Longtime readers of this blog know that I bleed Mets blue and orange. That’s why I resonate so much with Devin Gordon’s piece today at The New York Times: “Who Am I if the Mets Are Good?” I love this line: “What separates the Mets from ordinary run-of-the-mill losers is the team’s long, albeit sporadic, history of winning every bit as theatrically as they lose….”
Here is a taste:
A popular misconception is that the Mets are irredeemably, unremittingly bad, but that’s not true. (You’re thinking of the Pirates.) What separates the Mets from ordinary run-of-the-mill losers is the team’s long, albeit sporadic, history of winning every bit as theatrically as they lose, dating all the way to the so-called Miracle Mets who improbably won the World Series in 1969. Four years ago, I wrote a history of the Mets told through the prism of the one thing our dear franchise has always done better than everyone else: losing, in ever more imaginative and excruciating fashion. Because with our team, you truly never know. You only probably know.
Now I find myself heading into this baseball season grappling with what feels like an existential dilemma. What if the Mets have suddenly emerged as something they’ve never been before — a competent, well-run organization, stocked with enough resources to compete with any team in baseball? What if — and yes, I know what I’m tempting here, perhaps even guaranteeing, by putting these words out into the world — the Mets are actually good now? I’m not sure how to be a Mets fan if the Mets are no longer the Mets.
Thankfully I also believe, in the grander sports-as-metaphor-for-life sort of way, that my Metsian prism on the world is fundamentally the correct one. Which is to say, we’re all losers most of the time. We’re all a little Metsy some of the time. We may have success, yes, but we can’t completely avoid failure and the sooner we embrace it, the happier we’ll be. There’s a reason so many Mets fans, myself included, remain delusionally optimistic after all these years, despite all the horrors we’ve seen and the LOLs we’ve endured. The highs are high, and the lows are low, and no matter how high things get we believe with religious fervor that a new low is just around the corner. But also, right behind that, possibly another high. It’s not a terrible way to go through life.
Read the entire piece here.
