After the events of the past few days — the Yankees winning their 27th World Series and being feted for it; the Mets doing no such thing — perhaps you wonder, what's the point? I'd love to tell you what it is, but I have no real clue.
But I do have a correction to offer, specific to previous entries to this blog:
This was not the World Series from hell, at least not in the sense that either outcome would be equally terrible. If the Phillies had won, I can say with a great deal of certainty that their hypothetical victory, however annoying when considered on its own conceivable merits, would not have measured up to the actual victory of the Yankees.
Which isn't annoying. It's atrocious.
The Phillies won in 2008. I didn't care for it. They beat us and then made their way through the playoffs. It felt like the Cardinals winning in 2006, that it had something to do with us. In '06, however, it was a more direct process: Cardinals beat us and they were in the World Series. I hated the Cardinals for the next year or so. The other day I ran across something I wrote in 2007 in which I reflexively spewed nasty things about the Cardinals. I stand by those feelings for then, but they seem quite out of code now. At present, I don't particularly hate the Cardinals as a going concern. I'll restoke my hostility toward them April 16, per the 2010 schedule [1].
When April 30 rolls around, I'll hate the Phillies plenty. I'll hate them eighteen times next year. I'll hate their players, I'll hate their fans, I'll hate their Phanatic. That's a promise. But right now the Phillies mean nothing in particular to me. If they were parading around in fresh new World Champion t-shirts, they'd mean about as much.
I hate the Yankees. I always have and I always will. That wasn't going to change because the Yankees might have lost the World Series. They could have gone down in four straight and I'd hate them more than I did before for having been exposed to them four more times. I don't like them any better for having doused our division rivals in six games even if the collateral damage of the Phillies losing was fine and dandy. I surely don't like them getting to update their bios with a 27th line. I surely don't like the spate of special sections my Sunday papers have printed in their honor or how blanketed my television was by their parade on Friday or how every time I poke my head outside my house somebody's walking by in their garb or how the cemented media narrative is, as it was more than a decade ago, that all of New York just adores the Yankees.
What is New York right now? A place where Xavier Nady has a key to the city [2]. A place where the guy who gave it to him exhibits no institutional memory [3]. A place where the Dunkin' Donuts on Chambers St. is needlessly overrun [4] with thirsty jugheads.
Tell me how this isn't tangibly more hellish than a Phillies victory. (Residents of New Jersey who live closer to Philadelphia than New York are excused from this exercise.)
Early in the history of Faith and Fear, there was some Yankee contretemps making headlines. It was Spring Training 2005, the beginning of Alex Rodriguez's second year in pinstripes. It probably had something to do with him. I honestly don't recall, but I do remember it was one of those Big Stories all of baseball reportage was consumed by. My initial impulse was to blog about it, but then I stopped myself. No, I thought, this is going to be a Mets blog. We exist in a universe that is Mets-oriented, a universe of our own creation. We didn't start this thing to add to the nonsense that everything about New York baseball is Yankees-this and that Yankees-that. If that was what we were going to produce, we could have just kept reading the papers.
Five seasons went by and where are we? With the Yankee cloud overshadowing everything in its midst, just as it did heading out of 1996, just as it did heading into 2005.
I thought we were past all that. We are not. We are essentially back where we started.
The late '90s/Millennial Yankees were an anvil that kept befalling us, even when it appeared we were enjoying a marvelous postseason stroll. Bop! they went on us. Mets have a nice season in 1997? Nobody noticed because the Yankees were back in the playoffs. Mets take it down to the wire in 1998? Nobody noticed (except for the gruesome ending) because the Yankees were winning 114 regular-season games. Mets do semi-miraculous things in 1999 and 2000? They weren't as tangible as what the Yankees were doing.
The anvil fell lighter starting November 4, 2001, the night when Luis Gonzalez flicked a soft line drive into short centerfield and the pain eased some. The Diamondbacks, then the Angels, then the Marlins and then, most deliciously, the Red Sox all lessened the burden of being a Mets fan. We weren't winning anything from 2001 to 2004, but neither were they, by their standards. We didn't have much, but at least we had Elimination Day.
