Dana Brand’s Mets Fan Blog

Metsblog reports that over Johan Santan’s last six decisions, the Mets are 0-6, although Santana has an ERA of 2.48.

Even by Mets historical standards, this is impressive.  I know that these numbers aren’t directly comparable, since Santana himself is not 0-6 over those six starts, but this reminds me of:

1962 Roger Craig 5-22, 3.78 ERA 

1973 Jerry Koosman 14-15, 2.84 ERA 

1974 Jon Matlack 13-15, 2.41 ERA 

1977 Jerry Koosman 8-20, 3.49 ERA 

We used to call someone who pitched well but wasn’t getting wins a “hard luck pitcher.”  Somehow, though, I would find it hard to call Johan Santana a hard luck anything.  I think things are going to be fine in the long run, but we are definitely in one of those old-fashioned Mets vortexes here.    

Since June 17, when Jerry Manuel became manager, the Mets have lost one and won one, won one and lost one, won one and lost two and won two and lost two, and won one and lost one and won one and lost one. 

I’m not getting on Manuel for this.  I have great hopes for him.  The Mets were playing like this, pretty much, before he came.  And there was plenty of ire and gall about Willie’s excessively even temper, and Rick Peterson’s equanimity.

I don’t know if I have ever seen a Mets .500 team that played so close to .500 so consistently.  These Mets may not even have had a day all season when they have had a runs scored total that was more than five runs away from their runs scored against total.  There’s getting to be something freaky about this.

In the past, it has generally been different.  Mets .500 teams usually look at some point in the season as if they are more or less than a .500 team.  The .500 they end up with is usually the result of some sort of concluding streak or slump.  This was true of all of those .500 teams at the start of the ‘70s and it was true of the 2005 team, which wildly gyrated at the end. 

Of course the season isn’t over, but it has certainly acquired a personality by this point.  It has a give with one hand, take back with the other personality, a marching in place personality, a fits and starts personality, something that from a distance looks like a wave pattern even if, from day to day, it feels like something that may actually go in just one direction.  After awhile, we get so dulled by this maddeningly repetitive pattern that we feel that no good game really means anything (look at the several good games we’ve had this week) and no bad game means anything either (look at the ones this week too).  Meaning is the sum.  And the sum is a flat landscape exactly halfway between heaven and hell.  In such a place, it is hard to understand anything, and it’s hard to be anything.

And it’s all the more meaningless because we’re only four games out.  The Mets are not being rewarded for the way they’re playing, but they’re not really being penalized either.  The division will probably go to the team that can manage a September streak. 

So, here we are in July.  Nothing is real and there’s nothing to get hung about.  There’s just a repetitive hum.  Like an engine getting primed, ready to start moving.  Or like some torture technique.  One or the other. 

On Saturday, I saw the Mets play the Yankees at the ballpark for the very first time in my life.  I have always avoided Mets-Yankees games.  They’ve always been sold out and I’ve never felt such a need to be there that I’d shell out the extra money it would cost.  Part of me didn’t want to see Shea with a lot of Yankees fans in it.  I didn’t want to see fights.  I didn’t want to risk seeing enemies exulting on our turf. 

For some reason, though, the Mets-Yankees thing is not what it was.  I got tickets on Friday on StubHub for only $13 more than face value.  And so, 45 years after I exulted in the Mets’ 6-2 triumph over the Yankees in the first Mayor’s Trophy game, I finally saw the Yankees play the Mets at Shea.

I have to tell you that I enjoyed the experience more than I thought I would, even though we lost the game.  It was very interesting, and a little surprising. 

The first surprise came when I was trying to find a parking space.  They had let me into the lot, but tailgaters were filling up so many spots that there weren’t any spaces visible.  I drove up and down a few aisles until finally some tailgaters motioned to me that I could come right into the space where they were tailgating.  They were very nice and accommodating and although it was perfectly obvious to anyone paying attention, I didn’t realize until I got out of the car that these nice people who looked like ordinary Mets fans were festooned with Yankee regalia.  Okay, I thought.  Whatever.

Then I walked to the stadium and was shocked to see something I was going to see all day.  I saw guy in a Posada jersey with his arm around a girl in a Reyes jersey.  I saw family groups where brothers with nearly identical faces were wearing shirts with antithetical logos.  This was totally bizarre.  How did this happen?  How could it happen so frequently?  I know that Cro-Magnon Man co-existed with Neanderthals for a few tens of thousands of years and we still don’t know if they interbred or if the Neanderthals just died out or were killed off by the Cro-Magnons.  This reminded me of that.  Seriously.  I felt as if I was witnessing an ancient and impenetrable mystery.  It didn’t look like normal New York diversity.  It looked like the strangely intimate co-existence of irreconciliable opposites.  The completely obvious fact that there were no distinguishing differences between Mets and Yankees fans except for the caps and jerseys they were wearing somehow bothered and amazed me.  I mean, shouldn’t there at least be physiognomical differences?  Shouldn’t we be able to see the arrogance on the faces of the Yankee fans?  Shouldn’t we be able to see the eager philosophical hope and sweetness on the faces of the Mets fans?  If I used some sort of selective imagination, I could see these things.  If I was honest with myself, I couldn’t. 

