Why Am I a Mets Fan?

A question that no sane follower can answer

Aug 03, 2023

Anyone who knows me knows I am not a sports guy. I don’t play sports and I never did. Sure, when I was a kid growing up in suburban Long Island, I would take part in the frequent after-school pickup games that seemingly materialized out of nowhere. Some neighbor kid would invariably knock on our front door and ask if I would come out and play, not because I was any good, but because they needed a quorum – I almost wrote “minyan” – for the games to work.

The games would change with the seasons, too: baseball in the late spring and summer months, basketball and football in the fall. I don’t recall us playing much outdoors in winter – back then, winters were real winters and snow was real snow and no one, or at least not I, wanted to play outside in the bitter cold. We weren’t Norwegians, after all. We were Long Islanders, and a polyglot group at that, whose ancestry was a veritable United Nations of ethnic backgrounds: Italians, Irish, Poles, Germans, and the like. Even the WASPs among our crowd were considered just another minority. There weren’t any other Jewish kids on my block, and there were no Black kids. In fact, when my family first moved to Islip from Jackson Heights, Queens, the only other Jews on our street – an elderly couple with Eastern European accents -- took us aside and warned us to keep a low profile as Jews, and whatever we did, not to have any Black people over our house. (To my parents’ credit, they defied the tacit color ban at every opportunity.)

But I stray. Once the flock of us – and we were a flock, there must have been eight or ten of us in the same age range, on a small street of 18 or 20 houses – entered junior high and high school, the real athletes among us joined school sports teams. That marked the end of the neighborhood pickup games, which was fine with me. My interests shifted elsewhere, to listening to records and FM radio, playing guitar, reading, writing, and cultivating a couple of close friendships. I also tried to cultivate “relationships” with girls, but that’s a story for another column (or not).

The one thing that stuck with me, however, the one thing I took away from my sports-minded posse of neighbor-friends, was a deep and abiding relationship with the New York Mets. Had I grown up two blocks away, who knows? Maybe they were New York Yankees fans over there. But for whatever reason – maybe it was a Long Island thing, maybe it was just the roll of the dice – on my block, we were all Mets fans. I did not inherit any team loyalties from my father, who, like me, was not particularly sports-minded. But he had been something of a Brooklyn Dodgers fan growing up in the Thirties and Forties, which made him a not-Yankees fan. And the Mets, to a significant extent, were created in 1962 to fill the void left behind by the Dodgers and the New York Giants, both of which abandoned the greatest city on earth to play in – get this – California of all places! All this simply to say that Dad was supportive of my interest in the Mets, supportive enough even to take me to an occasional home game at Shea Stadium, and enough to let me skip school so I could watch the Miracle Mets during their amazing postseason triumph of 1969. I was nine years old that year, the perfect age to cement a lifelong bond with the mostly hapless but occasionally great team, a bond that lasts to this very day. Even as an adult, when I spent most of my years living in western Massachusetts in a sea of Red Sox fans, I maintained my loyalty to the Mets. There was never a year as sweet as 1986, when Bill Buckner’s knees helped the Mets triumph over the Bosox, much to the emotional devastation of everyone around me.

My Mets fanaticism waxed and waned over the years, without regard to whether the team was playing well or poorly. I had no one to share my enthusiasm with, and I lived without broadcast or cable TV during the Nineties and the Oughts, so watching games was a rare event. My mind was elsewhere and my time was fully occupied with raising children and establishing a career, such as it is. The mother of my children hailed from Boston, and while she was no avid Red Sox fan (or any kind of sports fan), my attempts to inculcate a love of the Mets in my children was destined to fail due to geography and lack of a peer group of fellow fans. We did, however, make our way to Shea Stadium for a game once, so for one brief, shining moment, I was able to share my enthusiasm firsthand with my family. But that was pretty much it.

My attention to the Mets was finally rekindled in 2015. It probably does not speak well of me, because that year they made it to the World Series for only the fourth time in their existence. That summer, I began dating a woman from my native Long Island. Unlike me, she was a sports fan. When I met her, she was a marathon runner. She had also worked at Sports Illustrated magazine. She had two sports-minded sons and an extended family that enjoyed playing sports and following various teams. All this is to say that my newfound attention to the Mets may have had as much to do with my then-girlfriend, who is now my wife. She says we watched many of the postseason games that year, including the World Series, although I have little memory of doing so. Maybe it was because the Mets performed embarrassingly, losing the series four games to one.

Since then, the Mets have teased fans with moments of greatness, but no trophies to speak of. They won 101 games last year and ended the season tied for first place, but by that time they were depleted and exhausted and they self-destructed in the playoffs. And while this year the Mets began the season with a blast of wins that offered renewed hope of ultimate triumph, the fire soon died out and, in spite of some great individual performances, they just could not keep it together as a team. Things are looking so dismal this season that last week, the Mets’ management unofficially threw in the towel on the 2023 season by trading their number-one closer (David Robertson), their ace starters (the inconsistent but at times still-brilliant Max Scherzer and the equally talented Justin Verlander), and the trusty veterans Mark Canha and Tommy Pham in exchange for minor-league prospects, none of whom are expected to play for them this season and only one of whom is expected to be on the 2024 Major League roster.

But many more years than not, this has been the story of the New York Mets. And many more years than not, loyal and longstanding Mets fans have learned to find ways to love the team, win or lose. Mostly lose.

But to be a Mets fan is not about rooting for a historically dominant team like the crosstown Bronx Bombers or the Los Angeles Dodgers, teams whose winning records make them easy to love. It is more about the kind of loyalty – call it blind faith if you like – that transcends success or failure. Bob Dylan once sang, “There’s no success like failure” in what ought to be the Mets’ motto. It’s about loving the underdog. It’s about perennially expecting the worse and celebrating when we are proven wrong.

They say that being a Mets fan builds character, like many kinds of suffering. I don’t know if that is true – it could just be stubbornness, obstinancy, or stupidity – and I am not one to be the judge, as I have skin in the game. In my lifetime, the Mets have been the worst team in the history of the game (the comically bad 1962 Mets) and miraculous and amazing (1969, 1973, 1986). I have loved them all the same, and I always will. Because I root, root, root for the home team. When they don’t win, it’s a shame — but it’s not the end of the world. It’s just a game, after all, and for better or worse, win or lose, my team is the New York Mets.

Wait ‘til next year….

Why are you a New York Mets fan? Leave your answer in the comments.

Everything Is Broken

Discussion about this post