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          LISTENING TO  MIKE AND THE
               MAD DOG AS A METS FAN

     Let me say first that I like to listen to Mike and the Mad Dog.  I enjoy the
predictability and unpredictability of their show.  There is always something new in
sports and they talk about it and their callers call in about it and no one ever says
anything that really surprises you.  People play roles and fall into groups:  those who
think we ought to bench this player or trade for that player or sign this free agent,
those who disagree, those who are in between, those who used to think one thing and
now think another.  There are the regular callers, obscure people who relish their
stardom.  There are the first-time (callers) long-time (listeners), obscure people with
whom you identify, giddy with their long-anticipated moment.  And in the middle of it
all, there are Mike and Chris, like brothers, the bratty brother and the one who is
supposed to be more responsible, with their half-real, half-cartoon personalities; half-
adult, half-kid; talking with managers, players, and fans, living the fantasy of a
million listeners driving home from jobs that are nowhere near as compelling as
theirs.  As in most families and groups of friends, the fun is just in the talk, sharing
the experience of following something you can't control.  When you get into the
rhythm of a radio show like this, you marvel at the waste of your time, but you enjoy
the relaxing sense of being locked into something that is lively and familiar.  I like
this.  I know where I am when I listen to Mike and the Mad Dog.

    But however much I like listening to their program, I do not enjoy it as a Mets
fan.  Mike and Chris broadcast on WFAN, the Mets station, and millions of Mets
fans listen to them and hundreds of Mets fans call them.  But they get this wise-ass
pleasure out of hating the Mets and rooting against them.  I know it’s part of the
show, but I don’t like it.  Mike Francessa is a Yankee fan, all cocksure and pompous,
and Chris Russo (called the Mad Dog because he talks funny and often pretends to
be out of control with excitement or anger) is a Giants fan.  San Francisco Giants.  
This is one of the great irrelevancies of life for sports fans in New York.  We have to
deal with and think about some guy rooting for a team that none of us care about.  
And we have to put up with it because they are Mike and the Mad Dog and people
listen to them and I suppose they think they have some kind of rapport and can’t be
broken up.  They couldn’t find a Mets fan who could do that job?

    Mike and Chris know a great deal about sports.  I turn to another station
whenever they start talking about anything other than sports.  They have amazing
memories for what happened in individual games.  But they have this absurd belief
that their knowledge and perspicacity entitle them to make judgments about what is
likely to happen in a baseball game or in a baseball season.  They tell you that there
is no way a team is going to win the three games that they need to win in a series in
order to get into first place and then the team will win the three games.  They will tell
you that a trade is a bad trade in a tone of voice, and with an insistence, that
suggests that they know that it is a bad trade and then it will turn out to be a good
trade.  Sure they’re right more often than not, but they’re not right that much more
often than not.

    Baseball is like this.  Studying it is like studying political elections.   It is not like
studying physics.  Sober, objective analysis will not pick you a winner much more
often than flipping a coin.  The whole point of being a fan is rooting for unlikely but
perfectly possible outcomes.  But you’d never know this if you listened to Mike and
Chris who love to explain to Mets fans why there is no rational or legitimate basis for
their hope and faith.   Do they think that we don’t know that Bennie Agbayani or
Mike Jacobs are almost certainly not going to be Babe Ruths?  Do they think that
we don’t know that the adrenalin boost after 9/11 is unlikely to lift the team above
the mighty Braves?  When it comes to Mets fans, Mike and Chris act like unhinged
priests who have become the most cynical rationalists and are trampling on the
simple piety of their parishioners.  They don’t understand Mets fans.  They don’t
understand how what we want to do, on late summer afternoons in the middle of a
winning streak, is gather our wild fantasies, bringing them together to ignite in a big
ecstatic conflagration.  We want the pleasure and the power of our improbable
dreams.  We don’t want two guys with funny voices pissing on our bonfire.  

    We could live with it, perhaps, if they made their points just once.  But this is a
radio show, after all, and people are turning them on all through the show.  So, if you
are listening for more than an hour, you have to endure the familiar wavelike rhythm
of a Mike and the Mad Dog schtick.  An assertion stirs, gathers force, builds in
intensity and then pounds the shore, only to recede, gather and build and strike again
a short time later.  Then it happens again, and again, and again, because all the
callers waiting on the line are responding to the same goddamn thing.  Normally a
topic holds through an entire afternoon and nothing can dislodge it, until at some
point, Mike and Chris just let it go without ever saying that they are letting it go.

    As a Mets fan, I have the capacity to listen to endless repetition when what is
being repeated has to do with the Mets and is interesting to me.  But Mike and the
Mad Dog have a knack for finding Mets topics in which I am not at all interested.  
For example, on Opening Day in 2006, they devoted their entire program to what
they felt was the travesty of the Mets new reliever, Billy Wagner, using the same
song to announce his entrance as Mariano Rivera has used for years with the
Yankees.  Oh my God!  Over and over, we get told that you just don’t do that
(why?).  Mariano is the greatest reliever ever (so what?).  Everybody knows what
song Mariano uses (they do?).  The Mets and Yankees play in the same city (they
do?).  You can’t use the same song if they play in the same city (you can’t?).  There
is something really numbing about listening to this kind of thing over and over.

     To prevent things from getting boring, Mike and Chris will sometimes take
opposing sides of an issue.  You can tell that at least one of them is just pretending.  
Usually it is the job of the Mad Dog to take what will be designated as the “crazy”
position, so that Francesa can do his rational, authoritative, if only intermittently
grammatical bit.  It’s funny, though, how I find myself agreeing with the Mad Dog
more often than I agree with Mike.  I think it’s because his holy fool thing, his
respect for his intuition, is more appealing to me as an approach to baseball than
Mike’s effort to come across as a wise man.  

     I don’t know.  I will keep listening to them.  And I will keep getting annoyed.  And
I will just hope that the Mets will do something that Mike and Chris have said was
impossible.  And then I will listen to them give the Mets a lot of credit for doing it.   I
will hear them having to hand it to them.  But they won’t admit that they were wrong
in a way that really means anything.  They’ll just admit that they were wrong in that
“have to hand it to them” way.
                                          
©Dana Brand 2006