Dana Brand’s Mets Fan Blog

Okay, so the Mets won 10 in a row, in an extraordinary game.  They went into first.  Now they’ve lost two in a row, catching their breath, already causing some anxiety in a deliriously happy but understandably insecure fan base.  You know all this.  You watched or heard these games.  I haven’t.  I have not been in the right time zone.

You see this picture.  It’s me, yesterday.  That’s not Shea stadium behind me.  It’s the bullfighting arena in Pamplona, Spain.  And the bearded guy on the left is arguably the greatest writer about sports in history, Ernest Hemingway. 

What can I say?  I planned this trip long ago.  Even bloggers have lives.  I’m having a great time, by the way.  I am trying to keep up with what’s happening to the Mets.  That’s always been a fun thing to do when you travel.  It used to be that all you had was Armed Forces radio and the International Herald Tribune.  I still think of a square in Venice where I read that the Mets acquired Keith Hernandez as Keith Hernandez Square.  I remember my anguish at the age of 14 when I was travelling with my family and we kept losing reception of the Armed Forces Station (because of Alps or something) and they were announcing that the Mets had finally moved into first place.  There used to be something very cool about how little you could know about what was happening back home, how much you had to infer from each precious box score.  Well, it’s different now.  All you do is log onto the Internet.  You can even read all the articles and blogs.  This is wonderful, but there was something wonderful about the old days too.

Anyway, I will be back in the States on August 4, but I hope to do some blogging even while I’m away.  So, I’m not shutting down.  But regular readers of this blog should please understand that how much I blog will depend on Internet connections in Spanish paradors and French, Dutch, and Irish budget hotels.  It may also depend on the quality of local wine and the mood of a diehard Mets fan who is, well, on vacation.

The last nine games have altered everything.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything like it.  The closest thing I’ve seen to it in recent Mets history is the now largely forgotten almost comeback of 2001.  Oh, people still remember Piazza’s homer in the first game after 9/11, but many seem to have forgotten that starting at the end of August, the Mets went on an 18 out of 21 streak that almost took them past Atlanta, almost redeeming a disappointing season after a pennant-winning year.  A few decent outings from Armando Benitez in a crucial series against Atlanta, and the Mets might have pulled off a miracle that would have been historic on a great many levels, a miracle that might have been a new myth for us to live on for a few decades.  But it didn’t happen. 

The closest analogy to all this in earlier Mets history was 1973.  That did happen.  We were having a garbage season and then we did something like we’re doing now.  Everything came together all at once and we won the pennant and went all the way to the seventh game of the World Series. 

What ’73 and ’01 and ’08 have in common is a sense that there is suddenly a new team on the field, a team that has nothing in common with the team that disappointed us.  Yeah, they have the same names and faces but the similarity ends there.  There is that sharp, audible crack in Carlos Delgado’s bat, there is that sense once again that Jose Reyes is such a unique talent that he will always be finding new records to break, there is that sense that the bullpen will hold, that the bench will shore us up, and there is that sense that for the first time in two decades, we may be able to enjoy that greatest of all Mets pleasures: the dawn of a pitching superstar. 

What’s most fun is having what we had in ’73 and ’01: that sense, that although we were heading for the exits, we have to get back to our seats.  We were, as you may remember, just about ready to turn our attention to the other things is our lives and worlds.  Now the Mets are back, better than ever, it almost seems, possibly better than any team in the National League this year except maybe the Cubs.  I’m sorry to have to qualify everything I’m saying, but you understand why I need to do that.  We’ve been burned a lot lately.  We’ve got a ways to go before we can feel confident in our hope. 

But here we are at the All-Star break, 51-44, a half game out of first.  A month ago, you would not have thought it possible.  67 games are left.  If we can win 39, losing 28, not a tall order for the team we see now, we’ll win the 90 that will probably get us the division title.  Hope for the Mets is no longer just a passionate existential assertion.  It is, kind of rational.  Isn’t it?  Don’t you like what you see?  Don’t you get a kick out of Jerry Manuel’s remarkable cool?  Don’t you get a sense that David Wright is no longer trying to swat something he knows is there but he can’t see?  I think I know what I’m looking at.  I’ve seen games like Pelfrey’s been pitching before.  I remember what it feels like.  I think I know what it means.  
 

Have you ever been in a casino and won eight blackjack hands in a row?  Well, I have.  I enjoy playing blackjack.  I understand its math.  I understand that if I have an excellent mastery of the basic strategy, I can’t win much, but I won’t lose much, as long as I bet small amounts of money and bet very conservatively.  At $10 tables, betting $10 each time, allowing myself $100 in chips, I will always reach a point when I am $60 ahead.  I will play until I want to leave or until I am back down to $50 ahead, whichever happens first.  Normally I make $50.  I know that the odds are that every once in a while, I will lose $100 before I’m ever ahead by $50, but that hasn’t happened to me yet.  I know that no matter what I do, I am ahead of the game if I make $50.  $50 is enough.  I say that I get a free dinner.  I get a free dinner.

