Dana Brand's Mets Fan Blog

I’d like to thank all of my blog and book readers and SABR members who came up to me after my talk at the meeting of the SABR  Casey Stengel chapter at the New York Public Library this Saturday.   It was a real pleasure to meet you and I am very grateful for your kind words.  Ernestine Miller, David Lippman, Evelyn Begley and all of the others who put together the Saturday program did a terrific job.  The whole program was wonderful.   I have never enjoyed a more interesting and informative day of baseball.    

I will be doing a number of readings in the northern end of the Mets homeland in February and I’ll have some Long Island readings in early March.  Stay tuned to this blog for more information.

Anyway, here’s where I’ll be in February.

February 9, 7 pm. Greenwich (CT) Library.

February 11, 7 pm Ridgefield (CT) Library

February 23, 7 pm Rye (NY) Library (The Rye Free Reading Room)

Millions of us can recall perfectly the sound of Shea’s organ as Jane Jarvis played it.  It was a very distinctive sound:  muffled, carnival-like, perfectly-timed, and filled with generous flourishes.  To hear a stadium organ played with such virtuosity is a privilege, and it is a privilege Mets fans have not had for thirty-one years.

Why not?  You know why not.  The sound of baseball has changed. 

I’m not going to tell you that the world was better in the past because it wasn’t.  Baseball wasn’t either, for reasons we don’t have to rehash.  But certain things about the past were really really nice.  And the sound of Jane Jarvis, Shea’s Queen of Melody, playing the Thomas organ was one of the nicest things I knew as I listened to her between the ages of 9 and 24.

That’s what Shea was, back in the day.  It was nice.  It wasn’t wow or whatever.  For all of its World’s Fair novelty back then, it was, by current standards, simple, rickety and low-tech.  It was like a permanent circus had come to town and that’s what Jane’s organ made it sound like.  A permanent circus.  Or a picnic.  My second favorite of all of the songs she played was a song called “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic.”  You’d know it if you heard it.  It’s an old song about Teddy Bears having a picnic while the children who are their “mommies and daddies” are off doing something else.  It’s a fun goofy song that gives an organist a real chance to show off.  Jane played it with relish.  Can you imagine a song like that being played at Citi Field for any reason?  It was a family song.  A picnic song.  A teddy bear song for the kids.

My favorite song of hers is a song that Jane composed.  It’s called “Lets Go Mets” and if things were different, it would be something you’d hear all the time at Citi Field.  I think they may have played it for the 1969 reunion.  When I was a kid I didn’t know it had a name.  It was just “Da dum da dum da dum dad um, DUM DUM DUM! (Let’s Go Mets), da dum da dum da dum da dum, DADADA DADADA DUM!”  and then on and on with the same organ-grindery curlicues and arabesques.    

How I wish that could all come back.  You see, back before there were clubs and suites, there were carnivals and picnics.  And everybody at the ballgame was a kid.  Even the grownups, for those three hours, weren’t grown up.  And when the game was over, Jane would play something nice for us to file out to, as our mommies and daddies took us home to bed.   Because we were tired little teddy bears.  Not an alienated fan base.  Not bitching and moaning pains in the asses.  Tired little teddy bears with tummies filled with cotton candy, hot dogs, and ice cream. 

When Jane died last week, I could not help but think of the fact that Karl Ehrhardt, the Sign Man, died almost exactly two years ago.  It was a similar Mets death in a similar dark winter, of someone beloved who had fallen out of our lives too long ago.  It was a death that made me wonder, what are we now?  Where are the Mets?  Where is the picnic?  What time does the circus start?  How did time go so fast?  How could it have been so long ago that these wonderful people were part of our lives?  I never knew them, of course.  I never even saw Jane with my own eyes.  And I knew nothing about the Sign Man except that he held up wonderful signs. 

But I loved these complete strangers because I loved the circus so much.  Anything that was part of the magic island of time at the ballgame was holy, and loved, and now it is painfully missed. 

Jane had to move out of her apartment a little over a year ago because a crane fell on it.  When this happened, I remember having the surreal thought that cranes were coming after her, just as cranes were tearing down Shea.  Jane dodged the wrecker’s ball.  Shea couldn’t.  So weird.

I will miss Jane, even though I haven’t heard her play in thirty years.  I hadn’t seen Karl’s signs in just about the same amount of time.  I hear her though.  I hear “Lets Go Mets.”  I can always hear it whenever I like, exactly as it really was, as I will always remember it.  And the circus and the picnic are still with me even when I sit in Citi Field, even if they are only in my mind.

I am now going to come out of hibernation, slowly but surely. I haven’t actually been hibernating, I’ve been working my butt off writing a book that has nothing to do with baseball. But now it is time to get back to baseball blogging.