One thing I enjoyed was the way in which the opposing fan groups gave each other an audience to cheer and boo for and at.  This made me realize what a lazy experience it is, normally, to watch a game in your home stadium.  You cheer and boo, but if you’re busy talking or putting mustard on your hot dog, it doesn’t matter if you don’t make any noise because everyone else is making the requisite obvious noise.  But when Shea has all these Yankees fans, you feel you have to make a lot of noise when something good happens for the Mets because the Yankees fans are making a lot of noise when something good happens for the Yankees.  You want them to hear you because they are trying so hard to make you hear them.  It takes a lot of extra energy to go to a Subway Series game.

And everybody seems to love the theatricality of the whole deal.  There is much generally good-natured striking of violently hostile Kabuki poses.  People even take pictures of staged scowling face-offs.  People whip themselves up into a frenzy, holding onto $8 bottles of bad beer.  One hand is always full and the other hand is waving around.  And it always funny that the lout in the Jeter shirt has in his hand a cobalt blue bottle with a Mets logo commemorating the last year of Shea. 

The afternoon continued as the Yankees fans would chant “Lets Go Yan-kees!” a chant that seemed to create a natural space for an answering chant of “Yankees Suck!”  The Yankees fans were only able to muster a weak “No” after “Lets Go Mets!” in the space in which younger fans like to put the “Woooo!”  We definitely had a more effective and persuasive counter-cheering situation, even if it did not exactly reflect well on us.
 

It began to rain and everybody took shelter, just like Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, in the cave-like promenade behind the stands.  There were endless lines for the bathrooms.  People streamed by, slapping the hands of those who had the same colors and logos, ignoring those who didn’t.  It was hot, steamy, and close, and there were claps of thunder that rattled the long echoing space filled with sweating bodies and the sounds of talking and laughing and shouting into cellphones.  Right next to me was a group of three mothers, two in Mets and one in Yankees outfits, and a big mixed-loyalty brood of their young.  One of the men associated with this group, a guy with a Mets jersey who was apparently the husband of the woman in the Yankees jersey, showed up with two blue bottles in his hand, drinking from both of them in a way that would only have made sense if he had had two mouths.  A domestic quarrel ensued, a foot and a half from my head.  “I called you four fucking times!”  “I didn’t fucking hear the phone!  It’s too fucking loud!”  “You should have been listening for the fucking phone!”  “I can’t take any more of this fucking bullshit!”  As all this was going on, my daughter was beside me texting on her phone.  And people kept up the chants and the silliness.  I had worried that a quarrel between a Mets fan and a Yankees fan might have led to something unpleasant but no one was paying attention and this was obviously a couple having an intimate fight in each other’s face.  So I just stood in wonder at the scene which eventually floated away at some point.  And gradually things grew lighter and you could see the bay and Manhattan off in a hazy orange distance, everything looking indescribably serene and calm beyond the streaming crowd on the promenade and the people smoking illegally off at the last edge of the stadium. 

When it was light enough for the game to resume, we walked up into the bright bowl and saw that the lights were turned on and that they were beautiful reflected on the white tarp covering the infield.  Wiping off our seats with tissues, we heard “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on the stadium sound system and excitedly turned to see a big fuzzy rainbow over Flushing.  The symbol of the season!  When reality starts pulling this kind of thing, I become full of cynical fear.  That’s not really the rainbow that I can take a picture of and say is a sign of the revivification of the Mets.  It’s just a rainbow and if the Mets were going to win this game, Jose Reyes wouldn’t have been picked off at second with David Wright at the plate.

Play resumed.   Sonia and I left our pleasant seats in the breezy Upper Deck at the end of the eighth inning because the Yankees contingent had become dominant since too many Mets fans had gone home, after a rain delay, and with the Mets behind 3-2.  We went down and watched the last inning with my sister Stefanie and her friend Terry in an area of the Mezannine where glum and tired Mets season ticket-holders sweated under the overhang to no purpose.  I got to see Mariano Rivera’s cutter in person.  There were a few Yankees fans down there but only a few, including a woman in a Williams jersey who did some kind of weird little dance every time one of Rivera’s pitches got by a Mets batter.  When the game ended, the Yankees fans gyrated and I felt for the first time all afternoon how much I disliked them and wanted them to go away and not come back.  Still, I thought, it was the Mets who lost that game, and all by themselves.  The craziness of the season continues.  But at least I’ve seen this.

This very strange thing.  This unending, century-old family quarrel that will continue as long as there is baseball.  This fissure in the city that is not a real division so much as an occasion for enjoying the pleasure of battle and contempt without any real meaning.  This exciting excuse to get all worked up and to chant and gyrate and be pleased to see rainbows.  Oh what fun it would be for the season to end with a big dramatic New York smash-up, a just-for-fun Armageddon  between these two mediocre teams.  
 

