Dana Brand's Mets Fan Blog

Late this afternoon (10/5), Mike Francesa interviewed Jeff Wilpon, David Howard, and Omar Minaya for an hour and a half.  Mike observed, in the course of the interview, that after some criticisms that were made in the first month, virtually everyone liked Citi Field now.  He asked Dave Howard what it was that the fans praised the most.  Howard said that what he heard most from the fans is that they appreciated the “intimacy” of the new stadium, they liked the smaller size of the stadium and the sense of closeness to the field and the players. 

I have been a fan of the New York Mets since six months before they played their first game.  My loyalty is deep, complete, and incomprehensible.  I will never cease to be a Mets fan.  Whatever the Mets are, I want to be close to them.  Like most fans, I crave intimacy with my team.

I find the experience of baseball in Citi Field to be less intimate than the experience of baseball at Shea.  Please understand that there are many fans who feel as I do, and please do not dismiss us as impractical sentimentalists pining for our lost Shea.  I have spoken to a great many Mets fans over the past six months and although I have heard them praise Citi Field for its food, bathrooms, legroom, and cupholders, I have never heard a single person praise it for its intimacy.  While I will take your word for it that you have heard such praise, I ask you to listen to those of us who feel differently. 

Citi Field does not feel intimate to me because when I arrive two and a half hours before the game is scheduled to begin, I am not permitted to stand in the area behind the dugouts to watch batting practice.  I am required to stand far from the players in a clump of people out in right or left field.  If I try to enter the enormous and virtually empty area of the field boxes near the players, guards rush down to tell me to return immediately to the clump.   At Shea, for 45 years, I was always able to watch the players up close during batting practice.  I saw them talking and clowning around, fifty feet away from me.  It was a wonderfully intimate experience.  If you are truly concerned with creating an intimate experience of baseball for your fans, you shouldn’t take away an intimate experience they had for decades and replace it with a policy that degrades them and distances them from their team.   I ask you please to restore the batting practice policy that had always been in effect at Shea.  Let everyone into the area behind the dugouts and require those who do not have tickets in that area to leave when batting practice is over.

Citi Field does not feel intimate to me because, like most middle-income fans, my seats at Citi Field are further from the field than they were at Shea.  Perhaps the field level seats are closer to the field, but I consider myself priced out of field level seats at Citi Field.  I found all of the seats at Shea to be affordable, including the field level, where I sat occasionally.  My usual $25 seats behind the infield in the Loge offered me a superb and intimate view of the game.  My current $25 seats in the Promenade are just all right.  There is nothing superb or intimate about the view from the Promenade.  If you have to pay the price of a Broadway show to experience intimacy in a new stadium, after you have for years had fine seats for one-quarter of that price in the old stadium, then you are going to feel anger towards anyone who tells you that the experience of the new stadium is more “intimate.” 

Shea was immense and, with a big crowd, it could feel sublime.  There was a beauty to Shea that derived in part from its enormous size, and from the sound that was made by an enormous crowd.  And yet in spite of the immensity of the crowd and the stadium, there was something intimate about the experience of Shea.  Everybody was in the same place, doing the same things.   We were all together.  When I go to Citi Field, I don’t feel as if we’re all together.  I feel that many of us are in well-guarded, exclusive areas closed off to the rest of us.  Many of us are behind plexiglass.  I feel as if we’re a fragmented stratified crowd that could never join together, as Mets crowds have in the past, to make the whole building tremble.   The crowd at Citi Field may be smaller, but the experience of the crowd seems less intimate. 

Another thing that detracts from the intimacy of Citi Field is the overwhelming presence of immense, ugly ads.  Citi Field was a beautiful piece of architecture when it first went up.  There were lovely arches and colonnades, a kind of retro-brownstone beauty.  

That beauty is still visible if the building is approached from some angles.  But from most angles of approach, this gentle aesthetic effect has been destroyed by the size and appearance of the billboards.  Inside the stadium, the ads dwarf the scoreboard and take up far too much of our field of vision.  All of this ugliness prevents intimacy.  As fans, we are looking for things we have always been intimate with:  the team’s vivid blue and orange colors, the wonderful logo, etc.  We don’t see those things, and we don’t see much about our history and heritage except for the recently installed Nikon ads.  We don’t see ourselves, we don’t see our team, but we see ads everywhere.  This too prevents us from feeling any intimacy in the new stadium. 

When people raise the kinds of objections I am making, everyone always says that you have to remember that baseball is a business and the owners need to make money so that they can afford to put the best team out there.  The argument is that they have a right to charge as much as the market will stand for tickets, they have a right to make stadiums smaller to increase the demand for the tickets, they have the right to fill the place up with ads.  I do not agree with these arguments.  I think that a business is something someone starts to satisfy people’s needs and compete with others who are trying to satisfy the same or similar needs.  Baseball is not a business in this way.  It is a monopoly.  It is most analogous to a privately-owned utility.  The only thing that prevents a privately-owned utility from doubling its rates is government regulation.  Nothing, apparently, prevents the Mets from doubling the price of what they offer.  What little government regulation there is of baseball is a joke.  So you get to determine the size of our stadium, the price of our tickets, and the nature of our experience, without having to get our approval or anyone else’s.  You don’t have to worry about competition from anyone else’s Mets.  If people want the Mets, and there are millions of us who do, you are the only game in town.  This gives you enormous power.  But I would say that it imposes upon you an immense responsibility.