Anyway, what happens when you win eight in a row is that, no matter what you know, and no matter what you’ve experienced, you start to wonder if you can quit your job and live off blackjack.  You really do wonder that, even though you know perfectly well that you can’t.  I’m not saying that you think it, but you wonder it.  You feel the power and majesty of a moment in which the world seems to be asking you  to make three wishes.   This feeling has accomplished wonderful things for many people.  It is a feeling that you are not tied down by necessity or fortune or any of the stuff that keeps us from being gods.  All it takes to get there is winning eight times in a row.
 
Now baseball is not blackjack.  It is, for the most part, not a game of chance.  But it is as much of the world as blackjack is.  It has shoulders and hamstrings and skulls, and malaise and stupidity and slumps.  But every once in a while you keep getting facecards and the dealer’s up card is a reliably a four or a five.  Every once in a while, you’ll average seven runs a game, while the other side is averaging less than one.  And no matter how much you know that a does not equal b, you somehow start to believe that it does or it could and that you’ll make it all the way to the World Series, averaging seven runs a game and averaging one given up.

I do think we’re going to the Series.  And I’m not giving up blackjack.  It’s not the end of the world if a good feeling turns out to be wrong.  Sometimes good feelings are right.  I’m worried about Pedro and I’m glad that Ryan Church is just having migraines.  And I’m glad Sam and Sarah got “Build a Bears.”

I don’t know where I was yesterday.  Technically, I was at a baseball game.  But it felt like I was at a picnic.  Several things contributed to this. 

First of all, I was sitting with lots of people wearing Gary, Keith, and Ron t-shirts (for great pictures of this day, including a rare really nice picture of me, click here).  There were people of all ages and sizes but only one baseball loyalty and only one kind of shirt, which definitely made it feel like a family affair.  There were actual families and there were school groups to whom Gary, Keith, and Ron had given free tickets.  In the middle of it all was Gary’s wife Lynn Cohen, who has not only organized garykeithandron.com but continues to run it virtually by herself.  There were also Gary’s mother Joyce, his son Zach, the Burkhardts:  Kevin and Rachel, Mr. Met, (Mrs. Met couldn’t make it, neither could my wife or daughter), Zoe Rice (a smart and sociable novelist-blogger who helps to make the society of Mets bloggers feel like a family and to whom I am grateful for taking great pictures because absented-minded professor-moron forgot his camera again, anyway you can see even more pictures that can accompany this piece on Zoe’s site), Kathy Foronjy and Joe Coburn, whose brilliant film Mathematically Alive defines Mets family feeling for all time.  You see what I mean.  There was the good lazy fun feeling of a daytime ballgame.  Yeah, it was hot in the sun.  Zoe and Lynn had a formidable array of mechanical fans and schpritzers and anti-schvitzing devices.  But, hey, it was the height of midsummer.  Ideal for picnics, for an old-fashioned day game.  It was the opposite of work and obligation.  No competition, nothing sad or mean or even necessary.  Just the kind of good feelings that community and family and shared enthusiasm can bring. 

I felt once again the way this whole GaryKeithandRon thing exemplifies the way in which Mets fans can merge into a family:  by giving us the opportunity to connect, in a human, loving way with the one aspect of the New York Mets about which we never have any complaint.  There are ways in which the New York Mets franchise can sometimes seem like a confused corporate machine.  But by remembering that we’re all family, and that we all connect through the voices and, as in GKR, the spirit of the announcers, from Ralph to Kevin, we somehow remember why, after all of our disappointments, we love to be Mets fans. 

The picnic-y spirit of the day went to my head, somehow.  I kept missing things.  I got there 45 minutes before the game, but just in time to have missed Gary and Ron, who had come to schmooze with the t-shirt crowd.  I had to give a radio interview on “The Locker Room with Kevin Williams” at 3:25 and just as I started to head back to my seat from the one place I had found in the bowels of the stadium where I could do a radio phone interview, I heard the whole structure tremble as Fernando Tatis hit his home run.  Whatever.  I missed it but I still felt good.  At least I got to see what it’s like to be deep in Shea’s innards when a Met hits an important home run.  There was something pre-natal about the experience, and there has been something pre-natal about this whole week.