I went to the game on Wednesday night.  It was a wonderful game, right after a horrendous game.  At this point, it would be totally banal to try to compare this season, or the last two-thirds of last season, to anything characterized by rapid and random up and down movement,  Let’s just say that, whatever is happening this season, my emotions have leveled out.  I really do feel the way people feel in the middle of roller coaster rides.  I will take whatever they give me.  I accept that I have no power to influence anything.  All I want is not to get sick.

The evening was particularly pleasant because of the company.  And since there were a number of people there who monitor websites and blogs, we had a discussion at one point of the timing of weird spikes in web traffic and the peculiar reasons why some people visit our sites, and the strange ways that search engines bring them.

So I thought I would share some of the things I have learned by looking at my latest report from WebLog Expert Lite (free of course) which analyzes my weblogs from Yahoo Web Hosting. 

Now one thing that your weblog report would permit you to do is say a lot of bullshit things.  It is in fact true that my website (both the metsfanbook.com pages and the associated blog) receive an average of 12,000 hits per day, 10,000 page views a day. and 5000 visitors per day.  But that, as I said, is bullshit.  If you actually look at the report, you see that most of that traffic comes from spambots trying to get onto my comment pages or trying to figure out a way into the guestbook I had to close because of them. 

If you look carefully, honestly, and fairly at the numbers what you actually learn is that about 800 people a day visit my blog, about 70 people a day come to my book page, and about 15 people a day read each of the essays linked to the book page.  These numbers vary widely according to how much Mets news there is (the spambot numbers don’t vary as much because people in Siberia don’t know about Willie being fired).  The traffic after the Willie firing was way above average, as I would have expected from previous experience.  I also get a spike whenever I am mentioned by another blog or appear on a podcast.  I’d love to see what would happen if I ever got an on-air mention or if Mike and the Mad Dog ever decided to make fun of me for my way-too-generous dissing of them in my book.  A Metsblog mention gives me an enormous spike but I get good traffic from a lot of blogs on a regular basis.  I think a lot of people read blogs the way I do, going to a blog and then going to other blogs by clicking on the links on their pages.  It is clear from my WebLog stats that a lot of my readers come to me from Metsblog, FaithandFearinFlushing, Mikes Mets, Hotfoot, Metstradamus, Optimistic Mets Fan, and The Eddie Kranepool Society.  I also get a considerable amount of traffic from sites authored by highly literate women (Pick Me Up, The Good, Bad, and the Ugly, the Mets!, MetsGrrl, YouCan’tScriptBaseball, and MySummerFamily).  I think that the pattern here is that I’m getting the kind of English major contingent among Mets fans.  My audience consists of people who like to read something because of the way it’s written.   Good writing is what all of the above blogs have in common.  As a result, I think you get a really nice gender mix, and as you can see on the comment pages, a lot of people who really have something to say, and are not exclusively interested in the ultimately always inaccurate analysis of the Mets’ unknowable prospects that you can find here and on any other blog. 

The most amusing aspect of the Weblog report are the search terms that bring total strangers to these shores.   People come here looking for Kelly Ripa, kinnahurra, and Sasha Baron Cohen (no relation as far as I know to Gary or Lynn Cohen).  They’re also looking for the Home Run Apple and Cow Bell Man and I am happy to accommodate them.  They steal my images (fine with me, I believe in sharing images).  And sometimes a spambot does get through to a comment page and tells anyone who is still reading a 2006 blog piece on Steve Trachsel that hot xxx chicks who will do anything live right in their area.  Spambots selling drugs at a discount also seem to have found a piece I put up on the Mets of Japan.

What a strange thing this Internet is!  What have I become now that I am a feature of it?  What have the Mets become and what does it mean now to be a Mets fan reading the blogs, with all of these tendrils reaching out into space and touching other Mets fans with laptops in front of ballgames.  I’ll write about this more eventually.  Right now I am trying to sharpen my blogging brains for this (whatever) Subway Series.

As a matter of fact, I’m going to my first ever Mets-Yankee game on Saturday.  I just grabbed tickets for myself and my daughter on StubHub for only $48 each.  Not bad, I think.  So if anybody’s anywhere near Section 34, row C, in Upper Reserved, please feel free to come by and say hello.  
 

As I pointed out in my previous post, there are people in the New York media who, when they hear an intelligent person (like Rick Peterson or Jerry Manuel)  use what’s called a metaphor, feel that they have to get shovel and sticks and beat it to a pulp before it eats them. 

