When Your Team Goes Bad

The days are getting short, the daily schedule is a nightmare (hence the light posts), and the New York Mets are tanking. If they lose tonight - and John Maine just collapsed, surrendering two different four-run leads to the lowly Nationals - they'll be but a game and a half up on the Phillies, that lunatic team from down the Turnpike. They're a whisker from a reverse storybook season, as a Bizarro Bob Murphy might have put it, and it has me in a funk.

At 45, I'm loathe to admit the antics of a bunch of young guys on a ballfield can still affect my inner self - but they can.

Been that way since '69 and it's not going to change. This year's team is an enigma, loaded with talent and a deep lineup and incapable of making a run or playing extended periods of solid baseball. David Wright has come back to have an MVP-type year, but Jose Reyes has faded badly. Pedro's back and fooling hitters with his guile and movement, but the young guys Maine and Perez are anybody's guess. And the bullpen is a hideous charnel house of failure.

During these long days of September as work cranks up and the hours get longer and longer, you look for that ballgame, that good play, that great boxscore. And after a long season in first place, you can feel the anticipation for the post-season - those truly mesmerizing playoff games - begin to build. Yet it might not be there. It's cool in New York this week, and for Mets fans, winter may come early.

But it's worse for Dodgers fans - Brooklyn Dodgers fans, that is. Sam Anderson writes about a half-century's malaise in New York magazine this week. Here's a taste:

“When the Dodgers left, it didn’t rip the heart out of the borough,” says [author Michael Shapiro]. “That’s too much. I think people said that because they couldn’t quite put into words the sense of what was lost. The departure of the Dodgers denied Brooklyn, for half the year, this common conversation—the idle chitchat you have with people on the subway or waiting for the elevator or going to the butcher. Baseball informed so much of that. ‘Can you believe that Furillo last night? Snider’s a bum! Is Hodges gonna get a hit?’ It created a relationship between strangers—you felt close to them, if only for a minute or two. What was lost was each other.”

Or as Rabbi Paul Kushner says of modern baseball: "It’s a private, profit-making corporation taking advantage of the innocent lambs who are foolish enough to be their fans."

Tell me about it.

Comments

[Tom K]

Aww, gee, it's not gonna be a cakewalk after all? So sorry.

The Mets are a better team than the Phillies (or the Padres, if it comes to that). Have faith. This past month or so is just catch-up time on the angst that fans of other teams (most definitely including the Yankess) have dealt with all year.

[Dan Leo]

I'd sympathize, Tom, but I'm still trying to recover from the Phils blowing it in 1964.

[Tony Alva]

I'm a football guy primarily, but enjoy baseball a great deal so I can certainly relate to the mood spoiling sentiment.

I used to get pretty down when my teams were stinkin' up the joint, but if you've been an Army football fan your whole life you kinda get used to regular defeat (hire a coach that runs an option offense like the other academies do for christ f**king sakes!!!). There... I got that out of my system.

My apporach has been to adopt a couple of teams to augment my list of lovable losers. All my teams I have some personnal attachment to so I'm not bandwagoning here. So far this season two of my favs are poised to stink it up again (Army/UM Terps), and the other two have game (Rutgers/Penn State). With my pro teams I don't fair as well (Raiders, Falcons, Jets, Giants) as you can see. Could be a long season...

[wwolfe]

Have you see the HBO documentary on the Dodgers in Brooklyn? For years, I'd heard and accepted the commonplace argument that the move to LA was all Walter O'Malley's fault. Lo and behold, it turns out that Robert Moses refused to give O'Malley eminent domain for the property in Brooklyn where the Dodgers owner wanted to build a domed (!) stadium, with his own money (!!). Moses wanted O'Malley to move to Flushing Meadows, where the new stadium would be at the hub of the new highways. When I was attending CCNY, I lived in a brownstone two blocks from where O'Malley's stadium would have been. I can't begin to picture how different that neighborhood would have looked and felt, had Moses not put the kibosh on this idea.

My Indians somehow managed to sweep the Tigers. As a Cleveland fan, I'm stunned, to put it mildly.

[Linkmeister]

I'd just like to say that the current LA Dodgers fans are not happy either, after being swept by the Rockies in four games, two of which were decided by two-run home runs either in the Rockies' last or next-to-last at bats. Their wildcard hopes are pretty much gone.

No joy in Flatbush, or the San Fernando Valley, or Santa Monica, or Boyle Heights, or...

[videogrrl]

Hmmmmph. Since 1969, huh?

I was an 11 year old girl and a Cubs fan in 1969. That's about as bad as baseball heartache gets. Eleven is a very tender age for having your hopes crushed.

HALF a century of disappointment? Whiner.

[Tom W.]

Good one, videogrrl - oh man this is pretty damned bad though.