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Michael Powell in the Times with as devastatingly accurate a portrait of what life is like at Citi Field in September 2012 as one could ever hope/dread to read/imagine.
(Pictures pretty telling, too.)
It is with no traditional autumnal sense of baseball anticipation that my son Nick and I ride the rumbling 7 train to Citi Field for a couple of games with the hated Phillies. We are father-and-son rubber-neckers drawn to the spectacular car wreck that is our team.
We step through the turnstiles to find 22 ticket scalpers, lost souls all, clustering around us.
I’ll give ya two $125 tickets for $70 apiece, one offers.
I counter with $15.
The scalper flashes a pained look. “I’m dying here.”
“Aren’t we all?” I reply.
We settle on $250 worth of tickets for $50.
At the stadium doors, a bored guard pats us down without touching us. The ticket taker shrugs and points at the scanner. Scan yourself, he says.
We walk in, a beaut of a stadium with fans scattered in so many nomadic clumps amid acres of green seats. We catch a dog and a brew and take a seat, any seat, really. Not for the first time in my lifetime of Mets rooting I wonder:
What have we gotten ourselves into?
Our left fielder, Jason Bay, steps to the plate. He was once a top slugger. That was a millennium ago. Now he’s batting .156, with 7 home runs and 18 runs batted in, a figure most left-field sluggers reach in early May. We are no longer in early May.
He hits a Nerf-ball of a pop fly that the right fielder shags.
Bay is one of three starters this September evening with batting averages under .200. In fact, our pitcher, R. A. Dickey, the 37-year-old knuckleballer, currently is outhitting Bay.
To be a Mets fan this September, as in so many others, is to be a gourmand of loss.
Some nights the losses taste like chewing on a Blue Smoke pulled pork sandwich laced with LSD — a 16-1 Thursday blowout featured six straight Phillie hits to open the game. Other nights, the steady drip of 2-1, 4-0, 3-2, 2-0 losses offers weirdly blissed-out exercises in lotus eating.
Tug on a Bud, munch on a chicken quesadilla and que sera sera.
Mets fans often frame our loyalty in terms a medieval monk would understand. Perseverance; suffering; pain: all good. I wander through a desert of empty left-field seats, sidle in next to Basher Najjar, 31, and pop the existential question:
Why remain a Mets fan?
He looks at me, shrugs, smiles. He came to the Mets in as random a fashion as fate could contrive — his father told him he could root for the first team he saw on television and he turned to Channel 5, 7, then 9.
He saw catcher Mackey Sasser, a not-so-great catcher who in a very Met-like manner later forgot how to throw a ball back to the pitcher.
Najjar was hooked for life.
Like so many Mets fans here at the rump end of a burnt-down season, he waxes philosophic.
“It’s all about loyalty and knowing what it means to lose,” he says. “We’re not like the Yankees; the expectation to win a championship isn’t always there. If you win 26, you just get greedy.”
Ruben Tejada, our shortstop, steps to the plate. He’s a soft-bodied, sweet-fielding kid who is hitting .286, an average made up almost entirely of little tear-drop singles to all fields. He replaced Jose Reyes, our rangy and powerful All-Star shortstop whom the Mets, in their infinite wisdom, chose to let walk away without first trying to trade him.
Tejada hits a lifeless fly to right.
Najjar watches and sighs. “Too many more seasons like this, I think, would be excruciating.”
I entered this Mets season, let it be said, shorn of illusion. We had a chance to be prosaically bad. But I figured if everything went wrong, if the Wilpons continued to turn their pockets inside-out and act like millionaire paupers, if General Manager Sandy Alderson continued to let prime talent just walk away, if our off-season acquisitions consisted of aging men desperate for one more major league paycheck — we had a genuine shot to be historically bad.
My sons, younger and thankfully less infected with my cynicism, saw hope. Mike Pelfrey might harness his nasty sinker, Jon Niese might command his fastball, Bay might recover his stroke and Lucas Duda might stroke homer after homer deep into the periwinkle skies over Flushing Bay.
Damned if by midseason, my sons’ bet didn’t look good. I predictably went weak in the knees, mumbling about 80, even 85 wins, maybe Duda hits 30 homers, maybe a wild-card playoff spot beckons. We made plans to take in a game or three.
