My Mets: It’s a Crazy Kind of Love

Well it’s another late September and while the weather is still a bit warm, there’s that Autumn crispness to the mornings and evenings. If you’re a Met fan it usually means you begin to turn your sports allegiance toward your football, hockey or basketball team.

For me it always has a twinge of melancholy as it signifies the end of another season of hope. Being a Met fan you are probably well accustomed to this feeling, as it often can come in July or August with a third of the season still remaining.

This year however, as on the rare occasion, they kept us hooked and hoping late into September. They faked us out in July falling 11 games under .500 around the All-Star break leading me to look for the Jets pre-season schedule(what a mistake that was). This was a different Met team. A team comprised of young, talented and unjaded players. Every time you thought the fork was going in, they managed to escape and get on a winning roll.

Even after one of the most horrific late inning collapses I have ever witnessed in blowing a six run lead in the bottom of the 9th to the Nationals, they still came back and stayed in the play-off race.

Bottom line is I like these guys. I love this team. I hope this is a core they keep for at least a few years. From Alonso and Davis to McNeil and Conforto and sprinkle in deGrom, this team was and is fun to watch.

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Speaking of watching. For the last 21 years of doing early morning TV Monday through Friday, I rarely saw the end of night games. I would often go to bed with the Mets in the lead after 5 innings and wake up to find out they lost. I would suffer along on the hour drive into the city at 3AM with Met fans calling into Joe Benigno on WFAN. In a strange way it was comforting being surrounded by all that Met misery.

In general, being a Met fan is like waiting on a miracle. They do happen, but very rarely. If you look at the Met teams that have made it to the play-offs and beyond it is often unexpected. Let’s start with 1969. The Amazing Mets! I was 8 years old and had only been a fan for a little over a year and my team unexpectedly wins the World Series. Of course it was 1969, a year that historians and many will look back on one day to see just what was going on in the universe to make so many incredible unprecedented things happen in one year. That was followed by 1973 and a late run in September from next to last to first place finishing with a record of 82-79. They blew out the Big Red Machine and almost took out the A’s, but Yogi pitched Seaver on three days rest to try and end the series in 6 games. You can tell I still haven’t totally healed over that one.

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From there it was the toughest years to be a Met fan. The team was disassembled. The Franchise, Tom Terrific was traded. The years from 1974-82 were brutal to be a Met fan. At the same time the Yankees were building a mini dynasty.

Then came 1983. In midseason the Mets picked up Keith Hernandez and Darryl Strawberry arrived from the minors. In 1984 it was Dwight Gooden coming up and by 1985 we added Gary Carter. With Davey Johnson at the helm we finally had another World Championship 17 years later in 1986. While I was not at game 6, the Buckner Blunder game, I was there to see them win it in game 7. Might be my first and last time to see a Met World Championship in person. Then again…..these are the Mets Im talking about here.

Of course this team which won 106 games in 1986 never repeated. I remember meeting Keith Hernandez years later on the show and I was talking with him in the green room. I thanked him as a Met fan for bringing a world championship back to Flushing. I said it was such a great time in my life as I was newly married and surrounded by all of my childhood Met fan friends and that the season was one big party. Keith smirked and said ” yes, we should have won more championships, but some of us partied too much as well.”

We then waited until the late 90s to get back into the play-offs leading to my first Subway Series experience in 2000. We know how that went. I’ve still not totally forgiven Timo Perez for showboating a homerun that wasn’t. Anyway, the bad guys won. I was also at the final game of that World Series, but left as soon as the ball was in Bernie’s glove in centerfield for the final out. I was not about to watch the “evil empire’s team” celebrate on my turf.

There were many other special, emotional moments I’ve had with this team. I was at Shea the first game back after 9-11. When Piazza crushed that homerun I’ve never felt that stadium erupt with so much emotion. I remember just grabbing strangers around us and hugging and jumping up and down on the verge of tears. It was a bigger moment than being there in 1986 for the championship.

Finally I have to thank them again for comforting and distracting me in 2015 with another miracle run into the World Series. That was the summer I was dealing with my wife battling for her life after her bone marrow transplant. I remember that whole Wilmer Flores trade/no-trade ordeal. Then the sweep of the Nationals.

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I was with my daughter in my apartment in NYC and we had just come back from the hospital. The final game of that series with the Nats was a Sunday night game. If memory serves me they hit back to back to back homeruns. I sat there and just started to cry. My daughter looked at me with this puzzled expression. I told her she wouldn’t understand, but somewhere in my twisted wiring as a Met fan, I believed this was happening to ease my personal pain and give me a moment of joy. I still believe that today. I think they kept this summer interesting for me as I was dealing with the end of my job at WNBC. I will now make my therapy appointment.

It’s all good in the end. The season is over Sunday for the Mets and I grudgingly wish all the best to the fans of that team in the Bronx as they move into the play-offs. In another 4.5 months pitchers and catchers will be reporting and thoughts of a new beginning, new hope, maybe some new miracles will be stirred again.

To me, baseball parallels life better than any other sport. There’s no clock. In life we never quite no how much time we have. The best things in a ball game or in life can happen in the beginning, the middle, or the end. There are times in our life we make mistakes, like errors on a baseball field. We, like that player, usually get the chance to redeem ourselves later in the game. My list goes on and on, but I think this blog has as well. So I will sign off with my usual.

If you’ve gotten this far I thank you for reading. Sunshine always.