Say Hey, You Gotta Believe

Having rooted for the Mets for more than a half-century, I’ve developed a pattern that allows me to cope with the possibility of obvious failure transforming eventually into ultimate success. First, there’s no way it will happen. The Mets are losing by a lot, ergo they will lose. Hopes are not gotten up, disappointment is not invited into the unoccupied seat next to me. Signs to the contrary of what I’ve conditioned myself to expect, that this apparent final inning somehow may not end the way I was sure it was going to go, are allowed to pass without comment or commitment. Yeah, there aren’t three outs yet. Yeah, another Met just reached base. “So what? They’re still gonna lose.” In contemporary baseball parlance, you might say I spit on those sliders off the plate.

But the coalescing comeback won’t go away. It’s going to hang around whether I’m comfortable with its presence or convinced of its intentions. The Mets are still losing, but by a little less. An inflection point approaches. I entered the inning deciding there’s no chance. Then there’s little chance. But a run or two scores and the gap is closed and little chance becomes legitimate chance.

Ah, fuck, the little inner voice grumbles beneath the growing outer chorus of LET’S GO METS!, now, I gotta take this seriously. Moments ago, I was resigned to the inevitable. Now evitability is rearing its alluring head. I don’t wanna buy in. I don’t wanna be let down. I already made my deal with defeat. Now defeat wants to flip its bat and show me up.

Too late. In for a penny, in for a pound. Or in relevant exchange rates, go ahead, break my heart, Mets. Fill my balloon with air. I understand it can deflate with one swing. I signed that waiver the second I began to believe this improbable come-from-behind effort might succeed.

But, you know, you gotta believe.

For every dozen or hundred or thousand Ls that stay Ls, you allow yourself to be tugged toward believing there’s a W in there somewhere. You are susceptible to the siren song of momentum. You dip a toe into the rally. Then you have no choice but to dive in. A 6-2 deficit that was 6-0 is suddenly 6-4, two are on and Steve Henderson is at the plate. Trailing 5-3 with two out and nobody on in the bottom of the tenth, with only the entire season about to shut down, in three blinks of an eye becomes 5-4 with Kevin Mitchell on third, Ray Knight on first and Mookie Wilson coming to bat. What was 8-1, Braves, on a night Mike Hampton didn’t have it, grinds and grinds until it becomes 8-6, the bases loaded, your most clutch hitter Edgardo Alfonzo ready to try his hand at keeping the upward hill climb progressing and your most dramatic batter Mike Piazza waiting in the on-deck circle.

Defense mechanisms melt away in the heat of formerly flickering, now smoldering hope. Probability has opted to beat the stampede down the ramps. Possibility is now your companion. If only possibility could be more definitive. But then it wouldn’t be mere possibility, would it?

I was in a place late Saturday afternoon where I could have sought expert consultation on what to do when it’s obvious what you want to happen from the Mets has no chance of happening, yet obvious begins to fade in the face of growing chance. I was at Citi Field. It was Old Timers Day. Steve Henderson himself was there. So were Kevin Mitchell, Ray Knight and Mookie Wilson. So were Mike Hampton, Edgardo Alfonzo and Mike Piazza. Come to think of it, so was Old Timers Day itself, an event I had long ago given up hope on ever again materializing in any ballpark the Mets call home.

Their collective attendance was why I was in attendance. A whole bunch of Mets who aren’t Mets in 2022 were home to be Mets once more. Some among 65 erstwhile players from my favorite team had been around periodically in one context or another. Some you simply would never see without an affair of this nature. Steve Henderson appears regularly in my recollections. He’s never on the scene in front of me in real time.

New scene in 2022. We’ve got Old Timers Day again. We get Old Timers, a phrase we wouldn’t use cavalierly to describe active older adults of a senior nature in these better-be-careful what we call who times. But this is baseball. It’s understood we’re being affectionate toward our retirees. We love Old Timers, particularly on Old Timers Day. We love Old Timers Day. We loved it when it existed almost without pause from 1962 to 1994. We yearned for it once we noticed it missing. We grumbled when our requests for its revival fell on hearing-impaired ears. The Mets weren’t interested in bringing back Old Timers Day. We stopped rooting for it.

Until the lineup was rejiggered. Erase the name of the owner(s) who didn’t care about Old Timers Day. Pencil in the new decisionmaker(s). The Wilpons couldn’t be bothered. The Cohens bought the Mets from them so they could be bothered with details that float fans’ boats. Can you bring back Old Timers Day?

