Dana Brand's Mets Fan Blog

Having been ten games above .500 at the half-way point, the Mets were back down to .500 on August 2.  The wild hopes of a playoff berth, spurred by the unanticipated minor miracles of the first half of the season (Pelfrey, Dickey, Niese, Davis, Pagan, Barajas, Takahashi) were fading.  The Mets lost several heartbreakingly close well-pitched games on the road.  Some impressive and potentially season-changing comeback efforts had fallen just short.  And in a few games, their strongest pitchers incomprehensibly imploded and the Mets were blown out.  The offense flagged.  The defense, strong and smart at the beginning of the year, began to look inept and aimless.  The trade deadline came and went without anything happening, as the Mets held on to what they hoped would be the building blocks of their future.  The fans, who had been through so much, were thoroughly demoralized.  A few thousand faithful saw four men from the now impossibly distant ‘80s inducted into the Mets Hall of Fame.  Mets Blog’s confidence rating dropped into the single digits.  And when the Mets began what everyone knew would be the most significant road trip of the season, poor defense and a briefly ineffective Johan Santana gave the Braves all they would need to beat the Mets in the very first inning.  The Mets offense would not score the runs they needed to come back against a vulnerable Tim Hudson.  And so, when Chipper Jones hit the home run that put his old rivals three runs behind, long-time Mets fans felt the painful echo of two decades of futility, of years of mediocrity relieved only by a few moments of competence that always came short and always left wounds that had by now hardened into bitter, unfeeling tissue:  scabs and callouses.  There seemed to be no miracle left in the Miracle Mets.  There was no belief left in their fans. 

Then, on the second night of the most important series of the season, R.A. Dickey, a man who should long ago have given up hopes of having a pitching career, took the mound.     

This makes a really good turning point in a story, don’t you think?  But no, you’re thinking, this is reality, not a story.  In reality, when people get fatal illnesses, they usually die.  When people screw up, they often have to pay for it for the rest of their lives.  When the team you love seems to have hit bottom, they haven’t.  They’ve got plenty of room to fall further.

Yes, it is reality.  But it’s also not.  It’s a dream we’re all having.  It really is optional even if it doesn’t always feel that way.  We have choices.  We can become Yankees fans (and think Steinbrenner was a great man because he cared about winning and great men care about winning, because the opposite of winning is losing and that’s what losers do and losers are not great men.  Bye.)  We can give up baseball (No.)  We can blame Jerry or Omar or the Wilpons (I know that these are the most popular options, but I still have a problem with this.  I wish I felt more equipped to second-guess the baseball decisions of the people who run this team, but I just don’t.  I can see their most outrageous mistakes but I also see their successes, and I am painfully aware of the tiny space between their failures and successes.  Blame if you like, but can you really tell me what should have been done that wasn’t done that you would have done and would have known how to do?)  We can still hope.  (I know as well as you do that the Mets have little chance of making the playoffs by this point.  I am not an optimist about their chances.  Hopefulness is something subtly different from optimism.  One of the reasons I love baseball is that it allows fans to be hopeful without having to be optimistic.  Only a fool would be optimistic about the Mets’ chances of making the playoffs at this moment.  I am not a fool, I hope.  But at this moment, I am not going to become a Yankee fan, I am not going to give up on baseball, and I am not going to blame people who may or may not be responsible for what is happening.)  I am going to hope.

Why?

Because I am doing this for fun and it isn’t fun to lose hope. 

It’s as simple as that.  And because I can remember times in my life when my predictions were wrong and my hope was rewarded, I am excited to imagine R.A. Dickey on the mound tonight.  Here is a man who had no reason to expect to be on a major-league roster at the start of the season, let alone 7-4 with a 2.32 ERA at the start of August.  I’m not going to say that if that’s possible, then the Mets making the playoffs is possible.  That would be an invalid inference.  But hey, here is a case where hope was rewarded.  Maybe it can happen again.

This afternoon, jet-lagged from my nine-hour flight home from Rome, I drove up the Van Wyck and saw Citi Field with the lights on and with a smattering of fans on the Promenade deck.  I had a warm sense of being home. 

I knew the Mets had played badly the two and a half weeks I was away, but I had seen things in the reports of recent games that have made me look forward to coming home and playing lyrical optimist as a counterpoint to everyone else’s despair.  I still don’t think Mets fans should give up hope when they are seven games away before September 12.   That would be obscene at this point.   And I don’t want them trading away any of our brightest points of light.  There is enough good stuff on this team to justify  … hope.  

Anyway, I turned on the radio as I passed the stadium and heard that Ollie Perez was pitching.  I didn’t have to wait to be told to know that we were more than ten runs behind.

I have to see what they did for the Hall of Fame ceremony.  I shake my head with the rest of you in sadness.  But the season isn’t over.  And I feel as if I am home. 

I’m sitting in a free wi-fi zone at JFK airport right now, about to board a plane to Italy for a vacation with my family.  I’ll be back on August 1.  I’m in a wonderful mood except that driving down, the radio was full of “the top story of the day,” the death of George Steinbrenner.  I feel genuine sympathy for the Steinbrenner family.   I do wish that I hadn’t had to listen to so many quotes and tributes containing lines like ”good losers are losers” and “winning is everything” and this is what life is about and George Steinbrenner made so many of us proud to be New Yorkers.

