The New York Times Said Mets Are Dead

Liván Hernandez is gone from our midst, but the Elton John song they played for him at Citi Field when he did something well resonates slightly this Sunday, specifically the part, “when the New York Times said God is dead…”

I wouldn’t want to get that deep, but what does it say about the state of the modern newspaper when the New York freaking Times doesn’t send a reporter to Queens to cover the only home team playing baseball in its city on this particular weekend?

I know what it says about the Mets. That the Mets aren’t contending and therefore aren’t going to be considered a vital topic. But the Mets have not contended in Septembers before, yet their home games were always covered by the Times. Always, at least as far as I can recall from my many years of dedicated reading.

Whenever I’m reminded of the plight of the newspaper business, of course I get sad. Sports sections have been my Greek chorus for forty years, offering vital commentary and filling in the details of the narrative that has been every Mets season I’ve lived through. There was a time up until a couple of years ago when I didn’t make a move without reading at least three daily papers. Sure I saw the game. Sure I knew the score. But the stories and the quotes and the columns, let alone the standings and the stats and the transactions…that was baseball. I loved that there used to be a newsstand on the 7 extension. I loved that somebody used to sell the Night Owl edition of the next day’s Daily News outside Shea after night games. I loved when Channel 9 used to show newspaper vendors strolling the concourses of Three Rivers Stadium and Jack Murphy Stadium because it underlined my sense that the local paper was the tenth man of every game.

Notice the use of the phrase “used to” pervading my relationship with the daily paper. I all but gave up on newspapers in 2007. I still help myself to much of their work, but I stopped paying for it six days a week. I felt too guilty to let go for the longest time; being a writer and all, I felt I should support the craft even once I had a high-speed Internet connection to give me all the information I used to have to make a trip into the outside world to get. The breaking point wasn’t convenience or thriftiness. I got sick of supporting the local media’s love affair with the New York team that wasn’t mine, reasoning that the space they were giving the Yankees came at the expense of ink to the Mets. Screw that, I finally decided.

And screw it I did. I went from a seven-day-a-week newspaper consumer to one. I stuck with Sunday. There’s way too much tradition to give that up, way too much custom and habit. There’s too tactile a feel to the papers on Sunday, dating back to when I was a kid familiarizing myself with the printed word, for me to just read it on my Mac.

It wasn’t just the reading, though. It was the act as it unfolded for me for as long as I could remember. It was my father bringing them home, sometimes on Saturday night, which seemed almost mystical. It was schlepping from candy store to luncheonette to wherever papers were sold because sometimes we/I wouldn’t get out early enough or they didn’t deliver enough to our area. It was that Sunday morning in college when my Tampa Tribune was delivered to my dorm room without the sports and I called to complain and they sent somebody right over — a guy just off the line…literally an ink-stained wretch. He had this big smile when he handed the rest of my Trib to me, happy that some college kid cared enough about the newspaper to want every bit of it. And I had this big smile when I accepted and realized how much a part of the paper he felt even though he didn’t write or edit it.

For as long as I’ve known the Mets, I’ve known Sunday papers, and I’ve built my Sundays around that one particular section called Sports before reading any of the rest. Sometimes I’d slurp it all down. Sometimes I’d sip a story here or a column there, leaving myself some sports to savor later in the day. I used to have nightmares about looking for the Sunday papers and not finding them, or finding the wrong edition or an issue from a week earlier. That’s how ingrained into my life they are.

It’s a hokey cliché but Sunday wouldn’t be Sunday without the Sunday News (nauseating Jeter soul-kissing and all), Sunday Newsday (Wally Matthews’ continued employment and all) and the Sunday Times. Of course the Sunday Times. Local news notwithstanding, I could live without Sunday Newsday. I lived without the Sunday News when it was struck in 1978 and again in 1990-91, and though I still hold great sentiment for it, I resent its Yankee ragness no end. But the Sunday Times is the Sunday Times. Its price goes up, it gets a little thinner, but it’s still the Sunday Times. The New York Times and I live together in the greater New York area. I would be abandoning my responsibility as a New Yorker if I ever stopped reading it.

