Here they are, in all their cardboard glory. Comments here. Sorry about the slippers — needed something to prop up Gomez and Sele.
 
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans. Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here. Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here. Got something to say? Leave a comment, or email us at faithandfear@gmail.com. (Sorry, but we have no interest in ads, sponsored content or guest posts.) Need our RSS feed? It's here. Visit our Facebook page, or drop by the personal pages for Greg and Jason. Or follow us on Twitter: Here's Greg, and here's Jason. |
I watched the games on TV, but I never could quite put Shea and football together. Even with photographic evidence, I can’t picture the Jets in Flushing, even if they don’t belong in Jersey. Our autumn expatriates ought to come back next November for a scrimmage or something, get some intended use out of the old Jets locker room. I think I’ve heard more references to “the old Jets locker room” (for overflow press conferences and such) with the Jets in absentia than I did when it was just “the Jets locker room”. I don’t honestly have much use for football — I generally tune in in late December, when I’m desperate for the sight of grass, and then whatever bandwagon team I pick gets bounced in the first round. But tonight was different: The Colts and the Patriots in a game that might as well be this year’s Super Bowl, a showdown made even livelier by Bill Belichick’s jihad against Roger Goodell and the entire NFL. This battle didn’t disappoint — it was just a phenomenal game from the outset. Emily and our friend Eddie and I caught the game at Toad Hall, a Soho bar with a fondness for the Mets — and the place where 13 months ago we celebrated one of the happiest days in Met history. (Here’s to victory! And to Schadenfreude!) The crowd — big and boisterous, and given a boost in both respects by tired, celebrating marathoners and a mild night — had naturally segregated itself. The Colts rooters (more properly, the hordes on the Anti-Pats bandwagon) were in the front at one end of the bar, while the handful of Pats fans were in the back by the waitress station. So the noise level see-sawed along with the momentum of the game, with one end of the bar quiet or groaning while the other roared and vice versa. This is a wonderful time for New England. The Red Sox are World Champs again, and this time it’s as a normal team, instead of as a collective saddled with a region’s tragedies and dreary myths. The Patriots are a juggernaut. Heck, the Celtics should be pretty good. Right now, if you want to locate the center of excellence in North American sports, it’s Boston. I’ve got lots of Red Sox friends. I know Pats rooters who grew up in the fan equivalent of total darkness, and for whom learning to cheer was like cave fish learning to see. I’m happy for them. I really am. But here’s the thing; As the tide turned for good, with the Colts sputtering and Manning fumbling, I started hearing this sound in Toad Hall. It was an unwelcome sound, one I don’t usually hear in November. A familiar, very New York sound — a cocksure bray, the kind of self-congratulatory noise I imagine a billionaire makes checking his balance. It was the sound of smug certainty and entitlement. Heed my warning, New England friends: I heard your brethren tonight in Toad Hall. Maybe I even heard you. And you sounded exactly like Yankee fans. One of my favorite Faith and Fear comments of 2007 included this line directed at me by the ever-popular Anonymous in disagreement with my insistence that the Mets retire 24 in honor Willie Mays’ achievements as a New York National League legend: Stop drinking the cool aid [sic] with those old guys up in Riverdale. I found that amusing since it was a callback to earlier posts about my involvement with the New York Baseball Giants Nostalgia Society, the current highfalutin name for the Giants Fan Club, a group that, whatever it’s titled this week, is the closest thing to a game at the Polo Grounds I’m ever going to find. Thursday night we were once again called to order, or at least to dinner. And once again, the Long Island chapter — me and my buddy Rich — made our periodic schlep to Riverdale for another helping of pasta, baseball and Kool-Aid, not necessarily in that order. The Kool-Aid is self-serve because the conversion process that made me a retroactive New York Giants fan took place long before I met the guys, though they certainly add a dimension to what had been a static, book-learned devotion to New York’s original National League stalwart. There is, I’ll confess, a certain cultishness in the air at Josepina on Johnson Avenue when we get together. Lots of reinforced learning. I always overhear variations on several Jintcentric themes: • The New York Mets derive as much of if not more of their lineage from the New York Giants than from the Brooklyn Dodgers. • No rivalry, no matter how hyped, measures up to that which burned between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. • “Once