Dana Brand's Mets Fan Blog

I had a ball at this “Mr. Met Speaks!” event last Saturday at LIU’s Brooklyn Campus.  Above you see a picture of me (standing to the right of Mr. Met) helping to facilitate a discussion between Mr. Met and members of the newest generation of Mets fans.

The event was very Brooklyn.  It was on the site of the old Brooklyn Paramount, a gigantic theatre almost as big as Ebbets Field that occupied a big space in the heart of old Brooklyn.  Marty Markowitz was there, the Borough President, an old-fashioned politician who seemed to genuinely enjoy being being among Brooklynites celebrating something having to do with our heritage.  A priest offered a charming prayer for the Mets that reminded me of the way in which all faiths came together in Brooklyn to convince God to end Gil Hodges’s batting slump.  I felt like it was 1950 or something.  There was a cool, characteristically diverse Brooklyn crowd, in which there all these families including my own (my sisters and my niece and nephew) and there were egg creams and cheesecakes at Junior’s afterwards.

The highlight for me, though, was what you see in the picture above.  It was the discussion between me, Bill Corbett, a fine poet and fellow baseball fan, a whole bunch of kids, and the man who stands for our team more than anyone else:  our dear mascot, Mr. Met.

What is most moving about something like this when kids are involved is that, without any self-consciousness, they enact what the taller and older people around them with the cameras are doing inside themselves.  I mean, most of these kids were old enough to understand what the deal is with Mr. Met.  But they were happy to play on the margin between what is real and what isn’t.  The fact that there is a skilled pantomimist in there somewhere doesn’t remotely detract from the aura of the magical man.  And then there were kids young enough to think that this guy was born that way, young enough to wonder if he knew the other magical guy who comes down the chimney during the off-season. 

Several kids there were on the margin.  These are the kids who asked the question.  These are the kids who really wanted to know, who had just experienced the first signs that it was all going to fade into the light of common day.  One of them came up to me as everyone was dispersing.  She looked at me and asked “Will you tell me the truth?”  The truth?  Will I tell someone the truth?  Why ask me that?  She wanted to put my credibility on the line.  “Is Mr. Met really Mr. Met or is he just a guy?”  First I tried an almost political evasion.  “As far as I know, he’s really Mr. Met.”  “Yeah, but is he really real?  You know what I mean.”  Oh, the Virginia Santa Claus moment.  Why do we like to lie to kids?  Why do we feel badly about it?  Then I thought of something I said in my piece about Mr. Met in Mets Fan.  “He is as real as everything else at the ballpark.”  “He’s as real as the Mets?” she asked, her voice rising.  “Yes,” I said, trying to be satisfied with this answer.  “He’s as real as the Mets.”  “But the Mets,” she insisted, “are real people.”  “I know I said, but they’re real people who are just playing a game, and games are kind of not real.”  “Are you saying that Mr. Met is not real?” she asked, beginning to lose interest in my evasions.

“No,” I said “What I’m saying is that Mr. Met is as real as the Mets.”

“Oh,” she said, as she politely walked away and went back to her mother.  Someday, perhaps, she’ll understand what this means.  For now, I just wasn’t answering what to her was a perfectly straightforward question.     

 *******

Come see me and hear me on Long Island this week, on Thursday, 3/4 at 7:00 pm at the Friedberg JCC in Oceanside, LI.

And on Friday, 3/5, at the C.W. Post Library in Brookville, LI at 8:00 pm.

This Saturday, I am going to do something that, as far as I know, no one has ever done before.  I am going to be on a panel discussion with William Corbett and Mr. Met.  The real one.  I know what you’re thinking.  But he actually has a translator!   Like Kaz Matsui used to.

Read about it here. 

If you want to be there too, get yourself over to the Cyber Cafe just within the gates of Long Island University – Brooklyn Campus at the corner of De Kalb and Flatbush Avenue in downtown Brooklyn.  It’s easy to get to by subway from Manhattan and there’s a Long Island Railroad stop just a few blocks away.  The event starts at 3:30 and the panel discussion starts at 4.  Doors open at 3.  

That’s Saturday, 2/27.  Be there or be square.  Or round.

I can’t wait to write about this.  It will be real.  A break from all of this completely baseless speculation with which we busy our brains in February and March. 

******

If Brooklyn is too far, I will be on Long Island next week:

March 4, 7:30pm, The Friedberg Jewish Community Center, Oceanside, NY

March 5, 8pm, The Library of Long Island University, C.W. Post Campus, Brookville, NY

There are certain pleasures you can only enjoy when you’re in the mood.  There are certain pleasures that never lose their appeal, no matter how much disappointment has been involved in your pursuit of them.  There are certain pleasures that are much richer and deeper when love is involved.  There are certain pleasures for which your desire is supposed to increase in the middle of February.  Such are the pleasures that come from following the fortunes of a baseball team.