Nevertheless, even when The Yankees had stopped automatically winning World Series after 2000, they still had the cloud. It still obscured everything, not that the Mets were difficult to obscure in those particularly dark days. Yet the moment was at hand there in the spring of '05 for change to take hold. Not right away, maybe, but we were getting back in the game. We were improving. They weren't. They were making the playoffs, but weren't a sure thing anymore. By 2006, we were a better bet. We even went further in our quest for No. 3 than they did in their quest for No. 27. The Cardinals tripped us up, but we had the momentum. This team, this town…it was all there for us.
And it never happened. The Yankees experienced a rough October of 2007, but they got an October. We pulled up short on September 30. The Yankees bowed out altogether in 2008, but so did we, in far more humiliating circumstances. They were all but eliminated when they closed their stadium but they looked sharp and stood tall [5] on the way out. We simply went “thud!” for a second year in a row.
Then 2009, which might as well be 1996. They're World Champions and we're trying to figure out to dig our way out from 90+ losses. It's like the promise of '05 and the reasonable satisfaction of '06 and even the excruciating teases of '07 and '08 never happened. It's like the two good years of '99 and '00 and the two decent years of '97 and '98 never happened. It's like 1996 all over again. The Yankees are champions of baseball and New York and we are…who are we again? And are we going to throw four years and $20.4 million at Bernard Gilkey?
I don't know if I ever learn anything, but I'm going to try to learn not to care about them all over again. This blog was a big step in that direction. Except for the annual Subway Series sets and a little peripheral schadenfreude, we've stuck to our New York team pretty exclusively since February 2005, at least until developments warranted otherwise in October 2009. (Stupid developments.) I'd have preferred we hadn't become a sidebar to what just transpired. I'd have preferred the World Series From Hell Scenario not grown legs. Though I annually write about the World Series no matter who's in it, I'd have preferred staying out of it altogether.
We'll deal with the Phillies when the National League East demands it. We'll ignore the Yankees as best we can until May 21 at Citi Field. Our mission is the Mets. They're hell enough these days. Even so, I take comfort from what the first Mets blogger to put down roots here in the Metsosphere, Steve Keane of Eddie Kranepool Society, had to say in the wake [6] of the inevitably unavoidable outcome of the final six baseball games of 2009.
[T]he big difference between Mets fans and Highlander fans is that we have a passion and love for our team, the Highlander fan has a love and a passion for Championships.
It's the sort of thing we told each other in other autumns of our discontent, particularly the autumn of 1996. If it sounds like the last refuge of an also-ran and an excuse for rooting for a certifiable loser when everybody else is riding high from winning, that's because it does.
Which doesn't mean what Steve wrote isn't true. Because it is — the part about us, for sure. I'm willing to go along with his diagnosis of them, but the confetti's cleaned up and the special sections are bundled for recycling, so I'm not worried about them going forward.
They're going to be how they are, just more so for a while.
We have, as Steve put it, Mackey Sasser and Mike Vail and Glendon Rusch to give us an “ah yeah” smile. We cherish our champions. We relish our reserves, too. We take it all in, no matter how distasteful, and we keep coming back. Right now we feel like roadkill from somebody else's parade route, but we're already up and marching to our own drummer. I don't know that that's a good or healthy thing, but it's what we do, and we're already doing it in ways we don't even realize.
We're done rooting against the Yankees. We're done rooting against the Phillies. We're rooting for the Mets.
God help us.
The New York Review of Books' November 19 issue was the first one I ever picked up, and I was not sorry once I got to page 22. Printed there was a story by Michael Kimmelman [7] about the no longer so new ballparks in New York. What made it worth reading was the generous helpings of quotations it contained from The Last Days of Shea by our friend Dana Brand [8]. We're very happy for Dana since he's been reading TNYROB a lot longer than we have and he says it was a thrill to find himself excerpted in there. You'll be happy (and, because of the subject matter, a little sad) if you pick up a copy of The Last Days of Shea [9], a book that brings you back to the old ballpark both psychically and physically one more time.