Sanctify Yourself

Welcome to Flashback Friday, a weekly feature devoted to the 20th anniversary of the 1986 World Champion New York Mets.

Twenty years, 43 Fridays. This is one of them.

One of the reasons it’s helpful to write something reasonably soon after you think of it is there’s a chance somebody else will come up with the same idea and beat you into print.

Example: Almost 20 years ago, I was reminded that in 1976, Jimmy Carter coined the phrase “misery index” with which to club Gerald Ford over the head. The misery index was inflation rate plus unemployment rate. It helped Carter win…and worked against him when Ronald Reagan noted the misery index under Carter had gotten more miserable.

There ought to be a misery index for baseball, I thought. Yeah, that would be a good barometer of who suffers most. I really should write that up one of these days.

Well, I waited too long. Last month, I was perusing Ryan McConnell’s Always Amazin’ blog and he reported that one of my favorite writers was as intrigued by the notion of the misery index as me. The brilliant Jim Caple of ESPN.com was, in fact, intrigued enough to beat me to the punch.

All right, Caple, you win this time…

Actually, it seems he did this bit once before, in 2004, and was just updating it in January to reflect the successes of various Sox thereafter, so I’m running out of legs to stand on here. At least somebody besides Reagan ripped off Carter and got some use out of it.

What warmed my heart, despite blowing the nearly 20-year head start, was that Caple saw fit to rank second among most miserable MLB franchise fan bases the followers of the Cleveland Indians. They finished just one notch behind those who live and die and die and die with the eternally dismayed Cubs. It’s not that I revel in the Tribe’s misery. No sir, sure don’t. My happiness on their account comes from the fact that they were recognized for their misery. They, you see, were the reason I wanted to devise a baseball misery index in the late 1980s. Before Major League brought their failures to everybody’s attention, I felt that the Indians were going underpitied.

The team that I thought was getting way too much empathy for their problems? The Red Sox. Especially after 1986.

As long as I’d been watching baseball to that point, the Red Sox were always pretty to very good. The Indians were never any to slightly good. I knew the Red Sox had had their share of heartbreak but better to have loved and lost, et al. Better to have gotten to the precipice and fallen off than to have never left base camp. Better to have the final out roll through your first baseman’s legs than have the out that ends your season arrive in June.

That’s how I look at it, informed by the Mets having alternately wandered through biblical spans of feast and famine.

1962-1968: Seven years of losing records.

1969-1976: Seven years of winning records (out of eight).

1977-1983: Seven years of losing.

1984-1990: Seven years of winning.

1991-1996: Six years of losing.

1997-2001: Five years of winning.

2002-2004: Three years of losing.

2005: The start of something big? Or a one-year trend, à la 1974? TBD.

I missed the first seven years, but I know I was way happier in the second, fourth and sixth epochs than I was in the third, fifth and seventh. Much happier. That 2002-2004 technically didn’t last half as long as 1977-1983 didn’t make it more than twice as easy to swallow. And though 1984-1990 included only two division titles and one world championship, it encompassed two more division titles, one more world championship and seven more seasons with the reasonable possibility of success than the seven years before it and the six years after it.

As a fan, that has to be satisfactory. I’m not suggesting a season that ends with a five-game losing streak that keeps your team out of the playoffs when two lousy wins would have assured you a berth is cause for celebration. No, I’m not suggesting that at all, particularly not after having lived through exactly that scenario in 1998. But it’s better than not sniffing a chance to choke.

Too much choking is unhealthy for baseball fans and other living things. It was not without merit that people who talked suffering after 1986 talked Red Sox. But the Red Sox’ big loss was in a World Series. Their patrons experienced a breeze to a division title, a spectacular comeback in the pennant round and three World Series games at Fenway Park.

In 1986, the Cleveland Indians were 84-78, a positive development by my code. Indeed, they spent a minute or two in first place in May and were forced to delay their start time at least once because fans were flocking in unforeseen, unmanageable numbers to cavernous Municipal Stadium. The Tribe was briefly a happening. Too briefly. They finished in fifth place and wound up 11-1/2 games out of first (pre-Wild Card). Though Sports Illustrated rather famously tabbed them to win the A.L. East in 1987, they took a giant step backwards, going 61-101.

That, unfortunately for Wahoo Nation, was more like it. 1986 was the first winning season in Cleveland since 1979, only the third in the era of divisional play. They wouldn’t finish over .500 again until the strike year of 1994, the first season in which they would legitimately contend since 1959.

1959! Thirty-five years without a sniff at the flag, 41 years, it would turn out, without capturing a flag (1954 to 1995), 58 years as of this year without a world championship. During their 1995-2001 mini-dynasty, the Indians somehow became the Braves. Most of us got tired of seeing them show up and fail every October. But they paid their dues and, for good misery measure, got kicked in the stomach in the seventh game of the 1997 World Series when they were — Red Sox style — two outs away from breaking their ultimate schneid. Six division titles in seven years were hardly a balm for four decades of utter, utter futility.

Now that’s what I call suffering, volume 35. What the Red Sox endured? One heartbreaking inning and a disappointing game two nights later. They had been perennial contenders and they would be again pretty soon. Their fans, too, would pay some horrible dues, but rarely wallowed in Indian territory.