Am I in the mood?  I’m getting there.  What I’m telling myself now is that the stage has been set for something wonderful.   No one expects us to win, and so if we win, how great would that be?  And it isn’t so far-fetched to think that we could do it.  If everything  …  Oh, if everything …

Has baseball lost its appeal for me, after all this disappointment?  No.  This is the deepest wonder of baseball fandom.  Disappointment doesn’t kill hope.  It feeds it.

Do I feel love?  Why should I?  They tear down my home and build me a stadium that I still don’t like.  They could screw up a two-car funeral.  The team is harder for me to embrace than the Mets teams I have embraced in the past.  Many of my fellow fans seem to have been driven insane.  I am braced for despair and humiliation.  Yes I feel love.

Do I desire baseball now that it is the middle of February?  The season isn’t starting for six more weeks and already I am bored with the analysis, which is either stupid or just the same thing over and over again.  Exhibition games make me want to tear my hair out.  If you feel hope, you know it could just be an illusion.  If you feel despair, you know it may not mean anything.  Yet people will watch meaningless games and talk about it and talk about it and talk about it.  Yes I desire baseball now that it is the middle of February.

Pity me.  I am a simple, foolish being, programmed to feel the equinoctial frenzy.  The days lengthen.  I will soon smell the ground.   I will fall in love.  I will be in the crowd.   I am a fucking idiot.  But I cannot help myself.

*******

I’ll be reading at the Rye Library at 7 pm on Tuesday, February 24.

And attention all Brooklynites!  At 3:30 pm on Saturday, February 27, I will be making a joint appearance with Mr. Met at the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University, at One University Place, at the corner of De Kalb and Flatbush, at the Cyber Cafe just inside the campus gates.  We’ll have a lot to talk about!  The event is free and open to all members of the public.  I hope to see you there!

And speaking of Brooklyn, members of the Gary, Keith, and Ron family will be receiving a cookbook in the mail that contains a lokschen kugel recipe I contributed in honor of my two Brooklyn grandmothers, each of whom could make a killer kugel.  If you make the recipe, let me know how it turns out.  The title of the cookbook is “Let’s Go Meals!”  Oy.

Tomorrow, I’ll post my thoughts about this year’s “Pitchers and Catchers.”  But first, here’s my general take on the whole ceremony of “Pitchers and Catchers,” taken from my book The Last Days of Shea

When a baseball season ends, it is a tradition for baseball fans to comfort each other by observing that there are “only three and a half months until pitchers and catchers.”  At holiday time, people say “only a month and a half until pitchers and catchers.”  Not “until pitchers and catchers report to camp ahead of everybody else.”  Just “pitchers and catchers.”  It’s a magic catchphrase, an incantation, with its own poetic rhythm.  Pitchers and catchers.  Butchers and bakers.

You know how when you’re waiting on line outside a building and you think, “once I get inside the building, I’ll be almost there” and you get inside the building and see that you’re not almost there because there’s this big waiting area where the line is compressed into a tight coil that you’re going to have to snake through for the next god-knows-how-long?  Well, pitchers and catchers is like when you just get into the building. 

When pitchers and catchers arrives, you see pictures in the paper of guys in uniform in warm sunny Florida.   You read articles about some players not going to dinner with each other as often as they used to, or about some manager wearing a World Series ring in order to fire up his players, or about some general manager announcing that the goal of the team is to win the World Series this year.  Somebody scoops the big story that the owner agrees with the general manager that the team ought to win the World Series.   The players will eventually be asked to weigh in on this.  You can’t wait.  Maybe someone will disagree?

 So you’ve waited so long for pitchers and catchers and this is what you have to read about.  Well, at least there’s some news, sort of.  A couple of guys played winter ball and you hear how they did.  Some young player who hit .270 last year did really well in winter ball.  So would it be fair to expect him to hit .290 this year?  Sure.  Why not? 

 What are you doing?  Well, pitchers and catchers are here.  So it’s time to predict and speculate about the season that will start in another month and a half.   You look over and over at the stats of the guys we’ve got.  You look over and over at the stats of the guys we don’t have.   You make little adjustments on the basis of people’s age, temperament, and that article about the guy in winter ball.  You try to determine, with the maximum amount of precision, just how much hope it is reasonable for you to have. 

