The Mets are good right now. Honestly, I almost hate writing that. I am a believer, for better or worse, in the concept of “jinxing” things, i.e. that speaking aloud that the Mets are good will, in fact, doom them to be bad, and I am a particular believer in my own particular ability to be a jinx that ruins something. There was a point around 2008 where I wouldn’t even look when my favorite player, David Wright, was at the plate, so convinced was I that the very act of me watching him would negatively afferct his performance (yes, I have discussed this in therapy).
This jinx fear amounts to a depressing worldview that I’m trying to give up. I don’t want to think that naming my joy, my happiness, is dooming something to failure. It’s the way I feel a little twinge when someone posts about a new relationship on social media — “Aren’t they going to regret that, one day?” I ask myself. I’m trying to ignore that voice, and listen to the one that says, “Joy is fleeting, so let’s linger in it as long as we can, even if tomorrow we’ll be sad.”
So. The Mets are good right now. Jacob DeGrom is the best pitcher in baseball and the best pitcher I’ve ever gotten to see pitch in real life. Offensively, the team is dragging, but they’re making it work and getting the Ws, so when their bats click into place, they’ll really kick off. I’m optimistic. It’s a feeling I’m not totally comfortable with.
On Monday Glenn Close was on a Mets podcast, talking about being a Mets fan. The interview is very delightful. She told the hosts she switched from the Yankees, the team of her grandmother, to the Mets because she didn’t like the attitude of the Yankees. I liked this answer; it felt very Mets fan. The Yankees have glamour and prestige. The Mets have Snooki and Matthew Broderick and the Beastie Boys and perennial Oscar runner up Glenn Close. (They also have The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas, who seems to really luxuriate in the negative Mets vibes.
Years ago I wrote a column for my college newspaper about how the underdogs on TV shows are always Mets fans. I have spent hours wondering if in the Marvel Cinematic Universe Steve Rogers would be a Mets fan, since he grew up in a world where the Dodgers played in Brooklyn and woke to one where they had long been in Los Angeles. Spider-Man is of course a Mets fan, as is The West Wing‘s Josh Lyman. Spoiler alert for Mad Men, but I always tear up thinking about how, when Don moves into Lane’s office after his death, he finds Lane’s old Mets pennant behind the a piece of furniture. Lane, the lovable loser, loving the lovable loser Mets. I recently watched Two Weeks Notice and Sandra Bullock, playing a hippie underdog lawyer, loves the Mets! To be a Mets fan is to believe that no matter how bad things can be, they might get better. “There’s always next year” is often said with the intonation of defeat, but really it is the gospel of hope. “Next year will come, and we will play baseball again, and maybe things will be better.”
Something covid took away was the little communities we’re all apart of and never paid attention to before. Or that I never did. I miss the people I used to see on the subway all the time. I miss the guy at my old taco truck. I think a lot about the security guard at the library I used to go to; I have this Mets backpack that I often brought because it fit so many books, and he always commented on it, and then we’d talk about the Mets for a couple minutes. I don’t know his name. I hope he’s alright, at home, watching the Mets with his loved ones.
Yesterday news broke of a proposed European football Super League. The details of it don’t matter right now, but I read this explainer from Defector. Billy Haisley writes at the end:
What are sports for? If sports are simply economic concerns divorced of anything other than that which the market rewards, vehicles for the enrichment of the entities that own them and the employees who work there, then the Super League probably is a good development and will happen either in this form or something else. But if sports are to serve some deeper purpose, something human that deals with interactions and identifications of real people and places and principles, then there’s no other way to see the Super League other than as a direct attack on the possibility that something, even something as silly as a game, can and should mean or serve something greater than its own bottom line.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot during the past year: What’s the point of sports? And I keep thinking of every person in this city I ever made small talk with about the Mets.
I miss them all.