Someone go check on the Times' normally sensible Selena Roberts, because something is seriously amiss.
Her off-day column [1] began with the inevitable Yankees comparisons (Wright is “a Jeteresque pinup darling” and yesterday's victory was accomplished “in vintage Yankee style”) that I've loathed for years but learn to ignore as the sportswriter's equivalent of throat-clearing. But it's all in service of an idea so profoundly loathsome, so foul and misguided, that it should leave any sensible Met fan shuddering in horror.
The Mets should feel worthy enough to ask, “Why not us?” should Roger Clemens hit the sales rack.
Yes really.
Roberts does get around to enumerating some of the objections to this idea. The Mets don't play in Houston, hometown of His Loathsomeness; weren't his employer on his ascent from the pits of Hell; and don't offer him the kind of comforts the Yankees could — said comforts apparently being a) the fact that that clubhouse is so suffused with backbiting and bitchiness that the temporary employment of a mercenary wouldn't cause a ripple; b) absolution for drilling hitters; and c) gobs of money in the part-time pursuit of hardware.
That mismatch is undoubtedly enough to sink the idea, thank Christ, but let's keep going. In the 10th paragraph, Roberts notes that “Clemens, in the eyes of Mets fans, is remembered for two things. First, knocking Mike Piazza nearly unconscious with a pitch to the head in 2000 interleague play and then turning the barrel of Piazza’s broken bat into nunchucks during that World Series.”
For us, the fact that that oversized, semi-literate troglodyte nearly beheaded the heart and soul of our franchise in a vengeful seizure is Paragraph 1, not Paragraph 10, but Roberts then idly waves that little detail away.
But no player is left from the 2000 Mets. And fans slip in and out of loving and loathing with uniform changes.
And there, all you kids who want to grow up to be sportswriters, is the terrible danger of the press box. Maybe it looks like that when you spend years watching athletes come and go from locker rooms and maybe it sounds like that when all you can hear is the loudest and the drunkest baying below the press box. But the fact that no 2000 Met remains doesn't mean a thing to me, or to any longtime fan worthy of the name. We're still here, and the image of Piazza crumpling to the dirt hasn't receded in memory. I remember it very well, thank you, just as I remember Todd Pratt red-faced with rage back at Shea, the jaw-dropping farce of Clemens and the bat, the tragicomedy of Shawn Estes' semi-revenge, and the Schadenfreude of Clemens getting shelled in the All-Star Game with Piazza as his unwilling receiver. Real fans don't forget these things, and it's insulting to suggest that we do.
Uniform changes? Yes, we can adapt — Orlando Hernandez and Tom Glavine have found acceptance at Shea. But we're not so cheaply bought. There's no room in the orange-and-blue heart for the likes of Jeter or Chipper or Clemens. And there never will be. Hell, I'm happy that cheap little Ty Cobb wannabe Michael Tucker has been excised from my Met universe. Real fans have long memories and longer-lived loyalties and enmities than Roberts seems to think, and we don't give them up as easily as she suggests.
Roberts gets a quote from Wright (“I know in this clubhouse we don’t have cliques. We go to dinner together.”) in noting that the Mets don't have Yankee psychodramas. But not having psychodramas isn't like not having cable. Having escaped them, why on earth would we want to import some? As far as I know, my fridge doesn't have flesh-eating bacteria, but that doesn't mean I'd like you to FedEx me a jar of it. Would the Mets' clubhouse really be improved by importing an aging mercenary headhunter who shows up when he feels like it and is motivated by a combination of Neanderthal rage and lust for another hunk of metal to stick in his trophy case? The Mets, Roberts writes, “can offer Clemens image reclamation”. But why on earth does he deserve that? And why on earth should we be his Argentina?
Selena, here's a message from this Met fan: I hate Roger Clemens. And I don't mean I hate him like I hate when it's drizzling — I think he's a vile human being and wish him ill, up to the limits of whatever human decency I can summon up in this case. Do you know why I hate him so avidly? Because I'm a Met fan.
Needless to say, I don't want him anywhere near my team. Needless to say, if he somehow became a Met, I would not cheer for him. You know what? If that somehow happened, it's possible I might not cheer for them.