The man had a major impact on the sport I love and it could be argued that George Steinbrenner had a significant impact on the fandom of all Mets fans.  I’ll blog about this when I get back but for the time being I’m glad I’m going away.  Little of what I have to say about Mr. Steinbrenner would be appropriate to say on the day after he died.   I will say that if George Steinbrenner had purchased the Mets in the 1970s instead of the Yankees and had conducted himself as an owner in the same exact ways, I would not have been a Mets fan.  I would have found something else to occupy my time.

Halfway through the 2010 season, the fans of the New York Mets are feeling very good, hoping very hard, and running a little scared.

We’re feeling good because the Mets are playing better than anyone predicted.   They’ve won 45 games at the midpoint.  Did any one of you predict that the Mets would win 90 games?   They’re feeling good because the Mets have unexpectedly come up with three starting pitchers who have been playing at ace-level and who no one saw coming.  We would have been happy with Pelfrey having won 6 games at this point.  He’s won 11.  We would have been happy with Jon Niese developing into a relatively reliable fifth starter.  We now have some substantial reasons to think that he is a lot more than that.  We had no idea who R.A. Dickey was.  Even if we were minor league wonks and knew who he was, we weren’t that impressed.  Now we are.

We’re feeling good because David Wright has come all the way back.  David has established by this point is that for an astoundingly consistent ballplayer, he never makes anything look easy.  Watching David hit, at various points in this first half of the season, was more painful than watching any other hall-of-fame level hitter has ever been.  But look at the results.  David has 64 rbis at the mid-point.

We’re feeling good because in the last month, Jose Reyes has been all the way back.  When he’s on, he’s the most exciting position player (we’ve had a few equally exciting pitchers) the Mets have ever had.   And we’re feeling good because we have a solid line of hitters after Reyes and around Wright.  None of them are spectacular, but all of them are doing things.  All of them (Pagan, Bay, Davis, Francoeur, Barajas) can make us excited when they come to the plate.   We’re feeling good because the relievers have generally been doing just fine.  They are no longer the team’s largest, bloodiest open wound.  We’re feeling good because extras and back-ups like Carter, Tejada, Cora, Thole, Blanco, and Rodriguez are fun and hungry, and they contribute.

We’re running a little scared because the two superstar pitchers who were supposed to have brought us the 2008 and 2009 pennants are pitching in ways that suggest that they’re still good but they’re not superstars.  We’re a little scared because Jose Reyes should not get so hurt from a swing of the bat in batting practice.  We’re scared because until we win another World Championship, every time we have success we are going to compulsively think of all the times we should have gone farther but didn’t.  It shouldn’t be this way.  I don’t approve of it being this way.  But that’s the way it is.  We’ve come too close too many times to be able to believe any longer that we are ever close.  We will not, alas, think we’re close again until we get there. 

We’re hoping hard because although Atlanta is also playing much better than anyone predicted, no team in our division, or league, is good and healthy enough to run away with it.  We’re going to be in this to the end.  And while there may be Mets who will not be as good in the second half as they were in the first half, Bay and Beltran will almost certainly be better.  That is a lot of nearly guaranteed improvement.

We’re also feeling good for the most important reason.  We love this team.  Although it still has the best players of the gang that blew the ends of the 2007 and 2008 season, it also has a lot of youth, a lot of new guys, and a lot of dash and class.  It is a team with its head screwed on straight, playing excellent defense, and fine fundamental baseball.  They make us feel confident.  And the fact that they seem so much at home in the new theme park in Flushing is gradually changing the way I feel about the place.  If the Mets are at home at Citi Field, I will be at home at Citi Field, as long as there is enough to remind me of the fun decades I spent at Shea.     

Winning a lot of ballgames makes everybody feel good and/or better.  My own private worries, as always, are about us.  We are still the walking wounded and we have developed a few pathologies that we should be careful to try to cut out before they become a part of us.  Frankie Rodriguez is allowed, guys, to blow a few games.  Every closer but Mariano Rivera does.  And if he likes, like Johnny Franco, to have a little company on the bases when he closes out ballgames, we should tolerate it as long as he gets the job done.  Let’s not turn him into Armando Benitez unless he gives us really good reasons to do so.  Psychologically, that is the hardest job in baseball and he needs our help.  Jerry Manuel, I admit, is kind of crazy and I don’t understand a lot of his decisions, particularly when it comes to using relievers.  Still, all successful Mets managers have been a little crazy and hard to figure out, except, people say, for Hodges.  But Hodges at this point is a myth from another era.  If he was managing now, he might look crazier than he looks in the haze of myth and memory.

There are times when Mets fans need to complain, when the Mets treat the fans badly, say, or when they forget to put anything in the stadium to let anyone know who plays there.  We should ridicule hype when it’s cynical.  We should ridicule authoritarian decisions that don’t take us into account.  We should complain about the garbage programming we have to listen to at most hours on WFAN.   But we are right now at the stage where the guys on our team with the rough patches need our encouragement, and where the team as a whole needs our love and belief.  And our love and belief need a little of what people used to refer to as constancy and fidelity.   Stop for a second and remember how filled with despair and bile and venom everyone was when the Mets started the season going 4-8.  Wasn’t that stupid?  Wasn’t that wrong?  Don’t do that again.  Ignore the temptations of despair.  Or save it for when we start a season going 40-80.   

I don’t know where this team is going and neither do you.  Bay could hit 30 homers in the second half.  Mejia could come up and win ten games as a starter.  Josh Thole could become the rookie of the year.  None of these things are likely but all are as likely as things that have actually happened in this magical first half. 

It’s going to be good baseball, fun races between flawed teams.  It’s going to be, I predict, an August and September to remember. 

And who knows what else?

Happy Fourth of July everybody!