So Jerry Manuel, in response to a reporter’s question about how booing affects Aaron Heilman, says:  “It’s difficult. It’s painful. But it’s also growth. It’s growth for him. It’s very, very – I’m going to say this, and I hope y’all don’t take this wrong. I know you’re going to run out of here with something crazy on this. It’s very, very fertile ground for growth at Shea Stadium. It’s fertile ground for a team’s growth and development. Sometimes fertile ground has fertilizer. (Laughter in room.) Fertilizer is a good thing. It’s a good thing. You get the greatest results, you get the most beautiful plants, when you put it in that type of fertile soil. That’s what we have the opportunity to do. Don’t y’all take that wrong because I know what you’re going to do with it.”

I mean, how hard is it really for a person competent enough to pay bills and drive a car to figure out that Jerry Manuel, in his colorful and cogent comment about fertilizer at Shea, was not calling Mets fans pieces of shit?   I mean, do we really have to have a discussion about what he meant?  Why would Jerry call Mets fans pieces of shit in this context?  Will there really be calls for him to apologize or, who knows, resign, because he’s like, so outrageous?  Is there actually a newspaper in New York City with so little respect for its readership that it employs a sports columnist (Bart Hubbuch in the Post) who seriously believes that Manuel intended to insult the fans  with this fertilizer remark?  I’ve heard that Craig Carton jumped on this bandwagon too.  Please, someone, reassure me that no one is this dumb, but there are indeed people cynical enough to milk something like this for ratings and readership.

How much more tired can we get of the way in which a loud minority of sports journalists in New York distort reasonable discourse in order to make lucrative trouble?  Why isn’t baseball interesting enough for them?  Can you imagine what these jerks would have done with the kinds of things Casey Stengel used to say?

I tell you, I like the way in which Manuel is just eccentric enough to phrase things with originality and how he’s also canny enough to play around with the smarter reporters by joking about what they’ll make of what he says.  Manuel has already established himself as a more interesting interview subject than Willie.  He has, in less than a week, earned himself a place in the Mets pantheon of characters.  But I have a good feeling about this man.  I have a sense that he may be more like Bobby V than anyone else:  a piece of work, and not exactly careful, but smarter than anyone else in the room.  Let’s hope.
 

Yesterday was a day I guess I will always remember.  The first wave involved reading all of the reactions to the way in which Willie had been fired.  Everybody was pissed off, everybody said that it was okay to fire Willie, but not in this way.  Everybody said pretty much the same thing.

Then there were the moving pictures of Randolph himself, shocked more than you’d expect, leaving his hotel to fly home.  These were awful.  And the saddest thing, as Willie pointed out, was that he now would never have his redemptive victory with the Mets.  The rest of us are still in this game, wondering if there will be a triumphant charge to the top of a weak division that will give a satisfying end to the Mets of this decade, who are Randolph’s Mets as much as the Eighties Mets were Johnson’s Mets. 

But Randolph now is out of it.  He lives, but we’re still in the station wagon and he’s not.  We can at least hope for a happy ending.  Willie’s all right, of course.  He’s got a well-paid leave of absence coming to him.  But he cannot now be part of any celebration we might have.  He is in a kind of limbo.  Alone.  And even if the most wonderful things happen now, here is where his story ends.  You can say that it may not matter, that nothing wonderful is going to happen.  But it does matter because all that keeps us from getting out of the station wagon ourselves is the fervent, at times pitiful hope that we’re going someplace where they have ice cream.

There were speculations all day in the press about whether or not Omar Minaya had really wanted to do this, or whether or not this was worse than what the Steinbrenners had done to Torre.  And as a fan trying to be fair-minded, I had to live once again with the indeterminacy of all situations like this.  I didn’t know who or what to get angry at or about because I had no solid information with which to direct the flow of my venom and bile.  And I feel crappy getting really mad at people when I have a sense in the back of my mind that there is a possibility that they don’t deserve it.

So I just watched, without much emotion, as SNY CNN’d the thing into a whole afternoon of programming.

Most of what I watched was boring.  There was some good analysis by journalists, but they had only about ten minutes of stuff to say and were recycling it in a loop. 

What was not boring was Rick Peterson, who was calm, smart, and eerily secure.  It made me wish that I had gotten to know him better.  As Rick observed, in a statement that deserves to be remembered:  “Homes go through renovations, and sometimes you have to make changes when things don’t go that well, and I’m part of that change. I totally understand that -– I grew up in the baseball business. I’m the hardwood floor that’s getting ripped out, and they’re going to bring in the Tuscany tile. It’ll be great… I wear this bracelet because I’m very in tune with Eastern philosophy and universal law. [The bracelet rings signify] faith, compassion, equanimity and love. … The Eastern language writes in symbols, and the symbol for crisis they also use for opportunity. I’ve been given a great opportunity here, and as I walk out that door, I seek my next opportunity. I walk out in peace, and I wish everybody else here the best. … Hopefully, the Tuscany tile will do a lot better than a hardwood floor.” 
 