You don’t just own a business.  You have been given a public trust that will bring you considerable profits that you have a right to take and a responsibility not to maximize.  The purpose of baseball is not to earn you as much money as you can make from it.  The purpose of baseball is to provide the glue of families and communities, to provide a wonderful pastime to enrich the lives of hard-working people who deserve it.  By all means make enough money to go out and get a starting pitcher and a power hitter.  But you can earn enough to do that, as the previous history of the Mets shows, by giving us a big enough stadium with reasonable ticket prices and such truly fan-friendly amenities as accessible batting practice, Old Timers’ Days, Fan Appreciation Days, Banner Days, room for all with reservations in the Acela Club, a museum that is not just a Hall of Fame but that also celebrates the diverse history of the Mets and the rich fan culture that has grown around this unique team.

You see, this is the kind of intimacy we’re craving.  We want you to see us.  We don’t want you to get on the radio, and along with Mike Francesa, deny that we exist.  If you really think that everyone is happy with Citi Field as it is, and that everyone is particularly happy with the “intimacy” of the new stadium, then you are betraying your sacred trust by being willfully blind.  Your job is to go down to those clumps in the outfield who stand and bitterly complain among themselves during batting practice.  Ask those people how they feel about batting practice at Citi Field as opposed to batting practice at Shea.  Your job is to head up to the Promenade and out to the outfield seats and ask the people there how they feel about the seats they can afford in Citi Field as opposed to the seats they could afford at Shea.  Your job is to watch a game from left field.  It may be that you can become more intimate with an outfielder if you can only see one of them, but if you ask the people around you, you will find that they prefer to see three, and their experience of the intimacy of the game is negatively affected by having to watch some of it on a video screen.  Your job is to find fans who can remember Old Timers’ Days, and Fan Appreciation Days, and Banner Days, and the whole history of this team and ask them what they think should be done so that the tradition we’ve given so much of our life to can be perpetuated.   Your job is to know what we’re actually thinking.  Your job is to stop saying that everyone is pleased with the intimacy of the new stadium when anyone who goes to the ballpark can tell you that this is simply not true.

You are in charge of an important part of our lives.  Hear us.  Know us.  Care about us.  Do this not only because it will enrich you in the end (it will).  Do this because it is the right thing to do.  We will appreciate it.  If you listen and respond, we will enjoy the intimacy of the new stadium you have built.  We will enjoy a sense of community and solidarity with each other and with you.   Please.  Listen.  Drop the PR.  And do the right thing.

*******

If you’d like to remember some of the intimacy Mets fans have experienced in the past, please check out my two books about New York Mets fandom:  the newly released The Last Days of Shea and the still very relevant and up-to-date Mets Fan  (2007).

Yesterday, I stood on the warning track and looked it in the face. 

I was with hundreds of people in our Gary, Keith, and Ron t-shirts attending Lynn Cohen’s end-of-the-year Main Event.  A year ago, we, the same people, stood on a different warning track at the end of a different season and looked into the face of a different stadium. 

I was happy to be in this crowd once again.  I was interested to be standing on the ground in a major league baseball stadium.  So this is how far it is from deep center to home plate!  If the seats were occupied, this is what a crowd would look like from down on the field!  This was instructive.  But the string was not vibrating.  There was no sound.  And I was looking into the face of a stranger.

Last year, I was looking at something that had so much dimension, that was so big and colorful and open out to the green tower of Flushing.  And it was as big in time as it was in space.  I was where so much had happened, to me, and to millions.  I was right next to Cleon Jones and Mookie Wilson.  I was beside my sisters, between my father and my daughter, wheeling my mother onto the packed dirt track.  I was ten and I was fifty.  I was there.  In my $1.35 green General Admission seat, or my General Admission seat that would turn into a bright orange Loge seat after the second inning, or my $27 Loge seat right behind homeplate, cramped but close to the field, with the most glorious possible sightlines.   I was there, all of me was there, with a thousand people in shirts commemorating the greatest TV broadcasting team in history.  At the third consecutive miraculous second-to-last game of a Mets season.  As time passes, my memory of that game does not dim.   I will remember forever Johan Santana’s change-up and what it was like to stand on that field, to be overwhelmed by my own past, by the past I shared with all of these people, standing as if in the center of a beloved building shaped like an embrace. 

I am sorry.  It was not possible for me not to remember this, as I stood with the same people up against forbidding black walls that were far too high.  As I stood out under the darkest possible daytime sky, under a scoreboard buried under vast ads for Arpielle rental equipment, gold merchants, and Fox News.  I looked across at the blanket of inaccessible yet empty seats on the field level.  I looked at the rows of inaccessible yet empty boxes and lounges behind durable plastic.  I looked at where I watched a game last week, at Citifield’s mezzanine, where you could sit in an expensive and undistinguished Excelsior-level seat whose main advantage is that you had the right to visit Caesar’s Club, a lounge that would not have been out of place in Akron, but would have been very much out of place on the Palatine Hill.  Yes, along the top of Romanland was my now-familiar Promenade.  Yes those seats were fine and reasonably priced.  But if you stand on the warning track or sit, as I sat out by the new Home Run Apple on steroids that is getting rusty from lack of use, you looked into the face of what? 

You look at what replaced Shea.  You looked at a poorly planned party after it ended in disaster.  You looked at the seats you wouldn’t have been able to afford to go to very often, that you expected to pay around $100 for every once in a while, that you were able to buy this year for $9.99 to see baseball that wasn’t even worth the price of admission.  Next year, I hope that the baseball will be worth what I pay for it.  I am hopeful.  I am bored and haven’t really cared about the outcome of a Met’s game for a couple of months.  But I have had enough time to forgive this season.  I forgive.  I have forgiven the Mets for half my life.  And they have rewarded me in the other half.  That is enough.

But how sad I was to stand there and to feel so little love for the home of my Mets. 