 How much hope it is reasonable for you to have?  Are you crazy?  You know, don’t you, that even if you read every scouting report, every newspaper article, every blog entry, and every statistical breakdown, you still will not have any idea of how well the Mets will do in a coming season.  You know that many things will happen that you cannot possibly anticipate in February.  But, you think, this is okay.  You like unpredictability.  This is part of the reason you’re a baseball fan.  You assume unpredictability.  And yet here you are trying to determine how much fear and hope you have a right to have, even though once the season starts, you will hope and fear as much as you goddamn want to, no matter what all the statistics and scouting reports have told you. 

 What you do during the offseason is a waste of your time.  In this respect, it is exactly like what you do during the season.   For even if things turn out well and your team wins 100 games and is way ahead, nothing you have seen in the season, nothing you know about any of the other teams, nothing you know about anything, will give you any way to even begin to guess what is going to happen in the World Series. 

 So pitchers and catchers arrives and your brain becomes a little command center, absorbing and interpreting information.  You read, think, calculate, and compare.  You may even buy some of those expensive baseball prediction magazines in the supermarket.  You have something fun to do as you move slowly in the line in the lobby of the building.   And to whet your appetite for the big show you’ll eventually be seated for, the people who run things have set up a little television in the lobby on which you can watch that most tempting yet annoying of all spectacles:  the exhibition game. 

Please consider tuning in to Mark Rosenman and A.J. Carter’s terrific TV show SportsTalkNY this Sunday, February 14, from 9 to 11.

This Sunday’s show is produced in conjunction with the publication of The Miracle Has Landed:  The Amazing Story of How the 1969 Mets Shocked the World, ed. by Matt Silverman and Ken Samuelson  (Maple Street Press).  The book is a tribute to the Mets miracle of 1969 and the show will feature the participation of 1969 Mets Ron Swoboda, Jerry Koosman, and Jack Di Lauro.  I will also be part of the program, along with John Coppinger (the great Metstradamus), as an in-studio guest.   I wasn’t on the 1969 Mets, but in 1969 I paid a LOT of attention to them, as you can read in my essay 1969, from my book Mets Fan. 

If you want to be brought back to a season in which the Mets confounded everyone’s expectations, if you want to know why the ‘69 team will always have a privileged place in the hearts of millions, please join us on Sunday.

And you know what?  You were considered a cock-eyed optimist if you predicted, at the start of the 1969 season, that the Mets were going to reach .500.

I’d like to thank all of my blog and book readers and SABR members who came up to me after my talk at the meeting of the SABR  Casey Stengel chapter at the New York Public Library this Saturday.   It was a real pleasure to meet you and I am very grateful for your kind words.  Ernestine Miller, David Lippman, Evelyn Begley and all of the others who put together the Saturday program did a terrific job.  The whole program was wonderful.   I have never enjoyed a more interesting and informative day of baseball.    

I will be doing a number of readings in the northern end of the Mets homeland in February and I’ll have some Long Island readings in early March.  Stay tuned to this blog for more information.

Anyway, here’s where I’ll be in February.

February 9, 7 pm. Greenwich (CT) Library.

February 11, 7 pm Ridgefield (CT) Library

February 23, 7 pm Rye (NY) Library (The Rye Free Reading Room)

Millions of us can recall perfectly the sound of Shea’s organ as Jane Jarvis played it.  It was a very distinctive sound:  muffled, carnival-like, perfectly-timed, and filled with generous flourishes.  To hear a stadium organ played with such virtuosity is a privilege, and it is a privilege Mets fans have not had for thirty-one years.

Why not?  You know why not.  The sound of baseball has changed. 

I’m not going to tell you that the world was better in the past because it wasn’t.  Baseball wasn’t either, for reasons we don’t have to rehash.  But certain things about the past were really really nice.  And the sound of Jane Jarvis, Shea’s Queen of Melody, playing the Thomas organ was one of the nicest things I knew as I listened to her between the ages of 9 and 24.

That’s what Shea was, back in the day.  It was nice.  It wasn’t wow or whatever.  For all of its World’s Fair novelty back then, it was, by current standards, simple, rickety and low-tech.  It was like a permanent circus had come to town and that’s what Jane’s organ made it sound like.  A permanent circus.  Or a picnic.  My second favorite of all of the songs she played was a song called “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic.”  You’d know it if you heard it.  It’s an old song about Teddy Bears having a picnic while the children who are their “mommies and daddies” are off doing something else.  It’s a fun goofy song that gives an organist a real chance to show off.  Jane played it with relish.  Can you imagine a song like that being played at Citi Field for any reason?  It was a family song.  A picnic song.  A teddy bear song for the kids.