a Giants fan, always a Giants fan.” I continually and enthusiastically refill the Kool-Aid pitcher where the first two points are concerned; the orange NY says it all on the first bullet. The last one strikes me as a rationalization by the NY Giants fans who became SF Giants fans, but if that’s what put a big Kool-Aid smile on their face for the past fifty years, well, rationalize away — you’ve earned it. (One could say the same for the most famous NY Giants fan alive of his new position, even if he is now managing, in the reverse spirit of Leo Durocher, the LA Dodgers.) These gatherings are incredibly nonjudgmental. It’s not just Giants fans of the past, present and theoretical/Met variety who show up. I’ve met Cubs fans, Phillies fans…even Dodger fans have been welcomed, if warily. Everybody brings something to the table, sometimes literally. Last night, Sid Gordon‘s son joined those who probably wished they had been Sid Gordon’s son. He brought his father’s scrapbook of clippings and scorecards, passed around gingerly and eyed lovingly. Where else is this gonna happen? Such eye candy, including the Giants-related newspaper stories our leader Bill Kent copies and distributes like Eddie Stanky sliding into second (“DID EVERBODY GET THE WES WESTRUM ARTICLE?”), is a bonus. I mostly come for the buzz. I love listening in on the old stories and the new spins. Rich is great at tapping the reservoir of baseball memories in the room. Granted, it doesn’t take much more than “you saw the Giants at the Polo Grounds?” but it’s something I’m a little shy about asking. When the talk turns to the baseball of today, I’ll chime in, but otherwise I don’t want to get in the way of what I’m hearing. Last night, though, I was more taken by something I saw than something I heard. A gentleman whose name I didn’t catch did see the Giants at the Polo Grounds on a rather memorable day: September 29, 1957. It was the final Giants home game under Coogan’s Bluff and this fellow thought to bring a Super 8 movie camera. He got a seat behind first base and filmed everything. Then, a half-century or so later, he transferred it to DVD. He brought a portable DVD player last night and showed us his home movie. Wow. There it was in all its glory: New York Giants baseball, alive. It was the Polo Grounds the way I’d always tried to imagine it but have never quite succeeded. I’ve watched documentaries, I’ve stared at photographs, I’ve ogled paintings, I’ve made a pilgrimage to the housing project that stands in its place, I’ve read and read and read. But this man’s movie brought it out in living color. There used to be a ballpark there, indeed. This big green edifice with a diamond and bases and seats and players and fans as it existed for decades, as it would cease to exist later that Sunday afternoon. There was Bobby Thomson pointing toward left field for old times’ sake. There was 26-year-old Willie Mays, pudgier than I would have guessed, signing autographs for kids. There were 1957 Giants and Giants from the past lining up to say goodbye. If you didn’t know any better, you’d figure the Polo Grounds was still there, that baseball had never left Manhattan, that next spring it will open up again. Did I mention wow? The postscript to my Giants jottings is always they left and the Mets came along and we lived happily ever after. True that, but seeing the Polo Grounds in all its Land of the Giants splendor…for a few seconds it wasn’t nostalgia. It was almost real.
Willard Mullin‘s Jint was the colossus of the baseball world in 1954, a status celebrated on the cover of the New York Giants’ 1955 yearbook. Gosh, he’s so happy there. How could have he known just three years later…oh, never mind. Happy Halloween, everybody. I wish today would disguise itself as part of baseball season. It’s been one month since the Mets played ball. Even their most recent version of it looks mighty good from the precipice of November. So the Mets didn’t dress up as playoff participants. So they’ve provided no tricks and few treats since they closed up shop for 2007. So all their news has been knees, bunions and paperwork. At least we’ll still have them next year if we so choose despite their having turned into a pumpkin when the clock struck midnight on the afternoon of September 30. If you need a little Mets to get you through this particular festive occasion, consider those who first got the ball rolling for us 45 going on 46 years ago. So what if the ball rolled by them as often as not? The 1962 Mets certainly understood the spirit of Halloween — they dressed up as a major league entity for an entire season. They might not have tricked anybody, but at least 922,530 New Yorkers who passed through the turnstiles of the Polo Grounds considered their existence a treat (as, one supposes, did nine other National League franchises). When you read about those Mets, whether through history or contemporary account, you get the sense they were a ghost story, that this ghoulish collection of 40-120 goblins stuck in one long rundown couldn’t have been real. But they