Blithe Assumptions

Hey Mets fans? Which National League teams do you hate?

The most common answer is that we hate — in the operatic sports pantomime sense of the word, you understand — the Braves and the Phillies. This is the way of the world, as those two teams are our principal antagonists in the National League East. But it’s never really resonated with me.

The Phillies are an interesting case — we’ve shared a division with them since 1969, but it’s only relatively recently that both teams have been good enough at the same time for any friction to be generated. That’s a historical quirk on which both Mets and Phillies fans can weigh in, with befuddlement on both sides; for me the Braves are of more note.

To be sure: I am not a fan of the Braves. Last year’s end-of-season showdown with them is one of the great cathartic moments of Met history, an exorcism of innumerable terrors. And it doesn’t take much to get me muttering about Chipper and Bobby Cox, or about John Rocker and T@m Fucking Gl@v!ne.

But these are adult dramas; when I was a kid the Braves were in the NL West, which never made any sense but was how baseball geography worked. Most of the time they were over there doing what they did, and you wanted to beat them when you had to (as the Mets did in the first-ever NLCS) but normally they were a problem for the Giants and/or Dodgers to solve. Hate the Braves? Whatever for?

As a kid I hated the Cardinals and the Cubs, most particularly the latter. I’d grown up on a steady diet of anti-Cubs lore: Leo the Lip, Ron Santo‘s heel-clicking, the black cat. And when I returned to the fold of Mets fandom, it was just in time to see the Cubs of Gary Matthews and Jody Davis and Rick Sutcliffe throw the ’84 Mets down off the mountain they’d not quite finished climbing.

Hating the Cubs, if you were a Mets fan, was as natural as breathing — even if newer generations of Met fans understandably found it a little odd. Weren’t they a problem for the Cardinals and/or Brewers to solve? Hate the Cubs? Whatever for?

These days, in truth, those fires are a little banked. The Mets, one may recall, beat the Cubs as badly in the 2015 NLCS as one baseball team can beat another one: The Cubs never so much as led in a single inning. (It turned out OK for them a year later.) These days you can depend on at least one wind’s-blowing-out donnybrook at Wrigley a summer and an influx of Cubs fans to Citi Field that puts your teeth on edge, but those are mere embers of a once-burning rivalry.

Still, embers can rekindle with just a little puff of breath. The Cubs marched into Citi Field (wearing impeccable road unis, by the way) Friday night to meet the Mets and a big, raucous crowd, with conditions chilly and blustery in a way that almost felt like October, and I felt something atavistic stirring in my Mets-fan soul: Warning! Danger! Intruders!

Which the Mets seemed to sense too. After Clay Holmes put down the Cubs 1-2-3, Lindor sent an 0-2 pitch from Jameson Taillon — the same Jameson Taillon the Mets never seem to square up — out to Carbonation Ridge, sending fans who’d just finished crooning “My Girl” into a renewed frenzy. (We’ll save further thoughts about Lindor and his music for another day.)

It was a welcome opening blow; pretty soon the rout was on. Brett Baty homered. So did Jeff McNeil, whom I realize is almost unrecognizable in those rare moments nothing displeases him and he can just smile. Next came Juan Soto, who annihilated a baseball so thoroughly that patrons out in the distant Citi Pavillon reached up quizzically as little squiggles of yarn and scraps of cowhide fluttered down from the heavens.

Meanwhile, Holmes looked as good as he has in a Mets uniform, muscling the Cubs aside with the exception of Kyle Tucker‘s solo shot. And some of the Cubs’ wounds were self-inflicted: Normally sure-handed Dansby Swanson gifted the Mets two runs by rushing the back end of a double play when he had time to set himself for the throw.

There was a bit of drama in the eighth, but it was all internal Mets stuff: After a debacle-ous debut in the desert, Dedniel Nunez was sent back out to not blow a five-run lead. Nunez started out well, fanning Swanson on three strikes and so reducing his season ERA below infinity. But he walked the next two Cubs and you could see his confidence ebb, and here came Tucker to the plate to try and make the game interesting when what we wanted was 15 minutes of boredom followed by overnight contentment.

Nunez’s control kept flickering on and off against Tucker, who couldn’t square him up (possibly because he had no idea where the ball was headed) but also wouldn’t go away. Until he fouled a slider straight up behind home plate. Deliverance! Francisco Alvarez made a little circle as the winds pushed the ball this way and that above his head, but you felt the fluttering in your stomach even before the ball ticked off Alvarez’s mitt to give Tucker new life.

This was remarkable cruelty even in a sport that specializes in it. But baseball is also very good at false hope: Nunez threw his best slider of the inning, one that Tucker swung through, after which Carlos Mendoza wisely went out to remove Nunez on a high note in favor of Reed Garrett. The Cub threat came to naught and a few minutes later the Mets had won.

If you’re a Cubs fan, you walked away muttering about plays not quite made by a normally capable defensive team, or about how in the world 12 of the Mets’ 13 hits came with two strikes. (The lone exception: McNeil’s first-pitch homer.) Most likely that was just the usual baseball being baseball zaniness that gets visited on some team every night … or maybe there’s something more to it.

Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.

You probably know by now that Leo XIV, nee the Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost, is not only the first American-born pope but also a baseball fan. The Cubs greeted this news with a gesture made perhaps in jest but perhaps in blithe assumption, the kind of thing that older brother teams in shared cities tend to do.

Not so fast Cubs: Even before Internet sleuths found the future pope in the crowd during Fox’s broadcast of the 2005 World Series, clad in classic White Sox regalia, his brother John had put the question of his Chicago fandom to definitive rest: “He was never, ever a Cubs fan. So I don’t know where that came from. He was always a Sox fan.”

If you’re a baseball fan, you get the significance of that added “ever” — it’s shorthand for no way in … well, yeah.

So Leo XIV is most likely the first pontiff able to wax enthusiastic about Scott Podsednik and explain in non-generalizations that yes, Jesus loves A.J. Pierzynski too. I’m not Catholic and in fact not religious at all, but I find this thoroughly unexpected development thoroughly delightful. And hey, right now the White Sox can use as many friends in high places as they could get. (Should he attend another World Series, Leo XIV will probably be easier to spot on TV.)

As for the Cubs, well, I don’t remember anything in the Bible about laying false claim to the allegiance of God’s representative on Earth, but it still doesn’t seem like a good idea. A certain number of Hail Marys might be advisable; I’m no theologian, but maybe one for each enemy two-strike hit would be a start.