I probably don’t need to tell you that this current high summer moment is unreal.  You could feel the unreal in the whole stadium, and not just in our happy section, to which SNY cameras gave a couple of seconds of fame (but to which they should have given a Kevin Burkhardt feature).

(Photo taken by Zoe Rice off of a TV screen) 

We have been bitching and moaning and complaining for a year now.  We have not been a particularly happy family.  Look at the archives of all of the blogs from before just last weekend.  In between a few little desperate eruptions of hope, there was the steady stench of the expectation of defeat. 

Now suddenly everything is different.  We seem to be different people in a different universe.   And I felt this powerfully in the crowd at Thursday’s ballgame.  We didn’t feel desperate.  We felt glad. We’re not sure yet exactly what we’re glad about.  But we’re glad in the way that a six-game winning streak and a climb up the standings can make people feel.  We’re glad in the way we felt thirty-nine years ago during the big monster Cub series that was a kind of birth or passage to adulthood or whatever metaphor of bright new beginnings you want to use.  I’m not forgetting the bottom of last September.  I’m not forgetting Adam Wainwright’s curveball.  I’m not forgetting any of the other things Mets fans never forget (Scioscia’s homer, Rogers’ walk, Templeton’s homer, Piazza’s ball caught at the wall).  I’m just remembering that eternal Mets thing, that losing of the mind and raising of the spirit:  that sense that bright blue cotton candy good fortune is promised in the sunlight of a summer afternoon.  

In the middle of their incredibly informative extended seminar on the evolution of the art of pitching, during the broadcast of this evening’s pitcher’s duel, Gary, Keith, and Ron took a moment to point out that tonight was the 39th anniversary of Tom Seaver’s Imperfect Game, a game that stands out in the memories of every fan of the 1969 New York Mets.  It’s strange that this game has such prominence because on the face of it, there is no reason why it should stand out.  It didn’t put us in first.  It was followed by a month of mediocre play that left the Mets 9 and a half games behind.  It wasn’t a perfect game.  It was just one of dozens of mysterious Mets near-misses.

The reason the game is remembered, and needs to be known by all generations of Mets fans, is that it marked the moment when the Mets became something different from what they had been before.  They didn’t become good on that July evening (they had been good since May, when they won 11 in a row).  They didn’t become the Miracle Mets, (they had already begun to show signs of miraculousness and wouldn’t really become miraculous until the second half of August and the months of September and October).   What happened on that evening, and in that three-game series against the division-leading Chicago Cubs, was that for the first time in their eight-year history, the Mets were playing games that mattered, in the eyes of a respectful world and wildly enthusiastic fans, challenging for all available titles, led by a young man who showed every sign, in his mid-20s, of being a shoo-in Hall of Famer.    

After a year of flat and often foolish baseball, are we ready to get excited about the Mets again?

I am, because I’m so sick and tired of not being very excited.  I don’t follow baseball because it is boring and doesn’t involve my emotions.  Most other things are boring.  Baseball is supposed to be exciting.  I am supposed to enjoy it.  The Mets don’t have to win to make me happy.  They just have to engage my interest.  But during the past uninteresting year, I have even had moments where I’ve regretted having written a book about such stupid bullshit.

I can’t think of a moment better than this one for the Mets to break away from all of the sour disappointments and futile anger of the past thirteen months.   We have just taken three out of four from Philadelphia and we are about to play ten consecutive games against mediocre teams before we face Philly again, at home.  There’s every good reason to think that we will be able to win more than two games in a row.  We may even be able to win a few games where we don’t give up a lead or almost give up a lead of historic proportions.  We’ve gained five games on the Phillies in the last couple of weeks.  That’s only two games fewer than they gained on us last September.  We could easily be in first place by the end of the next Philly series.  And if the genuinely risible saga of A-Rod and his mind-controlling mystical girlfriend (control of A-Rod’s brain, imagine what that’s like! Imagine Madonna having control of anyone’s brain, especially if it is by means of an ancient mystical tradition that has been watered down to the point where it can be understood by Madonna and A-Rod!) ever settles down long enough, we may even be able to read about our team on the back pages of the tabloids.   

The Yankees are eight and a half out and we’re two and a half out.  I know that means that the Yankees are still more likely to win their division than we are, but it would be mean and depressing for them to do that.  No one who loves baseball could root for the Yankees to win their division this year.  Even Yankees fans shouldn’t want to beat Tampa Bay.  That would be like taking candy from a baby.  But we deserve to win this year after what happened last year.   Deserve?  A team like this?  With so many holes in their goddamn heads?  Yes, deserve.  We deserve to enjoy them.  They are not a particularly impressive baseball team.  But a very large number of them are now playing well.  We deserve to enjoy the pleasure of seeing them win. 