were. I can swear they were. I’ve heard the creaking and the thunder and all the spooky sound effects. Earlier this year, my considerate friend and New Breed veteran Joe Dubin (or Joe D. as you might know him from commenting here) sent me a recording of Game One of the Cubs @ Mets doubleheader of June 17, 1962, a broadcast he tracked down because it included the notorious Marvelous Marv tripling but being called out for missing first (and, legend has it, second) play. While Lindsey Nelson’s call doesn’t mention the occasionally added kicker of Ol’ Case running out of the dugout to point at all the bases when Charlie Neal directly follows Marv’s miscue with a homer (what good is a legend if it’s absolutely true?), the broadcast features an announcer saying something I can’t imagine has been said since 1962. It’s the bottom of the seventh, Marv Throneberry is batting, and Bob Murphy has a request: Marv Throneberry and several other members of the New York Mets, now that school is out, would like very much to move their families to New York for the summer if they can find a furnished house to rent someplace. If you know of one, don’t call but write Housing, The Polo Grounds, New York, 39. When they tell you 1962 was a more innocent time, believe them. I think my favorite part is “don’t call but write,” as if no hurry, the Throneberrys can sleep out on 155th Street a few more nights, the weather has been beautiful of late and those puffy cumulus clouds are like a soft blanket to Mrs. Throneberry and Marv’s delightful children Mary Beth and Marvin Junior. In Janet Paskin’s Tales From the 1962 New York Mets, it was explained why you were supposed to write, not call. The first appeal for Met housing was made in April after Jay Hook asked Murph, Lindsey and Ralph Kiner to spread the word that New York’s newest heartthrobs were hard up for housing (it was less New York’s treacherous real estate market than the front office forgetting to take care of this rather common detail that led to such dire straits; outfielder John DeMerit said most teams helped players in a new town find a place to live, but the Mets said, “Here’s the newspaper”). The announcers did as they were asked and, Paskin writes, the New Breed put out the welcome mat: Soon enough, the switchboard at the Mets offices lit up with calls from people who had rooms, apartments and houses for rent. Nobody warned the Mets operators. They answered the phone, told would-be landlords that they had no idea what they were calling about, and refused to take their messages. Two months later, the broadcast of June 17, 1962 reveals there were still, figuratively speaking, Mets knocking on doors like kids on Halloween. Except they didn’t want candy. They wanted to move in. But the Mets on the radio their first year weren’t just an excuse for classifieds of the airwaves — a Roger Craig’s List, if you will. Lots of other gold nuggets revealed on this baby Joe D. sent me, including: • continual entreaties to stop up, plenty of baseball left today, plenty of good seats available (yes, they actually said it and really meant it); • the Rheingold theme played in Spanish (and you thought Los Mets were a recent phenomenon); • the soon to be visiting Houston club referred to as “the amazing Colt .45s,” presumably for not being as horrible as the only other National League expansion club of the 20th century; • much promotional excitement that just-retired Clem Labine has joined the cast of next month’s Old Timers Day; • a reference to an on-deck batter hoping “to get a stick” in this inning; • Cubs “head coach” Charlie Metro making moves (the infamous rotating college of coaches was in full effect for the innovative Cubbies in those Mad Men days); • a reference to Ron Santo having been voted best “second man” in the National League by the writers last year (I think “second year” is what Lindsey meant, though I don’t think there’s a sophomore of the year award anymore); • hearing the national anthem loud and clear and being told Flag Day ceremonies would take place between games; • all those we think of dinosaurs actually roaming the earth as ballplayers, including Cliff Cook, Ken Mackenzie and newly acquired Gene Woodling; • young Lou Brock reaching the right-center bleachers (first time ever at the Polo Grounds and it took Met pitching to make it happen); • Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks, being booed in the first inning; • and Marvelous (albeit haplessly homeless) Marv Throneberry striking out with the winning run — pitcher Hook, pinch-running for Big Donkey Frank Thomas — on first and being pretty badly booed for it. So much for the fans embracing the lovable losers. I can just hear the calls to the switchboard rescinding their rooms for rent. Quite a game to go with quite a broadcast. The Cubs scored four in the top of the first. The Mets, despite Marv’s misadventures around first (and possibly second), tied it. Before Neal’s bases-empty homer, Throneberry’s non-triple did drive in two runs, though the Baseball-Reference notation has to be one of a