have an old radio in my car.  Of course I have my I-Pod but this was Opening Day.  I was ready to listen to stuff about baseball the whole way down.  This meant of course, that I was listening to Benigno and Roberts, whom I rarely listen to because they’re never on when I’m driving.  So I listened and very soon I got bored.  I felt like a bug who had gotten trapped in something and couldn’t crawl back out.  They talked and talked.  But they didn’t observe, appreciate, surprise, or help me to understand.  Is it always like this?  I’m not being a snob to say this, I think, because when I listened to Gary Cohen, Ron Darling, and Keith Hernandez, I heard what I wanted and needed to hear.  They weren’t being pretentious or hoity-toity, but when they spoke, I understood so much, I was able to feel so much.  Why is the radio like this?  ESPN just had stuff about basketball.  I wanted to psych myself up.  Is it too much to ask of the Mets’ radio station that they give me something to psych me up before the game, and something else to allow me to savor a victory afterwards? 

The game was great, well, sort of, you know what I mean.  There was that problem about so many more baserunners than runs.  But there was Murphy and Church coming through.  There was Santana and the magical change-up.  There was Green, Putz, and Rodriquez, with their interesting, dazzling new pitching styles.  There was an eerie new feeling of confidence in  late innings.  There were the broadcasters explaining which pitches were in the arsenals, which were working and which were not.

Driving back, I looked forward to being psyched down.  What I mean is that there used to be a kind of Mets thing where you see the Mets win and then you just enjoy revolving the game in your head with the help of the radio, like chewing a gum that will not lose its flavor.  You can still get this when you listen to Steve Somers after a game.  But this was daytime.  There was Francesa, who is now, without Mad Dog, so boring that I can’t even listen to him.  It used to be that he would sit like a beachball that thought it knew everything and there was this nutty kid who would kick him around.  Now nothing kicks him around.  He just sits there and pronounces.  Why is this?  Why doesn’t anyone understand or care about what Mets fans might want to listen to after the first game of their season?  Mad Dog wasn’t there to make some kind of stupid artificial controversy that would have been entertaining, if irrelevant.  No the Grand Poombah was just taking questions like the Wizard of Oz, before we get to the basketball national championship, as if we were so petty as to care about the Mets when something as big as Michigan State vs. North Carolina was happening on the same day.

Mets fans called up all so enthusiastic.  Mike made fun of their enthusiasm and called it crazy, with the sagacity of a fine analyst.  It was just one game, he pointed out, as if he had done a careful study of how little predictive value there is in the result of one game out of 162, and as if his listeners didn’t realize this and thought that the pennant would be won by the team that won its first game of the season.  We needed Mike to repeat this insight many times, which is what he did, because all of us are so unbelievably dumb as to be encouraged and want to talk about it. 
 

If one game won’t tell you anything, why did we bother to listen to it?  Why do we bother to listen to any game?  No one game will tell us anything.  Does anyone think we just listen to games to find out if we are going to make it to the playoffs? No we listen to games because each individual game IS the season.  And as we listen, we develop emotions and habits that become the total experience of the season.  Fans in April are just like players in April.  We are developing our reflexes.  And there was something fascinating and new to see Green, Putz, and Rodriguez pitch like that, three in a row, saving Santana’s win.  There was something interesting in watching the youthful intensity of Murphy and Church, the desperate over-eagerness of Wright, the veteran calm and competence of Delgado at the plate.  There was something interesting about Manuel walking out to the mound and taking out Santana after his 99^th pitch.  We had new things to see, to adapt to, to observe, to appreciate, to listen to.  But to Mike Francesa, there was only an opportunity to point out that this was “just one game, folks!” 

It was, Mike, but it was a first game.  It was a new beginning to a new rich experience that is going to be shared by millions.  But we weren’t going to hear anything about that.  We were going to the basketball at 6.  And in the meantime, WFAN would just give us sound between commercials as millions would, separately and in silence, savor the game they had just seen.

The Mets have a new stadium and an old situation. They look like the best team in their division, but they are hardly a reliable pick. Their main rivals are the World Champions. Before I say anything else, let me congratulate the Phillies. Why shouldn’t I congratulate the Phillies? How could you argue that they did not deserve what they achieved? How would you like to root for a team that could, two years in a row, win something like three-quarters of their final seventeen games?