As I’ve said before, they’re not going to tear Citi Field down and build something new.  A big enough new stadium affordable for all, welcoming to all, with reasonable field dimensions, proudly proclaiming itself the home of The New York Mets is not going to rise up out of the vast parking lot on the shore of Flushing Bay.  I am going to have to learn to love this small, strange, and still, to me, obnoxious place.  I ask for help from the Mets and their owners.  Maybe I will get it and maybe I won’t.  I have a gut feeling that if I am ever to love this place, it won’t be in spite of or because of its physical being.  It may not even be because of the beautiful games that may someday be played here.  It will be because of this stream of humanity strung along the high dark walls, the stream of humanity on the line for hot dogs and pretzels and diet Pepsi and autographs from Gary, Ron, and Kevin.  It will be because of Lynn and her elves and all of the colorful, happy if grindy New Yorkers in the shirts picknicking down by the real Home Run Apple.  It will be because of the bloggers who write their stuff for nothing on the electronic wind that blows out of this strange noisy corner of Flushing by the chop shops and the elevated subway tracks and the airports.  It will be because there is something about baseball that has become indispensable to me, that makes me feel part of my family, the human community, and the stream of sights and sounds I am privileged to have for the time I will have it.

****

If you care about the Mets and cared about Shea, you’ll love my just-released book, The Last Days of Shea:  Delight and Despair in the Life of a Mets Fan

Just a note to let you know that:

1)  On Monday, September 28, I will be the featured guest on “The Cheap Seats,” broadcast at 7:30 pm on WNYU-FM, 89.1.

2)  On Tuesday, September 29, I will be giving a reading from “The Last Days of Shea” at 7 pm at the Newtown Public Library in Newtown, CT.

3)  On Saturday, October 3, I will be at the big end-of-the-year, Pitch In For a Good Cause, Gary, Keith, and Ron Main Event at Citi Field.   I hope to see and meet many of you there. 

4)  On Sunday, October 4, at 6 pm, I will be, along with Matt Cerrone and Mike Silva, one of the featured guests on the Second Anniversary Show of Seven Train to Shea.

5)  On Monday, October 5 at 8:10 am, I’ll share my thoughts about the end of the Mets season on Morning Wakeup Call with Mitch Merman on WRHU-FM, 88.7. 

If anybody is waiting for my blog piece about my most recent trip to Citi Field, I assure you it is coming.  I had a very busy weekend, but you are going to see this in the next few days. 

There’s still excitement left in this season.  Will we win 70?  Follow all the drama right here.

This is how bad it’s gotten.  Last night (9/23), I didn’t watch or listen to the Mets game because it was my birthday and my wife took me out to dinner.  It is, right now, 3:10 on 9/24 and it was only 5 minutes ago that I realized that I did not know how last night’s Mets game turned out.  I don’t think I have ever gone as late as 3:10 into the next day before I made an effort to find out what happened in a Mets game I missed the night before.  This is a record.  And a disturbing one. 

I had an interesting time going to the game on Tuesday night.  I will blog about that very soon.  In the meantime, you can hear me interviewed tonight (9/24) at 9 pm on Pro Baseball Central with Steve Keane and Joe McDonald.  I will, of course, be talking about my new book, The Last Days of Shea:  Delight and Despair in the Life of a Mets Fan.  

You can, if you like, see a five-minute video of me reading from my book at this link.

And you can see a ten-minute interview with me about the book at this link.

Tomorrow, September 23, is my birthday.   To mark the occasion, I am printing here a portion of a chapter from my new book, The Last Days of Shea, called ”My Birthday Party.”   It is about my birthday, two years ago, when I had a book launch for Mets Fan and saw, for the first time, signs that the Mets internet community existed in real space and time.    Speaking of real space and time, I’m going to Citi Field tonight (9/22).   I promise to post a piece about my experience. 

… On September 23, 2007, I celebrated my 53^rd birthday and for the first time since I was 13, I had a birthday party.  But it wasn’t just a birthday party.  It was a book launch.  I had written a book called Mets Fan  and I was throwing a party to promote it at a little bohemian joint on Avenue A in the East Village called Mo Pitkin’s House of Satisfaction.  A reader of the blog which I had set up to promote my book, was an investor in the place and he recommended it for the book launch party.  It turned out to be perfect for the occasion.   A book launch party has always been a fantasy of mine, a part of my dream of myself as a writer and not just a professor.  I had always imagined that they were glamorous affairs, either glittery or funky.  We were obviously going to go for funky here.  But they don’t really have book launch parties any more, certainly not for obscure little books by nobodies like my Mets Fan.  They’re things of the past, things from the days before the corporate acquisition of publishing houses, things from the days when the world, irrationally, had more on its mind than making money. 

They also don’t really have funky and cheap little joints in the East Village any more.  Yet Mo Pitkin’s was trying to be the kind of mythical place where hip, offbeat and not very rich people could gather and eat comfort food and hear great music and watch performance art.  It was a dream of the Hartman brothers, Phil and Jesse, big Mets fans who had founded the Two Boots pizza empire.  Mo Pitkin’s would be out of business by the end of the year.  It just seemed to me to be appropriate that we were having the kind of party they don’t have any more in the kind of place they don’t have any more, to celebrate a book about being a baseball fan in ways that didn’t fit what baseball is now any more.  The whole thing was an exercise, on every level, of wistful yet idealistic romanticism.  It was perfect for a 53^rd birthday.  It was perfect for an aging professor who was trying to re-invent himself, before it was too late, as the writer he had dreamed of being every since he was 15.