In WilponWorld, the answer was “nah.” Under the CohenDome, the response is “sure.” Though there was more work to it than “…and just like that, Mets Old Timers Day was back,” we quite suddenly got to commune with a panoply of what we’ll loosely term our heroes. We learned more than twenty years ago not to throw around phrases like “heroes” to describe men who play a child’s game, no matter how skilled they are at it or how high their skills can lift our emotions. But following the first Old Timers Day the Mets have held in 28 years, we can play fast and loose with the language. Our heroes were in our midst again.

Heroes who defined a franchise where there was none before 1962. Heroes who engineered a miracle in 1969. Heroes who were on hand for a notable chapter of Tugging and Believing in 1973. Heroes who didn’t accept two down, two out, nobody on and near-zero statistical opportunity as precipice to a conclusion. Heroes for whom fifteen innings of rain and an impending loss wasn’t going to end everything just yet in 1999. And if “heroes” sometimes exaggerates the roles these Mets played in our lives, “old friends” doesn’t seem out of line to describe our relationship to them. Some Met from 1963 or 1994 or 2005 or some other year that is never emblazoned on commemorative merchandise is as welcome in this atmosphere as anybody wearing a championship ring.

Sixty-five Mets of yore. Sixty-five Mets who composed a significant portion of our baseball consciousness. Sixty-five Mets who drilled into us episodically that nothing is over until they say it’s over.

Thus, when Howie Rose completed his introductions of every Met from every era, starting with lone holder of a winning pitching record from 1962 Ken MacKenzie and ending with greatest home run-hitting catcher and Hall of Famer Mike Piazza, you should have accepted as gospel anything you wish would happen and believe should happen and hold conviction that it must happen could still happen.

Especially when the evidence is being laid out in front of you.

Once Howie completed his introductions of Mets Old Timers, he asked those of us in the sellout crowd to direct our attention to CitiVision for a “very, very special video”. What could be more special than 65 different Mets joining us to celebrate the 60th anniversary of a franchise that has acted, in its 61st year, utterly reborn? What could be as or more special than what we’ve already experienced in 2022 both on and off the field? We have a steady first-place team that continues to withstand an Atlantan assault. We have a Tom Seaver statue. We have a plaque bearing Gil Hodges’s likeness hanging in Cooperstown. We have Keith Hernandez’s 17 in the rafters, no longer distributed willy nilly to the next journeyman reliever or utility infielder (not that we don’t embrace journeymen relievers and utility infielders). We have frigging Old Timers Day. I’ve directed my attention to CitiVision on countless occasions. Usually CitiVision is loudly trying to sell me something I don’t want. What could be so very, very special about this video?

Well, it started with Willie Mays. That sold me on watching closely. Specifically, there was an image of Willie Mays in a New York Mets uniform and a narration invoking the many transcendent qualities of Willie Mays and a conscious effort to link every hot button I nurture in my soul — New York, National League, Say Hey, Polo Grounds, Greatest Player Ever, Came Home, Mrs. Payson, Mets — and I began to think like I thought on June 14, 1980; on October 25, 1986 (technically October 26 by the time the bottom of the tenth rolled around); especially on June 30, 2000. The Ten-Run Inning. Losing by seven becoming losing by six, then five, then less and less and fighting the impulse to fully believe because I fully anticipated that belief to be futile, but here we are, down by only two with Fonzie coming up and, if Fonzie keeps it going (there are two out), Mike.

I see this tribute to Willie Mays of the New York Mets and I don’t want to let myself believe what has to be unfolding in front of my eyes. First I tell myself there’s going to be somebody after Mays they’re going to spotlight, that this is about to be a montage of great players who wore the Mets uniform. But, no, it’s just Willie Mays. OK, then, it’s going to be about a greater truth, how the Dodgers in Brooklyn but also the Giants in Manhattan had to disappear from our reach so the Mets could alight in Queens and touch us as they do. No, that’s not the message. Well, maybe they just thought it wouldn’t be a perfect Old Timers Day without us hearing from Willie Mays, a Met in 1972 and 1973, a New York legend from 1951 forward, the plausible answer to any query that asks who was the greatest baseball player ever. One of the signature highlights of the many Mets Old Timers Days before there stopped being Mets Old Timers Day was Willie Mays striding through Shea’s center field gate with his fellow five-borough center fielders of renown. DiMaggio and Mantle and Snider could all cover a lot of ground. You could imagine Willie racing from the South Shore of Staten Island to the northern border of Riverdale to track down a fly ball. You couldn’t have Mickey or the Duke let alone Joe D. show up in 2022. Willie’s 91 and ensconced in California. Maybe he taped something and they wanted us to look at and listen to that.