My favorite song of hers is a song that Jane composed.  It’s called “Lets Go Mets” and if things were different, it would be something you’d hear all the time at Citi Field.  I think they may have played it for the 1969 reunion.  When I was a kid I didn’t know it had a name.  It was just “Da dum da dum da dum dad um, DUM DUM DUM! (Let’s Go Mets), da dum da dum da dum da dum, DADADA DADADA DUM!”  and then on and on with the same organ-grindery curlicues and arabesques.    

How I wish that could all come back.  You see, back before there were clubs and suites, there were carnivals and picnics.  And everybody at the ballgame was a kid.  Even the grownups, for those three hours, weren’t grown up.  And when the game was over, Jane would play something nice for us to file out to, as our mommies and daddies took us home to bed.   Because we were tired little teddy bears.  Not an alienated fan base.  Not bitching and moaning pains in the asses.  Tired little teddy bears with tummies filled with cotton candy, hot dogs, and ice cream. 

When Jane died last week, I could not help but think of the fact that Karl Ehrhardt, the Sign Man, died almost exactly two years ago.  It was a similar Mets death in a similar dark winter, of someone beloved who had fallen out of our lives too long ago.  It was a death that made me wonder, what are we now?  Where are the Mets?  Where is the picnic?  What time does the circus start?  How did time go so fast?  How could it have been so long ago that these wonderful people were part of our lives?  I never knew them, of course.  I never even saw Jane with my own eyes.  And I knew nothing about the Sign Man except that he held up wonderful signs. 

But I loved these complete strangers because I loved the circus so much.  Anything that was part of the magic island of time at the ballgame was holy, and loved, and now it is painfully missed. 

Jane had to move out of her apartment a little over a year ago because a crane fell on it.  When this happened, I remember having the surreal thought that cranes were coming after her, just as cranes were tearing down Shea.  Jane dodged the wrecker’s ball.  Shea couldn’t.  So weird.

I will miss Jane, even though I haven’t heard her play in thirty years.  I hadn’t seen Karl’s signs in just about the same amount of time.  I hear her though.  I hear “Lets Go Mets.”  I can always hear it whenever I like, exactly as it really was, as I will always remember it.  And the circus and the picnic are still with me even when I sit in Citi Field, even if they are only in my mind.

I am now going to come out of hibernation, slowly but surely. I haven’t actually been hibernating, I’ve been working my butt off writing a book that has nothing to do with baseball. But now it is time to get back to baseball blogging.

I had actually been planning to get back into things by writing a “State of Our Union (With the Mets)” piece right around now. The thing is that as I read other blogs, I find that I don’t have much to add to what others are saying. Like most of our most perspicacious bloggers, I am not happy right now. I remain, as I’ve often written, perpetually unhappy with the way in which Mets ownership and management seem chronically to believe that the only things fans care about are winning and losing, and that we have no interest in such things as democratic access to batting practice, making sure that every fan feels as valued as every other, or making sure that fans have wonderful things to remember like Banner Days and Old-Timers Days. I do have hope that the Mets are going to start doing better on that score. But this is an old anger.

I can’t honestly say that I’m angry about the baseball decisions that have been made during this offseason. I am not upset about the Mets not getting any of the players they didn’t get. I am also not convinced, as many others seem to be, that players are steering clear of the Mets. There are all kinds of reasons why particular players may choose to sign with this or that other team. Being rejected by so-so players who are not worth extravagant offers is not necessarily a sign that nobody loves us. I am happy about Bay. I don’t know any more than you do about his knees. But if Bay is well, he at best replaces Delgado’s power in the lineup. That just brings us up to the level of a team that will be fortunate to win 85 games, given a starting roster of five question marks.

The situation we find ourselves in right now is delineated expertly by Greg Prince over at Faith and Fear in Flushing (Identity Issues). The team wasn’t made much better during the off-season. It’s not clear who’s in charge or why they do what they do. But it’s hard to jump on the bandwagon of despair when it’s not clear that anything was even possible that could have plausibly turned our hope into belief. We Mets fans just keep talking across the canasta table in front of the beach cabana. We’re just talking. We won’t know much until later.

Lacking belief, all we have is hope. That is not enough for fans who have been through the particularly cruel dance of dream and disaster we’ve just been through. But hey, as Greg points out without much conviction, there was 1984 and 1997. Things happen. Yeah, and planes sometimes crash.