I had invited my friends and colleagues and blog readers and my fellow bloggers to the party.  And of course my family was there including my mother Helen, who had made it up the one flight of stairs with considerable difficulty and my father-in-law Charlie who was bravely going out into the world less than two months after losing his wife.  My sisters, Jennifer and Stefanie, my wife, Sheila, and my daughter Sonia were there.  Sonia wore a cool, hip new dress and had gotten a bohemian gamine haircut, thinking that she was going to a big literary event in Greenwich Village.   A lot of people came.  I was particularly moved by the turnout of fellow bloggers.  There was Steve Keane, of the Eddie Kranepool Society, Mike Steffanos of Mikes Mets,   Kathy Foronjy was there, who had made a documentary film about Mets fans called Mathematically Alive, which I hadn’t seen yet but which turned out to be just like Mets Fan in spirit.  There was MetsGrrl and there were three women bloggers Zoe Rice, Taryn Cooper, and Steffie Kaplan, and who called themselves the Joan Whitney Paysons after the woman who was the Mets’ first owner.  I knew my friends, family, and colleagues, of course, but I had never met any of the Mets people in person before.  I felt like a kid in a cartoon whose imaginary friends have come to life.  Sure I knew that people I knew from the Internet really existed, but you’re never really sure, you know what I mean?   For all I knew, these people were inside the worn laptop with the F8 key missing on which I had written my book, and on which I composed my blog and my website.   

Everyone was so nice and so supportive.  Everybody made me feel as if I had done something worth doing.  Everybody made me feel as if we were all in this together, trying to build an alternate world of blogs, podcasts, and films about the Mets; an alternate world in which the hopes and dreams of millions and the joys and sorrows of fandom, were treated with respect.  For that one afternoon, the Mets did not exist simply to soak up irritating condescension from Mike and the Mad Dog.  They were part of a family that included many fine, generous, and imaginative people.  

All through the afternoon, as we ate Two Boots pizza, drank, and talked, people kept track of the game that was being played in Florida.  The Mets finally won, 7-6, on a David Wright home run in the eleventh.  The Phillies had lost, 5-3, to the Nationals.  We were two and a half games up with seven more to play.  The Phillies had six more games to play.  If we could win 4 of our 7 games, the Phillies would have to win all 6 of theirs to tie us.  If we only won 3, they would have to win all 6 of their games to beat us.  If we won 2 and lost 5, they would have to go 5-1 to beat us.  We were okay.  Everyone in the assembled company felt good.  When the game was over, I read a few pieces from my book to my fellow Mets fans.   

You know, in the end, I am convinced that the most amazing thing about the New York Mets is not the inconsistent baseball franchise by that name.  It is the millions of people who continue to root for them, through years of frustration and disappointment, even though they are geographically entitled to root for the most successful of all baseball franchises.  We fans had been dangling over a precipice ever since the Mets had dropped those four games in Philadelphia.  Now we could breathe just a little bit easier.  We could rest.  We would find out soon enough how we would remember this strange moment in Mets history.  Whatever happened, though, I knew that I would never forget my 53rd birthday.  I knew I would never forget my sense of wonder at how I was celebrating my 53^rd birthday.  I would never have imagined any of this on my 50^th birthday.  Life was full of surprises.  All life is is surprises.  It is one thing that might have been different after another thing that might have been different.  That’s what it is.

1)  If you’d like to see me reading a few paragraphs from The Last Days of Shea in person, please check out this Youtube link produced by Hofstra’s Department of Public Relations.   If you’ve got more time, the Chappaqua Library did a video of me reading from Mets Fan.  You can see that here.

2)  If you’d like to meet me and other Mets “celebrity” authors in person, I will be attending the Amazin Tuesdays program at 7 pm on September 15 at Two Boots Tavern at 384 Grand St.

2)  If you are a night owl, you can listen to me on the morning of September 16 at some point after 1 am on the nationally syndicated Joey Reynolds show.  If you are not a night owl, you can listen later to the archived broadcast on this link.

3)  If you want to hear a detailed discussion of my book, please listen to Mike Silva’s New York Baseball Digest radio show and podcast at 6 pm on September 17.  Mike and I are going to have an hour-long “fireside” chat (without the fire) about the book.  Mike is a terrific interviewer and I am really looking forward to this.  You can listen to our chat, in real time or afterwards, here.

This is the first September since 2004 in which no significant Mets games are being played.  But, like other Mets seasons in which we’ve had no chance of making it to the playoffs, the September of 2004 offered some baseball pleasures.  We had some interesting new guys on the team named Wright, Reyes, Valent, Seo, and Keppinger.  There was stuff to pay attention to, stuff to hope for.

There haven’t been any pleasures this September and, like many other Mets fans, I’ve experienced something unfamiliar.  I am watching the Mets win and lose (mostly lose) without any emotion.  This has never happened to me before.  I feel like a person who has lost his sense of smell or taste.  I feel a numbness.

The Mets fall behind and I expect them to stay there.  I have no expectation or hope that they will catch up and so I am not really upset when they don’t.  The Mets get ahead and I wait for them to fall behind. I wish they would stay ahead but I am certainly not surprised when they don’t and I am not terribly sad when they don’t.

I do look eagerly for signs that Pelfrey won’t do a job on himself, or or that Angel Pagan will develop some baseball sense, or that Daniel Murphy will show us that he is worth our time and trouble.  But I also have the sense that whatever happens in the next couple of weeks isn’t likely to tell us much about our prospects for next year.  It’s not like previous bad years, when we were getting first exciting looks at September call-ups.  Nothing ever happens that gives me an excuse to experience the very mild pleasure of September-wait-till-next-year dreaming.

There are no pleasures.  There is only limbo.  A grey hazy blank present in which one cannot see a horizon.  The Marlins sweep us, challenging for the division title, after smashing our dreams like a piece of china for two consecutive seasons.  It happens.  We can’t and don’t stop it.  This is our hour of lead.

