The temptation after a night like Wednesday, when the New York Mets defeated the Chicago Cubs, 8-3, at Wrigley Field to sweep the National League Championship Series in four straight games [1] and claim the fifth pennant in franchise history is to say this is what makes being a Mets fan worthwhile.
Nonsense. It’s been worthwhile all along.
It was worthwhile the first time you picked up something resembling a ball or a bat and identified with the man on TV, the one who threw the ball faster or swung the bat harder than you ever could.
It was worthwhile when you decided that it might be fun to play baseball, but that watching baseball with all your heart and all your soul would be more your forte.
It was worthwhile when you discovered you could wear shirts and caps with the same letters the players on your team wore and you could collect pictures of those players and you could read about them and you could keep watching them on TV and once in a while, if you were lucky, you could go and see them play their games in person.
It was really worthwhile to learn it wasn’t just you who enjoyed these things. You were part of a community, a tribe, something bigger than yourself. Those who shared your enthusiasm for this stuff were not necessarily exactly like you, but they were close enough. And you grew close to them.
In winter, you counted the days until the next baseball season with them. Through spring and summer and into fall, you counted the years until the next great baseball season with them. You reassured each other one was coming. Until it did, you enjoyed as best you could the ones you were given.
You enjoyed the year after your team last went to the World Series. The team sort of went into the toilet early and often in 2001, but you never stopped going to games with your friends, never stopped conceiving of ways the team could fight their way back into a race. To your surprise, they scratched and clawed and made an otherwise horrible September briefly beautiful. They didn’t win anything, but it was still worthwhile.
You enjoyed the years that followed: 2002, 2003, 2004. You didn’t enjoy them that much, because your team never came close to returning to the World Series, but there were still the trappings of a baseball season. There were trips to the ballpark and nights you’d tune in and players you started to pick out as your next favorites. You had no illusions, but you never gave up.
You enjoyed your first hint that things might really get better, in 2005. You enjoyed writing about the goings of old heroes [2] and the comings of new hopes [3]. You enjoyed writing about all of it.
You enjoyed coming so close to the World Series you could taste it [4]. In your heart, you know 2006 was the year; it just got misplaced along the time-space continuum. Then again, the time-space continuum has proven to be a little overrated [5].
You enjoyed, in the perverse way only your kind could, falling tantalizingly short in 2007 and 2008. There’s at least a couple of songs that say something about it feeling so good to hurt so bad. That was those years. You doubt anyone not immersed in what you’ve been immersed in could understand that feeling something — even feeling something awful [6] — was better than feeling nothing at all. Good thing you know others who are immersed the way you are. Anybody else would think you were nuts.
You enjoyed trying to feel something for your team after it stopped coming close. You were more sour than the naked eye could have divined in 2009 and 2010 and 2011…and 2012 and 2013 and deep into 2014 [7]. But it never occurred to you your team wasn’t part of your life, and you never for a second didn’t feel at home with the people who weren’t necessarily exactly like you, but they understood what you were going through better than anybody else could. They were going through it, too.
Because they were close enough. They were close to you and you were close to them and together you dreamed of a night when your team would do something that was becoming unfathomable to the lot of you, like making it to a World Series.
All of that was worthwhile. It was worthwhile whenever you started rooting for the New York Mets. It was worthwhile when the Mets couldn’t win a pennant in the 14 seasons that succeeded 2000. It was worthwhile as the Mets went about coalescing into the kind of team that could win a pennant in 2015.
When the Mets did win that pennant, after sweeping the Cubs…yeah, that was worthwhile, too.
Extraordinarily so.
For those of you who endured some or most or all of the pennant drought that left us high and dry for fifteen long years in the autumnal baseball desert, congratulations. For those of you who got a load of the Mets maybe two weeks or two months ago and thought “that sure looks like fun, I wanna be a part of it,” congratulations to you, too. You chose wisely. Hope you’ll stick around.
For those of you who’ve been at this forever, who can remember not just the last National League championship before the current one but the ones that preceded it, congratulations on a lifetime well spent. You and I know this isn’t just about the pennants and it’s not just about the waiting for the pennants. It’s about every bit of faith and community and bucking each other up and laughing to keep from crying and keeping each other going and moaning and griping because we’re human and coming back for more because we’re Mets fans.
For those of you who are Daniel Murphy (.529, a home run every night), thank you.