I had actually been planning to get back into things by writing a “State of Our Union (With the Mets)” piece right around now. The thing is that as I read other blogs, I find that I don’t have much to add to what others are saying. Like most of our most perspicacious bloggers, I am not happy right now. I remain, as I’ve often written, perpetually unhappy with the way in which Mets ownership and management seem chronically to believe that the only things fans care about are winning and losing, and that we have no interest in such things as democratic access to batting practice, making sure that every fan feels as valued as every other, or making sure that fans have wonderful things to remember like Banner Days and Old-Timers Days. I do have hope that the Mets are going to start doing better on that score. But this is an old anger.

I can’t honestly say that I’m angry about the baseball decisions that have been made during this offseason. I am not upset about the Mets not getting any of the players they didn’t get. I am also not convinced, as many others seem to be, that players are steering clear of the Mets. There are all kinds of reasons why particular players may choose to sign with this or that other team. Being rejected by so-so players who are not worth extravagant offers is not necessarily a sign that nobody loves us. I am happy about Bay. I don’t know any more than you do about his knees. But if Bay is well, he at best replaces Delgado’s power in the lineup. That just brings us up to the level of a team that will be fortunate to win 85 games, given a starting roster of five question marks.

The situation we find ourselves in right now is delineated expertly by Greg Prince over at Faith and Fear in Flushing (Identity Issues). The team wasn’t made much better during the off-season. It’s not clear who’s in charge or why they do what they do. But it’s hard to jump on the bandwagon of despair when it’s not clear that anything was even possible that could have plausibly turned our hope into belief. We Mets fans just keep talking across the canasta table in front of the beach cabana. We’re just talking. We won’t know much until later.

Lacking belief, all we have is hope. That is not enough for fans who have been through the particularly cruel dance of dream and disaster we’ve just been through. But hey, as Greg points out without much conviction, there was 1984 and 1997. Things happen. Yeah, and planes sometimes crash.

This has all got me thinking about the history of the Mets in relation to our expectations. For your amusement, I offer a list of how I think the Mets have done in each of their seasons, in relation to the expectations most fans had of them at the beginning of the season. This list can’t be used to predict anything, since only the most recent years may tell us much about the Mets’ current hopes. But this will give you a sense of how reliably our hopes have been rewarded. To give you an idea of what I’m doing here, let me say that if the Mets were to win between 75 and 85 games in 2010, I would say they had done as well as expected. If they won between 85 and 90 games, or made it to the playoffs winning fewer than 85 games, I would say they had performed better than expected. If they won more than 90 games and/or made it at least as far as the NLCS, I would say that they had performed much better than expected. If they won between 70 and 75 games, I would say they performed worse than expected. If they won less than 70 games, I would call their season much worse than expected. You may not agree with all of my judgments, and you are encouraged to offer your input, but I am prepared to defend each of the following categorizations.

In xxxx (year) the Mets did _____

1962 – Worse than expected

1963 – As expected

1964 – As expected

1965 – As expected.

1966 – As expected

1967 – As expected

1968 – As expected

1969 – Much better than expected

1970 – Worse than expected

1971 – As expected

1972 – As expected

1973 – Better than expected

1974 – Worse than expected

1975 – As expected

1976 – As expected

1977 – Worse than expected

1978 – As expected

1979 – As expected

1980 – As expected

1981 – As expected

1982 – As expected

1983 – As expected

1984 – Much better than expected

1985 – Better than expected

1986 – Better than expected

1987 – Worse than expected

1988 – As expected

1989 – Worse than expected

1990 – As expected

1991 – Worse than expected

1992 – Worse than expected

1993 – Much worse than expected

1994 – Better than expected

1995 – As expected

1996 – Worse than expected

1997 – Much better than expected

1998 – As expected

1999 – Better than expected

2000 – As expected

2001 – Worse than expected

2002 – Worse than expected

2003 – Much worse than expected

2004 – Worse than expected

2005 – Better than expected

2006 – Much better than expected

2007 – Worse than expected

2008 – As expected

2009 – Much worse than expected

The breakdown: Much better than expected: 4 Better than expected: 6 As expected: 22 Worse than expected: 13 Much worse than expected: 3.

The Mets, overall, do what they’re expected to do about half the time. When they don’t, they are somewhat more likely to disappoint than to please us. One consolation, I suppose, is that for the past decade, the Mets have shown a real tendency to not perform as they were predicted to perform at the start of the season. The bad news is that they’ve usually been worse. The good news is that if Johan Santana, Mike Pelfrey, Oliver Perez, and John Maine perform as well as they did for large portions of the 2007 and 2008 season and if someone new comes out of the blue, the Mets could win the division and who knows what else. Is that good news? No. Is that news? No. There is no news.

*****

There may not be news, but here is a list of some of my upcoming appearances. At each, I will be talking about and reading from my new book, The Last Days of Shea: Delight and Despair in the Life of a Mets Fan. I try to vary my program, so that I do different things at each.