The Red Sox, shed of the slight detail of no World Series win from 1918 on, no longer figure in this discussion of misery and won’t for an incredibly long time. They have a world championship under their belts, a world championship that can be recalled by every single one of their sentient fans. In ranking teams from 1 to 30, Caple places Boston in a three-way tie with the Jays and the Cards for 25th in terms fan misery. Only teams behind are the Braves (no sympathy for ten straight October boreouts), the Diamondbacks (the nouveau riche got wealthy in their fourth year) and the Yankees (Caple’s lovable shtick is hating the Yanks and hating them well). The White Sox and Marlins, recent champs, are just ahead of the Red Sox.

Every year is a potential dollop of misery, but it’s fair to exclude a team that’s five or fewer years removed from the brass ring. Both Sox, the Fish, the Angels (Caple somehow thinks their recent good fortune hasn’t made their un-sufferable) and the D’Backs are clutching an immunity stick by any reckoning. Your team’s won a World Series in the past half-decade, you lose the right to be taken seriously about them when you start peeling your bunch of gripes.

• Jeffrey Luria destroying your franchise? Shut up, you won.

• Ozzie Guillen courting disaster with his yap? Shut up, you won.

• “Los Angeles of Anaheim” kind of stupid? Shut up, you won.

• Woe is us in Boston because…shut up, you won.

The Diamondbacks are one year from falling out of this group. They haven’t made the playoffs since 2002. Just about everybody from the 2001 champs (they beat the Yankees, if you haven’t heard) is gone. They are a mess. If they don’t do some serious contending in 2006, they have a right to complain. A little.

Then there’s the 26-ring exception, meaning any team’s fans who think not winning a championship is the exception and not the rule also means they can’t complain, no matter how arid their drought becomes.

Ever.

As for the rest of us, it has to be an individual decision just how miserable we want to be. Caple rated the Cardinals and Blue Jays low on the sadness scale since one is generally successful and supported while the other can theoretically still suckle at the teat of two consecutive world championships in relatively recent memory. If I were a fan of one of those teams, I don’t know that I’d buy either, but I’m not a fan of either of those teams.

So, you may be wondering, where did Metsopotamia rank among the miserable? Not that badly, says Jim Caple. We’re No. 18, tied with Oakland, just behind the Royals (Caple’s too kind), the Nationals (more a sop to long-abandoned Washingtonians — I assume Expos fans feel a lot worse) and the Angels, and just ahead of the Reds and the Orioles. His very succinct explanation for why we’re not so bad off:

When you’ve witnessed two unqualified miracles (1969 and 1986), there should be no misery. Unless, of course, someone mentions Mo Vaughn.

My first thought was to echo Ryan McConnell’s:

You’re telling me Mets fans have suffered less than the L.A. Angels, Minnesota Twins, and Washington Nationals fans?! He ranks the Mets “recent despair” (produced by losing seasons) and “historic pain” (defined as agonizing ends to winning seasons) as a mere 3 out of 10. Need I remind Mr. Caple of 2002, 2003, and 2004?! Losing to the friggin’ Yankees in the World Series wasn’t painful!? Armando Benitez wasn’t excruciating?! I demand a correction!

But given some time to reflect, I’m not so sure. Was I miserable in 1993? You bet. Was I miserable in 2003? Janet Jones would have to take that action. Was the way 1998 came crashing to the ground enough to make me swear off baseball for good? Yes, it was (though my swearing didn’t carry as much weight as I thought it would). Were four of the final five games played in October 2000 what inspired Messrs. Merriam and Webster to create new definitions for wretched? Yup.

All of that took place after 1986, long enough after so that I could no longer rationalize them away in the light of “well, at least I lived through one great year with an eternally happy ending.”

Wait a second…when did I ever do that?

Not in 1987 after Terry Pendleton and Darnell Coles and Luis Aguayo did their worst.

Not in 1988 in the wake of Mike Scioscia, Kirk Gibson and holy Hershiser.

Not in 1989 amid various pains in the Aase.

Not…well, you get the point.

Baseball’s time-space continuum is a forward-progress mechanism. As much as we flash back and wallow in nostalgia, it’s hard to save us from the present on those occasions when the present doesn’t work as we wish it would. If we take it seriously (and we do), we are going to react as if the world has ended again and again and again. By my count, the world has ended definitively 19 times since 1986. At no time from 1987 through 2005 did we dance off the field of play with clumps of grass, tears of joy and every single marble there was to be had.

But — aha! — we did exactly that in 1986. We who bore witness to it in full consciousness will always have that. When we’re looking back on our lives from an even greater distance than we are today, what will we remember about our having been Mets fans? Not, I will bet you, that we finished last in 2003 or embarrassingly last in 1993 or maddeningly short in 1998 or second of two in 2000. We will remember the best year of our lives.

We got one of those. We’ll take another one right away, but we’re not going to die without. We’ve been taken care of into perpetuity. Our fandom was sanctified forever in 1986.

I’ve been made Met-miserable since then and I have a hunch I’ll be made Met-miserable again. But I don’t mind us not being thought of as the most miserable fans in baseball. We were mathematically eliminated from that race 20 years ago.