And then, yesterday, after the usual drill of blowing the lead, settling into the quartz contentment of far behind, we come back and win it in Philly.  We beat the Phillies in their own home park, to everyone’s astonishment, even ours.  It doesn’t feel spectacular, because we were so numb we weren’t even hoping for it.  But it happened, as David Wright suddenly knew exactly where the baseball was and where it had to be struck.  I knew in a flash, when the ball left the pitcher’s hand, that he was going to hit the second one.  But I could never prove it.  It wasn’t a hope. I wasn’t hoping. But I knew it.  I suddenly remembered what it was like to win a game with a home run, driven with assurance by David Wright into the left field stands. I felt emotion.   But I am still trying to figure out what my emotion was.

*****

Check out my just-published book:  The Last Days of Shea:  Delight and Despair in the Life of a Mets Fan and please come meet me at the last Amazin’ Tuesday, 7 pm on September 15 at Two Books Tavern, 384 Grand St. on the Lower East Side, hosted by Greg Prince and Jon Springer, with guest readers Jeff Pearlman and John Coppinger.  And if any of you are night owls, I’ll be on the Joey Reynolds Show on the morning (1 am to 5 am, not sure when) of September 16.  I’m also the featured guest on New York Baseball Digest on September 17 from 6 to 7.

The biggest question about the 2009 season is why is this season being perceived as a disaster and not a misfortune?

It is a misfortune, isn’t it? No team in my memory has ever been hit as badly by injuries as this one. If it weren’t for the injuries, we’d at least be contending for the Wild Card, wouldn’t we? If the team was as healthy as it was last year, and if the performance level of the players was roughly the same, the addition of Frankie Rodriguez would be enough to push our win total up into the 90s, wouldn’t it?

Well, maybe.

There are those that say that a good major league organization has enough depth that it can compensate for injuries, even a rash of injuries as catastrophic as this one. To these people I say that if fewer players were injured, and we had gotten the fill-in performances we’ve gotten from Angel Pagan, Gary Sheffield, Livan Hernandez, Cory Sullivan, Alex Cora, and Omir Santos, we would have been quite happy with each of them. We are unhappy with the Met’s depth not because the Mets weren’t deep enough, but because nothing can make a whole team of worthy subs look as good as a real team. We may not have as many first-rate almost ready young players as we should, but that’s not why this particular season has been a disaster.

This season has been a disaster because in the midst of our catastrophic misfortune, we lost our faith. Having lost our faith, we were unwilling to cut the team any slack. We don’t feel badly for the Mets. We are unhappy with them. An enormous core of us remains loyal to the franchise. But we are in a moment of crisis, because we are floundering in our efforts to imagine what we are remaining loyal to. For the moment, we are unsure about what the Mets are. Things will not be right again until the Mets address this problem with intelligence and imagination, and not just with good baseball sense. We need to see signs that the Mets have enough intelligence, imagination, and good baseball sense to pull us through this difficult moment. This is where we can help them. We will not help them by being blandly and blindly supportive. We will also not help them by jumping the gun and making assumptions we don’t have enough evidence to make. We must make our voices heard. We must give them a chance and we must help them restore our faith in them.

Part of our loss of faith has to do with the straightforward issue of having a roster of players capable of getting to the playoffs. I continue to have faith that the vaunted core (Wright, Reyes, Beltran) is sound. I know that many are beginning to doubt that Reyes is all we thought he was, but I think it is more accurate to look at Reyes as a Strawberry-type player: a first-rate major leaguer who may or may not acquire, in his youth, the maturity to achieve his historic potential. Even if some doubts have crept in, I think most Mets fans still have faith in this core. Where most of us have lost faith is in the guys who were supposed to be our rotation. Pelfrey’s slump, Maine’s fragility, and Ollie’s many mysteries have left us with a starting rotation of Johan Santana and four players to be named later. No one can win a pennant with this. Of course, we could win over 100 games if Pelfrey, Maine, and Perez could ever pitch all together as each of them at certain points have pitched. But this is nothing to count on. As everybody knows, to even have a dream of contention, the Mets will have to purchase a bat who can replace Delgado’s and a starting pitcher who is not mainly imaginary.

Another loss of faith has been at the level of manager and general manager. Jerry Manuel, with his wit and intelligence, won us over last year by doing more with the team than Willie Randolph was able to do. The sloppiness of the Mets’ play this year, however, has made us wonder if he was, last year, simply the lucky beneficiary of the remarkable runs of Pelfrey and Delgado. Omar squandered years of good will, for no purpose, in the most embarrassing news conference I have ever seen anyone give. While there aren’t enough reasons, I think, for anyone to blame this season’s misfortunes on Manuel or Minaya, there simply aren’t enough Mets fans who feel that either of them needs to stay. We’ve lost faith in them. And the ownership must therefore know that getting rid of them would be a relatively easy (and inexpensive) way of making it look as if they are addressing the team’s problems.

I think it is fair to say, as a fact, not as a judgement, that the fans have lost faith in the baseball skills and capacities of the ownership and higher levels of management. I have been, over the years, a supporter and an admirer of the Wilpons as the owners of the Mets. I have never considered them cheap, I have never wanted owners like George Steinbrenner, and I have felt that they have made the right moves in three separate periods (the 80s, the late ‘90s, and the mid ‘00s) to bring the team back from the dead (I can’t determine to what degree they could be blamed for the team having died in the first place). But many, many, probably most fans have lost faith in the Wilpons. They must restore our faith or they must sell the team. Right now, fans doubt that the Wilpons have the money necessary to provide what the Mets need to compete with the Phillies next year. All economies are being interpreted as signs that the Wilpons are broke because of the Madoff swindle. I myself doubt that they are broke and I believe that the Mets are capable of paying for themselves if enough is invested in them. I am not making any judgements about the Wilpon’s solvency until I see what they actually do in the offseason. If they are broke, I beg them to sell the team. If they are not, I ask them to put their money on the table.

