I enjoyed the Mets’ sweep of the Braves this past Opening Weekend as much as the next guy (unless the next guy has a penchant for the tomahawk chop) but it wasn’t until I was watching Daniel Murphy take a pie in the face last Monday night that I thought, “Is this what it’s like to be a Yankees fan?”
I don’t actually think so. With the Yankees, more so than any of the other leading teams, comes an expectation of winning. If the Yankees open the season 4-0, a fan might not even look up or give more than a passive acknowledgement. An indifferent grunt if you will. And even though they opened 0-3 this year themselves, I sincerely doubt their fans reacted any differently to that reversal of fortune.
But for the Mets, for the 2012 Mets, well, that’s a horse of a different color. But, just like the Yankees losing their first three games, the Mets winning theirs is in reality, insignificant. At least, it’s insignificant now. If by some amazing fate they end up in the hunt for the newly created second wild card spot, and they’re only in the race in September because they got off to a good start in April, well then in retrospect it will have been very important indeed. But today, it’s 4 games out of 162 and there’s six months to go, so let’s not entertain delusions of grandeur.
So, in terms of their record, it’s no big deal, it’s the first week of the season, everyone’s still shaking the rust off, and it’s still pretty chilly at those night games here in New York. But, I believe this first week (the Mets were 6-3 as of this writing) is actually so significant in an intangible sense, that it could very well define their season.
The Mets have been the butt of the joke for their entire existence. Their inception was so perversely designed that I’m convinced it was done intentionally, even brilliantly from a certain point of view. They have two World Series champion squads in their fifty year history, the first of which is still referred to as the “Miracle Mets” and, patronizing or not, that is an apt description of the 1969 season. Only the 1986, 2000, and 2006 teams had real dominant seasons, and only the first managed to win it all. Though it’s hard to say about 2000 considering they had to play against Hulk Smash! Rajah Clemens.
Since that called third strike that ended the 2006 season and denied the author his chance to go to a World Series Game (I still have the unused ticket) the Mets have had a steady decline, each year just a little worse than the one that proceeded it. And considering this offseason brought not only the loss of their most dynamic player with Jose Reyes’ move to Miami, it also saw the corresponding gutting of the team’s payroll that brought the Met in line with mid-market teams that go nowhere nor are they expected to. And that’s fine for a baseball team when you’re the only game in town in a small Midwestern city, but this is New York! Home to the greatest players in history, that in its prime had three beloved teams. When they write stories about baseball there’s a reason they don’t set them in Cincinnati or Minneapolis or Kansas City.
Needless to say, expectations coming into 2012 were low. Rock bottom in fact. Nearly every sports writer, broadcaster, blogger, and pundit picked the Mets to finish dead last in the NL East, maybe even in the NL itself. My brother-in-law bet me they’d lose 100 or more games this season. I’ll give you three guesses as to his favorite team, and the first two don’t count. Then came Spring Training and Valley Fever, and the daily oblique injury, and things somehow looked even worse. The plane was going down and all you could do was brace for impact. But then on Opening Day the hydraulics kicked back in and we started to gain altitude, and now having played all but one of their division rivals and taken two out of those three series, things have leveled out and there are good things on the horizon.
I think that the Mets, especially David Wright and the younger guys like Murphy and Davis are out there playing with something to prove, and there’s a certain satisfaction in showing up and shutting up your detractors.
I won’t lie to you, it was nice sitting in my local pub this past Friday night with my friend Mark on one side, and my brother-in-law Chris on the other, having dinner and watching some baseball and not only having it be the Mets game on all the TVs and not the Yankee one (blissfully scheduled earlier that day) but to have the Mets beat the Phillies, in Philadelphia, and to have them see what I see: that these guys aren’t so bad, in fact they’re pretty good.
I don’t pretend to know what the future holds, for the Mets, for myself, or for anyone, but I do know that I really enjoyed baseball this week. I like this team. I like these 2012 Mets. My glass isn’t half-empty or half-full, I’m just happy to hold the glass in my hand and take a drink now and again. Because what I saw and heard, either listening to or watching these games this week, was that the Mets are truly undefeated, in the only way that word actually matters.
