New York Mets: Showing some love to a stricken die-hard

New York Mets: Showing Some Love to a Stricken Die-Hard

“She is a diehard Mets fan and has been from the start . . . Since the mid-1960s, she has lived and breathed everything Mets,” Ally wrote. “She’s covered in blue and orange head to toe. She wears Mets apparel every day of her life, day and night, winter or summer. She even paints her nails blue and orange, and has worn a gold Mets necklace for at least the 18 years that I have known her.”

I know from whence the lady hails. Betraying my age, I’ve been a Met fan since the day they were born, too, never mind that I’m almost two decades younger than Mrs. Selig, or that my Mets-related belongings amount to one alternate game hat and a decent number of books on my shelves that chronicle various periods of Mets calamity and triumph alike.

Kathleen Selig was around 24 years old when the Mets emerged from the womb. I was a mere six-year-old boy in the north Bronx when I was taken to my first Mets game, in the rambling wreck of the Polo Grounds, where they played awaiting the completion and opening of Shea Stadium. My maternal grandfather took me to that game. Such an introduction to live baseball could get him charges of child abuse today.

For Grandpa it might have been a sort of homecoming. He’d been a New York Giants fan, and he probably thought his oldest grandson could do far worse than seeing his first live baseball game in the Giants’ old home since the National League was back in business there again. For grandson, two things remained firm in the memory.

Thing one: Who can forget seeing the box seats separated in sections by dangling chains? Thing two: The Original Mets themselves, and living to tell about them. They were The Comedy of Errors as interpreted by Ringling Brothers and Chaplin & Keaton’s Circus on The Ed Sullivan Show. Without the classical double piano concerto preceding or the wild animal act to follow.

The Original Mets were Abbott pitching to Costello, the Four Marx Brothers covering the infield, the Three Stooges patrolling the outfield, the Harlem Globetrotters on the bench, and the Keystone Kops in the bullpen. “I don’t know what this is,” said Hall of Fame outfielder Richie Ashburn, ending his career as an Original Met, “but I know I’ve never seen it before.”

The stories in the New York sports sections about those Mets make me think today that perhaps the writers and their papers stretched to overkill. All you really had to do to wrap a typical Original Mets game was give the final score and quote manager Casey Stengel telling his players, post mortem, “Well, there’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.” Or, telling their fans (I swear this is true), “Come an’ see my amazin’ Mets! I been in this game a hundred years but I see new ways to lose I never knew were invented yet.”

My Grandpa Morris, of course, couldn’t (and wouldn’t) resist the chance to sneak a little learning through the slapstick, and he didn’t have to lift a finger or utter a word. The faculty was the visiting team.

The Original Mets may have been Looney Tunes, but the rest of the National League was Elmer Fudd getting even with that “scwewy wabbit.” Somehow, someway, I was presented the majesties of Sandy Koufax, Juan Marichal, and Bob Gibson pitching; Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, and Dick Allen hitting; Mays, Roberto Clemente, Curt Flood, and Ron Santo playing the field like six parts deer and half a dozen parts acrobats.

Mrs. Selig, our Original Mets couldn’t obstruct the important lesson that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a blown head gasket. The Mets got laughs in their house. I had to leave my house to get most of my laughs. (Grandma Diana and Grandpa Morris could only stay weekends. Likewise Grandma Gertie and Grandpa Walter. And I could at least spend school breaks with them. And, other families.)

New York Mets: Showing Some Love to a Stricken Die-Hard

But something happened when I was half a year past my bar mitzvah. The Mets learned how to play baseball. One way or the other. Almost surrealistically. It was somewhat sad that they now left the comedy to Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, but it was joyous watching them (in year one of divisional play) tell the National League East, “And, now, folks, it’s sock-it-to-me time!” Without getting the water dumped on themselves.

Then the Mets got even more surreal. It was a further thrill watching them turn the Atlanta Braves upside down in the first National League Championship Series. Then, it was . . . who knew precisely what, when they turned the Baltimore Orioles upside down in the World Series. With neither direct recall nor the archives for support, I’m sure the conspiracy theorists of the day took it to mean the end was near for America and the world. All of a sudden the clowns stepped to one side and the artisans took over.

To this day some think the Apollo 11 moon landing was a Hollywood stunt. For all I know, others even now think the 1969 Mets were a Communist plot. I think a Mets relief pitcher named Tug McGraw had it just about right: “When those astronauts landed on the moon, I knew we had a chance. Anything was possible.” And I lived to tell about that, too.

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Why did a boy from the north Bronx not surrender to the mob and plight his baseball troth to the almighty Yankees? Even then I learned that entitlement is a vice. You couldn’t swing a bat without the prospect of whacking a Yankee fan to whom triumph was a birthright, the Promised Land was destiny, and the World Series was illegitimate without a Yankee presence at minimum and yet another Yankee World Series ring at almost annual maximum.

We Met fans were taught early enough and often enough what Chicago Cub, Boston Red Sox, and Philadelphia Phillie fans knew for sad decades, that no one was entitled to a bloody thing, in baseball or in life. We learned to laugh like Figaro that we might not weep. We learned the real meaning of erring being human, forgiving being divinity, and therefore we had the most divine troupe of the absurd on the planet.

We had who’s on first, what’s on second, and we didn’t want to know on third. (For how many decades was finding a reasonably regular Met third baseman the equivalent of finding the lost treasure of the Incas?) “Marvin Throneberry plays first base for the Mets,” Jimmy Breslin wrote, in our 1962 Bible, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game. “This is like saying Willie Sutton works at your bank.”

A few sourpusses in the New York sports press just didn’t get it. Another who did was the New York Post‘s Leonard Shecter. So much so that, when the crazy Mets got crazy enough to get serious and get to the Promised Land, Shecter actually mourned the Original Mets, in a charming little book called Once Upon the Polo Grounds:

Preposterous . . . We were, none of us, ever going to be old enough to see a day like this. Our lot was to be forever enveloped in a cult of sweet misery, the kind enjoyed for so many years when the Brooklyn Dodgers were “Dem Bums.” The Mets made music to lose by, to love hopelessly by, to reminisce by. But there was never going to be that hot, thumping rhythm of a march to the pennant and a world championship. Not for us. For our sons, perhaps, or their sons.

New York Mets: Showing Some Love to a Stricken Die-Hard

Mrs. Selig, you and I remember how our Mets went from slapsticks to the Flying Wallendas in the outfield. We remember how our Mets went from basepath boneheads to station-to-station smart. We remember how our Mets went from pitchers who could have taken their partners to court for non-support to pitchers who could have been trained at IBM, demanding of their teammates, think.

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We remember a few more pennant races, then a division title at the last minute and a that close overthrow of the mighty Oakland Athletics in another World Series, and the occasional postseason triumph or mere entrance imbalanced against the protracted spells of mis- and mal-management.

Yet we learned less to rage at the blasting of our hopes but to pray each season that somehow, someway, this time the fooleries wouldn’t matter because our Mets might return to the Promised Land. Maybe.

Today’s Mets look reasonably well positioned to strike for it, give or take a few tune-ups along the way. We have last year’s Rookie of the Year and a back-to-back Cy Young Award-winning pitcher leading. We have a manager who seems at least to have a brain in his head. We still have owners inclined less to wisdom than to whack-a-do baseball malfeasance, but you and me both learned early and often that you couldn’t have everything just yet.

Dear Mrs. Selig, we Met fans—since the day they were born or otherwise—join your loving granddaughter in prayer that the Lord who sustains you grants you another season, at least, whenever it may begin.Another summer of New York Mets baseball that might, maybe, somehow, someway, take them and you to the Promised Land one more time.