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Zach Lowe, Grantland's NBA writer, writes a touching piece on how he couldn't have been a bigger Mets fan, but once he lost the handle, he just couldn't get it back.
I remember the exact moment my Mets fandom crested: September 16, 1998, when Todd Hundley cranked a pinch-hit solo homer to put the Mets up 4-3 in the 11th inning in Houston. Turk Wendell, that rosin-tossing freak show with the lethal slider, blanked the Astros in the bottom half to clinch the win. The Mets were 86-68, just a half-game behind Chicago in the wild-card race.
I sprinted upstairs, busted into my parents’ bedroom without knocking — what in the world was I thinking? — and announced, breathlessly, that the Mets had won on a Hundley homer. I had been watching the game 45 minutes earlier with my dad when Mike Piazza, the long-lost superstar New York had acquired in the middle of that season, came up with two on and two out in the ninth and the Mets trailing 2-0. I was shaking on the couch. I felt the home run coming in my bones. I told my dad. He laughed at me.
Piazza smashed a laser-beam line drive over the right-field wall to put New York up 3-2. Hundley winning the game two innings later was poetic. He was the incumbent All-Star catcher; Piazza had displaced him. I owned an official Hundley jersey. He was the team’s best player as the Mets crept up from mediocrity starting in 1997. I had already bought a Piazza batting practice jersey, but I wouldn’t spring for the real thing, because in my head, that would have been disrespectful to Hundley’s tenured status. The Mets had tried to play Hundley in the outfield, but it wasn’t working. I couldn’t say it out loud, but I knew on that night that Hundley was done as a Met — that the game-winning homer might be his last great moment in New York.
I loved Hundley. The Lowes were a baseball (and basketball) family. My parents would get why I had to wake them up and tell them what Hundley had done. They were still awake, and demanded the details.
The Mets won games that were more important, and did so in more thrilling fashion, the next year, when they advanced to the National League Championship Series, and then in 2000, when they lost to the hateful Yankees in the Subway Series. But every fan gets amped for playoff games. The pure joy I felt over a regular-season game, a joy that still courses through my body as I close my eyes and recall sprinting around the house, is something more special. It is representative of how much that team, and that particular group of players, meant to me.
And it’s all gone, and has been for years. The Mets are doing the very thing I lived 25 years hoping they’d do, and it is absolutely killing me inside. Never let your passions die. |
Sort of in that realm, if not as touching, Jeff Katz, Mayor of Cooperstown and author of Split Season, says he can't quite get it going again for his childhood team.
| In June 1977 I watched in horror as the Mets sent Seaver to the Reds and I realized at that moment that I loved Tom Seaver more than I loved the Mets. It became clear to me that the game was the players, not the owners, not the team names, not the stadiums. It was a minor epiphany, a liberating one which allowed me to enjoy the game itself without the drag of rabid, team-centric, interest. [...] Once that bond was broken, that deeply felt emotional tie, it couldn’t be repaired, it couldn’t be reclaimed. I came out of a spell. Do I wish the Mets ill? Nah. Do I wish them well? Sure, for whatever that’s worth. I simply have no feelings about them. |
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