For those of you who are Daniel Murphy’s teammates, what’s it like knowing Daniel Murphy? It must be an incredible sensation to be near that much greatness every day. If you’ve touched Daniel Murphy, can we touch you? By all means apply some Neosporin first, because if you’ve touched Daniel Murphy, you’re probably going to need to salve those burns. No baseball player has ever been hotter than the 2015 NLCS MVP.
Murph, a Met since 2008, didn’t do it alone, but you had the sense he could have had it been necessary. It wasn’t. He won the pennant alongside David Wright, from 2004; and Jon Niese, from 2008; and Lucas Duda (author of five essential Game Four RBIs) from 2010; not to mention a procession of Mets who began to stream into our consciousness in 2012 and 2013 when we were convinced a season like 2015 was still light years away: Nieuwenhuis, Harvey, Familia, Lagares, Flores, d’Arnaud. It wasn’t seamless and it didn’t always register as logical as 2013 became 2014 — Why Granderson? Why Colon? Who’s deGrom? — but something was happening. Even as we alternated in our derision and dismissiveness (defense mechanisms as much as the products of dispassionate analysis), the Metscape was shifting.
Onto it strode Michael Cuddyer, Sean Gilmartin, Kevin Plawecki, Noah Syndergaard, Steven Matz, Michael Conforto, Kelly Johnson, Tyler Clippard, Yoenis Cespedes, Addison Reed and — because Juan Uribe and Ruben Tejada were hurting — Matt Reynolds. Half the team was new for 2015. They had never lost with the Mets. They joined a cluster of players who had matured and persevered and survived until they could win as Mets. It wasn’t an obvious championship roster until you watched them play as one under Terry Collins, perhaps the most underestimated manager [8] in modern major league history.
Once they all came together and showed what they could do, there was no doubt. Same as there were no losses to the Cubs. Same as there was no feeling like that we felt when Jeurys Familia struck out Dexter Fowler looking on October 21, 2015 — with the respective exceptions of Nolan Ryan, Tug McGraw, Jesse Orosco and Mike Hampton retiring Tony Gonzalez, Dan Driessen, Kevin Bass and Rick Wilkins under similar circumstances in 1969, 1973, 1986 and 2000.
Those were the first four seasons in which the New York Mets ever won the National League pennant. First four. As of 2015, there’s a fifth. You’ll have to revise the total that’s been ingrained into you for a generation. You’ve been so used to saying the Mets have been to the World Series four times. Now you’ll have to say five. I’m sure you can make the adjustment. The Mets adjusted from perennial losers to dynamic winners in 2015. We Mets fans adjusted from thinking this fifth pennant might never get here to embracing it as it arrived: built by Alderson; shaped by Collins; earned by pitching; secured by Murphness; sprayed by champagne; baptized by tears.
We never had to change our ways, though. We may not have always believed, but we were always capable of Believing. It was in us the whole time. Our capability just had to be tapped.
I Believed sometime in late August. I must have. It was one of those nights when I was visiting my dad in the hospital [9]. He was being difficult, to put it mildly. This was when he was recovering from pneumonia and heading for another round of rehab. He didn’t seem much interested in recovering or rehabilitating. He had undergone brain surgery in May, worked hard to regain his ability to walk in June, submitted himself to radiation and chemotherapy in July and seemed to be doing all right until the middle of August. Then came pneumonia and the hospital and a will to live that was crumbling.
This was also when he decided he liked having his son visit to watch the first-place Mets with him. His son thus played the only motivational card he had at his disposal. Dad, he said, I want to watch the Mets in the World Series with you, but you have to get better so I can watch it with you at home. At the very least, it made him less difficult that night.
It’s two months later. He’s not home. Rehab was too much for him. Instead, he’s in what they call palliative care, where they just try to make a person in his situation “comfortable”. But you know what he’s looking forward to doing with me this coming Tuesday night, and what I’m looking forward to doing with him? Just like we did for Game Five of the NLDS and Game Three of the NLCS, we will be getting together to watch Game One of the World Series — Mets-Royals, Mets-Blue Jays, whichever. I promised it to him as if it was mine to promise in August, and these Mets made it a deliverable reality in October.
That makes this pennant a little extra worthwhile for me, just as this pennant makes being a Mets fan a little extra worthwhile for all of us. We’d still be this and do this without this, but getting to have this?
It really gives you something to Believe in, doesn’t it?