This brings me to what I consider to be a crucially important yet somewhat intangible reason for the widespread loss of faith in the Mets. I believe that the transition to Citi Field has prompted an identity crisis that needs to be addressed as much as the problems created by the weakness and uncertainty of the current roster. I think that a crucial, reason why Mets fans are so unwilling to cut the team, management, or ownership any slack is that there is a widespread unhappiness with the experience of the new stadium.

Even those of us who stubbornly adored Shea were looking forward to the new stadium. It has not been worth the wait. We were promised that we would be closer to the field and that we would have better sightlines. For those of us who are unwilling to pay more than double to see a game at Citi Field than we paid to see a game at Shea, the sightlines are worse and we are further from the field. We were promised a stadium that was a beautiful piece of architecture. The architecture is beautiful. We got to see how beautiful it was last year as it was being built. Once you put up immense and particularly unattractive ads everywhere you possibly can, however, the stadium’s beauty is lost. Shea, at least, had its sublimity. You saw the stadium and you saw the neon sculptures as you approached. Your spirit was lifted. When I approach Citi Field from any direction, I cannot avoid a disappointing sense that it looks like crap, that it is a little lovely stadium buried under a pile of ugly billboards. My spirit isn’t lifted. I am kind of embarrassed.

The worst thing about Citi Field, and the most trying for the faith of a longtime fan, are the many opportunities it affords for being excluded and even humiliated. It seems, at points, as if every few feet you run into people whose job is to tell you that you cannot freely walk past them. I find it humiliating to not be able to go to the vast, virtually empty area behind the dugouts to watch the players up close in batting practice the way I did for more than four decades at Shea. I hate having to plead to no avail with the men in the green jackets, just doing their job, to just get in there and take a picture or two. I hate the fact that all of the stadium below the Promenade Level and behind the infield (hey, that’s where I always used to sit at Shea! In an affordable seat with a great view of the field!) is turned over to luxury boxes and clubs for the rich. I hate seeing the emptiness of the best seats in the house, waiting there for the crowds of people, who never materialized, who were projected to be both rich enough and dumb enough to spend more than $200 for a ticket to see a baseball game. Citi Field leaves a bad taste in my mouth and the superior food from the Shake Shack and Blue Smoke and Catch of the Day is not enough to get it out.

Citi Field must also leave a bad taste in the mouths of the many middle-class people who paid more than they wanted to pay for a season ticket and who justified the expenditure to themselves by thinking that they would be able to resell the tickets they would not use. They can’t resell their tickets. They must take a big loss, in this economy. They cannot be happy. And those of us who look ahead to the period when the Mets will be good again, and season tickets holders will be able to sell their seats on the secondary market, are not happy with the stadium’s unforgivably tiny capacity. 

Add to this that most Mets fans are still unhappy with the fact that in the three or so years they had to plan and design the new stadium, the Mets organization did not figure out how to present the place as the home of a proud and storied team that had been in existence since 1962. They did not anticipate the attachment that millions had to the heritage and history of that team even though their profits were dependent on the actual existence of those millions. They seem to have thought that the money would come as long as there was “good product” on the field. They did not understand the magnitude of what they were entrusted with. They did not understand the scope and scale of their responsibility. They didn’t even get a few display cases together. They didn’t even take the trouble to set up the Mets’ measly Hall of Fame. And they do not yet deserve any credit for having belatedly stuck up a few pictures without captions that appear to be nothing more than Nikon ads. I will resist the tendency I have to go on and on about my astonishment at this degree of obtuseness. But I will say that for a very significant number of Mets fans, this insensitivity has generated a great deal of bad will. In combination with the high ticket prices and the disappointments of the stadium and the season, it is a contributing factor to the fact that many Mets fans have lost their faith in the team.

The Wilpons can salvage much of this situation by looking us in the eye and listening to our voices. They can invest in another powerful hitter and another reliable pitcher. They can make Citi Field feel more like the home of the Mets. They can make it into a repository of our proud traditions, a place people can be fond of, a place where old timers can teach kids about what they have inherited. They can make the stadium more fan-friendly and less exclusive. They can stop telling us over and over how fan-friendly and wonderful they think it is.  They can let us back into the area behind the dugouts for batting practice. They can let us into the club areas with a reservation. When somebody says that it would be nice to see an Old-Timer’s Day again, or a Banner Day, they can have somebody thoughtful and interested saying, “well, let’s look into that, fans might enjoy it.” The face and style of this franchise need to change. The organization should not behave like a bunch of corporate board members. They should behave like passionate fans, anxious to serve a loyal public.

Right now, Mets fans are unhappy because they don’t know who the Mets are. They don’t like what they see. They don’t recognize anything. Yet they are sticking with the team because they have no place else to go. Let the rebuilding of the Mets begin. Let’s get out of the woods and find our way back home. There is a lot of work to do. And the work that needs to be done is a lot more complicated than signing a few checks.

*******

Check out my just-published book:  The Last Days of Shea:  Delight and Despair in the Life of a Mets Fan

I am very happy to announce that my new book, The Last Days of Shea: Delight and Despair in the Life of a Mets Fan has been officially released. It is in stock and can be purchased right now at Amazon (for $11.53) and Barnes and Noble and it will be at all other online sources and in bookstores in the next few days.

Dana

Is the original title of this blog piece which I am not finished writing.  But I don’t have time to finish it because as soon as my wife and daughter get home I’m driving down to the city to have some fun tonight.  I’m getting together with any Mets fan who feels like it at Two Boots Tavern on the Lower East Side at 384 Grand St., between Norfolk and Suffolk for AMAZIN’ TUESDAY tonight at 7.  This is an event hosted by Greg and Jason of Faith and Fear in Flushing.  I’ll be reading from The Last Days of Shea and Greg, Jason, and Caryn (Metsgrrl) will be at the mike with me, as we prove that even if the Mets are right now the lousiest team in baseball, they undoubtedly have the most literate fan base. 