kind: M Throneberry Flyball: 1B; Woodling Scores; Thomas Scores Al Jackson gave up eight runs (four earned) on eight hits and five walks…yet Casey left him in until there was one out in the ninth, presumably a reflection of the confidence he had in his bullpen. Little Al took the 8-7 loss, dropping his record to 3-8. One of the Bob Millers started the nightcap and left in the sixth leading 3-2. But Craig Anderson surrendered a homer to Billy Williams in the seventh and Vinegar Bend Mizell gave up a long ball to second man Santo in the ninth, making him a 4-3 loser…though how a man who went by the name Vinegar Bend could ever be described as a loser is beyond me. Marvelous Marv went 1-for-3 in the second game, drove home a run on a sac fly and was charged with a fielding (as opposed to running) error at first base. He committed one of those in the opener as well, when, in the aforementioned four-run first, the Cubs’ Don Landrum was technically caught stealing second but was ruled safe on first baseman’s interference when he got himself into a rundown and ran right into Marv, who neglected to be holding the ball at the time. In As Jimmy Breslin observed in Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?, “Rundowns are not Throneberry’s strong point.” The tenth-place Mets’ record dropped to 16-44 that Fathers Day. The ninth-place Cubs, despite the presence of future Hall of Famers Brock, Banks and Williams, improved to all of 24-42. Then again, we had Casey Stengel and they had a head coach. Paid attendance was 13,128, as many available good seats apparently went wanting. That’s Housing, the Polo Grounds, New York, 39. Don’t let the Throneberrys sleep in the subway, darlin’. The weird part about the way the 2007 World Series ended, specifically after the World Series of the past half-dozen years, was seeing no monkeys flung from anyone’s back, no albatross peeled from around anyone’s neck, no donuts, no bagels, no bupkis filled up or filled in, no getting off the schneid. This wasn’t some eternally deprived expansion team sipping at last from the chalice of ultimate success, nor a long-suffering tribe (whether deserving or despicable) reaching the promised land for the first time in eons. This was simply the inevitable becoming reality, the best team earning its just reward after trumping its overmatched opponent in a one-run game that wasn’t terribly close. Terrific if you’re a Red Sox fan, not all that electrifying otherwise. World Series sweeps are bad for the losers as well as the unaffiliated observers who just want more baseball. But they can’t be over fast enough for the winners who don’t need to wait a moment more than necessary for a second World Series sweep in four years. Red Sox fans are no longer deprived and no longer suffering. Yet I doubt winning is getting old for them. Their team flat out deserved to win. Not only did the Red Sox lead their division from April 18 on, but they, unlike at least one other Northeastern team I can think of, didn’t blow a longstanding and formidable divisional lead in September. They faced down their bout with adversity (behind 3-1 to the Indians in the ALCS) and they supplanted the Rockies as the hottest team in baseball. Colorado started the postseason 7-0. Boston ended it that way. Swell buncha fellas on television, from the monsters in the middle to the percussion in the bullpen to the rooks to the not one, but two cancer survivors to that pitcher who evokes comparisons to Christy Mathewson, Bob Gibson and, perhaps, Catfish Hunter. The Red Sox blended a roster of experience and youth and power and speed and arms and bats and gloves…it’s as if they, among all the other things they did right, gave their versions of Lastings Milledge and Ruben Gotay legitimate shots and their kids did not disappoint. How nice for the Red Sox, how nice for their Nation. Every Mets fan I know who lives in New England finds his Red Sox neighbors insufferable and overbearing, but I don’t live in New England, so I’m happy for them. The village elders didn’t have to hang on for one more breath for so they could die happy and no parents needed to wake their babies so they could grow up to say they witnessed a once-in-a-lifetime event. It’s twice-in-a-lifetime now. When the Red Sox broke their cold spell in 2004, the Daily News snottily suggested this would be it until 2090. Turns out there wasn’t an 86-year wait this time around. Turns out the team of this century, to date, hails from Boston. Turns out that Mike Lowell was the best third base pickup anybody in the A.L. East has made since the winter of ’04. Turns out Alex Rodriguez is still looking for a team whose coattails are long enough to drag him to a pennant. But that’s somebody else’s problem. If the Rockies, who stormed into the World Series before being stormed right out of it, had stayed hot, they would have written the more exciting final chapter to 2007. I rooted for them and I’m disappointed for them, but the Red Sox winning is a good story any year…‘cept one, as we all know. You New England-based Mets fans may not