Yet the New York Times is abandoning its responsibility. On a Sunday. To the Mets. And to me.

Today’s paper had one story about the Mets-Cubs game from Saturday. That’s OK. I understand the Mets aren’t a big deal at this stage of their lost season. With the tennis and the college football and other teams in pennant races, I understand if their game rates just one story.

But I don’t understand how they rate one wire story.

Nevertheless, that’s all the Mets’ activities Saturday got in the sports section of Sunday’s Times. (There was a cheeky column comparing the woes of the Mets and Knicks, but it was from reporting Friday and had very little to do with informing you about anything you don’t know about your ballclub.) Mind you, the Mets played a home game Saturday. They played a day game. I get that papers sometimes save money by not sending reporters on the road in hopeless Septembers. And I get deadlines from night games not always meshing with the paper I see. And I’ll even throw in the realization that the “New York” in New York Times is a bit more of a brand name than a hometown, that this newspaper has a mission that extends way beyond the five boroughs and environs.

But come on. This is a disgrace. Saturday’s game was in Queens, right next door to the Times-staffed U.S. Open. It sold upwards of 38,000 tickets. Even with the Mets down and out in the National League (and the Cubs about the same), it is a subject of continued interest to who knows how many hundreds of thousands of regular Times readers. It is a staple we look forward to regardless of wins and losses. There is still a little part of me that doesn’t think a Mets game has taken place until I see what is written about it in the papers I buy.

Ben Shpigel is a terrific reporter and writer. I love to read his work in the Times. If he was granted a few well-earned days off, I’d be content to read what his substitute is writing for a weekend. I’d be interested in reading what a new voice has to say. I’d at least skim a lousy story by some hack. The point is I buy a paper that is the New York whatever it is and I expect my New York team, playing at home the previous afternoon, to be covered by somebody on that New York paper. And it was not. It was not in the print edition and it wasn’t online. There was just an AP story. AP stories are fine if you’re out of town.

I’m right here and so are the Mets. Where’s the story?

I was out at Citi Field today, Sunday. The Mets played a marvelous ballgame, at least a scaled down version of one given the expectations we now have for them. Mike Pelfrey found redemption. Daniel Murphy found his power stroke. Frankie Rodriguez found the ability to not disappoint a crowd of nearly 40,000, many of whom came expressly to take home his bobblehead. Whatever special insight is to be gained from their successes and our presence does not look like it will appear in Monday’s Times. There is an AP story on its Web site right now, more than four hours since the Mets won, and nothing else.

As happens regularly, I was reading one of those sad plight of the newspaper industry stories the other day. This one concerned the Times and its sports section. John Koblin reported in the New York Observer on the near demise of its general column Sports of the Times, long a centerpiece of the sports section. The overriding reason for its fade from view, according to the article, was the business has changed. That’s usually the reason newspapers don’t do what they used to do. One of the ways the Times would make up for the loss of that column, according to NYT sports editor Tom Jolly, would be by asking its beat writers to write more opinion pieces.

Whether that’s a great idea or not can only be divined from the pieces that are written and what it correspondingly does to the regular game coverage that has always been those reporters’ first order of business (former Timesman Murray Chass isn’t for it). But how will the Times offer any kind of perspective on the Mets — first-person, third-person, objective, subjective — if they can’t be bothered to send a reporter to Citi Field for two consecutive days?

As a writer, I want newspapers to succeed and endure. As a reader, I want newspapers to succeed and endure. As somebody who counts some good friends as members of that industry, I want newspapers to succeed and endure. But as a Mets fan who has always relied on the Times to tell me about the Mets, if they’re not going to tell me a blessed thing, why should I give a damn what happens to them?

UPDATE: Times posted Shpigel’s story on Sunday’s game on its site later Sunday evening.

Covering the Mets across four decades, Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.