The very first copies of The Last Days of Shea arrived at my house UPS Overnight yesterday evening.  It is not yet available from online sources or bookstores but it will be available in the next few days (it can be pre-ordered at Amazon).  In the meantime, I’ll bring down some copies if anyone would like to have one ($12) signed by me with love. 

I will have to write about sorrow, despair, and defiance because that is the story of this season.  But right now, it’s time for pizza, beer, and the eccentric love of a remarkable community.  Please come down to Two Boots Tavern tonight.  I’d love to meet you.

On my Facebook newsfeed, the famous Mets blogger Coop wrote that she had an extra ticket to the 1969 New York Mets commemoration this Saturday, August 22.  Did anyone want to go with her?  Unfortunately, I can’t go to this event because I have another obligation.  But what interested me was that somebody responded that they wished it was a reunion of the 1999 team, which was this person’s favorite team of all time.  I understand what this person is saying.

I know from my own experience that it takes some inner work to get really excited about commemorating things that happened before you were born, or before you can remember.   With respect to the 1969 New York Mets, the big wave hit me with full force, when I was perfectly prepared for it.  I was a pure baseball geek who turned 15 the week the 1969 Mets clinched the Eastern Division and I had rooted for the Mets, with everything in me, since their very first game.  If you do not remember the 1969 Mets, you should envy me.  You can be a baseball fan for the rest of your days, into the second half of the twenty-first century for all I care, and you will never experience anything like what I experienced.

You younger people don’t like it when older people say stuff like this.  And you are perfectly right to resent us.  After experiencing fifty-four years, however, my own sense is that there really were some things in the past that you should regret having missed.  But, as you know, there are also things you are experiencing now and that you will experience in the future that older folks should envy. 

This is why we have or should have commemorations.  We didn’t want you to miss the 1969 New York Mets.  It just happened that way.  We always wanted you to share it, even though you weren’t born when it happened.  And we want you to share it because we want you to have the opportunity to make it a part of you.  We don’t just want you to know about it so that you will envy us.  We have all these memories and you have no idea yet how much having a lot of memories enriches the texture of experience.  We can’t zap these memories into your brain, but there are ways in which we can get them into your head in some form.  We can have commemorations and Old-Timer’s Days, we can write books for you, and set up museums that will give you some idea of what happened.  We’re not just doing all this so that we can get all teary-eyed and insufferably obnoxious.  This is as much for you as it is for us.  When you can’t have a memory of something, you can have a heritage.  With a heritage, you’re not totally out of the loop.  You’re a human being, and this entitles you to be able to have some of the treasures of the past, even though the past is all gone. 

I know about this.  I teach literature for a living.  And there are few things as wonderful to me as helping a bunch of people born after the Mets’ last world championship become excited or moved by something written before they were born, before I was born, or even before anyone who has ever spoken English was born.  Don’t tell me this stuff is not for me or for them.  We can read it.  This is what the imagination is for.

The Miracle of the 1969 Mets happened.  I saw it with my own eyes.  I heard the people screaming, I saw the city gripped by Mets love, by the sense that the downtrodden could triumph, by the sense that the impossible was possible.  If you are a Mets fan, you are entitled to know this and you are entitled to imagine that you were there even if you weren’t.  This is what it means to be a Mets fan.  Being a Mets fan is not just being stuck in a lousy little pocket of time in which there is no hope, there are no prospects, and there’s only an endless cascade of disappointments and disasters.  Being a Mets fan also means getting out of this for a moment, getting beyond even the limits of your own lifetime, becoming part of something that has been around a long time and will continue for a long time.  This weekend is a good time to make this leap.  As Mets fans, we have no more pressing concerns at this moment.

So enjoy the commemoration of the 1969 New York Mets this Saturday.  Pay attention.  Close your eyes and imagine.  You may not have actually been there.  But we were thinking of you, and we were waiting for you to join us. 

For those of you who may not have read it, here is the essay “1969” from my book Mets Fan (2007).   
 

      The 1969 season will never go away.  It gives a particular
flavor to life, and it will be taken as a treasure to the end.  No one
could have foreseen what we saw.  It stands apart from all other
sports miracles.  Baseball historians can point to a few examples
of teams leaping from terrible to great in a single year.  But
none of these are comparable to the 1969 Mets because no other
suddenly great team had spent so long in the cellar, and no other
team had ever become such a symbol of futility.        

      1969 began like all of our other seasons, with a loss on
opening day.  We lost to an expansion team.  Nothing was
surprising in April or May.  Our pitching was good and our hitting
was weak, just as they had been in 1968, when we poked our
heads into ninth place.   The Mets seemed to be headed for the
fifth place finish everyone had predicted, in the first year of
divisional play, the first year of the Expos.  But around Memorial
Day, something happened that at the time seemed as weird as the
discovery of crop circles or a story of an alien abduction.  
The New York Mets won eleven games in a row. 

      I remember how this felt.  Something had cracked.  The Mets
had never done anything like this.  When a team wins eleven
games in a row, it alters your sense of what is possible.  At the
end of that eleven game streak, the Mets were five games above .
500.  It was June, and my eye didn’t need to look for my team
at the bottom of the list.  They were in second place.  And for the
very first time in my eight years of looking at the standings, the
two-digit number on the left was larger than the two-digit number
on the right.  

      Suddenly the Mets could imagine that they were in a pennant
race, with the Chicago Cubs of all people, another Cinderella team
emerging from years of mediocrity to dominate a division that
everyone thought should have been dominated by the Cardinals.  
The Mets held steady.  The Cardinals slept.  And then in July, the
Mets played the Cubs in the first series they ever played that
actually mattered.  They played it for all it was worth.  In the first
game, they came from behind in the bottom of the ninth.  Seaver
almost pitched a perfect game in the second.  Then the Mets
flubbed the third game with fielding errors, prompting Cubs
manager Leo Durocher to call the clumsy team of the third game
“the real Mets.”   