At which point the Mets promptly and profoundly collapsed. This was not subtle. Roofs fell in, floors fell away. And now here we are in September.
What’s our choice? To root for the triumphalist Yankees is to describe an impossibility, like walking through Manhattan chanting: “Goldman Sachs! Goldman Sachs!” Instead, we adopt the mien of Scottish highlanders facing the English army — loss is assured, but let’s go out with panache and a touch of humor.
As it happens, this night and the next one, the Mets pitchers offer a glimmer of hope. Dickey’s pitches come out of his hand fluttering and dipping like drunken butterflies.
If only someone on our team could hit.
We walk upstairs to the mezzanine. There’s a Nathan’s Hot Dog stand with the green metal gate pulled tight, and a horseshoe bar with all the taps turned off.
A season beyond drink is lost beyond calculation.
Two stadium security guys are watching the Monday night football game on the overhead television. They jerk their thumbs toward another set of stairs.
“You think this is bad? Check upstairs.”
So we trudge upstairs to the top ring of Wilpon hell, the promenade. I came here that first year the stadium opened in 2009, stood in the long lines for Box Frites and the tacos at Mama’s of Corona. It was joyous, even if the Mets had in fact collapsed the previous two years and, in 2009, would implode utterly. (I’m realizing the good news part of this narrative is lacking).
Now the promenade is Tombstone, Ariz., come to Flushing Bay. Mama must be home sleeping in Corona, because her place is shuttered. As is Box Frites, as is Blue Smoke, as is the fried-dough joint.
I walk across the empty and windswept plaza and talk to a voluble young man working for one of the few open vendors. “Slow? The game of baseball is slow enough, and then you work here,” he says. “I’m a sports fan, but this is really depressing and I really don’t mind telling you that.”
He’s warming to his subject. As with most New Yorkers, it’s as if he has waited all his life to give a quote. “Every year, this beautiful stadium, it’s like the same movie: We’re on the Titanic and you know we’re going to hit that iceberg.”
We wander downstairs and find a grooved-out box-seat usher who is dancing and shimmying, although she has no headset and nothing is playing on the loudspeaker. Whatever. We slip by her and take our pick of 100 empty seats behind the first-base dugout.
We’re just in time to watch the manager pull Dickey for a pinch-hitter. His chances of winning 20 games officially are on life support; you want to page Manager Terry Collins and point out that Dickey has a better chance to get a hit than any of the Ghandian hitters on the Mets’ bench.
The how and why of my Mets fandom is about bloodlines. My father was a Boston Braves fan, and he and my mother adopted the National League’s New York Giants when they moved here in the early 1950s. The Giants left, the Mets took birth.
I passed these loyalties on to my sons, God help them.
The “Game of Thrones” theme song starts throbbing on the loudspeaker and my son Nick starts hooting. What up, dude?
“I’m the president and C.E.O. of the Mike Nickeas fan club and he’s at bat,” he tells me. My son’s excitement qualifies as disturbing, and I blame myself. When you raise boys in such sporting conditions — Mets, Jets, Knicks — you risk incalculable harm, not the least that they’ll end up hooting on a chill September night for a fourth-string catcher hitting .175.
Nickeas does not get a hit.
“I have a lot of faith in the Wilpons,” Commissioner Bud Selig told Newsday’s Marc Carig on Wednesday. “I have a lot of faith in Sandy Alderson.” He went on: “I’m very confident about the Mets. Very confident.”
The Mets have, after a fashion, constructed a very 21st-century New York team. Crony capitalism by Flushing Bay, with Selig in the role of crony enabler. As Bob Murphy, the departed Mets play-by-play man might say, here’s the sad recap: The Wilpons entrusted massive piles of their boodle to Bernie Madoff, a great guy they would have trusted with their lives. Some of that money vaporizes and a lot of people eye the Wilpons suspiciously.
Now the Wilpons, who wear sweaters and expensive sunglasses that sometimes remind me of Bebe Rebozo, claim they no longer have enough money to sign their own free agents, much less dangle a reasonable offer to a semi-reasonable player from another team. They could sell the team of course, as this is New York and there are approximately 1,789 hedge funders who would view owning the Mets as better than Viagra.