P.S.  If you are going to either Wednesday night’s game or Thursday’s day game and you have taken the 7 train or the LIRR and are walking down the subway staircase, look to your right.  There you will see me in front of my 2002 green Subaru, between two “Mets Fan” posters.  I will be sitting in a blue fold-up chair behind a little table with copies of my book.  If you want to get a signed copy of my book for one-third less than the price on Amazon, or if you just want to say “hi,” please come and say hello.  I will be very happy to meet you. 

Metsblog reports that over Johan Santan’s last six decisions, the Mets are 0-6, although Santana has an ERA of 2.48.

Even by Mets historical standards, this is impressive.  I know that these numbers aren’t directly comparable, since Santana himself is not 0-6 over those six starts, but this reminds me of:

1962 Roger Craig 5-22, 3.78 ERA 

1973 Jerry Koosman 14-15, 2.84 ERA 

1974 Jon Matlack 13-15, 2.41 ERA 

1977 Jerry Koosman 8-20, 3.49 ERA 

We used to call someone who pitched well but wasn’t getting wins a “hard luck pitcher.”  Somehow, though, I would find it hard to call Johan Santana a hard luck anything.  I think things are going to be fine in the long run, but we are definitely in one of those old-fashioned Mets vortexes here.    

Since June 17, when Jerry Manuel became manager, the Mets have lost one and won one, won one and lost one, won one and lost two and won two and lost two, and won one and lost one and won one and lost one. 

I’m not getting on Manuel for this.  I have great hopes for him.  The Mets were playing like this, pretty much, before he came.  And there was plenty of ire and gall about Willie’s excessively even temper, and Rick Peterson’s equanimity.

I don’t know if I have ever seen a Mets .500 team that played so close to .500 so consistently.  These Mets may not even have had a day all season when they have had a runs scored total that was more than five runs away from their runs scored against total.  There’s getting to be something freaky about this.

In the past, it has generally been different.  Mets .500 teams usually look at some point in the season as if they are more or less than a .500 team.  The .500 they end up with is usually the result of some sort of concluding streak or slump.  This was true of all of those .500 teams at the start of the ‘70s and it was true of the 2005 team, which wildly gyrated at the end. 

Of course the season isn’t over, but it has certainly acquired a personality by this point.  It has a give with one hand, take back with the other personality, a marching in place personality, a fits and starts personality, something that from a distance looks like a wave pattern even if, from day to day, it feels like something that may actually go in just one direction.  After awhile, we get so dulled by this maddeningly repetitive pattern that we feel that no good game really means anything (look at the several good games we’ve had this week) and no bad game means anything either (look at the ones this week too).  Meaning is the sum.  And the sum is a flat landscape exactly halfway between heaven and hell.  In such a place, it is hard to understand anything, and it’s hard to be anything.

And it’s all the more meaningless because we’re only four games out.  The Mets are not being rewarded for the way they’re playing, but they’re not really being penalized either.  The division will probably go to the team that can manage a September streak. 

So, here we are in July.  Nothing is real and there’s nothing to get hung about.  There’s just a repetitive hum.  Like an engine getting primed, ready to start moving.  Or like some torture technique.  One or the other. 

On Saturday, I saw the Mets play the Yankees at the ballpark for the very first time in my life.  I have always avoided Mets-Yankees games.  They’ve always been sold out and I’ve never felt such a need to be there that I’d shell out the extra money it would cost.  Part of me didn’t want to see Shea with a lot of Yankees fans in it.  I didn’t want to see fights.  I didn’t want to risk seeing enemies exulting on our turf. 

For some reason, though, the Mets-Yankees thing is not what it was.  I got tickets on Friday on StubHub for only $13 more than face value.  And so, 45 years after I exulted in the Mets’ 6-2 triumph over the Yankees in the first Mayor’s Trophy game, I finally saw the Yankees play the Mets at Shea.

I have to tell you that I enjoyed the experience more than I thought I would, even though we lost the game.  It was very interesting, and a little surprising. 

The first surprise came when I was trying to find a parking space.  They had let me into the lot, but tailgaters were filling up so many spots that there weren’t any spaces visible.  I drove up and down a few aisles until finally some tailgaters motioned to me that I could come right into the space where they were tailgating.  They were very nice and accommodating and although it was perfectly obvious to anyone paying attention, I didn’t realize until I got out of the car that these nice people who looked like ordinary Mets fans were festooned with Yankee regalia.  Okay, I thought.  Whatever.