As Gary and Ron were to observe later, this metaphor really works.  The Mets have commissioned a new floor, although what they may really need is a new ceiling.  It may or may not be great.  But it will be different.  Sometimes when we make a change, we can trick ourselves into being different.  And if we don’t change, and things don’t happen as we would want, there is always faith, compassion, equanimity, and love, qualities Mets fans have always had, if not always in the requisite abundance.  Ron said that he’d still prefer to go with the travertine.   I agree that it looks nicest, but you can slip on marble and if you do, you can really crack your head open.

The bald guy who does the “Beer Money” filler show made fun of Peterson for talking as he did.  This man doesn’t do metaphors.  And what’s this, he asked, with “Middle Eastern philosophy?”  And “equanimity,” what the hell is that?  He says he was an English major and he doesn’t know what the word “equanimity” means.  He was an English major?  Great.  The next time I’m advising students about what they can do with an English major, I’ll tell them that they can do “Beer Money.”

Is it my imagination or does SNY hire its civilian analysts mainly according to how well they can be heard without a microphone, in a sitting position, from a distance of 500 feet?  You know, I really don’t want to sound like a snob, but how many beefy male dolls does one city need, who, when you pull a ring at the back of their necks, will bark with a Hollywood version of a New York accent that the team has no heart and that they’re sick and tired of it?  Why can’t FAN and SNY recognize that the people we like to hear from are people like Gary, Keith, and Ron and Howie and Eddie?  Have we not made that clear?  We don’t know what to make of and we certainly don’t warm up to these parodies of simple-minded middle-aged male sports fans they keep throwing at us.   Are these guys supposed to look like us?  Have they ever met us?  Do they understand that some of us speak without barking and can maintain two possible alternative ideas in our heads at the same time without exploding?

Anyway.  The bright spot of the afternoon was not Omar Minaya’s moving and unconvincing effort to take it all on himself.  It was Jerry Manuel’s poise and intelligence.  I have to be honest.  I’ve never paid much attention to Jerry Manuel.  It’s an awful admission but when I saw a headline on the Web about Manuel taking over for Randolph, I think I may have actually wondered how Charlie Manuel could manage our team.  But suddenly there he is, with a prominent place in all of our lives, answering questions from the press, with a schmoozy ease you never actually saw from Willie.  I wish him well.  And I’m genuinely curious to see how the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. can be applied to baseball management.  Not much was made of this, but it is a little counter-intuitive.  Personally, I think that Mahatma Gandhi and Eastern philosophy might be more helpful for the fans this year then they would be for the Mets.

So then we have to have the game.  And could you believe it?  In the very first at-bat Manuel has to face the first serious challenge to his authority.  The only satisfactory explanation I can think of for what I saw is that Manuel and Reyes staged the whole thing to show the world who’s in charge.  I propose that explanation because I do not want to believe that Jose Reyes, who may be the most talented position player I have ever seen in a Mets uniform, is immature enough to threaten the authority of a new manager in his very first inning. 

The game was disheartening.  I’ve used that word before for the 2008 Mets and I expect to use it again.  But I am very far from giving up hope.  We could win this thing.  We may not have the chemistry for it, but we may very well have the starting pitching.  Or we may not.  It’s all the same.  I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m going to take down my copy of the Bhagavad-Gita and see if it will help me get through the season. 

I’m a pretty loyal Mets fan.  It screws up my schedule to stay up past midnight, but when there’s a West Coast night game, I usually allow my schedule to be screwed up a little.  I can’t always last the whole game, but I like to stay up for a big chunk of it.  The house is quiet.  Everyone’s asleep.  There’s a weird sense I have that I am keeping Gary and Ron company.  Is it my imagination or is there a kind of late-night intimacy to their West Coast broadcasts, as if they know they’re talking to people who are watching the game all by themselves, with the volume down, in quiet houses?

I made it through most of last night’s game.  I decided to pack it in after Heilman got out of the seventh.  The game was still close, but I was tired and I had a sense, if you know what I mean, that I had put in my watching of the game. 

So I wake up and I’m having breakfast and my wife Sheila, on her way out of the house for a yoga class, tells me that the Mets have fired Willie Randolph.  That can’t be, I think.  I was up until 1 am and they hadn’t fired Randolph.  What were they going to do, fire him in the early morning hours so that nobody would notice?   

To show me that she hadn’t misunderstood what she heard, Sheila went and turned on SNY and said that “yes,” they had fired him (there must have been something on the banner at the bottom of the screen).  I finished my breakfast and went into the study and turned on the computer.  They did fire him.  At 3:15 in the morning, Eastern Daylight Savings Time.

What in God’s name were they thinking?  Is there a universe in which this makes any sense?  If so, I don’t want to go there.  It’s one thing for the Mets to be underachievers.  I can’t handle a “what could be worse?” joke. 

The dynamics of this situation were fairly simple.  Anyone could have figured them out.  Mets fans were divided between those who wanted Willie to go, and those who would have liked for him to stay but had fully accepted that he was on his way out.  I was in the latter group.  I did not think that Willie Randolph was the main or even a particularly significant reason for the team’s mediocre performance over the past year.  But I understood that when baseball fate bends in a certain way, the traditional remedy is human sacrifice. 

