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Our favorite mascot gets a nice write-up in The New York Times today:
Mr. Met Keeps His Head Up
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
You know Mr. Met. Enormous baseball for a head and four fingers on each hand. An eternal smile and black eyebrows set at optimistic angles. Blue Mets cap perched on his head like a yarmulke.
Mr. Met, the red-stitched Übermensch born without a first name, has experienced so much as the giant head of the Mets: good years, but many bad ones, World Series celebrations and late-season collapses. Jose Reyes but Vince Coleman. Tom Seaver but Aaron Heilman. Gil Hodges but Art Howe.
Imagine, then, Mr. Met as Sisyphus, muscling his head up the steep hill of tough Mets history. That’s his life and his plight.
And in that, he is in 2012, perhaps more perfectly than ever, a symbol of the club. The Mets have stunk on the field. The club’s owners have been accused of benefiting unjustly from one of history’s great frauds. The franchise’s finances — with a world of debt, a slashed payroll, ever-shrinking attendance — are imperiled. Even its new $1 billion stadium has been deemed a flawed structure that hurt the team it was built to showcase.
Mr. Met, then, can be seen as the one blameless figure in Flushing. Mr. Met doesn’t give up five runs in four innings. He doesn’t lose fly balls in the sun. He hasn’t lost his home run stroke. He didn’t throw in his finances with Bernard L. Madoff. He didn’t design Citi Field.
He is, in his way, harmlessly pure. And as a result, arguably more popular than ever.
“As a performer, as I was, you’re a reflection of your fan base,” said Dave Raymond, the first Phillie Phanatic, who now develops mascots for professional and college teams. “Fans love Mr. Met because he’s very protective of them. Even when he’s used to poke fun at the Mets, you smile.”
So, perhaps not surprisingly, Mr. Met has been asked to pitch in to address the club’s issues off the field. The owners, who have spent the last five months seeking 10 or so minority investors to raise desperately needed cash, put together a list of perks that would be available to those willing to pony up $20 million. Access to Mr. Met at Citi Field was one of them.
Mr. Met, then, might be more than a symbol. Maybe he will be the club’s savior.
“Just the fact that something like that could be included in the perks suggests significant value is there that goes beyond money and speaks to what he represents,” said Howie Rose, one of the Mets’ radio voices.
But a former Mr. Met counseled some reason as he assessed the mascot’s importance to investors.
“Heavy as his head is, I don’t think it’ll tip the scales,” said A. J. Mass, who danced, hugged the kiddies and sweated through his costume (a spherical ecosystem that he says is 40 degrees hotter than outside) from 1994 to ’97.
Maybe. But Mr. Met’s appeal has followed him outside his two home ballparks. He has been in “SportsCenter” ads on ESPN, and he has starred in commercials over the last few years for Xerox (he illegibly writes a brochure with his fat digits); Citi (he cheers on bored workers from outside the glass wall of a conference room); Pepsi Max (he applauds the delivery of the soda along with Hall of Famers in a “Field of Dreams” parody), and Sony PlayStation (he picks up his Mets uniform at a dry cleaner).
Mr. Met’s Internet archive includes: a video of him at Punit and Pooja’s 2007 wedding; a mock movie trailer (“In a world where sports rule/One mascot defied the ballparks/And dared to entertain”), and a minicartoon in which he lays waste to Citi Field. Conan O’Brien has used Mr. Met as a comic foil, once depicting the Phanatic in bed with Mrs. Met and another time showing the Phanatic finishing off a suicidal Mr. Met.
A news report on the Web site Funny or Die detailed how Mr. Met leapt to his death from a four-story building in Flushing and left behind a legible suicide note.
The Mets maintain a “no comment” position about Mr. Met, apparently to maintain an aura about his life. They refused last week to discuss the precise size of his head or what it is made of; how many people have played him; or details of his endorsement work. A spokesman for Mr. Met declined to comment other than to say, “Mr. Met never speaks.”