Then I walked to the stadium and was shocked to see something I was going to see all day.  I saw guy in a Posada jersey with his arm around a girl in a Reyes jersey.  I saw family groups where brothers with nearly identical faces were wearing shirts with antithetical logos.  This was totally bizarre.  How did this happen?  How could it happen so frequently?  I know that Cro-Magnon Man co-existed with Neanderthals for a few tens of thousands of years and we still don’t know if they interbred or if the Neanderthals just died out or were killed off by the Cro-Magnons.  This reminded me of that.  Seriously.  I felt as if I was witnessing an ancient and impenetrable mystery.  It didn’t look like normal New York diversity.  It looked like the strangely intimate co-existence of irreconciliable opposites.  The completely obvious fact that there were no distinguishing differences between Mets and Yankees fans except for the caps and jerseys they were wearing somehow bothered and amazed me.  I mean, shouldn’t there at least be physiognomical differences?  Shouldn’t we be able to see the arrogance on the faces of the Yankee fans?  Shouldn’t we be able to see the eager philosophical hope and sweetness on the faces of the Mets fans?  If I used some sort of selective imagination, I could see these things.  If I was honest with myself, I couldn’t. 

One thing I enjoyed was the way in which the opposing fan groups gave each other an audience to cheer and boo for and at.  This made me realize what a lazy experience it is, normally, to watch a game in your home stadium.  You cheer and boo, but if you’re busy talking or putting mustard on your hot dog, it doesn’t matter if you don’t make any noise because everyone else is making the requisite obvious noise.  But when Shea has all these Yankees fans, you feel you have to make a lot of noise when something good happens for the Mets because the Yankees fans are making a lot of noise when something good happens for the Yankees.  You want them to hear you because they are trying so hard to make you hear them.  It takes a lot of extra energy to go to a Subway Series game.

And everybody seems to love the theatricality of the whole deal.  There is much generally good-natured striking of violently hostile Kabuki poses.  People even take pictures of staged scowling face-offs.  People whip themselves up into a frenzy, holding onto $8 bottles of bad beer.  One hand is always full and the other hand is waving around.  And it always funny that the lout in the Jeter shirt has in his hand a cobalt blue bottle with a Mets logo commemorating the last year of Shea. 

The afternoon continued as the Yankees fans would chant “Lets Go Yan-kees!” a chant that seemed to create a natural space for an answering chant of “Yankees Suck!”  The Yankees fans were only able to muster a weak “No” after “Lets Go Mets!” in the space in which younger fans like to put the “Woooo!”  We definitely had a more effective and persuasive counter-cheering situation, even if it did not exactly reflect well on us.
 

It began to rain and everybody took shelter, just like Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, in the cave-like promenade behind the stands.  There were endless lines for the bathrooms.  People streamed by, slapping the hands of those who had the same colors and logos, ignoring those who didn’t.  It was hot, steamy, and close, and there were claps of thunder that rattled the long echoing space filled with sweating bodies and the sounds of talking and laughing and shouting into cellphones.  Right next to me was a group of three mothers, two in Mets and one in Yankees outfits, and a big mixed-loyalty brood of their young.  One of the men associated with this group, a guy with a Mets jersey who was apparently the husband of the woman in the Yankees jersey, showed up with two blue bottles in his hand, drinking from both of them in a way that would only have made sense if he had had two mouths.  A domestic quarrel ensued, a foot and a half from my head.  “I called you four fucking times!”  “I didn’t fucking hear the phone!  It’s too fucking loud!”  “You should have been listening for the fucking phone!”  “I can’t take any more of this fucking bullshit!”  As all this was going on, my daughter was beside me texting on her phone.  And people kept up the chants and the silliness.  I had worried that a quarrel between a Mets fan and a Yankees fan might have led to something unpleasant but no one was paying attention and this was obviously a couple having an intimate fight in each other’s face.  So I just stood in wonder at the scene which eventually floated away at some point.  And gradually things grew lighter and you could see the bay and Manhattan off in a hazy orange distance, everything looking indescribably serene and calm beyond the streaming crowd on the promenade and the people smoking illegally off at the last edge of the stadium. 

When it was light enough for the game to resume, we walked up into the bright bowl and saw that the lights were turned on and that they were beautiful reflected on the white tarp covering the infield.  Wiping off our seats with tissues, we heard “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on the stadium sound system and excitedly turned to see a big fuzzy rainbow over Flushing.  The symbol of the season!  When reality starts pulling this kind of thing, I become full of cynical fear.  That’s not really the rainbow that I can take a picture of and say is a sign of the revivification of the Mets.  It’s just a rainbow and if the Mets were going to win this game, Jose Reyes wouldn’t have been picked off at second with David Wright at the plate.