This has all got me thinking about the history of the Mets in relation to our expectations. For your amusement, I offer a list of how I think the Mets have done in each of their seasons, in relation to the expectations most fans had of them at the beginning of the season. This list can’t be used to predict anything, since only the most recent years may tell us much about the Mets’ current hopes. But this will give you a sense of how reliably our hopes have been rewarded. To give you an idea of what I’m doing here, let me say that if the Mets were to win between 75 and 85 games in 2010, I would say they had done as well as expected. If they won between 85 and 90 games, or made it to the playoffs winning fewer than 85 games, I would say they had performed better than expected. If they won more than 90 games and/or made it at least as far as the NLCS, I would say that they had performed much better than expected. If they won between 70 and 75 games, I would say they performed worse than expected. If they won less than 70 games, I would call their season much worse than expected. You may not agree with all of my judgments, and you are encouraged to offer your input, but I am prepared to defend each of the following categorizations.

In xxxx (year) the Mets did _____

1962 – Worse than expected

1963 – As expected

1964 – As expected

1965 – As expected.

1966 – As expected

1967 – As expected

1968 – As expected

1969 – Much better than expected

1970 – Worse than expected

1971 – As expected

1972 – As expected

1973 – Better than expected

1974 – Worse than expected

1975 – As expected

1976 – As expected

1977 – Worse than expected

1978 – As expected

1979 – As expected

1980 – As expected

1981 – As expected

1982 – As expected

1983 – As expected

1984 – Much better than expected

1985 – Better than expected

1986 – Better than expected

1987 – Worse than expected

1988 – As expected

1989 – Worse than expected

1990 – As expected

1991 – Worse than expected

1992 – Worse than expected

1993 – Much worse than expected

1994 – Better than expected

1995 – As expected

1996 – Worse than expected

1997 – Much better than expected

1998 – As expected

1999 – Better than expected

2000 – As expected

2001 – Worse than expected

2002 – Worse than expected

2003 – Much worse than expected

2004 – Worse than expected

2005 – Better than expected

2006 – Much better than expected

2007 – Worse than expected

2008 – As expected

2009 – Much worse than expected

The breakdown: Much better than expected: 4 Better than expected: 6 As expected: 22 Worse than expected: 13 Much worse than expected: 3.

The Mets, overall, do what they’re expected to do about half the time. When they don’t, they are somewhat more likely to disappoint than to please us. One consolation, I suppose, is that for the past decade, the Mets have shown a real tendency to not perform as they were predicted to perform at the start of the season. The bad news is that they’ve usually been worse. The good news is that if Johan Santana, Mike Pelfrey, Oliver Perez, and John Maine perform as well as they did for large portions of the 2007 and 2008 season and if someone new comes out of the blue, the Mets could win the division and who knows what else. Is that good news? No. Is that news? No. There is no news.

*****

There may not be news, but here is a list of some of my upcoming appearances. At each, I will be talking about and reading from my new book, The Last Days of Shea: Delight and Despair in the Life of a Mets Fan. I try to vary my program, so that I do different things at each.

February 6, 11:20 am to noon – This is my time slot as a featured speaker/reader at the annual meeting of the Casey Stengel (New York City) chapter of SABR. This will be a great all-day program of interest to all NYC baseball fans. It will be held from 10:30 to 3:30 at the Mid-Manhattan Branch of the New York Public Library, 455 Fifth Avenue (at 40th Street), 6th Floor.  This is the building diagonally across from the one with the lions.  Check out the full program here.

February 9, 7 pm. Greenwich (CT) Library.

February 11, 7 pm Ridgefield (CT) Library

February 23, 7 pm Rye (NY) Library (The Rye Free Reading Room)

The holiday offer was so successful that I’m going to extend it.  Over 50 of you received personally inscribed copies of my books.  I enjoyed it because I got a chance to write extensive personal inscriptions to true blue and orange Mets fans and it really wasn’t a hassle to do the mailing.  So far none of the checks have bounced.

If you would like to have or to give an inscribed copy or copies of either Mets Fan, The Last Days of Shea, or both, please write me an e-mail at danaabrand@yahoo.com.  Tell me how many books you want, the name of the fan to whom the book should be inscribed, and tell me a little about their Mets fandom.  Also, tell me the address to which the book(s) should be sent.  I will send the personally inscribed books to you right away.  Every book will have a unique inscription.  Once I have sent the books, I will send you an e-mail indicating what you owe me and where you may send your personal check.  The cost is $15 per book (that’s a slight discount from bookstore price for The Last Days of Shea, and a significant discount for Mets Fan) plus postage.  The cost of postage is usually $2.75 (media mail) for an entire mailing of one  or two books and a little more for anything larger than two books. 

Please note:  I am about to go on a New Year’s trip to London with my family and so I won’t be mailing anything out until after January 5.   My blog, as you can tell, is on hiatus until the Mets do something worth blogging about.  Happy New Year to everyone!  Let’s hope against hope that this will be a year to remember.

