I don’t like being mad at the Mets.
They’re an important part of my life — while I’m not as doctrinaire about it as I was in the not so distant past, it’s odd for me not to see or hear every pitch, and decidedly rare for a game to go in the books wholly unglimpsed by me. (The last one, though? It was Friday night. Emily and I took my mom out for birthday dinner, and the new Manfred rules meant I returned thinking it would be sixth or seventh only to find out the game had ended [1] 10 minutes or so earlier.)
Being at my station most every day means Brett Baty [2] and Francisco Lindor [3] and Starling Marte [4] and their teammates are near-constant presences in my life, people whose faces and mannerisms I know extremely well despite never having met them in real life. My presumption is that I will like them because they’re wearing the uniform to which I’ve sworn allegiance, and though I know this wouldn’t be particularly true in practice, I choose not to think about that too deeply. When the Mets win they bring me joy and I think better of them, ascribing qualities to them that they may or may not have in real life.
The flip side of this is that when I’m mad at the Mets I am mad at them like they’re family members or dear friends I feel have betrayed me. Which is to say I become volcanically pissed at these young men I imagine I know who are actually total strangers. I scrutinize their failures harshly; I parse their postgame mea culpas like a particularly vengeful prosecutor; I judge their futures with a jaundiced eye and a sneer.
This is not healthy for me. (The actual Mets neither know nor care; the people around them worried about what blogs like ours thought for a brief period some years ago but as far I can tell they no longer do, which is probably better for all involved.) It just makes me stew and shortens my life expectancy. The Mets will be death of me one day, of that I have no doubt — Emily will find me on the couch after another loss waxy of visage and cool to the touch, mouth fixed in an O of despair or outrage, and she’ll say, “Well of course it was the Mets” — but I’d very much like that day to be as far in the future as possible.
This hasn’t been a great year for Mets-induced life expectancy, not with the team determined to be lousy in lots of ways that are grindingly irritating when viewed in contrast to last season, or at least the first 90% of it. But the good news is that I think I’ve let go of all that, or at least some meaningful portion of it, reaching if not acceptance than something reasonably close to it.
Granted, today might come with an asterisk. We kicked off our annual week on Long Beach Island, driving down from Brooklyn and taking possession of our slice of a beach house. With the car disgorged of luggage I figured out how the cable TV worked and found Kodai Senga [5] in trouble against the Cardinals in their baby blue motley. Senga got out of that trouble but then found himself in more of it; while we were buying necessities and booze (OK mostly the latter) at the market in Beach Haven Luis Guillorme [6], of all people, brought the Mets within a run with a homer. The rest of the game played out with the Mets close on the scoreboard but never particularly feeling like threats; when they lost [7] I sighed and shrugged and we went to dinner.
The experience of a single game may not be as existential as I’ve made things out to be; from the moment Paul Goldschmidt [8] went deep against Senga this game gave off the vibe that it was one of the 50-odd you’re guaranteed to lose in any particular season, notable only for being career win No. 198 for Adam Wainwright [9], who long ago Ruined Everything.
But the point is that the Mets, barring some reversal of fortune for which there’s zero evidence at presence, are going to lose a fair number more games than 50-odd, and most likely a fair number more games than they and we and various baseball prognosticators thought back in March.
And you know what? That’s OK. I mean, on one level it isn’t, because it means I’ll be sad or PO’ed when I’d rather be happy. But it will be … well, it will be disappointing and not devastating, though I grit my teeth reflexively at putting it that way.
Some years everything your team touches gets sprinkled with pixie dust: The veterans stay healthy, the kids prove precocious and game after game unfolds with every bounce going your way. And some years are the opposite of that. You can’t have one possibility without the other, and, honestly, the not knowing is essential to fandom — there’s nothing less watchable than a guarantee.
The Mets are trying. They’re as baffled as I am that it doesn’t seem to be working, and they’re mad about it too. I’ll watch and listen to them whenever I can and root for them and want to like them, and I’ll try not to get too angry at them when things don’t work out.
It’s acceptance, or at least something close to it. Let’s see how it goes.