Play resumed.   Sonia and I left our pleasant seats in the breezy Upper Deck at the end of the eighth inning because the Yankees contingent had become dominant since too many Mets fans had gone home, after a rain delay, and with the Mets behind 3-2.  We went down and watched the last inning with my sister Stefanie and her friend Terry in an area of the Mezannine where glum and tired Mets season ticket-holders sweated under the overhang to no purpose.  I got to see Mariano Rivera’s cutter in person.  There were a few Yankees fans down there but only a few, including a woman in a Williams jersey who did some kind of weird little dance every time one of Rivera’s pitches got by a Mets batter.  When the game ended, the Yankees fans gyrated and I felt for the first time all afternoon how much I disliked them and wanted them to go away and not come back.  Still, I thought, it was the Mets who lost that game, and all by themselves.  The craziness of the season continues.  But at least I’ve seen this.

This very strange thing.  This unending, century-old family quarrel that will continue as long as there is baseball.  This fissure in the city that is not a real division so much as an occasion for enjoying the pleasure of battle and contempt without any real meaning.  This exciting excuse to get all worked up and to chant and gyrate and be pleased to see rainbows.  Oh what fun it would be for the season to end with a big dramatic New York smash-up, a just-for-fun Armageddon  between these two mediocre teams.  
 

I went to the game on Wednesday night.  It was a wonderful game, right after a horrendous game.  At this point, it would be totally banal to try to compare this season, or the last two-thirds of last season, to anything characterized by rapid and random up and down movement,  Let’s just say that, whatever is happening this season, my emotions have leveled out.  I really do feel the way people feel in the middle of roller coaster rides.  I will take whatever they give me.  I accept that I have no power to influence anything.  All I want is not to get sick.

The evening was particularly pleasant because of the company.  And since there were a number of people there who monitor websites and blogs, we had a discussion at one point of the timing of weird spikes in web traffic and the peculiar reasons why some people visit our sites, and the strange ways that search engines bring them.

So I thought I would share some of the things I have learned by looking at my latest report from WebLog Expert Lite (free of course) which analyzes my weblogs from Yahoo Web Hosting. 

Now one thing that your weblog report would permit you to do is say a lot of bullshit things.  It is in fact true that my website (both the metsfanbook.com pages and the associated blog) receive an average of 12,000 hits per day, 10,000 page views a day. and 5000 visitors per day.  But that, as I said, is bullshit.  If you actually look at the report, you see that most of that traffic comes from spambots trying to get onto my comment pages or trying to figure out a way into the guestbook I had to close because of them. 

If you look carefully, honestly, and fairly at the numbers what you actually learn is that about 800 people a day visit my blog, about 70 people a day come to my book page, and about 15 people a day read each of the essays linked to the book page.  These numbers vary widely according to how much Mets news there is (the spambot numbers don’t vary as much because people in Siberia don’t know about Willie being fired).  The traffic after the Willie firing was way above average, as I would have expected from previous experience.  I also get a spike whenever I am mentioned by another blog or appear on a podcast.  I’d love to see what would happen if I ever got an on-air mention or if Mike and the Mad Dog ever decided to make fun of me for my way-too-generous dissing of them in my book.  A Metsblog mention gives me an enormous spike but I get good traffic from a lot of blogs on a regular basis.  I think a lot of people read blogs the way I do, going to a blog and then going to other blogs by clicking on the links on their pages.  It is clear from my WebLog stats that a lot of my readers come to me from Metsblog, FaithandFearinFlushing, Mikes Mets, Hotfoot, Metstradamus, Optimistic Mets Fan, and The Eddie Kranepool Society.  I also get a considerable amount of traffic from sites authored by highly literate women (Pick Me Up, The Good, Bad, and the Ugly, the Mets!, MetsGrrl, YouCan’tScriptBaseball, and MySummerFamily).  I think that the pattern here is that I’m getting the kind of English major contingent among Mets fans.  My audience consists of people who like to read something because of the way it’s written.   Good writing is what all of the above blogs have in common.  As a result, I think you get a really nice gender mix, and as you can see on the comment pages, a lot of people who really have something to say, and are not exclusively interested in the ultimately always inaccurate analysis of the Mets’ unknowable prospects that you can find here and on any other blog. 

The most amusing aspect of the Weblog report are the search terms that bring total strangers to these shores.   People come here looking for Kelly Ripa, kinnahurra, and Sasha Baron Cohen (no relation as far as I know to Gary or Lynn Cohen).  They’re also looking for the Home Run Apple and Cow Bell Man and I am happy to accommodate them.  They steal my images (fine with me, I believe in sharing images).  And sometimes a spambot does get through to a comment page and tells anyone who is still reading a 2006 blog piece on Steve Trachsel that hot xxx chicks who will do anything live right in their area.  Spambots selling drugs at a discount also seem to have found a piece I put up on the Mets of Japan.