I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season.  This isn’t the best time of year for baseball fans, particularly frustrated ones.  It seems to me that because there is so much at stake, Mets fans are filled with more anxiety than usual about the moves the team will make during the offseason.  All I can say is that what is true of baseball in general is particularly true of the offseason.  It ain’t over ’til it’s over.

A number of people who have not been able to attend some of my most recent readings have written to ask if it would be possible to purchase inscribed copies of my books as holiday gifts.

I am happy to do this.  If you would like to buy an inscribed copy of either The Last Days of Shea or Mets Fan for just $15 per copy (that’s a significant discount on Mets Fan) plus postage, please just send me an e-mail at danaabrand@yahoo.com.   Please indicate 1) the address to which you’d like me to send the book(s); 2)the name of the person(s) to whom you’d like the book(s)  inscribed.  Please also tell me if the person is over 21, and, if you like, anything you might want me to know about their Mets fandom.  I will send a copy right out with a personal inscription to the person you indicate.  In my return e-mail, I will tell you how much is owed, and the address to which you can send a check.

Please also check out my website for The Last Days of Shea, where I have a regularly updated list of scheduled readings.  In February and March thus far, I have appearances scheduled in Manhattan, Greenwich CT, Ridgefield CT, Rye NY, Oceanside LI, and at C.W. Post University.

“… The leaves are off the trees, the sun slips wearily along the edge of the horizon, and it is dark most of the time.  Between the end of the World Series and the arrival of pitchers and catchers at training camps in Florida, you can only think of what you don’t have.  All you can do is dream of the pleasure of warm evenings lit to a brightness beyond imagining in which titanically gifted grown men play a child’s game for your pleasure.”  from The Last Days of Shea

By now you should have read this weekend’s press release:  Mets Expand Club Presence at Citi Field

This is, of course, important news for all of us who have been waiting to see if the team was going to respond to one of the most significant reasons for fan discontent with the new stadium.  It is good news to hear that the history, heritage, and symbols of the Mets will no longer appear to have been intentionally excluded from Citi Field.

As anyone familiar with my blog and books will anticipate, I won’t thank the Mets for commemorating important figures in Mets history by naming VIP entrances after them.  The VIP entrances still stick in my craw.  I don’t care what they call them.  They can name one the M. Donald Grant VIP Entrance, another the Bernard Madoff VIP entrance, and the third the FOX News Fair and Balanced VIP Entrance for all I care.  Since I will never spend more than $100 (in 2009 money) for a ticket to a regular season baseball game, I will be forever excluded from the status of a VIP when I go to Citi Field.  I could live to be 110 and be the last person to remember the first Mets game, I could write 10 books about them, and I will not be a VIP.  I will never be anything more than a P.  

I do thank the Mets for naming the bridge by the old home run apple the Shea bridge.  That’s nice.  I am also jazzed (doesn’t take much to jazz me but it takes something) by the fact that those dreary staircases are going to be painted blue and orange and by the fact that there are going to be full-color banners and logos all over the place.  That could be wonderful and it could drown out or at least compete with all the visual noise from the ads that have grown out of the attractive little stadium like alien fungi.

The really important news, of course, is that there is going to be a Mets museum.  Not just a Hall of Fame, which we’ve been promised for a while, but a Hall of Fame and Museum.   This is crucially important.  And it is crucially important that the Mets do the museum right.

They might do it right and they might not.  Those of us who care about such things need to watch what happens carefully.  One reason I am hopeful is that Gary Cohen and Howie Rose have been put on “The Mets Hall of Fame Committee.”  If I had to choose two individuals to serve as the custodians of the history and heritage of the Mets, it would be Gary and Howie.  I trust these guys to make sure that Mets fans get something meaningful, rather than something corporate or cliched.  What has me a little worried is that although the press release refers to the “Mets Hall of Fame and Museum,” all it talks about is the Hall of Fame.    Talking about the Committee, Jeff Wilpon is quoted as saying:

“The re-formation of the Mets Hall of Fame Committee is central to our concerted efforts to better connect our present and future to our past,” said Wilpon. “It reinforces the organization’s and our fans’ shared desire to recognize our greatest players. With our 2010 opening of the Mets Hall of Fame & Museum at Citi Field, now was the time to bring this group together.”