February 6, 11:20 am to noon – This is my time slot as a featured speaker/reader at the annual meeting of the Casey Stengel (New York City) chapter of SABR. This will be a great all-day program of interest to all NYC baseball fans. It will be held from 10:30 to 3:30 at the Mid-Manhattan Branch of the New York Public Library, 455 Fifth Avenue (at 40th Street), 6th Floor.  This is the building diagonally across from the one with the lions.  Check out the full program here.

February 9, 7 pm. Greenwich (CT) Library.

February 11, 7 pm Ridgefield (CT) Library

February 23, 7 pm Rye (NY) Library (The Rye Free Reading Room)

The holiday offer was so successful that I’m going to extend it.  Over 50 of you received personally inscribed copies of my books.  I enjoyed it because I got a chance to write extensive personal inscriptions to true blue and orange Mets fans and it really wasn’t a hassle to do the mailing.  So far none of the checks have bounced.

If you would like to have or to give an inscribed copy or copies of either Mets Fan, The Last Days of Shea, or both, please write me an e-mail at danaabrand@yahoo.com.  Tell me how many books you want, the name of the fan to whom the book should be inscribed, and tell me a little about their Mets fandom.  Also, tell me the address to which the book(s) should be sent.  I will send the personally inscribed books to you right away.  Every book will have a unique inscription.  Once I have sent the books, I will send you an e-mail indicating what you owe me and where you may send your personal check.  The cost is $15 per book (that’s a slight discount from bookstore price for The Last Days of Shea, and a significant discount for Mets Fan) plus postage.  The cost of postage is usually $2.75 (media mail) for an entire mailing of one  or two books and a little more for anything larger than two books. 

Please note:  I am about to go on a New Year’s trip to London with my family and so I won’t be mailing anything out until after January 5.   My blog, as you can tell, is on hiatus until the Mets do something worth blogging about.  Happy New Year to everyone!  Let’s hope against hope that this will be a year to remember.

I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season.  This isn’t the best time of year for baseball fans, particularly frustrated ones.  It seems to me that because there is so much at stake, Mets fans are filled with more anxiety than usual about the moves the team will make during the offseason.  All I can say is that what is true of baseball in general is particularly true of the offseason.  It ain’t over ’til it’s over.

A number of people who have not been able to attend some of my most recent readings have written to ask if it would be possible to purchase inscribed copies of my books as holiday gifts.

I am happy to do this.  If you would like to buy an inscribed copy of either The Last Days of Shea or Mets Fan for just $15 per copy (that’s a significant discount on Mets Fan) plus postage, please just send me an e-mail at danaabrand@yahoo.com.   Please indicate 1) the address to which you’d like me to send the book(s); 2)the name of the person(s) to whom you’d like the book(s)  inscribed.  Please also tell me if the person is over 21, and, if you like, anything you might want me to know about their Mets fandom.  I will send a copy right out with a personal inscription to the person you indicate.  In my return e-mail, I will tell you how much is owed, and the address to which you can send a check.

Please also check out my website for The Last Days of Shea, where I have a regularly updated list of scheduled readings.  In February and March thus far, I have appearances scheduled in Manhattan, Greenwich CT, Ridgefield CT, Rye NY, Oceanside LI, and at C.W. Post University.

“… The leaves are off the trees, the sun slips wearily along the edge of the horizon, and it is dark most of the time.  Between the end of the World Series and the arrival of pitchers and catchers at training camps in Florida, you can only think of what you don’t have.  All you can do is dream of the pleasure of warm evenings lit to a brightness beyond imagining in which titanically gifted grown men play a child’s game for your pleasure.”  from The Last Days of Shea

By now you should have read this weekend’s press release:  Mets Expand Club Presence at Citi Field

This is, of course, important news for all of us who have been waiting to see if the team was going to respond to one of the most significant reasons for fan discontent with the new stadium.  It is good news to hear that the history, heritage, and symbols of the Mets will no longer appear to have been intentionally excluded from Citi Field.

As anyone familiar with my blog and books will anticipate, I won’t thank the Mets for commemorating important figures in Mets history by naming VIP entrances after them.  The VIP entrances still stick in my craw.  I don’t care what they call them.  They can name one the M. Donald Grant VIP Entrance, another the Bernard Madoff VIP entrance, and the third the FOX News Fair and Balanced VIP Entrance for all I care.  Since I will never spend more than $100 (in 2009 money) for a ticket to a regular season baseball game, I will be forever excluded from the status of a VIP when I go to Citi Field.  I could live to be 110 and be the last person to remember the first Mets game, I could write 10 books about them, and I will not be a VIP.  I will never be anything more than a P.  