What a strange thing this Internet is!  What have I become now that I am a feature of it?  What have the Mets become and what does it mean now to be a Mets fan reading the blogs, with all of these tendrils reaching out into space and touching other Mets fans with laptops in front of ballgames.  I’ll write about this more eventually.  Right now I am trying to sharpen my blogging brains for this (whatever) Subway Series.

As a matter of fact, I’m going to my first ever Mets-Yankee game on Saturday.  I just grabbed tickets for myself and my daughter on StubHub for only $48 each.  Not bad, I think.  So if anybody’s anywhere near Section 34, row C, in Upper Reserved, please feel free to come by and say hello.  
 

As I pointed out in my previous post, there are people in the New York media who, when they hear an intelligent person (like Rick Peterson or Jerry Manuel)  use what’s called a metaphor, feel that they have to get shovel and sticks and beat it to a pulp before it eats them. 

So Jerry Manuel, in response to a reporter’s question about how booing affects Aaron Heilman, says:  “It’s difficult. It’s painful. But it’s also growth. It’s growth for him. It’s very, very – I’m going to say this, and I hope y’all don’t take this wrong. I know you’re going to run out of here with something crazy on this. It’s very, very fertile ground for growth at Shea Stadium. It’s fertile ground for a team’s growth and development. Sometimes fertile ground has fertilizer. (Laughter in room.) Fertilizer is a good thing. It’s a good thing. You get the greatest results, you get the most beautiful plants, when you put it in that type of fertile soil. That’s what we have the opportunity to do. Don’t y’all take that wrong because I know what you’re going to do with it.”

I mean, how hard is it really for a person competent enough to pay bills and drive a car to figure out that Jerry Manuel, in his colorful and cogent comment about fertilizer at Shea, was not calling Mets fans pieces of shit?   I mean, do we really have to have a discussion about what he meant?  Why would Jerry call Mets fans pieces of shit in this context?  Will there really be calls for him to apologize or, who knows, resign, because he’s like, so outrageous?  Is there actually a newspaper in New York City with so little respect for its readership that it employs a sports columnist (Bart Hubbuch in the Post) who seriously believes that Manuel intended to insult the fans  with this fertilizer remark?  I’ve heard that Craig Carton jumped on this bandwagon too.  Please, someone, reassure me that no one is this dumb, but there are indeed people cynical enough to milk something like this for ratings and readership.

How much more tired can we get of the way in which a loud minority of sports journalists in New York distort reasonable discourse in order to make lucrative trouble?  Why isn’t baseball interesting enough for them?  Can you imagine what these jerks would have done with the kinds of things Casey Stengel used to say?

I tell you, I like the way in which Manuel is just eccentric enough to phrase things with originality and how he’s also canny enough to play around with the smarter reporters by joking about what they’ll make of what he says.  Manuel has already established himself as a more interesting interview subject than Willie.  He has, in less than a week, earned himself a place in the Mets pantheon of characters.  But I have a good feeling about this man.  I have a sense that he may be more like Bobby V than anyone else:  a piece of work, and not exactly careful, but smarter than anyone else in the room.  Let’s hope.
 

Yesterday was a day I guess I will always remember.  The first wave involved reading all of the reactions to the way in which Willie had been fired.  Everybody was pissed off, everybody said that it was okay to fire Willie, but not in this way.  Everybody said pretty much the same thing.

Then there were the moving pictures of Randolph himself, shocked more than you’d expect, leaving his hotel to fly home.  These were awful.  And the saddest thing, as Willie pointed out, was that he now would never have his redemptive victory with the Mets.  The rest of us are still in this game, wondering if there will be a triumphant charge to the top of a weak division that will give a satisfying end to the Mets of this decade, who are Randolph’s Mets as much as the Eighties Mets were Johnson’s Mets. 

But Randolph now is out of it.  He lives, but we’re still in the station wagon and he’s not.  We can at least hope for a happy ending.  Willie’s all right, of course.  He’s got a well-paid leave of absence coming to him.  But he cannot now be part of any celebration we might have.  He is in a kind of limbo.  Alone.  And even if the most wonderful things happen now, here is where his story ends.  You can say that it may not matter, that nothing wonderful is going to happen.  But it does matter because all that keeps us from getting out of the station wagon ourselves is the fervent, at times pitiful hope that we’re going someplace where they have ice cream.