The Mets should honor their greatest players, with information, memorabilia, sculpture, etc.  I look forward eagerly to seeing a vital Mets Hall of Fame.  But the Mets need to realize that if they just have a Hall of Fame commemorating important Mets, they will not have done enough.  A museum needs to be more than a hall of fame.  It needs to honor not only our heroes, but the experience of the millions of people, alive and dead, who have given a chunk of their lives to following the exploits of these heroes and all other kinds of players the Mets have had as well.   The Mets are not the heroes.  The Mets are the bond between the millions and the Mets, heroes and non-heroes.  This is what needs to be commemorated in the museum.  It has to tell the story not just of the Hall of Fame greatness of Seaver’s pitching and Piazza’s hitting.  It has to tell the story of the people who hung the banners and marched with them on the field on Banner Day.  It has to tell the story of the people who ran onto the field in the sixties, who knew it was spring when Bob Murphy’s voice told them it was, who stuck with the team when there was no rational reason to do so.  It has to tell people about the Curley Shuffle, Jane Jarvis, the Sign Man, and Doris from Rego Park.  It has to honor our songs and chants and apples and baseball-headed mascot.  It has to remind us or teach us about the moments that will never be forgotten:  Seaver’s almost-perfect game, Jones dropping to his knees, Tug’s September of Belief, the ball that found its way through Buckner’s legs, the Grand Slam single, Endy’s catch, the final ceremony at Shea:  the moments that took our breath away and never gave it back.  If the museum does not do this, it will not have done its work.  Citi Field will still not be able to tell us who we are or why we’re here. 

Please don’t just give us what used to be in the entrance area of the Diamond Club.  Please don’t just give us statues and trophies.  Please give us the history and the poetry of the Mets.  Please give us the sense that we’re still the New Breed, we’re still the loudest most emotional fans of all, the ones who made the Upper Deck of Shea feel like an earthquake.  Give the museum enough space.  And fill it with care, emotion, and imagination.

Please.  Mets fans deserve this.  All of us.

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Please come and hear me read from The Last Days of Shea on:

December 1 at 7 pm at the Hillside Library in New Hyde Park, LI

December 2 at 11:30 am at the Hofstra Bookstore in the Hofstra Student Center

I’d love to meet you.

For those of you who don’t want to read the long post that follows, I will tell you that the short answer to all three questions is “No.” 

The Yankees didn’t buy a championship because you can’t buy a championship.  They deserve a lot of credit for what they accomplished this season, the Steinbrenners deserve a lot of credit for their dedication to winning championships, and yet … and yet … when to get out of the house to avoid even the possibility of turning on the TV or computer to learn anything about their ticker-tape parade, I ended up going to get my hair cut and beard trimmed and found myself confined to a a barber’s chair within a few feet of a big screen TV broadcasting that parade, I felt as if I was a detainee at Guantanamo Bay.

Baseball, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, is not fair.   The success of a baseball team depends upon the actions of unelected individuals who are granted absolute control over a chunk of millions of lives by a monopolistic system masquerading as free enterprise.  It is, of course, nothing of the sort.   The main virtue of capitalism is supposed to be that it allows people to become rich by satisfying the needs of others.  In a monopoly like baseball, the unelected despots become rich without having to give any thought to the needs of the millions who root for a team. 

And I am most certainly not fair, when it comes to experiencing emotions about baseball.  I know this and I struggle with it.  To illustrate my irrationality, and my self-consciousness about it, I offer these quotations from my book, The Last Days of Shea:  Delight and Despair in the Life of a Mets Fan:

p.89:  “After reading the Mitchell Report and venting my outrage at the rotten eggs who had tried, by cheating, to alter the competitive balance of baseball, I turned my attention to the efforts of the Mets to trade for Johan Santana, a pitcher who would deserve and receive the largest contract ever offered to a pitcher.”  Note the irony directed at myself.  I have a problem with people who alter the competitive balance of baseball with an injection, but I don’t have a problem with my team altering the competitive balance of baseball with a massive amount of money?  Yes, I would have been bothered if the Yankees had signed Santana.  No, I don’t think this is consistent of me.

p.200-201  ”Isn’t it corrupt of me to love an underperforming team with one of the biggest payrolls in baseball?  Isn’t it disingenuous of me to try to pretend that the Mets still have anything to do with the colorful underdog image the New York hype machine manufactured for them back in the 1960s?     …    Whenever my analytical mind penetrates all the way to the deepest absurdities of my baseball fandom, my poetic mind pushes back and says, see, there’s something extraordinary here, because you don’t like irrational belief, and here you are irrationally believing in something.”  What you find here is a contemptuous self-consciousness about something I write about a great deal in my book.  Baseball is a place where I allow myself all sorts of primitive thrills I don’t allow myself in ANY other aspect of my life.  I believe myths I know are not true.  I feel tribal identification.  I hate people and abstractions that don’t deserve to be hated.  I become deeply attached to home turf and I scorn the home turf of others.  The only reason I can accept morally the fact that I do these things when I root for the Mets is that I am always fully aware that the myths are not true, the enemies are not enemies, and that the tribe is an arbitrary community that demands nothing from me.   In baseball, all of the emotions that have made human history so wonderful and so horrible are turned into a game where they may be enjoyed in brackets, where they don’t hurt anybody.

