My Baseball Team Stinks and I Don’t Care

As another playoff-less baseball season winds down, Marc Stern reflects on being a New York Mets fan.

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New York has one and a half professional baseball teams. But this article is not all about New York. It’s about a baseball as a metaphor for life, and why I am moved by failure.

My name is Marc Stern. And I am a New York Mets fan.

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Here in New York lives the king-like all-world-first-class-citizen twenty-seven championships team. Pristine and polished and classy.

And then there are my loveable losers. It’s true, the second-class citizen New York Mets have had a few select halcyonic years, but the hopes of a perpetual dynasty (like that OTHER team across town) was consistently, thuddingly and quickly destroyed by drugs, financial ruin, and prodigiously awful management.

I love them anyway. Why?

Because the Mets represent real life. As we have been taught, you can’t buy happiness, you can’t buy family, you can’t buy your life-long friends. The most precious moments in life are grown, nurtured in the belly of your farm teams. Watch your children grow before your eyes and find success, love, happiness. THAT is real life in motion.

What the OTHER team shows us is the polar opposite. You can buy winning. You can buy happiness. (Well. Not recently. Recently, they’ve shown us that you can buy old fat players at the tail end of their mega-contracts and watch them self-destruct in hilarious fashion.)

With the OTHER team in town, the winning is expected, even demanded. But in the human condition known as “Mets fan” there often is sadness, losing and heartbreak punctuated by moments of great joy and misguided hopefulness. One learns to appreciate these brief joys more if they are not expected or demanded.

This reflection on baseball as it relates to a society that values immediate and constant gratification does not hold true for all fans, nor would I generalize the associations of either team. In fact, I am not a fan who despises the OTHER team across town, and will even admit cheering them on. Occasionally. Well, at least once or twice.

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It is pride, but also with sadness and hopefulness for future generations, that I have passed on the mantle of Mets fandom to my sons. They consistently bemoan that our team sucks, but they also understand the importance of supporting those that you love and the hope that next year will… ah, never mind. Heck, with my Mets, I’m just happy if SOMETHING good happens at all. I understand there’s a nice new restaurant at CitiField, right? Beautiful! Of course, this perspective makes winning that much sweeter when it does finally happen, say, in 2037.

But hopefully sooner.

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(Photo Credit: Associated Press)