I do thank the Mets for naming the bridge by the old home run apple the Shea bridge.  That’s nice.  I am also jazzed (doesn’t take much to jazz me but it takes something) by the fact that those dreary staircases are going to be painted blue and orange and by the fact that there are going to be full-color banners and logos all over the place.  That could be wonderful and it could drown out or at least compete with all the visual noise from the ads that have grown out of the attractive little stadium like alien fungi.

The really important news, of course, is that there is going to be a Mets museum.  Not just a Hall of Fame, which we’ve been promised for a while, but a Hall of Fame and Museum.   This is crucially important.  And it is crucially important that the Mets do the museum right.

They might do it right and they might not.  Those of us who care about such things need to watch what happens carefully.  One reason I am hopeful is that Gary Cohen and Howie Rose have been put on “The Mets Hall of Fame Committee.”  If I had to choose two individuals to serve as the custodians of the history and heritage of the Mets, it would be Gary and Howie.  I trust these guys to make sure that Mets fans get something meaningful, rather than something corporate or cliched.  What has me a little worried is that although the press release refers to the “Mets Hall of Fame and Museum,” all it talks about is the Hall of Fame.    Talking about the Committee, Jeff Wilpon is quoted as saying:

“The re-formation of the Mets Hall of Fame Committee is central to our concerted efforts to better connect our present and future to our past,” said Wilpon. “It reinforces the organization’s and our fans’ shared desire to recognize our greatest players. With our 2010 opening of the Mets Hall of Fame & Museum at Citi Field, now was the time to bring this group together.”

The Mets should honor their greatest players, with information, memorabilia, sculpture, etc.  I look forward eagerly to seeing a vital Mets Hall of Fame.  But the Mets need to realize that if they just have a Hall of Fame commemorating important Mets, they will not have done enough.  A museum needs to be more than a hall of fame.  It needs to honor not only our heroes, but the experience of the millions of people, alive and dead, who have given a chunk of their lives to following the exploits of these heroes and all other kinds of players the Mets have had as well.   The Mets are not the heroes.  The Mets are the bond between the millions and the Mets, heroes and non-heroes.  This is what needs to be commemorated in the museum.  It has to tell the story not just of the Hall of Fame greatness of Seaver’s pitching and Piazza’s hitting.  It has to tell the story of the people who hung the banners and marched with them on the field on Banner Day.  It has to tell the story of the people who ran onto the field in the sixties, who knew it was spring when Bob Murphy’s voice told them it was, who stuck with the team when there was no rational reason to do so.  It has to tell people about the Curley Shuffle, Jane Jarvis, the Sign Man, and Doris from Rego Park.  It has to honor our songs and chants and apples and baseball-headed mascot.  It has to remind us or teach us about the moments that will never be forgotten:  Seaver’s almost-perfect game, Jones dropping to his knees, Tug’s September of Belief, the ball that found its way through Buckner’s legs, the Grand Slam single, Endy’s catch, the final ceremony at Shea:  the moments that took our breath away and never gave it back.  If the museum does not do this, it will not have done its work.  Citi Field will still not be able to tell us who we are or why we’re here. 

Please don’t just give us what used to be in the entrance area of the Diamond Club.  Please don’t just give us statues and trophies.  Please give us the history and the poetry of the Mets.  Please give us the sense that we’re still the New Breed, we’re still the loudest most emotional fans of all, the ones who made the Upper Deck of Shea feel like an earthquake.  Give the museum enough space.  And fill it with care, emotion, and imagination.

Please.  Mets fans deserve this.  All of us.

***********

Please come and hear me read from The Last Days of Shea on:

December 1 at 7 pm at the Hillside Library in New Hyde Park, LI

December 2 at 11:30 am at the Hofstra Bookstore in the Hofstra Student Center

I’d love to meet you.

For those of you who don’t want to read the long post that follows, I will tell you that the short answer to all three questions is “No.” 

The Yankees didn’t buy a championship because you can’t buy a championship.  They deserve a lot of credit for what they accomplished this season, the Steinbrenners deserve a lot of credit for their dedication to winning championships, and yet … and yet … when to get out of the house to avoid even the possibility of turning on the TV or computer to learn anything about their ticker-tape parade, I ended up going to get my hair cut and beard trimmed and found myself confined to a a barber’s chair within a few feet of a big screen TV broadcasting that parade, I felt as if I was a detainee at Guantanamo Bay.

Baseball, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, is not fair.   The success of a baseball team depends upon the actions of unelected individuals who are granted absolute control over a chunk of millions of lives by a monopolistic system masquerading as free enterprise.  It is, of course, nothing of the sort.   The main virtue of capitalism is supposed to be that it allows people to become rich by satisfying the needs of others.  In a monopoly like baseball, the unelected despots become rich without having to give any thought to the needs of the millions who root for a team. 