By now you may have heard, from several distinguished Mets blogs, that baseball author Howard Megdal has begun a campaign to be chosen by the fans as the next general manager of the New York Mets.

You may have been wondering, “What could possibly be the purpose of such a stunt?”

Well, watch this:  http://megdalforgm.com/?p=80.  It may explain the project to you.

It looks to me as if Howard is trying to examine, with humor and quite a bit of subversive insight, the assumptions that underly the whole system of baseball.   Why is it that in modern America, where we’re pretty much agreed that monarchies and dynasties aren’t smart ways to run anything, we allow baseball, which means so much to so many of us, to be run as if it were the most primitive form of feudal aristocracy?  What about our democratic values?  Why does no one even advocate the idea that baseball should be run of the people, for the people, and by the people?  What would it be like if we lived in a world where our baseball leaders were as answerable to us as our political leaders are supposed to be?   Howard poses this question, it seems to me, without being too obvious about it.  I think this is very funny and very interesting.  It’s the kind of smart, wacky performance art baseball could use.  It makes me wonder what it would be like if baseball fans had power, and if we didn’t have to feel, so often, as if we were medieval peasants, passionately loyal serfs, with no power at all to affect our destinies.

And yes, that’s me in the ad shaking fingers with Howard.  It’s not precisely an endorsement, but I would like to hear the man make his case.

During the third season of “Seinfeld,” in 1992, Keith Hernandez appeared as himself in a two-part episode entitled “The Boyfriend.”   In an interview on the DVD release, Jerry Seinfeld says that this is his favorite episode.  It is certainly one of the most famous of all “Seinfeld” episodes, which means that it has been seen over and over by everyone in the entire world.   Whenever anyone asks Keith Hernandez whether he thinks he is more famous for having played baseball or for having been a character on “Seinfeld,” he says he thinks he is more famous for having been a character on “Seinfeld.” 

There must be a lot of people who know very little about baseball who, when they think of the New York Mets, think of this episode.  I like this, because I want the Mets to represent to the world the things I like most about New York.  And “Seinfeld” has given the world a sympathetic and not entirely inaccurate view of New York.  I think it is closer to the soul of New York than any other television show has ever been, with the possible exception of “Car 54.”   Jerry Seinfeld is a New Yorker and an enormous New York Mets fan.  His comedy reflects this.  There seems to me to be something deeply Mets-like about “Seinfeld.”

Like rooting for the Mets, “Seinfeld” is all about living with failure and false starts.  It is about maintaining your expectations regardless of how reliably life does not reward you.  It is about the same things happening to you over and over again, without you ever realizing that you are stuck.  It is about sabotaging yourself.  But it is also about the way in which life is made bearable, even pleasant, by the affection you have for the things you know best, for the things you have always known, which you love mainly because you know them.  Things like Pez dispensers and Superman Comics and Mr. Met and the Home Run Apple.  This aspect of Jerry Seinfeld, the sweet, loyal, love of the familiar, is central to the spirit of Mets fans.  We do not desert the crumbling stadium and all the silly things in it just as we do not desert the disappointing team.  We can’t imagine our lives without them.

The faces and gestures of the Mets fan are the faces and gestures of Seinfeld’s stand-up comedy.  We shrug as he does.  And you know that facial expression where he scrunches the lower part of his face and seems to be saying that something is ridiculous but what is he supposed to do about it?  That is our face.  In the show, and in his routines, Seinfeld is a connoisseur of the ways in which reality and social custom stubbornly refuse to make sense.  This is not a philosophical perspective you could associate with the New York Yankees. 

But it is exactly right for Mets fans.  Being a Mets fan is fun, even though it is often ridiculous and humiliating and it doesn’t make sense.  You ever notice how when the Mets get good, they always seem to screw something up?  Why is that?  Hey, how about Mr. Met?  What is it with that stupid smile?  Why is everybody so excited when they shoot the Pepsi t-shirts into the crowd?  Do they even know what is on the t-shirt?  The apple in the hat?  Why does the apple come out of a hat?  When are apples ever in hats?  Rabbits are in hats, sometimes.  But apples?  What is that supposed to mean? 

Yankee fandom, with all of its rewards, has an element of rationality about it.  The Yankee universe makes sense.  Winning is a good thing and losing is a bad thing.  The Yankees win.  Therefore it makes sense to be a Yankee fan. 

With the Mets, it’s more complicated.  Just as it is on Seinfeld.  Winning and losing are often intimately connected.  You expect to lose, even as you are winning.  You think you might win, even as you are losing.  Winning has a way of turning into losing.  Losing leads to winning, without any warning.  And while winning is good, losing can be good too. 

In “The Boyfriend” episode Jerry starts off by winning big.  He meets Keith Hernandez, his favorite ballplayer, in a locker room.  Hernandez recognizes him and tells him that he loves his comedy.  What better thing could happen to Jerry?  He is in love with Hernandez.  And this episode is built around the dream of all baseball fans that the love we have for a ballplayer could be requited.     

Elaine actually gets to go out with Keith because of the accidental fact that she is a woman.  But she is more amused than impressed by the great ballplayer.  Elaine is not a fan.  She doesn’t know who Mookie is and she is hearing about “Game 6” for the first time.  Jerry feels the injustice and the waste of this.  So many men and women are in love with Keith.  And here he is going out with someone who doesn’t care who he is.  It is Jerry who should be able to go out with Keith.  Keith should be his “boyfriend,” not Elaine’s.