All of this is to say that if I want to fucking hate the Yankees, I’m going to fucking hate the Yankees. 

I understand and sympathize with the puzzlement that some articulate responders felt when they read my previous misty-mythical-Metsy blog entry about how we’re better than they are because we don’t think we’re entitled, but someday the fates will send a small shaft of light down to lift our humble misery to the heavens, and blah, blah, blah.   I can’t satisfactorily answer the astute and challenging questions posed by JD and Kiko.   They are right when they say that the Yankees are doing nothing wrong and are not in fact buying championships.  They are right that the Mets are morally no better and are mainly less competent.  They are right to point out that the owners who stiff their fans by taking a profit and not investing in their team deserve to be criticized more than the Steinbrenners.  But nevertheless I feel about the Yankees the way I feel about the Yankees.  They are the not-me and I cannot root for them.  To root for them because they are of New York, and New York is the place I identify with more than any other place in the world, would make them part of me.   And I don’t want the not-me to be part of me.  I don’t want that.  To root for the Phillies, a worthy team that is merely a rival, seemed to me to pose less of an existential threat in this last World Series.  I don’t defend this.  I have never defended it.  In my piece about how Mets fans should root for the Phillies, I made the point of comparing the Mets to Cain and the Yankees to Abel.  Unpack this.  Cain’s resentment of Abel was legitimate.  He didn’t understand why God accepted Abel’s sacrifices but rejected his own.  It wasn’t fair of God, but it was the way it was.  I’m not saying that Cain was right to hate Abel so much that he killed him.  But I am saying that when I see Alex Rodriguez riding on top of a limousine receiving cheers and cascades of shredded paper from the buildings that line the canyon of heroes, I want to kill him.

And I will stand by what I said in Yankee Hatred.  Even if no one can reliably buy a championship, winning far more than any other team because you are always extremely well-funded and generally competently run takes some of the fun out of being a baseball fan.  I congratulate sincerely Yankees fans who can identify Horace Clarke or Danny Tartabull, but I warn Yankees fans who now have too much of the heroin of winning in their system.  You may be doing nothing wrong, but a time may come when you are doing nothing fun.   If the Mets ever win anything again, it will be a miracle and it will feel like a miracle, even if they have enjoyed every advantage in the world.  Yes, we will have more fun than you are having now.

As for the question of what is to be done, all I can say is this.  I don’t want a salary cap, which isn’t possible anyway, because owners will just use it to make more money for themselves.   It is my firm belief that the only way the problem of the games unfairness could be solved is if people somehow managed to get rid of the system whereby teams are owned by families and individuals.  I don’t know enough about the law to know what we could have, but I dream of a world, which we can probably never have, in which teams might be managed, on a non-profit basis, by boards of trustees accountable to elected officials in counties within specific metropolitan areas, where ticket prices are kept low in the interest of the fan, where the money made is divided among the players according to formulas that reward performance plus intangibles as determined in a fair, agreed-upon way, and where every team has as much of a chance of winning in a particular year as any other team.   Profits make sense in a system in which there is competition.  But they are not good things in a monopoly.  I can’t help but think that it would be a good thing if baseball were re-organized in such a way that it would only benefit the fans and the players.    This utopian suggestion, of course, won’t do as a proposal for an alternative.   I really don’t know what to say. 

I am waiting until next year.  And I am wrapping myself in the blanket of my myths and my antipathies.  My baseball universe isn’t happy at the moment, but it is coherent.  I know what I want.  I want to feel good about the Mets.  I want them to win.  I want that level of baseball excitement that I have only felt just a few times, that is so rare, so perfect, and so memorable that just a tiny amount gives the soul the sustenance it needs to hope, dream, and suffer through decades.

*******

Check out this recent interview with me, about my book and the World Series, with Frankie the Sports Guy on WGBB 1240 AM.

Come see me talk about and read from my book on at 7:30 on Tuesday, November 10 at the South Huntington (LI) Public Library.

Or come see me talk about and read from my book at 7:30 on Tuesday, November 17 at the Teaneck (NJ) Public Library.

And please check out Michael Kimmelman’s article “At the Bad New Ballparks” in the current issue of the New York Review of Books which features The Last Days of Shea.