I was ready for the sacrifice.  Like most Mets fans, I felt for this decent, skilled, strong, and solid man.  But firing the manager when a talented team is underperforming is not a judgement.  It is a tactic.  It is pushing the reset button, going out and coming back in.  It is a blind expunging of the whatever, since you can’t surgically remove exactly what you know to be wrong.  I was looking forward to a purely psychological sense of renewal, for the players and the fans.  There would be blood.  But the blood would do some useful work.

Now look at what they’ve done.  They’ve made a mess of it.  The story is not that Randolph was finally fired.  It is that Randolph was fired at 3:15 am New York time.  The story is that after four encouraging games what was probably but not necessarily inevitable was done in the middle of the night way the hell out in Anaheim.  This doesn’t feel like the dignified, considered removal of a fine man willing to offer himself up for the greater good.  It feels like a rubout.  It feels like Willie was taken for a ride at 3 AM, bumped off, and thrown in the Pacific. 

This sucks, not just because Willie deserved better but because the Mets and their fans deserved a sacrifice that would have felt good so that they could start feeling good again.  You can’t feel good about something that has been so botched.  It makes you feel as if they really don’t know what they’re doing and we’re all in more trouble than we realized.  When I look at the schedule, I have a sneaking suspicion that they were understandably afraid of Anaheim, but thought that they could get a decent streak going against Colorado and Seattle.  I wonder if they wanted to wait until Santana’s start to increase the odds of a good run after the firing.  Please don’t tell me that they did this in the early morning hours because they thought it would attract less attention. 

I feel sick right now.  A decent man has been treated badly and an opportunity has been lost.  I suppose we can afford this rudeness to a decent man.  We can’t afford to lose many more opportunities. 
 

As much as I love the drama and brilliance of a stadium lit up at night, there is just something about a day game. There are all these kids. There are all these teenagers in matching t-shirts. There are all of these grownups who feel as if they’re playing hooky, even if they’re not. There is innocence and generosity. And so the day game of June 12, 2008 felt terrific as people came in off the ramps into the bright sunlight of the stadium plaza.

It wasn’t just an ordinary day game, though. The crowd that poured into Shea had the giddiness of a death-row prisoner who’s just been reprieved. The night before, we had come so close to what felt like the worst possible disaster when Billy Wagner gave back Mike Pelfrey’s three-run lead in a game that seemed on the point of giving us back our season. Carlos Beltran won it with a 2-run homer in the 13th inning. We were alive. We were greeting an afternoon we hadn’t expected to see, at least not in a good way. And we came to see our ace show us that there were reasons to be glad we were still Mets fans, sixty-four games into a mostly joyless season.

Things really did feel good in the crowd. When Ramon Castro hit his home run, you felt that there could be a season after all. Santana went through all of his innings with precision and grace. He was as untouchable as the “Direct TV” blimp that plowed the cloudless sky all afternoon. I noticed that the apple didn’t come up when Castro hit the home run. I’m not saying that that means anything, but I just noticed it. I also noticed when a boy in a wheelchair won an autographed baseball. He was up on the Diamond Vision as his father smiled sweetly at the camera and adjusted the boy’s head in his headrest. The father rubbed his son’s shoulder with an absolutely tender gesture of affection and it really moved me, although this was off the screen in a few seconds.

David Wright drove in a second run with a double he tried to turn into a triple. Fernando Tatis drove in two more in the seventh. And so as the Mets established a decent lead behind a great pitcher, the mood of the fans stayed calm and wonderful. How little it takes to make Mets fans happy! If this crowd could feel this good on the few crumbs they had thrown us, imagine what we would be feeling if we were actually having a good season.

Santana came out after 7 for a pinch-hitter. It was time for the relievers to start righting their own ship. Four runs, no doubt, were enough. Wagner had only given up three the night before. Joe Smith then gave up two runs in the eighth. He was relieved by Scott Schoeneweis, with a 2.30 E.R.A., who threw two balls outside the strike zone to the first batter he faced. I thought it was strange how two balls could produce such a funny sound from the crowd. It was a kind of frightened moan, not the sort of thing you’d normally hear after two balls. I didn’t want anyone to start booing Schoeneweis for two balls and I was relieved to hear the affirmative pleasure of the crowd when the batter popped up to short left to end the inning.

Two runs, by all rights, should be enough. The crowd sang “I’m a Believer” and the loud “ooooohhhhhs” suggested that we were still happy with the situation. And when they did the whole “watch out hear comes Billy Wagner” Wagnerian photo montage to “Enter Sandman” at the start of the ninth inning, most of the crowd stood and applauded. There were a few boos, but trust me, they were greatly outnumbered.