And I am most certainly not fair, when it comes to experiencing emotions about baseball.  I know this and I struggle with it.  To illustrate my irrationality, and my self-consciousness about it, I offer these quotations from my book, The Last Days of Shea:  Delight and Despair in the Life of a Mets Fan:

p.89:  “After reading the Mitchell Report and venting my outrage at the rotten eggs who had tried, by cheating, to alter the competitive balance of baseball, I turned my attention to the efforts of the Mets to trade for Johan Santana, a pitcher who would deserve and receive the largest contract ever offered to a pitcher.”  Note the irony directed at myself.  I have a problem with people who alter the competitive balance of baseball with an injection, but I don’t have a problem with my team altering the competitive balance of baseball with a massive amount of money?  Yes, I would have been bothered if the Yankees had signed Santana.  No, I don’t think this is consistent of me.

p.200-201  ”Isn’t it corrupt of me to love an underperforming team with one of the biggest payrolls in baseball?  Isn’t it disingenuous of me to try to pretend that the Mets still have anything to do with the colorful underdog image the New York hype machine manufactured for them back in the 1960s?     …    Whenever my analytical mind penetrates all the way to the deepest absurdities of my baseball fandom, my poetic mind pushes back and says, see, there’s something extraordinary here, because you don’t like irrational belief, and here you are irrationally believing in something.”  What you find here is a contemptuous self-consciousness about something I write about a great deal in my book.  Baseball is a place where I allow myself all sorts of primitive thrills I don’t allow myself in ANY other aspect of my life.  I believe myths I know are not true.  I feel tribal identification.  I hate people and abstractions that don’t deserve to be hated.  I become deeply attached to home turf and I scorn the home turf of others.  The only reason I can accept morally the fact that I do these things when I root for the Mets is that I am always fully aware that the myths are not true, the enemies are not enemies, and that the tribe is an arbitrary community that demands nothing from me.   In baseball, all of the emotions that have made human history so wonderful and so horrible are turned into a game where they may be enjoyed in brackets, where they don’t hurt anybody.

All of this is to say that if I want to fucking hate the Yankees, I’m going to fucking hate the Yankees. 

I understand and sympathize with the puzzlement that some articulate responders felt when they read my previous misty-mythical-Metsy blog entry about how we’re better than they are because we don’t think we’re entitled, but someday the fates will send a small shaft of light down to lift our humble misery to the heavens, and blah, blah, blah.   I can’t satisfactorily answer the astute and challenging questions posed by JD and Kiko.   They are right when they say that the Yankees are doing nothing wrong and are not in fact buying championships.  They are right that the Mets are morally no better and are mainly less competent.  They are right to point out that the owners who stiff their fans by taking a profit and not investing in their team deserve to be criticized more than the Steinbrenners.  But nevertheless I feel about the Yankees the way I feel about the Yankees.  They are the not-me and I cannot root for them.  To root for them because they are of New York, and New York is the place I identify with more than any other place in the world, would make them part of me.   And I don’t want the not-me to be part of me.  I don’t want that.  To root for the Phillies, a worthy team that is merely a rival, seemed to me to pose less of an existential threat in this last World Series.  I don’t defend this.  I have never defended it.  In my piece about how Mets fans should root for the Phillies, I made the point of comparing the Mets to Cain and the Yankees to Abel.  Unpack this.  Cain’s resentment of Abel was legitimate.  He didn’t understand why God accepted Abel’s sacrifices but rejected his own.  It wasn’t fair of God, but it was the way it was.  I’m not saying that Cain was right to hate Abel so much that he killed him.  But I am saying that when I see Alex Rodriguez riding on top of a limousine receiving cheers and cascades of shredded paper from the buildings that line the canyon of heroes, I want to kill him.

And I will stand by what I said in Yankee Hatred.  Even if no one can reliably buy a championship, winning far more than any other team because you are always extremely well-funded and generally competently run takes some of the fun out of being a baseball fan.  I congratulate sincerely Yankees fans who can identify Horace Clarke or Danny Tartabull, but I warn Yankees fans who now have too much of the heroin of winning in their system.  You may be doing nothing wrong, but a time may come when you are doing nothing fun.   If the Mets ever win anything again, it will be a miracle and it will feel like a miracle, even if they have enjoyed every advantage in the world.  Yes, we will have more fun than you are having now.