Elaine likes to see what Jerry goes through when Keith doesn’t call him for three days.  She enjoys seeing how jealous Jerry gets when Keith cancels a date with him to go out with her.  The way men treat women has always been a mystery to Elaine.  But now she sees that men like Jerry care about their favorite sports figures in the way women care about the men with whom they have fallen in love.  In his “relationship” with Keith, Jerry’s emotions are engaged, his vulnerabilities are exposed, as they never are when he’s just going out with a woman.   

As fans, don’t we dream of the players making us happy?  Aren’t we crushed when they don’t?  Aren’t we a little shy around them at first?  When we finally embrace them, don’t we think about them all the time?  Don’t we need them?  Aren’t we wounded when we have a sense that they don’t care about us?  Don’t we want them to know how much we care about them?  Aren’t we sure that they would like us, if only they knew us, and understood our affection?  Regardless of our gender or our sexual orientation, we baseball fans are all involved with these guys in something that feels like a relationship.  Of course it is a waste that a non-fan like Elaine gets to go out with Keith just because she is a woman. 

Hernandez is perfect in his role.  He has the illusion that he is a real person, just another guy living through a protracted late adolescence on the Upper West Side.  He thinks he is a Seinfeld character!  Keith is making a new friend and trying to go out with a woman.  His fame is only something he will use to try to get into bed with Elaine.  Confident that he can impress Elaine with his eleven Golden Gloves, he is as clueless and self-absorbed as all of the other men Elaine goes out with.  The fact that he smokes gives her the out she always looks for.   

Jerry’s biggest hero becomes his friend.  They plan to go to movies together.  The fan’s fantasy is achieved.  But then Keith asks Jerry to help him move.  Senselessly self-sabotaging as always, the man who is puzzled by the logic of all rules and customs once again insists on their inviolability.  A man has to know another man for longer than this in order to have the right to make this request.  Jerry refuses to help Keith move, only to have  Newman and Kramer take his place after Jerry demonstrates, in a parody of Oliver Stone’s film about the Kennedy assassination, that Keith could not have been the one who “ruined” Kramer’s life by spitting on them after Newman insulted Hernandez after a game in 1987. 

Something has happened, but you don’t know what it is.  You thought things were fine, but something you couldn’t have seen coming turned it all around in a moment.     The world has many moving parts, subplots that come together and then diverge.  Miracles happen.  George can go out with Marisa Tomei.  But everything will collapse in an instant.  You’re helpless as you watch.  You can’t believe what you’re seeing.  But you always come back to the same living room, the same friends, the same coffee shop, because this is where you have always been and it is where you will always be. 

The history of the Mets shapes the spirit of the Mets fan.  We believe that anything is possible, but we know that anything can happen. We are lyrical and sentimental about what we’ve had because what we’ve had is all we’ve got.  We are even lyrical about losing because if we weren’t, we’d have to hang it up.  We are happy right where we are, even if we know that there are other people having a lot more success and maybe more fun somewhere else.  Jerry Seinfeld has given the world a pattern of our perspective. 

He made a lot of money doing this in L.A.  But as a lover of his own oldest, deepest, most familiar things, he had to come back here.   Now he can do whatever he wants and what he wants to do is go to Shea.  The TV cameras always find him, sometimes with a friend who is sometimes a celebrity.  It’s great to have him back.  But he never left. 

[The essay above is in my book, Mets Fan (2007), the prequel to my new book The Last Days of Shea.   I am reprinting it here because I am so excited about Jerry Seinfeld broadcasting from the Mets booth this coming Wednesday.  I am excited about everything having to do with the New York Mets right now.  As it says in the second verse of "Meet the Mets," we've got ourselves a ballclub!]

At 37-28, the Mets are on a track to win 92 games.  If they continue to win for the rest of the season at the same rate as they have been winning since their 4-8 start, they can be expected to win 97 or 98 games.  How likely is it that the Mets will maintain their current pace, improve upon it, or do worse?  Think about it.  There are strong reasons to think that Reyes, Bay, and Santana will actually play better for the rest of the season than they have played thus far.  Beltran will be coming back in July and he should be an improvement over Pagan, however well Pagan is playing.  Wright, Francoeur, and Davis are likely to play as well for the rest of the season as they have played thus far.  Neither Wright nor Francoeur is playing over his head and although we don’t really know what to expect of Davis, it seems to me to be as likely that he will improve as that he will decline.  And there’s no reason to expect a decline from the second base position either. 

The only players on the Mets who are making a major contribution and may be playing over their heads are Barajas and Dickey, although neither of them are showing signs that they are going to be worse than they have been thus far.  It is possible, of course, that Pelfrey will cool off, but he isn’t showing signs of that either.  I don’t think it is likely that we will see a series of declines in the remainder of the season that would be equivalent to the improvement we can probably expect from Reyes, Bay, Santana, and Beltran.  I believe in Niese and I think his season is just beginning.  At the start of the season, I predicted that the Mets would win 85 games.  I am willing to go on record predicting that they will win 95. 

Some will say that this just reflects the euphoria we now have after beating up on two terrible teams.  But the Mets have been beating good teams too and I don’t think that the schedule for the last five eighths of the season is demonstrably harder than the schedule for the first three eighths.  It’s true of course that there could be injuries, but I think that the only injury that could devastate us at this point would be Wright.  We have more depth in the outfield than we did last season.  We have more depth at catcher than we did last year.  We have more reliable pitchers.  This is a good team.  I don’t see a team in the National League that is certainly better.  While there are a few teams in the American League that I think are better, I don’t see any team in baseball that I am convinced the Mets couldn’t beat in a seven-game series. 

