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

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."