But Selig insists that all is well with his friends the Wilpons and refuses to pressure them. Of late, management has crafted a fascinating sub-specialty in running down its players. Last year, Fred Wilpon gave an interview to The New Yorker and mocked David Wright, the team’s putative star. Then unnamed somebodies ran down Reyes, suggesting the shortstop could not play in pain after he had played in a lot of pain. They pulled the same kidney punch on Carlos Beltran, the slugging center fielder.
This past week some unnamed somebody even ran down Ike Davis, the sweet-fielding, power-hitting hope of the Mets. He happens also to be Jewish, which in New York is like hitting the daily double. He could be gone next year.
With all of this in mind, two nights later, we watch Daniel Murphy — one of the Mets’ keepers — start back on a fly ball. He goes back, and back, and back, until the fly ball almost hits him on the back before plopping to the ground. No one boos. Murphy is like that overeager kid you’ve known since first grade; he just does that sort of thing.
The next batter hits a grounder, giving Murphy a shot at redemption. Tejada shovels to Murphy, who pivots and ... releases the ball from somewhere behind his right ear, soaring a good couple feet over the top of Davis’s outstretched glove hand.
Murphy shuffles back into position, head down. I motion to a vendor: Could I have another Bud Light?
“Excuse me.”
A big guy in a Jimmy Rollins Phillies jersey leans over toward us. Keith Collins is a Phillies fan, and in a real competitive ballpark, he might take some mild abuse for being decked out in Phillies red. Not here.
“Explain this to me,” he asks, almost earnestly. “I used to hate this team when they were good. How could they be so bad?”
Look, I can’t talk, we got to go.
I just counted the upper deck, from the left-field foul pole to the end, thousands of seats, and I figured 108 fans, give or take one or two. I spotted three sitting as far from home plate as is possible while remaining in New York. We walk up there.
Why? I say to the three fans, Tim Greene, his sister Eileen and Steve Fornatale.
“Greatest seats in house, view of field and of the bay, and the beer guy even came up here for us,” Fornatale says. “We thought we’d have to send up smoke signals to get one.”
You ever rethink your loyalties? I know the answer by now; they’re helpless.
“I started up in the early 1980s, right after the Mets got Mookie,” says Tim Greene. “Then they got the Kid, and Hernandez and Dwight, and we were really good.”
“Yeah, for a week at least,” adds a friend.
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for America’s No. 1 mascot: Mr. Met!
Only the happy talk makes me feel as if I’m going to lose my mind. The sense of inhabiting a lunatic asylum with like-minded lunatics, most of them sweet-tempered, is fine. I grew up here in the horrible, very bad losing days of the 1970s and the early 1980s, sitting high and high in general admission seats. By the seventh inning, Shea Stadium often acquired a nice glow.
But the magic facts drive you slightly nuts. The baritone stadium announcer gives the “official” attendance figure, which is some obvious cubed multiple of reality. Let’s say 21,000 when there are perhaps 3,400 of us, counting the ushers and grounds crew.
It’s the nightly late-game fantasy, and it occasions a sort of stadium-wide chuckle.
On Wednesday night, it feels a little different, at least for a while. Pitcher Matt Harvey, the oh so intense young stud, tosses BBs and offers genuine hope for the future. (I’m a Mets fan; please at least humor me.)
This time, I walk into the box seats behind third base, and find Sean Emery of Windsor Terrace and Alan Yau of Jackson Heights. They are true, chattering, knowledgeable and lifelong Mets fans. They know their OBP from their OPS.
And the Mets are coming on. Two-hitting the Phillies until the ninth. Now manager Collins has brought in Josh Edgin, a big stocky left-handed relief pitcher with a heavy fastball. He puts down one, another, and then up comes Chase Utley, the Phillies’ second baseman.
“Edgin, man, I really like this guy, really,” says Yau.
“He could be our closer next year,” says Emery.
I’m there with them: how many nights, how many kids with big upsides in the dying days of another lost season, have given me hope? Absolutely, I like Edgin, I tell them. And I do. Utley walks.
Ryan Howard steps to the plate. Edgin stares in, fearless, and hums a 93-mile-per-hour fastball. Howard, a massive man, unleashes his swing. Yau and Emery moan. Maybe I do, too.
For just a moment I think: Do I root for the Mets, or do I root for my story’s losing narrative? Howard makes the question moot.
The narrative lands high and deep in the right-field stands. |
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