There is happiness in Metsville.  That helps too.  And I predict that there is more happiness to come.

I’m still trying to come to terms with all that happened to me yesterday.  I remember waking up and driving myself and my daughter, Sonia, down to Flushing.  I love to drive down to a day game in the morning.  Everything is lazy and waking up.  There’s not the end of a workday feeling of a night game.  There is a sense that watching a ballgame is all the work that’s going to get done by anybody today.

We first went to see where our seats were.  This was a suddenly convened Pitch In For a Good Cause/ GaryKeithandRon event.  Somebody cancelled their event on the Bridge Terrace and Lynn Cohen had all these tickets.  I hadn’t really been conscious of the fact that there was such a thing as the Bridge Terrace.  It’s an area of café seating hanging off of the Shea Bridge.  I’ve walked past it plenty of times, but I somehow never really took in the fact that it was there.  I tell you, it’s going to be years before I know my way completely around Citi Field.  This is both good and bad.  I like the complexity, but part of me wonders why there needs to be anything at a ballpark besides the field, facilities for players and announcers, and a few concentric rings of plain old ordinary seats. 

Anyway, the Bridge Terrace is really nice.  You feel like you’re sitting at a café watching the ball game.  You have a table in front of you for elbows.  You can eat your ribs and elote cheese corn with a little bit more dignity.  You are exactly where left-handed hitters are hoping to hit the ball. 

Anyway, Sonia and I had a very nice afternoon, watching one of these ballgames where the Mets look like they’re only going to get a couple of hits from a fairly early point and then they do in fact only get a couple of hits.   Games like this are more fun for socializing, as we did with blogger Zoe Rice, who took some great pictures of us, and Lynn, and Sharon Chapman, and Howard Megdal, a fine baseball author soon to announce his campaign to become the next general manager of the New York Mets (after Minaya, Howard’s not trying to cause trouble).

Then something extraordinary happened.  Lynn asked me if I wanted two tickets she had just gotten from SNY to sit in the second row behind the Mets dugout for the evening game.  Now I had already asked Sonia if she wanted to stay for the night game of the day/night doubleheader.  She had said to me that she’d love to Daddy but that she’d promised Pete (new boyfriend two hundred miles away in the summer) that she’d Skype with him tonight because they hadn’t been able to Skype last night because he was too tired after he came home from work.  It being a fairly new relationship, the Skyping I guess was kind of important.  Ah, why are things important?  What is important?  Anyway, when Lynn asked me what I was doing tonight, I had to tell her this.  And there was an unreal few minutes as Sonia’s eyes remained so wide open you couldn’t see her eyelids and she also began to look sick.  Anyway, Lynn and Zoe said all the things I couldn’t bring myself to say to Sonia about how if Pete didn’t understand how important it was for us to have these tickets, then he wasn’t worth being with.  In just a couple of minutes we had the tickets.

When the game was over, they kicked everybody out of the stadium (no hiding in the bathrooms!)  I thought of how my parents used to sneak into Ebbets Field and see games for free and wondered if it was even possible for a kid to do that in Citi Field.  Probably not.  And so Sonia and I sat by the Home Run Apple and talked about all kinds of things until they let us back into the stadium and Sonia got a blue Ike Davis t-shirt for being so considerate as to postpone Skyp-ing with Pete until tomorrow night so that we could sit in $300 seats we got for free right behind the Mets dugout.  Parents!  Are you familiar with this kind of absurdity?  Is it any wonder that this generation is so spoiled?  Bah!

Anyway, now it was time for the entering of the clubs.  Our tickets said that we could go anywhere we wanted in the whole goddamn stadium except Jerry Seinfeld and Fred Wilpon’s private bathrooms.  Hell, I think we could have taken a shower in the player’s clubhouse, this was such a premium ticket.  We could have tried on Mr. Met’s head.  I don’t know.  Well, as you may remember from a previous post of mine, the fancy clubs at Citi Field aren’t really all that much.  But getting into them?  There’s nothing like it.  You walk up to the person who’s supposed to keep you out and you show them the ticket (thinking inside your head “yeah I spent $300 for this ticket, yeah I’m the kind of person who spends $300 bucks to go to a baseball game, that’s me all right, do it all the time”) and they are so nice and cuddly and they hold the door open for you and you are on top of the world.  So then you go in, walk around a little, and go and do it with the next place.  Sonia compared the feeling to the scene in Annie where she first gets to go to Daddy Warbuck’s mansion.  That’s it all right.

We ended up eating in the Caesar’s Club looking out at the old World’s Fair.  With some trepidation, Sonia called Pete, who was perfectly sweet about everything.  Thank you, Pete.  Enjoy Skyp-ing tonight.  And no, Sonia, we don’t have to return the Davis t-shirt.  Eating our supper, we watched it rain and worried that our evening was not going to happen.  Then after the sky had gotten everything completely wet, the sun came out and we were looking down on the old Home Run Apple, glistening with rain water, illuminated by focused sunlight, redder and brighter than just about anything I had ever seen.  The sunlight and water made you see how mottled and uneven the surface of the old Apple is.  I thought of how it must have thousands of layers of paint.  It looked like the surface of the moon, or like the shaven head of a very old guy, smooth but filled with ridges and rivulets, pocked and marked.  You know, wasn’t this the most perfect image of all of our baseball fandom?  What we have in our head and hearts are all these layers and layers of paint, all these different experiences that go way back and of which traces now forever remain.  What we have is old and complicated and uneven and imperfect and yet it is all a brilliant red with our newest coat of paint, our excitement about the miraculously living and fun new 2010 Mets even though through the newest bright red surface you can see the gashes of 2009, and the gouges right at the end of 2008 and 2007 and the hopes of 2006 and 2005 and the horrors of 2002-4, and under that the giddy fun of the period right around the turn of the millennium.  And buried of course under all those layers were layers that went down five decades all the way to the unpainted surface of the apple itself, which had now become all that was painted upon it.