Wagner walked a batter and brought the tying run to the plate. There was the same frightened moan you heard in the eighth. Then there was an infield hit and you had to realize reluctantly that you were watching a significant moment that would take all of your concentration. Now I worried that the crowd would boo Wagner and there was a kind of muted booing when he threw a ball to the next batter. But the crowd was still with him. You heard that in the cheers of encouraging delight when the next pitch Wagner threw was a strike. Oh great, I thought, we’re down to booing and cheering every ball and strike. The next pitch was inside but the crowd acted as if it was affronted when the umpire called it a ball. This isn’t good, I thought. And then the batter hit a double down the left field line. A run came in and there were now two runners in scoring position with nobody out and a one-run Mets lead. The boos were real boos now. They were an ocean and no one was cheering.

Anybody who has read my book and reads my blog knows how much I hate booing, how much I blame the little coterie of macho-moron boo-ers for depriving us of a few division titles and pennants by preying mercilessly on our more fragile players over the years. I have credentials as an anti-booer. But I must tell you that the crowd I was in yesterday at Shea was not really booing in the destructive way we’ve seen in the past. They were not really booing. They were moaning. With bitterness and sadness. They were angry, but not in the way of morons. They were angry like loving parents or children or lovers who have been betrayed. They were crying to the heavens about the cruelty of fate, crying to the Direct TV blimp that just kept going back and forth and back and forth. What made us different from real booers is that we really were behind Billy Wagner 100%. You could hear this in our pleasure when a runner was forced at home. You could hear it in our cheers for Wagner’s strikes on the next hitter. And if the game had ended where it should have ended, with the double play, the shouts of joy and relieved appreciation Wagner would have heard would have made everything all right. We weren’t telling Billy Wagner that we wanted him to go away and not come back. We were telling him how sad he was making us. We were asking him why he was doing this to us when we needed him so badly right now. And so when he finally ended the inning with a strikeout that seemed to suggest that there was nothing actually wrong with him, the warm ocean of boos he got for his inning’s work was just us telling him how hurt we were, and how depressed, and how helpless we felt. Just like he felt helpless. Except he was making us feel this way. We weren’t doing anything to him. Why was he doing this to us?

We were back in the same situation we had been in last night. We had gone from watching a game that would redeem us to watching a game that could not be lost. Okay, so let it be like last night. Let there be the redemption that only a win in the final turn at bat can provide. Jose Reyes made it to first on a ground ball that would have been an out for anyone else. He clapped his hands with joy three times. Endy bunted him over. Then in a split second, David Wright’s game winning double down the left field line turned into a ground out. Beltran was walked intentionally. And Carlos Delgado, who must have been insulted, came to the plate. The crowd made a committed effort to cheer him. At just this moment, two very confused birds flew over my section, looking to escape this loud curved place. Delgado walked and Damion Easley came up. He grounded out and a disheartening number of people got up to leave. Why do people get up and leave a tie game after nine innings? They would not be beating any rush hour traffic. It was already 4:30. Why pay the money to go to the stadium if you’re not going to stay to see the end of something like this? Only about half the original crowd was there at the top of the tenth. Why? Why? What does this mean?

Those of us who stayed felt the terrible symmetry of this game and the one the night before. When Justin Upton doubled off of Heilman to start the 10th inning, there was almost no crowd reaction. No “awwwwww.” No boos even. There was just a steady simmer of anguished boredom and discontent. And yet there was still excited “lets have a strikeout” clapping when the count on a hitter went to 0-2. When the go-ahead run scored on a sacrifice fly, more people headed to the exits. I had the sense that we were all thinking that Beltran’s home run had only been a cruel reprieve. Now we were going to have the doom that had been intended for us the night before. In the bottom of the tenth, Ramon Castro, a hero of the game, fouled out. Pinch-hitting Luis Castillo beat out a strange, weak infield hit. The new guy, Chris Aguila, had the chance to be our hero. I have always loved it when the new guy is the hero. Aguila grounded into a double play. Everybody got up really quickly.

I don’t know what to say. But I will say this. Mets fans are still with their team. But we are basket cases. And so are our boys. We expect disaster. We have love and hope but no faith. We are ill and we deserve sympathy and not contempt. The booing is something different from what has been seen before. It is not the sound of spoiled brats. It is the sound of something deeper, something that a big crowd of people cannot put into any more nuanced form. It is “oh hell,” “oh shit,” “oh woe.” We could bounce back. They could bounce back. But there has been too much bouncing and when a ball bounces too much, it eventually loses its ability to bounce.

I drove out of the parking lot and into the rush hour. I stopped off to have dinner with my mother in New Jersey. We talked about the game but didn’t have much to say that’s worth repeating.  We ordered out Chinese food and ate it in the kitchen. On the window sill of the kitchen, there was the replica of the brick that my sisters and I bought for CitiWalk, to mark my mother’s 80th birthday. It looks good, doesn’t it?

Thanks to my sisters Jennifer and Stefanie for this arrangement. I think there’s something profound in this picture, but I don’t even want to know what it is.

Have you ever had a friend who suffered from severe depression or had a substance abuse problem?  Most people have had this experience.