      This crack, from Durocher’s notorious lip, opened the
floodgates.  The worried Cubs despised us, and we would hate
them back.  Here were America’s two biggest and oldest baseball
cities.  Here were two teams of great character, and no history of
success.  Only one could win.  It was a shame.  But boy it was
fun.  It was tense and it was wild, and as the season progressed it
turned into a full scale carnival, with brushback pitches, black
cats, and taunting cheers.  It was hand-to-hand combat between
two desperate and deserving dreams.  In the second Cubs series
in July, at Wrigley, the Mets once again won two out of three.  
They were only three and a half games out of first place.   In mid-
July.

      Then it all collapsed.  It had to.  How could it possibly have
happened?  How could we have dared to hope for this?  By mid-
August, after a rough month, the Mets were nine and a half games
behind the Cubs.  They were in third place, as the Cardinals had
finally woken up.  And the Pirates were gaining.  We would
probably finish fourth.  It was okay.  It had been more fun than any
Mets season had ever been.  I wasn’t crushed.  I was only 14, but
I knew something about how the world worked.

      I don’t know how to describe what happened next.  It is the
best baseball memory I have.  Imagine lightning.  Imagine the
silence after the flash.  Imagine a swell of sustained thunder.  
Imagine the heavens opening and the rain loud and sweeping and
drenching the earth.  Imagine a baseball team winning thirty-eight
of its last forty-nine games.  Imagining all of the other teams
crumbling with fear, dissolving into irrelevance.  Imagine two
young aces winning eighteen of their last nineteen starts.  
Imagine a team that has always been bad suddenly playing
as no team ever has.  Imagine the largest city in the world fully in
its thrall.  There are no words adequate to this.  There are not
even numbers.

      There is only the bursting of all boundaries.  There is only
the image of thousands of fans spilling over the line that had kept
them off the field on which the miracle has happened.  There are
flying corks and foam on the camera lens.  There is the emotion of
millions watching the Mets in their wet dugout singing all
of the baseball songs they can think of.  There is the memory of
the hung-over Mets recording the songs in a studio the  next day
and all of us rushing out to buy the quickly-pressed record.  There
was a pure and powerful happiness that waved a wand over the
last seven years.  The bad years would no longer be laughed at,
or cried about.  They were lifted up out of the gutter and given a
place of honor at the table.  They gave the moment of triumph its
luster.  They were the preparation for the launch. They had been
worth it.  But you only knew it now.  Everything had happened as
it was supposed to happen.  This was the real meaning of the
Mets.

      After the Mets won the NL East and celebrated, you needed
to remind yourself that, for the first time in history, the team that
had won more games than any other in the league still had to win
a few more to claim the pennant.  After the way they had played,
the Mets were still not favored to win the National League
Championship Series.  It was as if nothing they could do could
render what they had done believable.  But they beat the Braves
quickly and easily, in three games.  Even that didn’t make them
the favorites to win the World Series.  The 1969 Orioles were one
of the best teams of all time.  I wasn’t in a mood to be greedy.  I
was happy with the pennant.  

      In those days, the World Series was played in the daytime.  
This made it a public event.  You could see what it really meant
to people.  There were radios in every classroom and every
office.  You could hear the game in every street and every
shopping center.  It seemed to me that the Mets were all that
anyone anywhere was talking or thinking about.   

      Seaver lost the first game.  Seaver lost.  Our team did not
look frightening.  None of them could hit like Frank Robinson and
none of them could field like Brooks Robinson.  Some of them
could pitch as well as Mike Cuellar, but not this time.  How had
the Mets managed to win so many games?  I felt, at the end of
the glum and sobering first game, as if I was beginning to forget.

      But the second game reminded me.  The Mets won by
scoring more runs than the other team.  But just barely.  To do
this with their lineup, they had to have spectacular pitching.  They
got it this time.  Koosman almost pitched a no-hitter.  Clendenon
hit a home run.  The Orioles tied the game.  But the Mets, with
three little singles, went ahead in the ninth, and held it.  

      In the third game, the Mets win was decisive, the only
decisive win of the Series.  Gentry and Ryan combined for a
shutout.  Tommy Agee made two catches that have changed my
understanding of how the human body can move.  The Mets won, 5-
0.  They had the momentum again, and the rumbling sound you
had heard all season long was back and it seemed as if it had
never gone away.  It swelled as Seaver returned to form in the
fourth game, as Clendenon hit another home run, and as Swoboda,
stinky fielding Swoboda, made a tumbling catch as great as either
of Agee’s the day before.  In the tenth inning, a fated and
probably wrong base running call gave the game to the Mets.

      The Orioles struggled mightily in the fifth game.  They knew
they did not deserve to lose.  They could not understand what was
happening.  Surely, the Orioles must have thought, this thing
could be prevented.   They had eyes and minds and arms.  They
had will.  And so they scored three runs before the Mets
could do anything.  Then in the bottom of the sixth, Cleon Jones
reached first because Gil Hodges convinced an umpire that the
shoe polish on a ball belonged to him.  Clendenon hit another
home run.  Al Weis, who could not hit home runs, hit one to tie the
game in the seventh.  A wave came out of the crowd and pushed
the Mets in front in the eighth.  Human beings could not stop this,
or anything else that had to happen.  Davey Johnson would some
day become the most successful manager in Mets history.  But
now, with two outs in the ninth, the Orioles second baseman hit a
line drive to left.

      In what seemed like slow motion, Cleon brought the dying
ball into his glove.  He squeezed it tightly.  He dropped to his
knees.