Tag Archives: new-york-mets

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ROOT, ROOT, ROOT

It’s symbolic of how difficult the New York Mets’ 2026 season has been that their All-Star break ends one night early – in Philadelphia, not exactly the place to ease back into a routine.

In fact, the Mets and their fans probably would do well with a whole week off instead of three days. Maybe even the rest of July.

The Mets were supposed to be good this season. Some experts actually picked them to win the World Series, ignoring the fact that the Los Angeles Dodgers exist. At the very least, they would make the playoffs.

Instead, they’re battling the Colorado Rockies and San Francisco Giants for the worst record in the National League. They lost 12 straight in April and seven straight last month, the latter streak resulting in the dismissal of manager Carlos Mendoza.

They were supposed to make the playoffs in 2025, too. But about halfway through, they seemed to forget how to win. On the last day of the season, the Miami Marlins ended their playoff hopes.

Mets fans, never a particularly optimistic bunch, have a scapegoat. It’s David Stearns, the team’s president of baseball operations.

After the Mets missed out last year, Stearns overhauled the team. To an extent rarely seen in the history of baseball. He traded or did not sign some of the team’s biggest recent stars – including Pete Alonso, the team’s all-time home run leader.

Stearns replaced them with well-known, if not especially superstar-like, players. It would be wrong to say they underperformed – too many of them haven’t been in enough games due to injuries.

So for the same nearly $400 million of Steve Cohen’s money, the Mets are embedded in last place in the National League East. They’re unlikely, barring an unprecedented comeback, to make a run at the postseason.

Fans wanted Stearns, hired away from the Milwaukee Brewers with much hoopla after the disappointing 2023 season, out the door with the velocity of a Jacob Misiorowski fastball. (Misiorowski, he of the 105 mph pitch, was one of the last players brought into the Brewers organization by Stearns.)

It’s fair to say Stearns made some miscalculations and bad moves. Mets fans would say that’s a generous characterization.

But here’s the question I have for those fans – of whom I am one: How much of the blame for the Mets’ lousy season belongs to us?

Right off the bat, that question would offend a large chunk of Metsdom. Especially the radio sports jocks who make their money fueling grievance and baiting Charlie from Lynbrook or whoever is on the line.

My view goes against one of the general principles of American life: The customer is always right.

It’s just that Met fans – not unlike their Gotham in-laws, New York Yankee fans – feel a sense of entitlement. And that sense has consequences.

When the Mets missed the playoffs last year, all you could hear was how the team needed to be overhauled. The core had to be broken up if the Mets were going to win again.

Then Stearns broke up the core. And the lamenting began. We needed to sign Alonso! Why did they trade Brandon Nimmo and Jeff McNeil? How could they let Edwin Diaz go to the Dodgers? (That kind of worked out – Diaz has been injured most of the season, and you should Google “Edwin Diaz and cockfighting” for another problem.)

The pressure on Stearns was relentless. And, for the most part, the acquisitions he made in the off-season were cheered by fans. Bo Bichette got the Toronto Blue Jays really close to winning the championship. Freddy Peralta was the second best pitcher in the National League last year.

It turns out fans are fickle and have no idea what it takes to build a winning baseball team.

For a long time, they thought it was the manager’s – Mendoza’s – fault. When I defended him in a social media post, one wizard told me that a real manager like Leo Durocher would have chewed out Juan Soto for not hustling – conveniently not knowing that it was Durocher’s overmanaging and badgering of the 1969 Chicago Cubs that contributed significantly to the 1969 Miracle Mets.

Fans booed Soto when he first arrived in Flushing because he got off to a slow start. They booed Bichette in the second game when he missed opportunities to drive in runs. In fact, fans believe booing is a motivator when home team players go into a tailspin.

Because we all dream of 40,000 people heckling us at the same time. It’s what little boys see and hear in their imaginations as they go to sleep dreaming of big-league stardom. (The previous two sentences are bonafide sarcasm.)

My wife is not a big baseball fan, but she knows how much I love it and goes to an occasional game. In 2019, she was at a Met game in which catcher Travis d’Arnaud, a contributor to the team’s National League championship in 2015, was making a return from an injury that had cost him most of the prior season.

d’Arnaud had a rough night. He couldn’t throw out baserunners trying to steal second – at least one throw found its way into the outfield. And, with the team down, d’Arnaud got a base hit – and tried to stretch it into a double, almost seeming as though he was desperate to make something good happen.

He was out. By a lot. He got booed off the field. The manager took him out of the game and the Mets released him the next day.

Of course, d’Arnaud ended up playing a role in winning a championship in Atlanta and made the All-Star team. Met fans were furious, because the Mets had let him go – despite the fact that they themselves pretty much drove him out of Flushing.

Fan entitlement is symptomatic of this era in our history. For whatever amount of money they pay to see a game or time they spend watching on TV, they believe they are owed success. They fail to recognize that this stuff isn’t easy – and the pressure to perform, on and off the field, would make most of us crumble. Especially in New York.

