It Happens Every Fall

My blog entries about baseball don't get a lot of readership or page views, which is why I don't do them very often.  But, sometimes, you just have to...

Indeed, my baseball pieces are sort of like New York Met fans.  They don't get a lot of love.   

It's an interesting fandom that I grew up in and still remain part of to a degree. If Major League Baseball had a social services department, there would be countless reports coming in of abuse.  Because no baseball fan, save for perhaps the perennially beleaguered Chicago Cubs, gets more shit thrown at them than the Met fan.

I remember it growing up.  Everybody in my neighborhood was a Yankee fan and, except for my childhood pal Leo, was pretty darn nasty about it.  You were the one always standing by yourself at the end.   The last to get picked.  The kid who, in the middle of September, was always waiting for next season and trying to figure out who was going to get traded during the winter.

Oh, sure, there were some wonderfully glorious periods.   1969.  1973.  1984 through 1988.   The year 2000.  But, for the most part, the Mets were also-rans and their fans were barely-runs.  

I'm less of a Met fan today, although I do try to keep my hand in the depression from afar.  I'm still wounded from the horrible way my former Shea seat mates and I were treated when the team moved across the parking lot to Citi Field.   Plus I despise the Wilpon ownership which is really a minor league operation that owns a major league franchise.  Plus, in Los Angeles, I've got the Dodgers which is a franchise that comes with its own special brand of neuroses.  But, the Mets?  They are truly pinstriped Zoloft.  

So, this summer, the Mets are inexplicably good.   Great young pitching.  Some smart player moves engineered by a less than smart front office.  By mid-August, they are streaking to the post season for the first time since...well...they blew that playoff chance two years in a row back in 2007 and 2008.   Right now, their first playoff round opponent just might be the...gasp...Los Angeles Dodgers.  All is looking good.

But, wait.  As a true Met fan knows, there's always calamity right around the corner.  Here's Dwight Gooden on the mound and Mike Scioscia at the plate.   Or is that Carlos Beltran at the plate in the bottom of the ninth?

Their pitching ace is this pompous ass named Matt Harvey.  I had heard this guy was a real selfish shithead two years ago and now Met fans are all realizing how true those rumors were.   Coming off Tommy John surgery last year for either the way he pitched or maybe the way he would stroke the hair of whatever high-powered fashion model he was fucking at the time, Harvey had a maximum innings count for 2015.   No more than 180.   

The only trouble is that, when your team goes deep into October baseball, a pitcher will have to throw a lot more than that.   

Uh oh, says Mr. Harvey and his agent Scott Boras who I believe once played a villain in an Indiana Jones movie.  Doctors say no can do.   Matt will have to be shut down.  

Uh huh.  

At play here is the fact that Matt Harvey is still getting the bare minimum for salary as a player.  $614,000.   Granted I could live easily on that, but Harvey's big money is still to come.   And, given the fact that the Madoff-raped Wilpon family doesn't have a pot to urinate in, Matt knows his next big contract ain't coming from Flushing.  So he's protecting his future.   

And that sound of raucous laughter you hear is coming from the likes of Sandy Koufax, Whitey Ford, Bob Gibson, and even Clayton Kershaw who have pitched/would pitch until their arms fall off.

What results is a public relations fiasco for Harvey, his agent, and even the Mets who should have managed this situation earlier in the season.  Harvey comes out with a statement retracting it all and it was obviously written by one of those crisis PR firms that often try to explain away why a noted celebrity was caught with a prostitute in a Travelodge on Sunset Boulevard.

And while Met fans knew the wheels were going to fall off their wagon eventually, they didn't think it was going to happen this way.

I mean, you figure that the other starting pitchers and the overused bullpen will fall apart.  You'd think that the big hits that Juan Uribe has contributed will turn into crushing double plays as a Dodger fan might tell you.   Or that this so-called wonder boy named Yoenis Cespedes would suddenly reveal why he's a player on his fourth team in four years.  

Sure, all of the above is still likely to happen.  And a true Met fan knows that the five game difference between first place and the Washington Nationals is a lot closer than it really feels.   Because, in reality for every baseball season, a real Mets fan has gotten into his car and almost always forgets to buckle the seat belt.

You just didn't think it was going to be Matt Harvey's mouth that would upend it all.

Funny.   I did.   Heck, maybe they will be the last ones standing in early November and Jeff Wilpon will be proclaimed...shit...a genius.  But I still think that the road to October 4 is going to be a bumpy one.

Isn't it always?

Dinner last night:  Frankfurters and German potato salad.