No, that wasn’t it. None of it was what I tried to tell myself what it was because I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe what so obviously it was, just as I needed convincing that Steve Henderson was going to hit that home run; that Kevin Mitchell was going to score from third on a wild pitch while Ray Knight moved up to second just before Mookie Wilson made fair contact in the direction of first base; that Edgardo Alfonzo could punch a single through the left side, bringing home two more runs to completely erase an 8-1 deficit, tie the game against the Braves, 8-8, take Mike Hampton off the hook, and bring up Mike Piazza with me barely hanging onto my last shred of disbelief lest this whole thing still somehow blow up. But then Mike lines Terry Mulholland’s first pitch above the left field wall at Shea and Shea explodes, my disbelief with it. Mets 11 Braves 8. Mets 6 Red Sox 5. Mets 7 Giants 6. This sort of thing happens. It just doesn’t happen enough.

Mays 24. That happened in 1972 and 1973 at Shea Stadium. It defied belief that something like that could never happen. Willie was back in New York to stay. It meant everything. Everything. Willie said hello with thunder (a game-winning home run versus those San Francisco transplants with whom he had been associated once the Giants departed New York after 1957) and said goodbye to America with tears. No longer playing for the Mets, he coached for the Mets. Willie wore 24. You couldn’t imagine anybody else wearing it after you’d seen Willie Mays don it most every day for most of eight seasons, not after he’d been Willie Mays in a nation’s consciousness for nearly three decades.

Then Willie Mays wasn’t around anymore. He’d visit a little, he’d put on his Met uniform, say hey, then say see ya later. There’d be 24 hours, but not 24 daily, and those who hadn’t seen 24 at all as a Met didn’t get much or any of the fuss when those of who felt it in our bones would bring it up now and again. Not that it had much reason to come up. For the most part, those who issued uniform numbers had the good taste to keep 24 on a shelf. Once it slipped onto the back of one of those journeymen. It was noticed. Kelvin Torve was given a different number. Once a pretty fair legend of an era after Willie Mays, Rickey Henderson, joined the Mets. Rickey liked to wear 24. Rickey asked Willie if it was OK. Willie told Rickey yes, but also mentioned to a reporter that the late Joan Payson, the first owner of the New York Mets and a diehard lover of the New York Giants’ legacy (which, by the end of the 20th century, was essentially Willie Mays), pledged no Met after Willie would ever again wear No. 24; that it would be officially retired; that, presumably, there would be ceremony and fanfare to square the circle that was Willie Mays’ National League career and impact in the City of New York.

But Mrs. Payson died in 1975, and nobody took up her cause, and the club was sold, and Willie moved on, and time moved on, and the issue, such as it was, never gained traction. Rickey wore 24 in 1999 and 2000. When he left, 24 returned to inactive status. Now and then, someone like me would write an impassioned plea to the Mets to retire 24. Some with a sense of New York baseball history and culture would nod their heads in agreement. Others with less sense of who Willie Mays was would politely or, frankly, obnoxiously dissent that a guy with less than two full seasons as a Met shouldn’t be feted so fulsomely when [fill-in-the-blank] hasn’t yet received comparable treatment. The issue became even less of an issue. You didn’t see 24 on any Met. You didn’t hear any talk anymore about what might be done with it.

In 2018, the Mets made a trade for Edwin Diaz. That’s how it should go down, based on what we’ve come to appreciate in 2022. That’s not how it was reported in 2018. The story then was the Mets got the old Yankee Robinson Cano. Robinson Cano was in the latter stages of a potential Hall of Fame career. It would have more than potential to it had Cano not been suspended for PEDs, but you serve your time, you deserve a clean slate. Robinson Cano had had a helluva run since 2005. Maybe he deserved the benefit of the doubt. He probably deserved the number he’d been wearing as he established himself as a superstar.

That number was 24. The general manager who acquired him was the agent who had previously represented him, a handsome fella named Brodie Van Wagenen. I don’t mean to imbue “handsome” with devious qualities. He was good-looking, though, which went with the smoothness. He’d brought us Robinson Cano. We traded a top minor leaguer and brought in a legit closer in the process. We should all be grateful to the handsome Brodie Van Wagenen was the implication, just like we should all be thrilled to have the accomplished Robinson Cano. We shouldn’t mind that Robinson Cano in 2019 was going to be the first Met since Rickey Henderson in 2000, who himself was the first Met since Kelvin Torve in 1990, to wear 24, which was sorta, kinda, but not really ever retired for Willie Mays, who wore it while being Willie Mays and a New York Met player and coach from 1972 to 1979. Kelvin was a veritable clerical error. Rickey asked permission. Brodie and Robbie just did what they felt like from what could be discerned. Much homage was dispensed toward No. 42, Jackie Robinson, the idol for whom Robinson Cano was named. You can’t wear 42 in Major League Baseball since 1997. It’s retired everywhere. It was retired first at Shea Stadium. It is honored lavishly at Citi Field. If you can’t wear the “4” and “2” to directly honor Jackie Robinson, the next best thing for a Robinson Cano is to transpose the digits. The Yankees didn’t have a problem with it. Seattle already had 24 on ice for Ken Griffey, Jr., so Cano settled for 22.