I’m not saying it all of the Mets’ problems are fans’ fault. Or even most. Stearns should feel as though he needs to do better or else be labeled one of the biggest failures in New York sports executive history.

In any event, it’s likely to be a year of playing out the string at Citi Field. Which, as a fan, isn’t the worst thing.

The worst thing is if the billionaires who run the sport decide they want to lock out the players and there’s no Major League Baseball in 2027.

So I’ll go the games for which I have tickets. I’ll root for players I like, in a town I love, for the franchise I cheer, and watch baseball – still the greatest game of all.

That’s what I’ll do until the regular season ends on September 28. When I will start hoping for a miraculous comeback in 2027 – or whenever the next season is.

And, if I’m looking for a winner, I’ve got my hopes up for the New York Heights, the new entry in the Women’s Professional Baseball League that begins play in August. Let’s go, Heights!

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9 – MEET THE METS

My parents, both baseball fans, knew when I was born that I would root for a team from New York.

I’m sure they expected it to be their team, the Yankees. The Yanks had just won the World Series for the fifth straight year. And given the Italian heritage of the team – Lazzeri, Crosetti, DiMaggio, Rizzuto and Berra – it seemed likely.

My Dad had grown up in Brooklyn and been to his share of Dodger games, especially during World War II when kids got in for bringing old tires or scrap metal to the gate. He had a soft spot for them – they were the team of Duke Snider, Carl Furillo and Jackie Robinson. And they were pretty good, having won the past two National League pennants.

Neither of my parents were fond of the Giants, who played in Manhattan across the Harlem River from the Yankees. But the Giants had inspired all of baseball in 1951 when Bobby Thomson’s famous home run capped a spectacular comeback. And they were getting their young phenom, Willie Mays, back from two years in the military.

So which of those three teams would the new gleam of their eye cheer for when he turned 70 years old in 2024?

Meet the Mets.

No, kids, the Mets did not exist in 1954 – although you could have confused them with the hapless Washington Senators of Douglas Wallop’s best-selling novel, “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant,” which was in the process of becoming a Broadway musical.

New York baseball fans did not imagine that the Dodgers and Giants would leave. Maybe the Giants, although they won the World Series in 1954 with the help of Mays’ play known simply as “The Catch ” Brooklyn loved the Dodgers and Ebbets Field, the bandbox where they played, and that bond seemed unbreakable.

But Walter O’Malley – who bought the Dodgers in 1950 – wanted a new, modern stadium – and he wanted it in downtown Brooklyn, where the Barclays Center arena is today. The city, in the person of “Master Builder” Robert Moses, offered him a place in Flushing instead, thinking O’Malley was bluffing about moving the Dodgers to Los Angeles. 

Bad call, Bob. O’Malley took the team west – and convinced Giants owner Horace Stoneham to go to San Francisco.

From 1958 through 1961, New York had one team. The Yankees. But there were way too many National League fans for that to last too long. After a lot of threats to form a third league, New York was granted a franchise to begin playing in 1962.

There were a lot of things that made the Mets attractive to me. They were building a stadium very close to where we lived in Flushing. My Dad took me to the ground breaking for what would become Shea Stadium in 1961. 

And then, when Yogi Berra was fired as manager after the Yanks won the pennant but lost the World Series in 1964, that was it. My grandfather and I were Mets fans.

Being a Mets fan is a lot harder than being a Yankees fan. A lot. Mets fans have suffered through some of the worst baseball ever played. The team still holds the modern record for the worst season ever – 40 wins, 120 losses in 1962. There are a lot more losing seasons than winning ones. Yes, there’s the occasional miracle – see 1969 – but heartbreak is the default mode.

And we’re fatalistic to a flaw. 

One time, my Mom and I were watching a game entering the ninth inning with the Mets up 4-2. I said “Goodbye, Mom.” And she responded, “How can you leave? Don’t you want to see them win?”

I said. “No, I don’t want to see them lose.”

My mother was too used to rooting for a team with Mariano Rivera as its closer. “Oh, ye of little faith. Stay and watch them win.”

“OK,” I said. “I’ll stay to prove my point.”

Which the Mets did. Final score: San Francisco 5, Mets 4.

But it’s also a lot more fun to be a Mets fan. When we’re winning, we’re happy and loud, full of braggadocio for a team that more often doesn’t have much. Met fans brought clever banners to the ballpark and embraced quirky players from Marvelous Marv Throneberry to Daniel Vogelbach. They’re the team of Hayden “Sidd” Finch and Chico Escuela, who don’t really exist, but the Mets went along with the joke. 

It seems like work to be a Yankee fan – if the team doesn’t win the World Series, the whole year is an abysmal failure.

So let Los Angeles have the Dodgers. Let San Francisco have the Giants. Let the Bronx have its Bombers. They might have all been here in 1954, but two of them are gone now.

We have the Mets. LGM!

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