The new stadium will make the Mets feel new. No it won’t. Because the Mets are not new. This is the essential team that we’ve had since 2006. They are improved, but this is the same essential team. And that essential team will have to fight for redemption. We still kind of love them, because 2006 is still kind of ringing in our heads. But we are afraid for them and we are afraid of them. There’s no point in pretending that everything isn’t on the line.

I predict that the Mets will find the new stadium confusing. Leaving aside all of the ways in which Citi Field is different from Shea as a place to watch a ballgame, I was struck, when I went to the St. John’s game, by how different it looked as a place to play a ballgame. The asymmetry of the outfield is disconcerting. Hitters, pitchers, and fielders are going to have to make adjustments and I think it will take a while for them to do that. The enclosed stadium is also disconcerting. I suspect that the players are going to be more aware of the crowd. This should help the Mets, given the traditional boisterousness and passion of the Shea crowd. This stadium may be smaller, and it may not shake, but I do think it has the potential to terrify opposing teams. This is good.

But it could also backfire. We could terrify the Mets. My guess is that this year is going to be a bumpy one. Too much is riding on this year for anything to be smooth. If the Mets were to go through a disappointing stretch, fans might, after the past two years, feel licensed to let them hear our disappointment. We will be on top of the guys on the field. We will surround them. They may feel trapped. But if things go well, we could become enamored of our own loud voices. And they might finally hear the sound that has fueled all successful Mets teams, the sound we have found it hard to give them.

I think that there’s the potential for a 100-win season. Barring a serious injury, I see no reason not to expect that the Mets will score as many or almost as many runs as last year and that was a lot. There is no possible way in which the bullpen will not be dramatically better. The key to everything will be the starting pitching. If things break right, the Mets could win 100. If they don’t, they could win 85. Every season contains a whole bunch of things that no one could have anticipated on the fifth of April. We’re at the mercy of that whole bunch of things. I won’t belabor the obvious or try to be clever by pointing out something no one else has taken note of. This could be our year, but my gut tells me that significant games will be played in the last week of the season.

If the Mets do make it to the playoffs, I think they will go far into the postseason. I think that winning the division would restore a sense of confidence, and perhaps even entitlement. I think we will go nuts and that we will be terrifyingly loud. If the Mets don’t make it to the playoffs, I fear that this great, promising team will need to be cremated. Something different will have to take the field in 2010. We can’t do this again. We just can’t.

We’re now down to the serious business. We’ve walked bug-eyed around and around the new freaky place, we’ve filled our bellies with very good new food, we’ve giggled at the casino lights in the Fancy Palace of the Imperial Caesars or whatever it is back there behind home plate. We’ve ooh-ed and aah-ed at all of the gift shops selling every Mets thing imaginable except books. We’ve marveled at the total sense of strangeness, which reminds me of the way I felt in our new house in the suburbs when my family moved out of the city when I was three and a half (see the bright lights in the round fixtures, see the stairs and your own room, see the aqua refrigerator, and what is that? A backyard!) We’re in the new place. Now the work begins. The hard work of caring and hoping and having no power. It is not easy, this thing. It’s not easy for them and it’s not easy for us. But it has to be done. And we’re very excited. And hopeful. And afraid. And if we weren’t so afraid, it would not be anywhere near as interesting.

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For what it’s worth: 93-69, first place by a game, both Phillies and Braves with successful seasons. NLDS win in 4 over Dodgers, NLCS win in 7 over Cubs, World Series win in 7 over Red Sox. NLCS and World Series will be classics.  NL Wild Card: Phillies.  AL Division Champs:  Red Sox, Indians, Angels.  AL Wild Card:  Rays.  Santana Cy Young, Pelfrey for real, Maine and Perez inconsistent as they have been. Offense roughly comparable to last year. Murphy and Church solid and Sheffield negligible. Yankees = Titanic, and that’s not just wishful thinking.

I just wanted to announce that I will be giving my very first reading/presentation from my new book, The Last Days of Shea:  Delight and Despair in the Life of a Mets Fan at 8 pm on Wednesday, April 22 at the Roslyn Landmarks Society.  This event, which is free and open to the public, is held at Sterling Glen of Roslyn, 100 Landing Rd., Roslyn, LI.  The Roslyn Landmarks Society is an organization devoted to historical and architectural preservation.  I will read from the new book and talk about the experience and meaning of the destruction of Shea stadium.  Please feel free to come and introduce yourself. 

I will post my preview of the season tomorrow.