Baseball Love And Blues

Some might call it delusion, but I think it’s a kind of strength, a resiliency

Editor’s Note: I hope you forgive my two-year hiatus from Substack, but I’m back with a personal essay about this past season of baseball and what it meant to me, reconnecting with old friends, and reflecting on the past and present.

The baseball of my childhood smelled like blue Powerade, hot dogs, and soft pretzels. It was leaving the complex, as we called it, from Little League practice back to our little house down the street. It was driving with my dad to Shea Stadium — in what seemed like endless, LA-level traffic — but from the New Jersey suburbs to Queens — once a year if I was lucky. 

This year I felt like I time traveled to that period – and a lot of people I spoke to, cheering on the Mets, also felt that way. They were like a kid again. They hadn’t followed a season this intently since 2015 or 2006. 

But now it looked and smelled different – spilled beer in the parking lot, fake popcorn butter in the stands, whiskey from a flask my friend labeled “Wild Animals.” We shot gunned Miller Lights, trash talked rival fans, snuck down from the bleachers to behind the dugout, and lived out a mix of childhood and adult dreams. 

My excitement for the Mets, and sports as a whole, surprised some of those around me. But it never felt silly or futile. I tracked the games I went to with the dates, teams played, and my win-loss record — I ended up going to 16 or so — made easier by it being such a close subway ride from my apartment.

I reconnected with old high school friends (friends that I once again have a Mets group chat with, and friends that I went to the playoffs with in 2015 – when the Mets were last in the World Series). It was a connective force throughout the summer and early fall, something to channel my energy into, and to be hopeful for.

I thought the baseball season could fix me. I drowned my problems in the games, not even in the stats, but the energy of the crowd and the hope of a win. But it didn’t work — because issues still bubble up from below the surface. I don’t think any romantic partner, new job, move to another city can fix you – but a good run can open your mind up and push you into new directions and different relationships with the world.

Some might call it delusion – looking at the TV screen in a winner-take-all playoff game against the Dodgers, in the 9th inning with two outs left, still chanting “Let’s Go Mets,” but I think it’s a kind of strength, a resiliency. 

In 1962, the first season for the Mets, they went 40-120. It was the worst record in the sport’s history — until, actually, this year. Here’s how legendary baseball writer Roger Angell put it in “The Summer Game.”

“Suddenly the Mets fans made sense to me...This was the losing cheer, the gallant yell for a good try — antimatter to the sounds of Yankee Stadium. This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us.”

There is a Met in every one of us – and that spirit is hard to break. 

When our beloved dog passed away in June, it was difficult for me to fathom what was coming. I bought fish oil and joint supplements. I made fresh food and fed him by hand. Nothing worked, and the end was near, but perhaps I had hoped to avert his fate — and I really wanted to make his last days a little less painful.

This was almost a family story repeating itself — of staring into the face of doom and praying and working toward a positive result. 

My dad at my age hoped to save his father’s life. After World War II, his dad was relegated to a wheelchair and was suffering from Multiple Sclerosis. But my dad sought to make his life better — spending hours researching at the Brooklyn Public Library and sending letters to doctors in Japan — in search of a larger treatment or cure. It didn’t work in the end, but I’d like to think his tenacity made an impression on his father, and that his energetic spirit of hope was valuable and created a better sense of being in those final days for his dad.

My fandom is a belief in the underdog — and it’s translated into my politics. As I joke to friends, the Mets are on “the right side of history.” And that was why I became a Met fan at an early age. Everyone around me liked the Yankees and they were always the favorite. This struck me as deeply sad and uninteresting. It was another reason to cheer on the “little guy.”

My dad didn’t have a team – he just reminisced about the good, old days of the Brooklyn Dodgers (Jackie Robinson making history, listening to games on the radio on his front stoop in Manhattan Beach) — so naturally he rooted for the Mets with me.

At the start of this season, when the Mets were down on their luck, my friends and I cheered our hearts out when a lesser-known starting pitcher gave a nice showing — allowing two runs over six innings with plenty of strikeouts. A bunch of guys, though, behind us yelled at us for cheering, saying that we were somehow the problem with the team and the fanbase. It made no sense, and we kept clapping. The Mets ended up going on a seven game win streak.

During that Mets loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers, their final game in 2024, the crowd at Lion’s Head Tavern on the Upper West Side, chanted “Let’s Go Mets.” And that was after the team lost, when it all came crumbling down. It epitomized a certain acceptance, because we fans were grateful that we had our hands on the prize, even if it was only for a few months. That acceptance helped me understand – less in my head and more in my body — that you’re not always in the driver’s seat. And that finiteness might have contributed to it being so special. We knew, with all our collective memory of the team, that it could end at any moment. But it just kept going. They kept proving correct our idealism, our “Ya Gotta Believe” sensibility.

When former Mets ace Johan Santana threw the first no-hitter in team history, I sat inches away from the screen. I was 14-years-old, biting my nails, doing magic fingers at the screen. And when Santana got the job done, I remember hugging my dad and crying – not because it was the greatest moment of my life, but because it was history. At the time, the Mets were one of only two teams to never record a no-hitter. Finally, we did it too. It was bigger and outside of myself.

My dad and I were able to share many of the games this year, for the first time in a while, and when the Mets were down 2-0 in the 9th inning – in another must-win playoff game against the Milwaukee Brewers with one out – a comeback looked unlikely. Where was my hope with Mets star Pete Alonso at the plate? I kept thinking that nothing was going right for me, and I wasn’t sure if the team could pull it off. The same was true for Alonso – in a big contract year, fans seemed to be disappointed with him and he looked deflated after not coming up clutch in big moments. 

But just like that, he hit a dart into right field – a go-ahead, three run home run to give the Mets the lead. A seemingly impossible moment that made me cry again for the team, and for life, because “Ya Gotta Believe.” I tackled my dad this time, hugging him, crying and cheering like it was 12 years earlier.

I think the outside world, sometimes, needs to affirm your faith.