The interesting thing about baseball is no matter how much drama has gone on over the course of a marathon season, it can still come down to the last week and have a six month emotional investment come down to a final six games. It seems like a thousand years ago that I wrote the Willie Randolph piece and went on to be horrifically wrong about the Jerry Manuel era.
Tonight was a fine example of the drama you find at the end of a season. The Mets won, the Phillies lost, and the Brewers won. The Mets creep to 1.5 in a division where they own the tiebreak and narrow the timeframe on the Brewers. They’re still a game up in the Wild Card and a game back in the division. The team had the benefit of incredible pitching by Johan Santana — 125 pitches, 7H, 10K, 2BB, 2ER — and random things that only happen to the Cubs in September. Santana was at the plate, hit a grounder that should have been an inning-ending double play, but broke his bat. The bat preceded the ball to second and the ball hit the bat again and deflected away from the fielder. Everyone was safe and David Wright would knock the both of them in after a Luis Castillo walk. It’s enough to make a Cubs fan wonder if they really are cursed.
This week is going to try the fan’s perseverance. It’s like a playoff series but not. So far, they’ve stuck to the script. They’ve lost with their five-starter and won with their ace. They pieced together three outs with two pitchers in the ninth. It’s what they need to do with a bullpen that isn’t going to make anything easy. Tomorrow, we get Ollie. There’s been very few appearances by Bizarro Ollie down the stretch. Thursday is Pedro. I’m not sure which of those two starts to be more nervous about. Ollie loves the spotlight. Let’s hope Pedro can reach back and find a little bit of that magic to grit out a few more starts.
What tonight told me, more than any other night this season, is that Johan Santana is worth every penny the team is paying him. He’s stepped up in almost every big spot this year and pitched gems (even if the bullpen would eventually blow it). If the time calls for a huge start, he delivers. He’s a hell of a weapon to have in your pocket on Sunday if you need a win.
In a semi-related note, Seven Nights At Shea – Part 1 was linked on Metsblog.com. The comments went in much the way I’d expect them to. Half of them we’re “you’re totally right” the other half we’re varying degrees of disagreement from “suck my **ck, Keith!” to well thought out and thoroughly wrong replies.
There are no good reasons to boo your team at home. You can try to justify them to yourself. You can say that “you have to earn love in New York”. You can call people who want to be supportive corporate lapdogs. All that is perfectly fine — but the vitriolic response to the accusation is because the truth hurts. You’re part of the problem and you don’t want to hear it. You’d rather put all the blame on the players and say things like “if I’m part of the team, where’s my check” because you think of it as “us and them”. That’s where the “don’t boo them” people disconnect from the “OK to boo them people. We think of this as family. You think of it as fans and players. This is where the argument over calling fans and players “we” comes from. People who use “we” think of the team and fans as one collective unit who all want the same thing. People who don’t use “we” think of the team as one collective unit with various fans watching them and hoping for the best. If you want to see the results of a crazy fan base who loves to boo their team, check and see how well the Jets have done for the last 20 years. This is what you want for the Mets? Really?
It’s likely none of the people who read yesterday’s post (if they even did and, based on the comments, I’ll assume they only read the bit that MB excerpted on their post) will read today’s. It was framed as “blaming the fans” when it was more meant to be “pleading with the fans to be supportive.” I understand that the fans are not on the field playing the game. I also understand that the cold stat-heads out there will say that atmosphere and the crowd stuff is overrated. Maybe that’s true. But I think fans can and do affect games. Their job, though, is to throw the AWAY team off their game — not the home team. The Shea fan seems to have forgotten that. They’d rather try to get in Aaron Heilman’s head then in Carlos Zambrano’s. There’s no universe in which that helps us. Someone has to go in and get outs. This is what we have.
At the end of the day, you can bitch and moan and boo and try to be an aloof fan and tell everyone how much you don’t care… and if that’s the way you want to be that’s perfectly fine. I don’t understand it, but it’s perfectly fine. But, there are times to moan and boo and criticize and there are times to put all that aside. You can complain to each other all you want about how bad the team is and how much they’re not going to win. But that’s for US to hash out behind the scenes. It shouldn’t be on display on the field. The field should be the place where the only goal is to beat the other team. No agendas. No moaning. Just winning. You’d never let someone call your mother a whore and agree and say “yeah, she really IS a whore.” That’s what you guys are doing to this team. You’re letting the Phillies and Cubs and Brewers to call your family member a whore and agreeing with them. WE can call the team a whore. THEY can’t.
For the Mets’ family, the time to be unified is right now. We’re all in this together. Next week, if they don’t make it, we can go right back to picking and criticizing and talking about how Omar Minaya does not deserve a four-year extension. We can even do that on blogs and newspapers and podcasts right now. But at the stadium either be happy to be there or don’t go. Give them positive energy. Save your venom for when they actually deserve it. They don’t deserve it on every pitch. They deserve it at the end of the season if they finish without a playoff seed.
For now, they’re the Wild Card, they’re a game-and-a-half from winning the division — for f*ck’s sake, what’s there to be unhappy about?