be able to stand being surrounded by RSN for the next few days (or years), and you have my sympathies, but at least at the heart of their narcissism there is our shared bond. Hank Steinbrenner may have been full of it last week when he dismissed Red Sox Nation as no more than a component of “Yankee universe,” but I don’t completely begrudge him his point that “if it wasn’t for the rivalry with us, they’d be just another team.” Maybe not for true Red Sox fans, but for me and most Mets fans, probably. At one point or another, I’d venture that just about every Mets fan’s favorite American League team has been the Red Sox precisely because they have been the archrival to our least favorite American League team. With the Blue Jays, the Devil Rays and the Orioles all having gone on hiatus over the past decade, the Red Sox have been all we could invest our residual hope in from April through September. They’ve been all we’ve had to combat our sidebar hatred. It took them a while, but they’ve gotten the job done on our behalf and the behalves of good people everywhere. The Red Sox embarrassed their rivals directly in 2004 and have completely upstaged them in every tangible fashion in 2007. The Yankees are left to hold meetings and interviews and conference calls in late October. The Red Sox hold parades. It’s nice to see. It doesn’t actually help the Mets, but it’s nice to see. And when it occurs to one of their celebrity fans, like the surprisingly surprised Ben Affleck, that there are New Yorkers who are empathetic to his cause, it’s nice to read this: I get a lot of supportive things about the Red Sox, which at first kind of confused me. We don’t understand this in Boston, but half of New York likes the Red Sox because they hate the Yankees and they love the Mets. And I love the Mets. So go Mets! And go Dave Magadan, revered hitting coach of the World Champion Red Sox, the only Met alumnus I noticed in the Boston dugout this October. Magadan (or Mags) hasn’t been a Met since 1992, but as with Bob Apodaca (or Dack), I still see him as a Met when I see him at all. I like that he got noticed for the Red Sox taking lots of pitches (and keeping lots of games going lots of hours). I’m always amazed that it’s news that if hitters take pitches, it might wear out the pitcher, that the hitter might eventually see the pitch he wants, that the hitter might walk. I seem to recall Mags collecting lots of bases on balls in his Met prime. Indeed, in 1990, his one really good year, he finished one point behind ex-Met Lenny Dykstra for the league lead in on-base percentage and was eighth in walks. It’s probably a poor excuse for irony, but Dave Magadan was the smart-money choice to take over third base from the departed Ray Knight in 1987, but Howard Johnson won the job out of Spring Training when Mags was sidelined by an infected lymph node in his right armpit. HoJo never relinquished third after that and it took until ’90, when Mike Marshall washed out as Keith Hernandez’s replacement, that Dave became a regular, at first base. The irony? Twenty years later, Magadan and Johnson are both Major League hitting coaches…and Magadan’s students have been doing much better. Maybe the Rockies were overwhelmed by their eight-day layoff, but now we all have an eight-day layoff. Actually, we all have approximately nineteen eight-day layoffs before there’s another new baseball game to remotely obsess over. Via the good graces of XM Radio, I listened to the top of the ninth on KOA, the Rockies’ station. I switched to WRKO’s Red Sox feed for the happier broadcast in the bottom of the ninth. In flipping, I felt a bit like the sheepish Shea assistant clubhouse manager in Jeff Pearlman’s The Bad Guys Won who, with Game Six in Metly peril, threw on a Red Sox warmup jacket so he could “be a part of the celebration, any celebration,” but I’d decided one sad ending in 2007 was enough for me. Moments after Joe Castiglione announced the Red Sox had become the first team in the 2000s with two world championships to its credit, he threw it to a reporter in the victorious clubhouse. On KOA, they couldn’t go to commercial fast enough — visit your Denver-area Dick’s Sporting Goods for Rockies merchandise and “show your support throughout the Series!” On Fox, Mike Lowell was named MVP and asked about his free agent plans. The baseball season was completely over everywhere I turned. A clip of this World Series might appear in a Chevy commercial down the line, otherwise it’s likely being forgotten by all but the participants and their most ardent admirers. Red Sox fans will have their t-shirts and their DVDs and their final assurance, in case any was necessary, that there was never any such thing as a curse. Rockies fans will have their mixed emotions. It took them however long they lived before 1993 to join the league of extraordinarily fortunate markets and have a baseball team to call their own. It took them 15 years to win a league championship. It took them 36 innings to fall back down the mountain. All those empty seats at Coors Field became fans