The Mets? Robbie wouldn’t have to settle. It’s not like 24 was retired.

“My dad told me all the things Jackie Robinson went through, the barriers he broke for future generations,” Cano told John Shea, co-author of 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid, the 2020 book that set out to frame for a whole new generation who Willie Mays was and what he meant. Cano was not completely unaware: “Every time you think about number 24, you go back and think about Willie Mays. He was the one who gave real value to the number. I mean, he’s a legend. There is no other word for him. That is what 24 represents to me.”

I appreciate that Shea went to the trouble of asking Cano about Mays. I would have appreciated it more had Cano or Van Wagenen paid as much as lip service to Willie Mays when they flashed Cano’s new Mets uniform bearing 24. They didn’t. They did the unveiling at the 42 sculpture in the Jackie Robinson Rotunda.

Edwin Diaz has been great for the Mets this year. He may make us never again mind the trading of a kid named Jarred Kelenic. Cano is now destined to go down as incidental in the transactional equation. He was a Met for four seasons. Three seasons, really. There was one season when he was suspended from playing due to a second finding of PEDs. And the fourth season ended quickly when rosters had to be pared and an unproductive Cano was DFA’d.

So no Met was wearing 24, at least until the next time a set of numbers needed to be assigned more than forty years since Mays last wore that set as a Met coach, almost fifty years since Mays last wore them as a player. They’d been effectively restricted from random circulation, but you never knew. And nothing was ever said. Willie Mays was still alive and relatively well on the West Coast. He was still hailed when discussions about Greatest Ever arose. He had passed 90. 24 lingered in limbo back east.

What I wanted to believe, what I was overcome by the thought of believing, was that the video to which Howie Rose had directed our attention was telling me the story I yearned to hear, the story I repeatedly told on the off chance anybody was directing any attention to the likes of me or anybody like me in this realm, the story that served to place before Metkind the common sense of the subject in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent (that’s from 1776, another set of numbers meaningful to me).

First the video, then Howie at the podium set it all out there for 40,000-plus to hear. Willie Mays was Willie Mays. Willie Mays was New York. Willie Mays was National League New York. Willie Mays was a New York Met. Willie Mays was told by Joan Payson that Willie Mays would have his number retired by the New York Mets. Willie Mays’s New York Mets teammates — several were among the 65 Old Timers — had “urged” its retirement.

It was happening. The 1980 Mets were closing the gap on the Giants. The 1986 Mets were overcoming the Red Sox. The 2000 Mets were completing the comeback on the Braves. It was really happening. They were doing it.

The Mets were retiring No. 24 for Willie Mays. After not doing it at every opportunity that could have presented itself, the New York Mets under Steve Cohen said this ends here. The “iconic” No. 24 won’t be worn by any other Met ever again. Just like that, years and years of forthright advocacy greeted by utter indifference simply blew out to center. For every old New York Giants fan who became a New York Mets fan. For every New York Mets fan who became a Willie Mays fan. For everybody who appreciated the thread that runs through a city, a league and a team. For everybody who cares deeply about this stuff. For everybody who couldn’t believe anybody didn’t see how plain and firm this case was. The case had at last been made by an entity with the authority to make it and make it stick.

A sheet was removed. A 24 was unveiled, white and orange and blue. Michael Mays, the son of Willie Mays, walked out to accept on behalf of his father. A continent away, Willie Mays, Howie Rose assured us, was watching. Willie sent along remarks of gratitude. They were posted on CitiVision and recited by Howie. By tone and tenor, you knew they were authentically Willie. Mays thanked a pair of Mets owners, one distant past, one vibrantly present. He thanked old friends from Shea and new friends at Citi. He acknowledged all New York and Mets fans and this specific act meant to him. And with that, the Mets, after ignoring what they had right in front of them for half-a-century, laid rightful claim to their piece of Willie Mays’s New York National League legacy, at last realizing bookending the legendary 42 with the legendary 24 and aligning it alongside 37, 14, 41, 31, 36 and 17 made all the sense in our world, common and uncommon.

Then the Mets Old Timers played a beautiful game whose score didn’t matter and the current Mets played a beautiful game whose score did matter — Mets 3 Rockies 0 — and I left Citi Field in a blissful state of total belief.