As for the question of what is to be done, all I can say is this.  I don’t want a salary cap, which isn’t possible anyway, because owners will just use it to make more money for themselves.   It is my firm belief that the only way the problem of the games unfairness could be solved is if people somehow managed to get rid of the system whereby teams are owned by families and individuals.  I don’t know enough about the law to know what we could have, but I dream of a world, which we can probably never have, in which teams might be managed, on a non-profit basis, by boards of trustees accountable to elected officials in counties within specific metropolitan areas, where ticket prices are kept low in the interest of the fan, where the money made is divided among the players according to formulas that reward performance plus intangibles as determined in a fair, agreed-upon way, and where every team has as much of a chance of winning in a particular year as any other team.   Profits make sense in a system in which there is competition.  But they are not good things in a monopoly.  I can’t help but think that it would be a good thing if baseball were re-organized in such a way that it would only benefit the fans and the players.    This utopian suggestion, of course, won’t do as a proposal for an alternative.   I really don’t know what to say. 

I am waiting until next year.  And I am wrapping myself in the blanket of my myths and my antipathies.  My baseball universe isn’t happy at the moment, but it is coherent.  I know what I want.  I want to feel good about the Mets.  I want them to win.  I want that level of baseball excitement that I have only felt just a few times, that is so rare, so perfect, and so memorable that just a tiny amount gives the soul the sustenance it needs to hope, dream, and suffer through decades.

*******

Check out this recent interview with me, about my book and the World Series, with Frankie the Sports Guy on WGBB 1240 AM.

Come see me talk about and read from my book on at 7:30 on Tuesday, November 10 at the South Huntington (LI) Public Library.

Or come see me talk about and read from my book at 7:30 on Tuesday, November 17 at the Teaneck (NJ) Public Library.

And please check out Michael Kimmelman’s article “At the Bad New Ballparks” in the current issue of the New York Review of Books which features The Last Days of Shea.

You’ll never forget this season.  You never forget any season.  But this season will stay with you.  The anguish, the disappointment, and the humiliation are inside of you now and it will be a very long time before they are digested, or excreted.  Contrary to what Mets management may tell you, in jest, a season like this does not build character.  What it builds isn’t noble or special.  But it is what you are.

The season began as beloved Shea was ground to dust and rubble.  In its place, they built something that could not see us, and had no arms to embrace us.  We felt the disappointment of a child whose parents have replaced a dear pet with a fancy toy, and have convinced themselves that the kid is happier now than ever before.

The Mets were impotent in the new stadium.  It looked smaller, but miraculously, the walls were further away.  Muscles separated from bones, tendons snapped, scars grew.  The Mets were replaced by scrubs who were then replaced by others.  At the end of the season, there were strangers on the strange field, and there was no one in the stands. 

And then, long after you stopped caring, the Phillies won the National League pennant.  And the Yankees, plodding, bland, and inevitable, won the World Series in six games.  All of the worst things that could happen had happened.  With all the imagination, poetry, and class of Donald Trump, the Yankee colossus claimed the prize it knew it deserved, and New York was promised the biggest ticker-tape parade in history.

This is why you’re a Mets fan.  You are not celebrating.   They say New York is celebrating, but you know it isn’t.  You are a New Yorker because you are not what they say you are and you don’t do what they say you’re doing. 

It’s not as if you choose misery.  And it is not as if you have chosen anything that is particularly worthy.  We are no better.  But we are different.  We’ve chosen a fate that looks like fate, and not an outrageous distortion of it.   And some November, late and cold, we will know a happiness they will never know.

I want to thank everyone who submitted guesses about the article that has just appeared in my favorite publication.  All of the guesses were good ones, but nobody actually got it.  I will, however, award the prize to Stormy, who guessed my second-favorite publication:  The New Yorker.  Stormy, please e-mail me at danaabrand@yahoo.com to claim your prize.

As for my favorite publication.  Well, although I read a lot about sports on the Web, and regularly read the sports sections of the two newspapers I read, The New York Times and Newsday, I don’t really like any sports publication very much.  If there was a sports journal written as well as Faith and Fear in Flushing, I’d subscribe to it.  But there isn’t.  The only sports publication I recommend to anyone is the Mets Annual put out by Maple Street Press.

The New Yorker is my second favorite publication and I often read and have the highest regard for Harper’s and The Atlantic.   I also always read and generally like The New York Times.

But my absolutely favorite publication is the one that Esquire has called ”the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language.”  It is.  This is why it fills the baskets in my bathroom.

My favorite publication is  The New York Review of Books. 

You have no idea what it means to me that the issue that has just hit the newstands contains an article by Michael Kimmelman, the chief art critic for the New York Times, that focuses on my book, “The Last Days of Shea:  Delight and Despair in the Life of a Mets Fan.”  This is an intellectual’s dream come true.  Mr. Kimmelman says some very nice things about “The Last Days of Shea” and he actually refers to me at one point as “the Proust of Mets bloggers.”  I’ll take that for an identity.   Kimmelman’s article is terrific and, with the help of my book, he says a number of things about the new baseball stadiums in New York, and about what stadiums mean to people, that need to be said in the context of an intellectual journal.

I had hoped to have a link to the article, “In the Bad New Ballparks,” but this is as far as I can take you.  If you don’t subscribe to the NYRB, and if you don’t want to shell out for a copy, you can find it in most libraries. 

