No, this will not fix the economy, or get Iran to stop pursuing nuclear weapons, or make healthcare any more affordable, or even bring my favorite baseball team any closer to that long-awaited World Series championship that still only exists in my imagination.
But it's a big deal, particularly for a franchise so comically snake-bitten as the Mets.
Regular visitors to this blog know that Stephen and I occasionally use this space to write about sports, as we did recently in considering the subject of ads on American jerseys, and as I felt compelled to after the Giants' thrilling Super Bowl victory. In my statements on the latter, especially, I tried to place my raw euphoria over the game within the broader context of what it feels like to go through life as a sports fan. The day after your team wins America's most watched sporting event is different when it's also the team you've followed since you were five years old.
On its own, this would be a rather token observation. But it's not just the time you put in. It's what you end up getting for it in the end, and why you're okay with that ultimately being very little.
Let's be clear: when it comes to emotional peaks and valleys, being a sports fan is a terrible deal. Even if you root for the best team in any given sport, over the course of your lifetime, you will be disappointed at the end of almost every season. You will see your team screw up more times than it succeeds. They will break your heart frequently, and tease you three times for every time they satisfy you once, starting from the moment you initially make the ill-fated decision to base your personal happiness on the trials and tribulations of a bunch of guys playing a game. It's the sports fan's paradox, but it's really quite simple, and the fate of a multi-billion dollar enterprise depends on it: if more people were less willing to put themselves through such an abusive relationship with their number one choice of entertainment, professional sports would NOT be one of the biggest industries in America.
Few teams exemplify this paradox better than the New York Mets, my first and only favorite team of all. All Mets fans are heirs to a special history, ever since the team began its existence in 1962 by posting the worst record ever - a mark of 42-120 that still hasn't been "beaten." They earned the nickname "Amazin' Mets" that year because their first manager, Casey Stengel, who won several championships with the Yankees before doing New York's newest baseball franchise a favor, remarked that the team was "so amazin' bad."
The Mets legacy in the intervening years has largely stemmed from the precedent set during that first one. In my 20 years as a fan, the aforementioned Yankees have more World Series championships (5) than the Mets have playoff appearances (3). One of those World Series championships and one of those playoff appearances came in the same year. I'll let you guess who came out on top.
But that's only the 40,000 foot view. For a better sense of just how messed up it was to be a Mets fan going into 2012, one need simply take a close view at the last six years, when in successive seasons the team:
- Had their best player strike out to end Game 7 of the League Championship Series, during a season where the team finished with the best regular season record in baseball (2006);
- Came back the following year to produce what was then the worse collapse in baseball history, losing a 7 game lead in their division with just 17 games to play (2007);
- Lost a lead late in the season for a second year in a row, then watched the hated Philadelphia Phillies go on to win it all (2008);
- Had it revealed that the team invested and lost millions with convicted Wall Street con artist Bernie Madoff (2009);
- Lost their star pitcher to a career-threatening shoulder injury (2010);
- Failed to resign their best position player because the team was short on money due to the aforementioned loss of millions to Bernie Madoff (2011) and;
- Dealt with a general sense of malaise surrounding the team, countless injuries to key players, bad PR, declining fan interest, attendance, and involvement, and the jokes of everyone from fellow baseball fans to casual passers-by (2009-2012).
In baseball, the quintessential team sport, the no-hitter is second only to the perfect game in its demonstration of pure individual achievement. It's hard enough to pitch nine innings and prevent the opposition from scoring, but no hits? It sounds almost unreasonable.
And yet, it still happens with startling regularity. There has been at least one no-hitter in every season (for a total of 14) since 2005. In 2011, there were three; in 2010, six. In the Mets' fifty year history before Friday night? None.
Given the franchise's historic futility, this might not seem surprising, but only until one considers that Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Dwight Gooden and Nolan Ryan all wore Mets uniforms at some point. Three of those four pitchers threw a no-hitter in their career, but only after leaving the Mets. Ryan pitched seven. Gooden threw his with the Yankees, and only after he ruined his Mets career by becoming addicted to cocaine. Then, about a month ago, Phil Humber, a former top Mets prospect written off as a bust and traded four years ago, threw a perfect game.
Until it finally happened on Friday, the no-hitter thing had almost become sort of funny, which was most galling. Like in a "we've existed the longest of any team that hasn't done this before, and it's clearly ridiculous but given the rest of our history you'd sort of expect it" kind of way. The whole thing had sort of faded to the back burner, something that would happen whenever the time was right and no sooner (if at all). Literally, any night could have been the night, or not.
Full disclosure: I didn't see a minute of the game itself. I was at my girlfriend's house, which has no sports channels (!), and I only found out after getting a text from my roommate after the final out had been recorded. I spent a few minutes brooding but then thought about the bigger picture and realized it might make more sense this way. If the Mets were in the World Series, everyone would know, and I would be sure not to miss a single pitch. But something as unique as a no-hitter can happen during any one of the 162 games every year. For the Mets, it just happened to occur on some idle Friday in June, in an out-of-market game that I wouldn't have been able to watch even had I been near a TV with a better baseball lineup.
It says something about fanhood that this was the best thing to happen since I started rooting for the New York Mets, and I missed it. Surely I wasn't the only committed fan who didn't see Johan Santana's historic effort, and thank goodness for internet replays. But this is one of those rare moments when watching the game is far from the most important thing. The Mets' first no-hitter isn't special because I got to see it, or because anyone else did (Citi Field, where the Mets play, was only about 2/3 full on Friday). It's special because it happened in the first place, and there's a history here. Upon hearing the news Friday, having just watched the game or not, I felt a similar feeling to Mets fans everywhere: for all of the crap we've endured... if this is finally possible, what isn't?
When I wrote about the Giants back in February, I wanted to capture how my sense of euphoria on Super Bowl Monday was best reflected not in the final result from the night before but in the journey it took to get there. Indeed, Johan Santana's no-hitter isn't special just because now Mets fans finally get to say we have one too; it's special because of everything it took to get here, from all the years of futility and bad luck to Santana's own personal journey back from the shoulder surgery that sidelined him for all of last year.
The last time the Mets went to the World Series, in 2000, I was 12 years old and my mom told a family friend that I "lived and died" with the Mets. That family friend, no fan of baseball generally but apparently a savvy consumer of New York sports culture, quipped to me in response, "you've done a lot more dying than living." The Mets went on to lose to the Yankees in five games in the World Series that year, and that season, for all its hopes and dreams, ultimately become just another in a long line of Mets disappointments. If the other adults in my life had raised my hopes as many times as my favorite baseball team did growing up, only to disappoint every time, I'd probably be doing years of therapy. Fortunately, while it may not always seem that way, this is only baseball at the end of the day and we learn to get over these things. But we don't forget them, nor should we.
Which is why it's important that in my history as a Mets fan, and in the histories of Mets fans everywhere who have been alive long enough to appreciate why our team's no-hitter drought mattered, Friday night was a night for living. Hopefully, somewhere, in the aftermath of one of its greatest successes, this franchise has a few more of those nights up its sleeve.
No comments:
Post a Comment