Why We Root For The Mets

By Mike McGann
Posted Saturday, March 24, 2007

“Met fan.” You might as well say “Trekkie” or “goth” for all the respect it garners.

Win, lose or draw, the Mets have been a punchline for more than a generation, relegated to secondary status behind the legend-encrusted Yankees. Almost daily, Mets fans are confronted with the reminder that they willingly chose the team that hasn’t won 26 world championships.

Yankee fans get Rudy Guiliani. Mets’ fans get Mike Bloomberg. They get caviar and champagne, we get a slightly stale kinish and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. The Yankees’ owner, George M Steinbrenner, was born on the fourth of July. The Mets’ owner, Fred Wilpon often seems like he’d rather be at a Brooklyn Dodgers’ game.

And don’t get me started on Mr. Met — we may love him, but most non-Mets’ fans thinks of him as a joke.

But you know, I wouldn’t have it any other way, and I suspect those of you who don the orange and blue and can recite the lifetime stats of George “The Stork” Theodore feel the same way.

At the end of the day, it’s more rewarding to be a Mets’ fan.

Any season the Yankees don’t win the title it’s a failure and a disaster. Meanwhile, Mets’ fans have been able to get excited about — and still wax poetic — about crappy teams that overachieved and stole our hearts, the 1980 version being the most obvious example. And when the Mets win, it is sheer nirvana.

Every Yankee win carries the weight of expectation. Every Met win carries the joy and thrill of newness and recent memory of failure, no matter how hard the team “battled.”

We’re a unique tribe, though, and at times revel in the shortcomings of our team, history and facilities.

Even though it is going to be largely torn down soon, Yankee Stadium is a cathedral, where Ruth, Gehrig and DiMaggio played. Shea Stadium, which is also due for the wrecking ball, is a particularly charmless shell of a ballpark, made home only by our memories there. Whereas the Yankees have Monument Park, we have a paper-mache apple that was cheesy back in the early 80s, but has somehow become oddly kitsch and lovable for its awfulness. Despite the lack of logic, Mets’ fans defend Shea publicly, while privately acknowledging its shortcomings with other Met fans.

Even the new ballparks — the new Yankee Stadium appears to be a marvel, a new kind of design, using classic lines, but with a modern high-tech twist. CitiField looks a bit like the nice new parks in Philly and Pittsburgh — a big improvement to be sure — but not a park that is going to stand out from the pack 10 years from now.

And so it is thus.

The Yankees are limousines. The Mets are the F Train — the local — on a hot summer day. The Yankees are a supermodel, the Mets are that sort of cute, but quirky girl/guy in your chemistry class, the one who might actually say yes if you asked them out.

With the Yankees, failure is not an option, except of course for the fact that it is endemic to the game of baseball. With the Mets, failure when done artfully or with passion, is sometimes celebrated, while the successes are treasured.

So it is an interesting time we find ourselves in. Although it is close, I think it is arguable that the Mets have the better of the two New York baseball teams. Because of history and outlook, I think fans on both sides of the aisle seem a bit unwilling to acknowledge this fact.

While 2000 might have been a World Series mismatch — that Mets team wasn’t nearly as good as the Yankee team that beat it in five games - this year could finally see a real Subway Series, with two powerful teams able to slug it out.

And even if the Mets are seen as underdogs, that’s like home field advantage, a warm comfortable blanket.

But even assuming the Mets’ win — assuming a lot, including a return to the postseason, granted — does that change anything? No. Brooklyn’s 1955 win was seen as a freak occurrence, a June snowstorm on the New York baseball landscape, nothing more. A win this October, changes nothing, other than to annoy legions of Yankee fans and royally anger The Boss.

Maybe the die was cast in 1962 when that awful team managed to capture so many hearts - although the 1969 Champiohsnip and subsequent teams of the early 1970s owned the city - until M. Donald Grant wrecked things. Maybe it happened while Shea sat rotting, literally, in the mid-70s, while Yankee Stadium was being rebuilt. Whatever and whenever it happened, it’s been around long enough to now be hardwired into Mets’ fans DNA.

So we choose to follow lovable losers instead of the so-called “Evil Empire.”

We pull for the underdog, hope against hope for our day in the sun. And on those rare days when the clouds part and the sun shines, the light is so perfect and special, that those moments can keep a fan’s soul warm for years — sometimes decades. We work through the bad times, the near misses (and ache at the closeness) and hope for the best.

I wouldn’t haven’t traded the last 35 years of highs and lows for anything — and wouldn’t trade the next 35, God willing, for anything, either.

So, even after all these years, the tingle of excitement a week before opening day is no less than it was when I was 12 years old and dazzled by Tom Seaver. We know joy. We know pain. We’re Mets’ fans and we know life.