again in late September. I probably won’t care in May when the Mets are the visitors and the Rockies just another team we have to beat, but I hope those who were disappointed these last four games remain in love with their team. Wrote Robert Wells of Milwaukee Braves fans after the novelty of winning the 1957 World Series wore off: When a player popped up with the bases loaded, he was no longer a figure of heroic tragedy but a bum. With triumph as well as aspiration behind them, the team’s followers began to be like baseball fans elsewhere. The plump ladies with cowbells and baseball caps started missing games. When it looked like rain, people who had considered going to the stadium decided to stay home. Whatever Rockies fans decide to do next year, I realize I’ve just blogged my last baseball game of this year. According to the Weather Channel right now, it’s 42 degrees in the vicinity of Shea Stadium. But it feels like 37.  13 comments - (Comments closed) | |  Print This Post |  2007 Postseason, Dave Magadan, Red Sox, World Series Ending People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring. — Rogers Hornsby You don't have to be a graduate of one of Colorado's prestigious school systems to know the Rockies are in trouble. They've lost a blowout, a squeaker and a moderately competitive slugfest. Even education-conscious Mike Hampton could have calculated his former team's current odds of survival as prohibitive long before his celebrated cameos at Denver County's highly regarded parent-teacher conferences. Yet I envy the Rockies. They've made it this far. They'll probably be dismissed as hopeless lightweights when (when, not if) they lose this World Series, but I hope their fans have enjoyed the unanticipated ride. No, they're likely not enjoying much right now, as evidenced by Fox's continual closeups of thousands of them between pitches — the home team's behind, the faces will be mopey, just shoot the action — yet the luckiest among them got to sit and shiver at Coors Field Saturday night. They were at the first game in the National League park. This marked seven consecutive years for certain that we could only imagine that the first game in the National League park was taking place at Shea Stadium. I caught the slightest and most accidental snippet of the last World Series game played at Shea as I flipped by a regional sports network that shall remain nameless. It aired Friday, October 26, which happened to be the seventh anniversary of the Mets' most recent Fall Classic appearance (and, it dawned on me, their crosstown rivals' most recent Fall Classic triumph). Putting 26 + 1 together, even though I'm no Mike Hampton, I realized Saturday would be October 27, or the anniversary of the last Mets World Series title won. So I popped Game Seven, the only Game Seven truly worth identifying as such, into the DVD player. Didn't watch all of it, just the good stuff: El Sid turning the tide in long relief; Mazz starting the rally in the sixth; Teuf drawing the walk that loaded the bases; Keith securing his postcareer broadcasting sinecure by driving in the first two runs; Keith furious at the lousily lazy call by Dale Ford that cost him second base when Dwight Evans couldn't handle Kid's right field fly which tied it; Knight's MVP laser of a homer in the seventh, the run that gave us the lead we never relinquished; shaky McDowell giving way to steady Orosco; Darryl's moon shot and subsequent trot around the solar system; Jesse swinging away to drive home the eighth and final run; then Romero, then Boggs, then Barrett going out, out and out; and then Jesse and Gary and everybody else dogpiling on the mound. It happened. It really happened. The Mets won a World Series. The Mets have won two World Series, but this was the one that happened least long ago. That it's been 21 years (soon to be referred to as 22 years) and counting…well, that's too long, but at least it happened. I have evidence. I have hard digital evidence that the Mets did what the Rockies won't, which is beat the Red Sox in the final baseball games on the calendar. October 2007 has been a month for anger and healing for most of us. Our emotions weren't at their prettiest on September 30 for obvious reasons and they've needed time to mend. Of course I envy the Rockies, even down 0-3. Of course I wish we had held on for one more day and then some. Of course losing twelve of the final seventeen was lethal when losing merely ten of the final seventeen would have satisfied all constituencies — the Mets still would have sucked as they were so determined to do, but at least we would have been sucked into the playoffs along with them. And from there, who knows? I'd be way happier if we were in, let alone succeeding at the 2007 World Series, just as I would have been way happier last October had we engaged in baseball beyond our last Game Seven. Unlike Tom Glavine, I was devastated when he and we came up short on September 30. But it neither made nor broke my allegiance to my team. I've given a lot of thought to Dan Shanoff's post on fandom