The rain stopped.  Our dinner was over.  We went to our seats.  Second row, behind the dugout.  We could reach out and touch the top of it.  I had never sat this close to a major league baseball game in my life.           

There are several things that are different about being so close to the game.  Some of them are pretty trivial.  One thing I learned is that every half inning, as soon as the players are finished with the ball they throw around to warm up, the ball makes its way to Razor Shines, a whole bunch of kids pour down the aisle to the dugout, and a security guard stands up to block with his belly the eager hands of the kids.  Razor looks over the dugout as if he takes this responsibility very seriously and turns his head slowly from side to side until his gaze alights upon a kid or a young woman.  Then he points to his intended target and underhands the ball to them.  Nobody fights and then the wave recedes.  This happens about twenty times per game.  From high up above, who knew that this went on?  What strange cultures and rituals we find when we travel to new places! 

The first thing I experienced that was really significantly different was the sense of what it was like for the players to take the field.  I have often seen the New York Mets take the field and I know that it is a pleasant but banal event.  From my usual seats in the Promenade, you see these little guys far away in their white uniforms running out onto a green field and you know the game will now begin.  From the second row behind the dugout, you see full-sized, recognizable, and in large measure beloved men running up a narrow stairway and then spreading across a big field on which you have the impression you’re sitting.  You feel as if you are behind a big white sail that is spreading out to catch the wind and move your ship forward into the sea of bright light that comes down to you  from arches high over your head.  It’s an amazing experience. 

Most of what you see in such seats is amazing.  There can be no such thing as boredom when you’re up this close, because you feel as if you are in the presence of the players and you are on their plane.  You are not above them and they are not small, distant, iconic creatures.  Weirdly, the fact that the players look bigger makes them seem smaller.  Distance normally gives you a sense that they are larger than life.  You are used to marveling that these little running figures are actually famous people, great athletes.  When you are two rows behind the dugout, the players look like human beings.  They are no further away than real people on the other side of a room.  Proximity brings them down to earth, to normal dimensions, and you therefore have to keep reminding yourself of the no longer obvious fact that you are watching a major league baseball game that millions of other people are following at this exact moment. 

Although the players become more real by becoming closer, what they do seems even less real.  Can human beings possibly throw a ball with that velocity?  Can they run that fast and swing and pivot and swoop like that?  They are so nimble and so physically gifted, they hardly seen human.  But if what their bodies are doing makes them seem superhuman, what is happening on their faces and in their shoulders makes them seem particularly and almost unexpectedly human.  I saw a lot of interesting things:  Frenchie’s loose and manic exuberance, Jose’s eerie and half unserious good humor, Wright’s unsmiling distracted confidence and confusion, the wary, hungry shyness of Jesus Feliciano and Ruben Tejada.  Yes you can see all this on the television.  But it is different when you are actually there and this close.  You don’t have a sense that you’re seeing something on a stage or a screen, something that an SNY cameraman is choosing to show you.  You are seeing something that only you and a few other people can see at that moment, something that is really happening and is just yours and not selected by someone else and therefore real. 

These interesting, somehow private things can happen at any moment.  From the second row, the dugout takes on the character of a magic box out of which extraordinary things regularly pop. Your attention cannot waver.  You cannot imagine leaving your seat to get food or to go to the bathroom.   

As a triple play happened right in my face, I wondered if I could go back to the Promenade.  I calculated that buying these seats as season tickets would cost $25,000.  Cars cost $25,000.  Maybe I could get a really cheap clunky car and always sit in these seats.  Would I ever get tired of this?  Would I ever get bored?   Having just done it once, I find it hard to imagine.  What could get me here?  Maybe I could get a terminal illness and justify this to myself.   

It would have been a miraculous evening no matter what happened.  But here was the kicker.  I saw one of the most extraordinary games I have ever seen.  I didn’t just see it.  I felt as if I witnessed it, I was so close.  Almost none of the drama had to come from my imagination.  None of the drama came from the dynamics of the crowd.  That was one thing I missed.  When you’re in the second row, you are aware of all the people around you, but you feel part of this little group and not part of this enormous crowd with its own geography and meteorology. 

Anyway, there I was seeing a game that deserves to be eternally famous and cherished, that will be with me no matter how many New York Mets seasons get painted over it.  I saw John Niese pitch a nine-inning game that missed being a perfect game by just one hit, a hit that nobody noticed in the third inning.  I swear that I now know what a perfect game looks like.   I saw, felt, and became as fully convinced of Niese’s absolute mastery as the Padres were.  I have never seen anything like this.  I have seen Koufax, Seaver, Koosman, and Gooden  pitch as well as Niese did last night.  But they were who they were, and they were overpowering.  Niese was an enormous surprise.  But time after time after time he got his ground ball or strike out or fly out.  I could also see his face and see his remarkably humble acceptance of the fact of his mastery.  I watched the kid as he came out of the dugout and went back into it.  He was focused, not exuberant.  He was delighted but there was no swagger.  There was no “this is who I am!”  There was a “who am I, what am I and how do I fit into the developing story of this season?” Jon must have seen what I and everybody else was seeing.  He must have sensed our surprise that an unexpected talent was emerging.  But for fear of waking up, for fear of it going away, he held it in.  I’ll bet he was worried about whether he could every pitch this way again.  I’ll bet that he will.  Even he seemed to be becoming more convinced as the wild cheers of a crowd that was staying rained down on his shoulders when he took the mound in the ninth, as Kevin Burkhardt interviewed him at the end of the game, just a few feet away from me, and Angel Pagan ran out to smash the whipped cream or shaving cream or whatever it was in his face. 