There were speculations all day in the press about whether or not Omar Minaya had really wanted to do this, or whether or not this was worse than what the Steinbrenners had done to Torre.  And as a fan trying to be fair-minded, I had to live once again with the indeterminacy of all situations like this.  I didn’t know who or what to get angry at or about because I had no solid information with which to direct the flow of my venom and bile.  And I feel crappy getting really mad at people when I have a sense in the back of my mind that there is a possibility that they don’t deserve it.

So I just watched, without much emotion, as SNY CNN’d the thing into a whole afternoon of programming.

Most of what I watched was boring.  There was some good analysis by journalists, but they had only about ten minutes of stuff to say and were recycling it in a loop. 

What was not boring was Rick Peterson, who was calm, smart, and eerily secure.  It made me wish that I had gotten to know him better.  As Rick observed, in a statement that deserves to be remembered:  “Homes go through renovations, and sometimes you have to make changes when things don’t go that well, and I’m part of that change. I totally understand that -– I grew up in the baseball business. I’m the hardwood floor that’s getting ripped out, and they’re going to bring in the Tuscany tile. It’ll be great… I wear this bracelet because I’m very in tune with Eastern philosophy and universal law. [The bracelet rings signify] faith, compassion, equanimity and love. … The Eastern language writes in symbols, and the symbol for crisis they also use for opportunity. I’ve been given a great opportunity here, and as I walk out that door, I seek my next opportunity. I walk out in peace, and I wish everybody else here the best. … Hopefully, the Tuscany tile will do a lot better than a hardwood floor.” 
 

As Gary and Ron were to observe later, this metaphor really works.  The Mets have commissioned a new floor, although what they may really need is a new ceiling.  It may or may not be great.  But it will be different.  Sometimes when we make a change, we can trick ourselves into being different.  And if we don’t change, and things don’t happen as we would want, there is always faith, compassion, equanimity, and love, qualities Mets fans have always had, if not always in the requisite abundance.  Ron said that he’d still prefer to go with the travertine.   I agree that it looks nicest, but you can slip on marble and if you do, you can really crack your head open.

The bald guy who does the “Beer Money” filler show made fun of Peterson for talking as he did.  This man doesn’t do metaphors.  And what’s this, he asked, with “Middle Eastern philosophy?”  And “equanimity,” what the hell is that?  He says he was an English major and he doesn’t know what the word “equanimity” means.  He was an English major?  Great.  The next time I’m advising students about what they can do with an English major, I’ll tell them that they can do “Beer Money.”

Is it my imagination or does SNY hire its civilian analysts mainly according to how well they can be heard without a microphone, in a sitting position, from a distance of 500 feet?  You know, I really don’t want to sound like a snob, but how many beefy male dolls does one city need, who, when you pull a ring at the back of their necks, will bark with a Hollywood version of a New York accent that the team has no heart and that they’re sick and tired of it?  Why can’t FAN and SNY recognize that the people we like to hear from are people like Gary, Keith, and Ron and Howie and Eddie?  Have we not made that clear?  We don’t know what to make of and we certainly don’t warm up to these parodies of simple-minded middle-aged male sports fans they keep throwing at us.   Are these guys supposed to look like us?  Have they ever met us?  Do they understand that some of us speak without barking and can maintain two possible alternative ideas in our heads at the same time without exploding?

Anyway.  The bright spot of the afternoon was not Omar Minaya’s moving and unconvincing effort to take it all on himself.  It was Jerry Manuel’s poise and intelligence.  I have to be honest.  I’ve never paid much attention to Jerry Manuel.  It’s an awful admission but when I saw a headline on the Web about Manuel taking over for Randolph, I think I may have actually wondered how Charlie Manuel could manage our team.  But suddenly there he is, with a prominent place in all of our lives, answering questions from the press, with a schmoozy ease you never actually saw from Willie.  I wish him well.  And I’m genuinely curious to see how the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. can be applied to baseball management.  Not much was made of this, but it is a little counter-intuitive.  Personally, I think that Mahatma Gandhi and Eastern philosophy might be more helpful for the fans this year then they would be for the Mets.

So then we have to have the game.  And could you believe it?  In the very first at-bat Manuel has to face the first serious challenge to his authority.  The only satisfactory explanation I can think of for what I saw is that Manuel and Reyes staged the whole thing to show the world who’s in charge.  I propose that explanation because I do not want to believe that Jose Reyes, who may be the most talented position player I have ever seen in a Mets uniform, is immature enough to threaten the authority of a new manager in his very first inning. 

The game was disheartening.  I’ve used that word before for the 2008 Mets and I expect to use it again.  But I am very far from giving up hope.  We could win this thing.  We may not have the chemistry for it, but we may very well have the starting pitching.  Or we may not.  It’s all the same.  I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m going to take down my copy of the Bhagavad-Gita and see if it will help me get through the season.