Even if you don’t know the New York Review, you may know it through Woody Allen, who often mentions it as beloved by New York intellectuals.   In “Annie Hall,” when the guy on line in front of him in the movie is going on and on about Marshall McLuhan, Allen’s character says of the couple:  ”They probably met through an ad in the New York Review of Books: Thirtyish academic wishes to meet woman interested in Mozart, James Joyce, and sodomy.”   And in Allen’s priceless short story, “The Whore of Mensa,” a character says:  ”I devised a complicated scheme to take over The New York Review of Books, but it meant I had to pass for Lionel Trilling. I went to Mexico for an operation. There’s a doctor in Juarez who gives people Trilling’s features – for a price. Something went wrong. I came out looking like Auden, with Mary McCarthy’s voice. That’s when I started working the other side of the law.”

Seriously, though, if you’re interested in literature, art, politics, and ideas in general, I can’t recommend any publication to you more highly.  Check it out.  And those personal ads really are like nothing you’ve ever seen.

One of the October rituals of a New York Mets fan is taking a break from leaf-raking and planning Halloween costumes in order to decide who you’re going to root for in the World Series.  Some years, there will be a team you can convince yourself to like and you root for them.  Other years, there will be a team you don’t like and you can root against them.  In many years, you are indifferent to both teams and so you remain indifferent to the outcome of the Series.

Only rarely do two teams you strongly dislike make it to the World Series.  When this happens, you face a peculiar problem.  As much as you’d like to remain indifferent, you can’t.  There is no conceivable way in which a Mets fan can be indifferent to a Yankees-Phillies World Series.  We are so used to responding positively to the failure of these teams, and so used to responding negatively to their successes, that we can’t just suddenly pull the plug on our emotions.  The problem, obviously, is what are you supposed to do if a single event (say Howard hitting a homer off of Rivera) would simultaneously flood your neurons with happy chemicals and unhappy chemicals?  You don’t want to explode and you can’t neutralize your emotions.  To keep from exploding, you have to pick one of these two teams and root for it.

In the upcoming World Series, I am rooting for the Philadelphia Phillies to defeat the New York Yankees.   Here is why.

Yankees fans right now are very happy about facing the arch-nemesis of the Mets.  They see an opportunity to get us on their side, to unite the city behind their team.  They think we will join them in celebrating the exploits of Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez.  They think that when we see what this is like, we will realize that it is actually not so bad.  Our hearts will melt, and since our own team has given us so much heartache lately, we might even consider, on the very edge of our consciousness, the possibility, dare one say it, of a change in loyalty, or a dividing of loyalty, in order to enjoy this sweet ambrosia of frequent winning.  It’s not so bad to win, is it?  Feels kind of nice, doesn’t it?  There are some good players on that team in the Bronx …..

WAKE UP!  Throw a pail of cold water over your head!  Don’t fall asleep!  Don’t ever do it!  Don’t be replaced by the pods in the basement and always resist the seductive but specious arguments of the Dark One. 

Mets fans!   Remember that no matter how successful the Yankees become, the one thing we can always deprive them of is the right to claim that they have unified this city, that they are “New York’s team.”  To this day, you will hear Yankees fans, their eyes misting with tears, remembering how the city came together behind the Yankees’ noble, doomed quest for a fifth consecutive World Championship in 2001.   Mets fans know that this didn’t really happen.  We weren’t very demonstrative about this, out of respect for what many Yankees fans had suffered in the attacks, but I am willing to tell the world that I know that in the New York metropolitan area, it wasn’t just my chips and dip table that got knocked over in exhilaration when Luis Gonzalez singled off of Mariano Rivera to drive Jay Bell home with the run that gave the Arizona Diamondbacks the 2001 World Championship. 

Mets fans cannot root for the Yankees under any circumstances.  It is as simple as that.  I understand that Yankees fans feel morally superior to us because they can, on occasion, root for the Mets.  The chutzpah is amazing but I’ve actually met Yankees fans who think they deserve credit for having rooted for the Mets in the 1986 Series.  Still, everyone needs to understand that Mets fans can’t ever root for the Yankees because for us, the dynamic is so much more complicated.  The Mets mean nothing to the Yankees.  The Yankees mean a great deal to the Mets.  We are the slighted younger brother.  We are Cain and they are Abel.  Hating them is central to who and what we are.  Think of it, Mets fan.  What will it feel like to you to hear them celebrating their 27^th World Championship in this year of all years in Mets history?   Would you rather hear them gloat or would you rather hear their anguish at being denied that to which they are so certain they are entitled?   