I saw one of those one-hitters that define the Mets franchise.  I am not disappointed that I didn’t see a no-hitter.  The one-hitter is the most characteristic Mets thing.  The fact that we’ve had 34 of them and never had a no-hitter suggests that the alignment of the universe is such that even at their very best, the Mets will never seem perfect.  The Mets will never seem perfect, even if they are sometimes surprisingly good.  They either hold out promise until they lose it just at the end, or if two times in a half century, they achieve the ultimate result, they will still look as if they’re on the point of everything collapsing.  Nobody thought the 1969 Mets were perfect.  They were blessed.  And although the 1986 team was as perfect as all but two or three teams in major league baseball history have been, look how close they came to defeat.  The scoreboard had conceded.  There will always be pits and bumps on the surface of the apple.  There will always be nicks on the bricks.  The Mets may be wonderful but we will never have a no-hitter.  Because not having a no-hitter is the way the Mets are.    

Citi Field is a happy place now, I felt as I walked back into it, from my seats on the edge of what had really happened.  I’ve felt this happiness before, but it was in a different place.  You’re going to yell at me or laugh at me and I don’t care but what the season reminds me of the most is the experience of 1969 before it became the 1969 of iconic memory.  People who don’t remember 1969 often think it was:  the Mets were bad for years, but then miraculously they were great, yayy!  It wasn’t like that at all.  In 1969 they got off to their typical bad start.  After eleven games, they were 4-7.  Then suddenly they were playing better as a whole bunch of guys you didn’t really expect to rely on started playing really well.  It got to the point where, after 59 games, they were 32-27.  Sound familiar?  And people were asking what they were to ask all summer.  It wasn’t “are we going to have a miracle of historic proportions?”  It was more like:  “Hmm.  What is real here?  How good are these guys really? Even if they’re good, they can’t really be good enough to win, could they?”  It was a summer of hope and very big doubt.  It wasn’t a summer of Koosman jumping up onto Grote.  And however much we admired this team full of surprises and unexpected heroes, the doubt was always stronger than the hope, all the way into August.  On August 13, we were ten games out.  It was only after mid-August that we heard celestial music.  Most of the time we were like beggars who have been given a gleaming coin and are biting it and rubbing it to see if it was real.

I don’t know if any of this is real either.  But I know that a LOT of things are happening that I did not expect.  I know that if everybody keeps up their not implausible current level of performance and Bay and Reyes just return to their accessible normal levels, this team makes the playoffs.  The wounded fans, the beggars biting the coins, are elevated.  This could happen.  There are omens.  That is what I will call this miraculous afternoon into evening, with friends, with my daughter, with the Home Run Apple, with seats in which I may never sit again, with Jon Niese’s breakout performance.  It’s an omen.  It is a symbol, I hope and pray, of what this season is becoming.  It is a symbol of the splendor of surprise.

*******

It’s not too late to take advantage of my Father’s Day Special.  If you’d like to give a dad a very personally inscribed copy of either of my books for Father’s Day, just e-mail me at danaabrand@yahoo.com.  Tell me a few things about the dad’s Mets fandom (that I can use in my inscription) and give me your address.  I will send you my address to which you can send a check for $17.50 per book, which covers everything including postage.  I will get his personal copy in the mail to you as soon as I have your e-mail.  Please note that this offer applies to both Mets Fan and The Last Days of Shea. 

Also, please check out my reading schedule for June in the post below.  If you come to one of my readings, please be sure to say hello.  It’ll be a pleasure for me to meet you.

The Mets will have a busy June, and so will I.   June and December are the biggest months for the sale of sports books.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to mention that I will almost certainly be making an appearance somewhere near you in the next month.  If you’d like to meet me, hear me read from and talk about my books, or get an inscribed and discounted copy of either of them, I will be appearing at the following venues in the month of June:

June 3 – 7 pm        Wethersfield Public Library, Wethersfield, Connecticut

June 8 – 7pm         Floral Park Public Library, Floral Park, Long Island

June 14 – 7 pm      East 4th Street Kensington-Windsor Terrace Veterans’ Memorial Garden (Located on East 4th Street between Ft. Hamilton Parkway and Caton Avenue in Brooklyn)

June 15 – 7 pm      North Arlington Public Library, North Arlington, New Jersey

June 17 – 7pm       Barnes and Noble’s, Manhasset, Long Island

June 21 – 7 pm      Milford Public Library, Milford, Connecticut

June 30 – 7:30 pm  Northport-East Northport Public Library, East Northport, Long Island

I will also be offering, for the entire month of June, my Father’s Day Special.  If you’d like to give a dad a very personally inscribed copy of either of my books for Father’s Day, just e-mail me at danaabrand@yahoo.com.  Tell me a few things about the dad’s Mets fandom (that I can use in my inscription) and give me your address.  I will send you my address to which you can send a check for $17.50 per book, which covers everything including postage.  I will get his personal copy in the mail to you as soon as I have your e-mail.  Please note that this offer applies to both Mets Fan and The Last Days of Shea.  The price for the inscribed book is therefore the same as an uninscribed Last Days of Shea from Amazon, and you get an enormous discount from me off of Amazon’s price for  Mets Fan (I’m passing on the author’s discount because I want more people to know about Mets Fan, which deals with being a Mets fan from 1962 to 2006).