You know what it’s like.  You love them but you never entirely trust them.  You get giddy with happiness when they have a few good weeks in a row.  You can get so intoxicated with hope that you’ll even get giddy with happiness when they have a couple of good days in a row. 

But then they slide back.  And you feel like an asshole for expecting too much of them.  And you feel contempt for their inability to straighten themselves out, even though you know that it’s not entirely their fault that they can’t.  But part of you feels that it is too their fault that they can’t straighten themselves out.  How difficult can it be?  Don’t they want to get better?

And then you feel guilty for not being sympathetic enough, for not believing in them enough.  You try like hell to cheer them on, to motivate them, and you see time and time again that it really doesn’t make that much difference what you do.  And so you begin to resent them for taking up so much of your precious time.  You give them so much and they give you so little.

You become convinced that they’re basket cases.  But you still love them.  And you never lose hope that they’re going to be all right in the end.  You are entirely sick of them, but you never reach the point where you want them to go away.  You settle into an impossible situation.  You are helpless, unhappy, and hopeful. 

I suppose it would be possible to say that the San Diego series was as disheartening as a series can possibly be.  I think it would be more accurate to say that it was as disappointing as a series could be.  But it wasn’t disheartening. 

Look at it this way.  If someone were to tell you two weeks ago that on the West Coast road trip, Maine, Martinez, Pelfrey, Santana, and Perez would give the team 5 excellent starts in a row, and that Carlos Delgado’s batting average would be up to .245, you’d have been very happy, right?  So be happy.

Look, I know, I know.  I know all the counterarguments.  Our team this year can’t seem to do anything consistently.  It is still locked in the peculiar pattern it has been in since last June, in which everything that advances immediately retreats, everything that fires up suddenly calms down, everything that settles into a groove is soon enough on its back in a ditch.   

But listen.  As in the 2000 World Series, every game in San Diego could easily have gone in another direction.  Doesn’t that mean something, at least if there are a hundred games to go?  It’s hard to evaluate a team that loses games like the ones in San Diego.  What can you conclude?  That Wagner, Schoeneweis, and Feliciano aren’t any good?  That is not a legitimate conclusion.  What would a legitimate conclusion look like at this point?

Look, the plain blunt fact of  the matter is this, and yes this can be said after 62 games, yes I will finally say it and you can tell everyone you first heard it here.  Are you sitting down?  This is not a great team. 

But it is not a bad team either.  And if something were to click, something extraordinary could happen.  And I’m increasingly of the belief that clicking is just something that happens or doesn’t happen.  It is a metaphysical accident that happens when there is a break.  I think this team could have a good enough chemistry if a few things broke right.  There are no deep divisions or total assholes.  And I am suspicious of the theory that pre-existing chemistry or big intense meetings or bench-clearing brawls are what pull a team out of a rut. 

What I think is this.  The Mets pitching staff is actually quite good.  Philadelphia is hitting like something I don’t want to go near, but their pitching is still not good and I doubt that their hitting can stay at anything quite like this level.  Florida and Atlanta have, like the Mets and the Phillies, a lot of virtues and a lot of vices. 

No one is running away with this.  It will be close, it could be exciting, and I would be completely shocked if it is not decided on the last day or two of the season.

My money, soul money, is on the Mets because I do think, seriously, that their pitching is good enough to allow them to emerge from this sorry little pack of the barely above average.  Some may tell you that when two or more teams are competing for something, the one that wants it more will win.  I don’t believe that for a minute. 

I think it comes down to the pitching.  And as I take a very big breath and look at the last week, this is what I choose to see.  I see five good to very plausible starters and a bunch of relievers who’ve been having excellent seasons.  I also see a lineup that for all the injuries, puzzles, and inconsistencies should, under normal circumstances, provide enough runs.  I see the kind of material that could cohere with the right kinds of accidents.  There are a hundred games left.  Could this team win the sixty that will get them to the ninety they will probably need?  Maybe. 

I’ve gotten a number of e-mails and a lot of attention from other blogs with respect to this idea of a conference about the Mets at Hofstra University.  I’m very hopeful that this can happen.  Hofstra has a long history of sponsoring significant conferences, often on topics that have not received as much attention as they deserve in the academic community (e.g. the Babe Ruth conference in 1995 and the Frank Sinatra conference in 1998).   Since there has been so much interest, I’m putting up a slightly condensed version of the proposal that Professor Richard Puerzer and I have submitted.   I will keep everyone posted as things develop.  If it happens, the conference is still a few years off, but as it approaches we will ask the Internet community for ideas about how to make it an enjoyable, interesting, and important experience for everyone.

To:  The Hofstra University Cultural Center

From:  Professors Dana Brand and Richard Puerzer

                  We are two Hofstra professors with scholarly and literary credentials in the study and appreciation of the sport of baseball.  Under the auspices of the Hofstra University Cultural Center, we would like to organize and direct a conference to mark the 50^th anniversary of the New York Mets, New York’s National League baseball franchise.