On Walkoff Balks and Agony

Rooting for the Mets is like watching a child take its first shaky, unsure steps. The baby's face is contorted in fear and excitement, he struggles valiantly to keep his balance, he puts one foot in front of the other and he actually does it! He takes a few steps, a few more with more confidence, and suddenly he is sprinting - straight off a cliff onto a bed of spikes.

The Mets lost in absolutely stunning fashion last night, thanks to a walkoff balk. Yeah, that's right. This team doesn't both to rip your heart out. They leave it in your chest cavity and simply bash it with a hammer ever second or third night. A team that had finally climbed back to .500, a team with a patchwork offense and a budding star in Dillon Gee and a transcendent season from Jose Reyes finally looks like they are putting it together. Then DJ Carrasco bobs his head and the game is over.

The sequence itself was so indicative of the Mets of the last decade that I'm surprised they didn't trade for Kris Benson and sign Kaz Matsui during the 7th inning stretch. Francisco Rodriguez has been on fire as of recent and managed to blow a save thanks to a Brooks Conrad homer. That's right, the same Brooks Conrad who made so many errors in the playoffs last year that everyone kept looking around hoping his mommy would take him home early from Little League.

In the 10th, 'defensive replacement' Lucas Duda came way off the bag to field a ground ball, a play that was so bad it looked like it was happening in slow motion while Gary Cohen loudly confused Duda with Daniel Murphy. Realizing his misnomer, he said it was "a Daniel Murphy-type mistake." Yikes.

Next, the inevitable single to right, which I'm fairly sure Ron Darling predicted out loud - either that, or it was me talking to myself. Clearly Ron and I have both seen this movie before, and we know how it ends. Now there are men on first and third. Jason Heyward stepped to the plate, a universal feeling of dread. There was no way this would end well - the only question being how the Mets would lose.

They chose the road less travelled. Carrasco leaned forward to get the sign, started to come set and stopped short, and Heyward ran out of the box and pumped his fist before the umpire even made the call. Game over.

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My house is a mass of boxes right now as my family prepares to move out for a renovation. I will embark on my second apartment excursion later this day, most likely winding through the streets of Chinatown, through alleyways with hanging laundry and up staircases to closet sized apartments with gorgeous views of other closet sized apartments. I will continue to fret about not having a job, I will continue to run into old friends and make awkward smalltalk and walk around the city until sweat pools in my shoes and fogs up my sunglasses. It is officially the "Dog Days," and I say that with a small white fluffy dog staring at me from her pillow. She's not happy about it either.

With basketball season over and football looking further away, I am dreading these dog days. We are still a month out from the All-Star game and I am still not really watching the Mets. The last few years have brought so much pain and anger, so many late season collapses and injuries and bad signings and financial meltdowns and embarrassing press that I simply compartmentalized my fandom and packed it away as much as possible. My Mets hats and tshirts and the like will have to go into a moving box this weekend, in a stunningly ham-fisted metaphor.

I made a promise with myself to not get sucked in this season. But all it took was watching Jose Reyes for a little, and seeing Carlos Beltran showing flashes of his old self, and here I am. I am the old Michael Corleone, grey haired in a red cardigan: "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in." It has been such a joyless experience rooting for this team for the last 5 years, and yet I know that come September I will have watched 40 more Mets games and seen probably 20 losses and think to myself, "They're still in it!" The scouring of the MLB standings on ESPN.com, the playoff odds calculators, the box score watching will all come right back. And then they will lose 8 in a row and that will be it.

It is not quick or painless. It sneaks up on you like a jungle cat in the brush. It hits you like an anvil in a cartoon. And yet, baseball season is so long that it is easy to get lulled back in. Just when you thought you were out.

M-E-S-S mess mess mess!

In light of recent events, I want to talk about my Mets fandom yesterday after seeing a guy at a restaurant wearing a "I'm Calling It Shea" t-shirt.

I started considering the psyche of this guy, so attached to a big concrete donut in Flushing that he refuses to honor its quarter of a billion dollar replacement by calling it Citi Field. I admit I was one of those people at one point, secretly hoping the new ballpark would be called Citi Field At Shea Stadium, but I realized I was clinging to the name of a completely crass, downright ugly monument to losing.

Shea Stadium was never Yankee Stadium, or Ebbetts Field, or Fenway Pahhhk or anything of the sort. It was a testament to the time it was built: remember, its ballpark contemporaries were RFK in Washington, Three Rivers Stadium, Veterans Stadium, etc - all destroyed within the last few years with nary a tear shed. Its charm stemmed from the fact that it was so utterly charmless, like a drunk guy at a bar telling dirty jokes and stinking of stale beer and body odor. Shea Stadium, you were a drunk guy that everyone liked for a few hours and was incredibly glad once you left. Sorry.

Any Shea Stadium apologists were basically ascribing a false history to a team that has constantly been the ugly stepsister and nothing more. People love things that are old and classic, or fresh and new. We love vintage cars and brand new sports cars - no one is clamoring for a 1995 Ford Fiesta. Shea was a crappy stadium for a bastard team that sprang from the graves of the old Brooklyn Dodgers and New York (baseball) Giants.

And basically, that's Met fans in a nutshell. We refused to root for the Yankees, we adopted a team out of necessity, and it has proceeded to jam its thumbs into our eye sockets every September for the last 25 years. We don't root for the Pirates, a team that has 112 consecutive losing seasons, or the Cubs, who are so historically bad that it's at least a LITTLE cute, or the Rays, who were a punchline because they were new and crappy and now are newish and good. We fall into that category with Astros fans and Padres fans and Mariners fans of liking teams that are 40-50 years old and are aggressively mediocre.

Sometimes, we win a World Series, sure. But more often than not we are cellar dwellers. Sometimes we go on a run, and the NY Post back page is something like "THE WRIGHT STUFF" or "REYES THE ROOF" or "BATS IN THE PELFRY" (copyright My Father 2011). Sometimes there are articles about how the Mets are replacing the Yankees as the hot team, and then it's right back to this.

So the Mets are hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, probably destined to fall into the hands of a somewhat crazy hedge fund billionaire. Could it get any worse? Not unless every time David Wright strikes out he slams his bat into a lucky fan's crotch. That would be a little worse.