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.