by way of Jason's piece from the other day. I suppose I'm one of the undiscerning masses from whom Dan distances himself. My route to becoming and remaining a Mets fan was neither clever nor circuitous nor unorthodox. I imagine it's a pretty typical tale for Mets fans of my vintage. With atypical brevity, here is the essence of my story: • I was little • They were local • It was 1969 After winning that first world championship, the Mets went a long time thereafter without winning a second. They paused to attain the aforementioned belt from '86, but have continued their unabated nonwinning ways otherwise. With me rooting like hell for them regardless. Probably the most telling characteristic you could infer about me and my Mets fandom is I'm stubbornly loyal and possibly loyally stubborn. I chose my favorite team when I was 6, I chose my political party when I was 7, I chose my favorite song when I was 9. I've remained faithful to “American Pie,” the Democrats and the Mets without hesitation, even if none of them has spent much time at the top of its respective chart since 1972, 1970 or 1969. But in the long Met run, the paucity of Commissioner's Trophies on display in the Diamond Club lobby doesn't quite matter. I caught that smidgen of Game Five from 2000 and I was bummed. I treated myself to those highlights of Game Seven from 1986 and I was conflicted — Yay! for winning, Damn! for winning almost half my lifetime ago and not following up for more than two decades. Yet so what? I didn't stop being a Mets fan because we didn't qualify for more World Series and lost the one World Series in which we did participate. I'm apparently deriving some benefit from being a Mets fan, even if success by association isn't it. Let me let you in on a little secret: I didn't hate being a Mets fan in September 2007. Don't misunderstand me. I didn't enjoy the squadrons of Phillies, Nationals, Marlins and Cardinals clomping repeatedly on the home plate of my heart for half a month. I didn't enjoy the Mets' myriad pop-ups, errors, blown holds and seven-run tops of firsts surrendered. I didn't enjoy earning our way into infamy. All of that and so much more created utterly hateful circumstances in September 2007. But I enjoyed that I was doing what I do. I was being a Mets fan. It wasn't working as desired, but I was watching Mets games and listening to Mets games and attending Mets games and talking about Mets games and writing about Mets games and reading about Mets games and thinking about Mets games. I was doing that while hoping there would be Mets games to attend at Shea Stadium in 2007 as late as October 27 and 28 and 29 — if necessary — but I would have been doing it had that hope not existed at all. The level of frequency and activity has varied from year to year, but there hasn't been a season since before I was 6 when I wasn't watching, listening, talking, writing, reading and thinking Mets. (I'd include attending, but I had to wait 'til I was 10 for my first on-site visit to Shea.) Here, I think, is the deal, historic chokes aside: they're pretty good at being my team; I'm awesome at being their fan. This has been going on all my life. It will be going on all the rest of my life if I have my way. It will include several to many Mets World Series appearances if I have more of my way, but that part of my way is way out of my control. I can also declare, four weeks removed from The Worst Collapse Ever, that it's surprisingly irrelevant. My stubborn loyalty and loyal stubbornness is not win-dependent. The joy my Mets fandom has brought me for going on 40 seasons has little to do with winning and everything to do with being. I love being a Mets fan. Not that I would reject out of hand a few more Mets games to watch, listen to, attend, talk about, write about, read about and think about tacked on to the end of every year, this one included.
On October 25, our friend and blolleague Dana Brand noted babies born the night of the Mookie-Buckner play for the ages were turning 21, old enough to order themselves a drink. In that beer, wine or spirit, Saturday the 27th marked the 21st birthday of the 1986 world championship. I would have thought its parents would have given it a younger sibling in one of the years that followed, but I guess 1986 remains an only — or should we say exceptional — child of the ’80s. Here’s to you, October 27, 1986. A better last Monday in October we will never know. |
Piazza: Catcher, Slugger, Icon, Star by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers. 
Amazin' Again: How the 2015 New York Mets Brought the Magic Back to Queens by Greg Prince is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers. 
Volume I of The Happiest Recap: 50+ Years of the New York Mets As Told in 500+ Amazin' Wins by Greg Prince is available in print and for Kindle on Amazon. 
Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History by Greg Prince (foreword by Jason Fry), is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers. |
|
Copyright © 2026 Faith and Fear in Flushing - All Rights Reserved |
||
