I suppose it was a matter of time before I would decide to write about this
subject.
People ask me all the time why I am a Mets fan, whenever I mention that I am
attending my family’s annual pilgrimage to Shea (now Citifield) Stadium to
witness the fireworks game. We go to tailgate. We go to be together, a family
of disparate people, in various geographic locations. We are touchstones to
each other’s childhoods. We are the people who contain the truth of who each of
us is that needs refreshing from time to time.
But the food and festivities are not the reason I am a Mets fan. If my
mother were alive, she would talk about coming from Brooklyn and the heartbreak
her father felt when the Brooklyn Dodgers left for the Left Coast. I suspect
this is not uncommon for many older Mets fans.
The epicenter of Yankee fandom is Manhattan, whereas for the Mets, it tends
to be the suburbs which included Brooklyn, Queens, New Jersey and Long Island.
(So much so, that Nassau County, L.I. colors are Blue and Orange – colors the
Mets adopted, presumably to appeal to that demographic.)
But that is romantic backstory.
As for my personal experience, I can point to a time before baseball was a
business, before the Curt Flood legal precedent, before ESPN, when as a seventh
grader I became enamored of the 1969 Miracle Mets. I recall sneaking transistor
radios with single ear pieces (stereo? what was that?) into Catholic grammar
school to listen to the playoff games during the day! During the day!
Watching the Mets win their unlikely 1969 series against a superior
Baltimore team was the precursor to the Boston Celtics’ Kevin Garnett “ANYTHING
IS POSSIBLE”
cri de coeur which has
become so common in my household, now living in Western Massachusetts.
I
recognize the landscape of the impossible from these experiences, and I push on
because of them.
The annual trek to see the “Amazin’s” is in part about family, but it is
also about teaching my adult children to be Mets fans
because they suck.
What is life if not misery? If you can find joy, hope, camaraderie, and love in
the midst of it all, nothing can beat you, nothing! We celebrate food and the
community that food represents in the cycle of seasonal disappointment, nothing
can beat you.
That is what this fireworks game means to me. That is what being a Mets fan means
to me.
It’s not about bragging rights, or overcoming some curse, or even just being
the perennial lovable losers other franchises are. It's the continuous potential
for the miraculous in an otherwise predictable, often mean world.