So, as they say, enough about me.  I’ll be back to blogging about the Mets in the next few days.

Yes I do think that there is such a thing as momentum in baseball.  Yes I do understand that if you flip a coin 162 times and record your results, you will find winning streaks and losing streaks that look just like the performance of a baseball team in the course of a season.  No, I do not think that proves that there is no such thing as momentum in baseball.

I’ve seen it in classes I’ve taught and in groups I’ve been a part of.  People respond to the other people around them, engaged in the same activity.  I’m not sure how it works and I suspect it works in different ways at different times.  I don’t think it follows rules, which is why people are still unsure that it exists. 

One of the reasons people doubt that there is such a thing as momentum is that it is very fragile.  The Mets have momentum at the moment.  Having beaten the Yankees in two out of three games and now having beaten the Phillies 8-0, they are more likely to win their next game than if they had lost two out of three to the Yanks and lost 8-0 to the Phils.  But more likely just means more likely.  If a Phillies pitcher pitches a great game and a Mets pitcher blows it tomorrow, the momentum can be lost or at least diminished, but if they keep winning they will still have an advantage.

One thing that helps create momentum is convincing teams like the Yankees and Phillies to respect you.  Another thing is earning the respect of your fans.  Look, we’ve had our ups and downs this season.  But we are at .500, only four games out, after 50 games.  And Jose Reyes and Jason Bay are just beginning to hit.  And more fun than anything else is the cornucopia of surprises we’ve already had this season.  Pelfrey, Barajas, Davis, Takahashi, Valdes, Dickey, Pagan, Mejia, Carter, Blanco.  Who are these people?  What did we know about them?  How much did we think of them or rely on them?  Last season the only player on the team who played better than expected was Luis Castillo, for all the good it did us.  This is a lot of what momentum often involves:  obscure people asking to be noticed, disappointing people eager not to disappoint, new people happy to be new and wanting to get old. 

What serious, discerning, loving, needing Mets fan is not enjoying this season at this point?  Who among you is certain that something cannot happen this year?  I’m still not giving it 50% odds, but I’m getting close.  I love the way they’re playing.  I love the way the chips are falling.  I love the eagerness I feel at 7.

In a blog called Clutch Bingles, a blogger named Brian mentions the fact that “Dana Brand wrote a book that fondly remembered The Last Days of Shea. …It’s one of the many things I genuinely love about Mets fans over Yankee fans. Mets fans lost their oft-derided stadium (even oft-derided among themselves), and they still mourn it. … Yankee fans, meanwhile, lost a palace with an unmatched history of championships (albeit one with a ’70s disco make-over) and replaced it with a gray gaudy mall — and Yankee fans hardly shed a tear for the old place … There’s no similar poetry devoted to the final days of old Yankee Stadium, not in the same vein as in the book by Brand, who obviously speaks for a lot of Mets fans. It’s like the Yankees brass (with the help of The City) plowed over a community park to drop an exclusive baseball version of the Palisades Center into the South Bronx, and Yankee fans loved them for it, even if that mall hardly loves them back.”

In the superb blog Subway Squawkers, the excellent Yankee blogger Lisa Swan wonders what people think now who had once said that they’d rather have Wright and Reyes than A-Rod and Jeter.  It is a fair question.  The stocks of Wright and Reyes are down at the moment.  But I still enjoy rooting for them to find their way, more than I’d enjoy rooting for Jeter, and much much more than I’d enjoy rooting for A-Rod.  When I noted this on Lisa’s Facebook page, it prompted several Yankees fans to marvel at comparably absurd preferences Mets fans have expressed to them over the years.  One woman marvels that her Mets fan husband says that he’d rather have Ike Davis than Mark Teixeira.  One man mentions that back in the ‘70s, the guy who owned his local deli said he’d rather have Doug Flynn, Ron Hodges, and Dan Norman than Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson and Mickey Rivers. 

Of course I’d rather have Ike Davis than Mark Teixeira.  I too was glad to have Doug Flynn, Ron Hodges, and Dan Norman rather than Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson and Mickey Rivers.  Wright and Reyes versus Jeter and A-Rod?  No contest at all.  These sentiments are relatively uncontroversial among long-time, die-hard Mets fans and they are entirely incomprehensible to Yankees fans.  This is how the fan bases can be told apart.  It is incomprehensible to Yankees fans that we would actually prefer players we know to be inferior to theirs.   We write books and poems of love to a mediocre newish stadium and they can’t even produce a tear (let alone a book or a poem) for a truly historic old one.  They can’t comprehend that we don’t envy them.  They think we should.  We don’t.  We feel superior to them, precisely because of the perversity and the sentimentality that prevents us from envying them. 

As I’ve said before, Yankees fans are just as good people as Mets fans.  But if the only way I could be a baseball fan was to be a Yankees fan, I wouldn’t do it.  It doesn’t look like fun to me.  For all of the disasters and absurdities, I can’t help but find Mets fandom fun. 

So here we are at the first Subway Series, a psychological point of the season that both Mets fans and Yankees fans know is important.  I’m psyched.  Because I know that anything can happen.  Yankees fans also know that anything can happen.  But they are not as much at ease with this fact as I am.