Jay Horwitz, the team’s vice president for public relations, seemed willing to publicly settle one matter. “I am not Mr. Met,” he said.
Mr. Met, history will show, was actually the Mets’ second mascot. Homer the beagle was the first. Trained by Rudd Weatherwax, who put multiple Lassies through their paces, Homer rooted on the Mets in 1962, their first season. Manager Casey Stengel hated him and refused to let the beagle sit on the Mets’ bench.
Homer was supposed to celebrate a Mets home run by running the bases at the Polo Grounds. According to Roger Angell’s book “Game Time,” Homer performed well in rehearsals, but in his first real test he touched first base and second, then took a detour and raced to center field. He had to be wrangled by “three fielders, two ushers and the handler,” according to the book.
Homer was fired.
Mr. Met, the human version, arrived at Shea Stadium in 1964, after being depicted in caricature form on Mets publications the season before. Dan Reilly, a member of the team’s ticket staff, was the first Mr. Met; he wore the unventilated papier-mâché head for the first time between games of a May doubleheader.
“I shook hands, posed for pictures, signed autographs,” Reilly told a blog called the Amazing Shea Stadium Autograph Project. “After that, I got cocky and started dancing. It was an instant hit. Back then, the fans might not have recognized the players, but they recognized Mr. Met.”
Reilly served as Mr. Met through 1967 and worked for the Mets for six more years; in 2007 he published his memoir, “The Original Mr. Met Remembers: When the Miracle Began.”
The Mets’ stubborn omertà regarding Mr. Met preserves the mystery surrounding his strange hiatus for at least 15 years beginning in the 1970s. A search of public records shows no rationale for his benching.
“There was a deep, deep void without him,” Rose said.
But in 1979, during a last-place season for the Mets that attracted only 788,905 fans, a new mascot appeared at Shea: Mettle the mule, whose job was to stride up and down the foul lines before games.
Mr. Met languished in mascot limbo until 1994, when he returned as part of the theme park developed by Nickelodeon and the Mets beyond the outfield walls of Shea Stadium.
After auditioning, Mass became the reincarnated Mr. Met, wearing a giant polyurethane-and-felt head equipped with louvers and a tongue that shot out. The lugubrious puppet head was replaced by a more appropriate mascot noggin in 1996 that allowed Mass to interact better with fans.
“My take on his personality was that Mr. Met liked music, he liked to dance, even though I don’t dance at all,” he said. “In the suit, he’s happy, optimistic and a dancer.”
He recalled that Mr. Met was such an allure to young fans “that they’d go sprinting down the ramps to hug me if they saw me at the loge level.”
The personalities of the Mets’ owners then, Nelson Doubleday and Fred Wilpon, became clear to him.
“Doubleday would bring his grandkids and say to me, ‘Come here, come here,’ and he wanted me to play with his grandkids,” said Mass, now a writer about fantasy sports for ESPN.com. “If Wilpon was coming toward me, he’d talk to me like an employee. Very serious. ‘Now, Mr. Met, how are you?’ ”
Mass said that 20 minutes inside the Mr. Met head physically taxed him; on a hot day he lost 15 or 20 pounds off his 140-pound frame. He dressed and relaxed in the Jets’ locker room. He had grown up a Mets fan in Flushing and walked to work. By the seventh-inning stretch, he could leave.
“But I’m a fan and stayed till the end,” he said. “Why would Mr. Met not be visible in a close game?”
Mass, the author of “How Fantasy Sports Explains the World,” is now writing his own Mr. Met memoir.
As a Met longer than virtually anyone else but Ralph Kiner, Mr. Met is seemingly too big to bench again — and he remains a bright spot for his employers in difficult times. He was inducted into the Mascot Hall of Fame in 2007 and was voted the No. 1 sports mascot of 2009 in a survey by Forbes magazine.
“I am in awe of him,” Rose said. “He’s the anti-Bobby Bonilla. You can’t take the smile off his face.” |
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