The Phillies are just our division rivals.  They are not wrapped around the tree trunk of our very existence as Mets fans.  If we root for the Yankees, we may cease to exist.   If we root for the Phillies, for this one series, it doesn’t make any difference.  It’s not as if there is any chance of us becoming Phillies fans, in the way that there is always a chance that a Mets fan might become a Yankees fan.  Sure, if the Phillies win, they will have bragging rights.  But what do they have now, please?  Are you worried that a second World Championship in a row will make the Phillies fans more obnoxious?  Who would you rather see get more obnoxious, Phillies fans or Yankees fans?  And hey, why shouldn’t these people be obnoxious?  They’ve earned it.  We just wish we could be this obnoxious to them.  We’re resentful that we can’t be.  When Phillies fans show up at Citi Field with their banners and their Championship shirts, I wish I could say something cutting and witty to them, but I can’t.  I hang my head.  I can’t find a good reason to hate the Phillies.  I’m just mad because they beat us, dramatically, three times in a row.  And I’m not going to start hating them because they treat the Mets with so much contempt and disdain.  Why do Mets fans feel that they are the only ones allowed to treat the Mets with contempt and disdain? 

It might even be fun for the Phillies to have won two World Championships in a row.  There will certainly be no question, when the season starts, about the team to beat in the National League East.  Even if the Phillies lose in four to the Yankees, there will still be no question about this.  They are the team to beat.  We are the underdogs.  That will make victory more fun if we can beat them.  Look, there’s nothing that can happen now that can hurt the Phillies in terms of their standing relative to the Mets.  As we all know, there is nothing shameful about losing a World Series, unless of course you lose it, when you have a better team, to a hated crosstown rival to whom you are often compared.  That can’t happen in this Series.  One of these teams will emerge as the 2009 World Champion and the other will be a respected pennant winner. 

Do it.  Root for the Phillies.  Sweeten the pot of our eventual triumph over them.  Deny the Yankees.  As much as we would like to, we can’t sit on the sidelines for this one.  There is too much at stake and too much going on.  Yes, this is a nightmare for Mets fans.  But face it, some nightmares are worse than others.  Oh, and if against everyone’s expectations, the Angels pull it out, and we have a Phillies-Angels World Series, root for the Angels.

For an excellent treatment of this same topic, check out the ever-reliable Faith and Fear in Flushing.

And if you haven’t submitted an entry yet in my Last Days of Shea  mystery article contest, please see the post below.

I’m not a contest person, but I have been inspired to have a contest.  Here’s the story:

At some point in the next few weeks, a lengthy article will appear in which my book, The Last Days of Shea, will be prominently featured and appreciated.    The article will appear in what is, without question, MY FAVORITE PUBLICATION.   I read this publication as soon as I get it.  I savor it.  It fills the basket on top of the toilet in our main bathroom.  I’ve been a subscriber to this publication for many many years, but otherwise I have no connection to it. 

Do you think you can guess where this article will appear?  Do you think you know what might be MY FAVORITE PUBLICATION?  You can have one guess, which you can leave as a comment on this post.  You may not guess any publication that someone else has already guessed.  I will reveal the identity of the publication only after the article is published.  No one who has ever gone to the bathroom in my house or who works for the publication may participate in this contest. 

The person who has made the correct guess will receive a free copy of my book, inscribed in any way he/she instructs, along with a copy of the publication in which the article appears. 

Excuse the self-indulgence of this, but this is a real Mike Myers moment for me.  Not only am I not worthy, I am totally verklempt.

1)  I am featured, along with Al Weis and his family, in a terrific article by Mark Herrmann in today’s Newsday, commemorating what happened forty years ago today (October 16, 1969).

2)  On October 16, I was an in-studio guest on “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” an episode of Colin McEnroe’s Show on Connecticut Public Radio.  Will Leitch of New York Magazine was another guest, as was Jefferson Singer, a psychology professor at Connecticut College.  The topic was the psychology of baseball fandom and the 50-minute show, if I do say so myself, will strike some of you as more worth listening to than a whole year of daytime WFAN.  Give it a try the next time you’re picking up the kitchen or organizing your closets.  You can also download it to your I-Pod.  You can find it right here:  Take Me Out to the Ballgame.

2)  Sunday, November 8, I will be on Sports Talk Live with Frankie the Sports Guy at 10 pm on 1240 WGBB AM

3)  Tuesday, November 10, I will be giving a reading from my new book at 7:30 pm at the South Huntington (LI) Library.

4)  Tuesday, November 17, I will be giving a reading from my new book at 7:30 pm at the Teaneck (NJ) Library.

5)  Tuesday, December 1, I will be giving a reading from my book from my new book at 7pm at the Hillside Library, New Hyde Park (LI).

I will have more information soon about other appearances, etc.  Once again, if you want to read about my book, see samples, blurbs, reviews, and ordering information, follow this link:  The Last Days of Shea:  Delight and Despair in the Life of a Mets Fan.