I’ll let you in on a little secret about the endless period between baseball seasons:
It does end.
Who knew?
I’m not sorry to see the stretch that commenced with the last out of the last Met season and concludes with the first pitch of the new Met season expire, though since I’ve been doing this stuff here, I’m always amazed at how much I don’t get to across those six barren months. Every year I have all kinds of “offseason posts” lined up in my mind for when the playoffs play out, for when the Hot Stove sizzles, for when the snowy void blankets our field of vision, for when we’re all making the same Rogers Hornsby allusions, for when Pitchers & Catchers report, for when Pitchers & Catchers & their teammates then proceed to jog in place for weeks upon weeks.
Then Opening Day arrives and I realize I got to several of them but never all of them. Some of them will spill into the new season, some of them will keep as evergreens, many of them will become inscrutable notations in my currently 54-page “blog ideas” MS Word document that I’ve been adding onto for the past eight years. (For example, my previously unpublished 2010 concept for a Ben & Jerry’s flavor called Angel Pecan probably goes no further than this parenthetical sentence.)
Oh well. As of 4:05, there’ll be new games to spawn more ideas, some ingenious, some dubious, some that will never be expanded upon but get jotted down in a moment of Metsian passion because I don’t want to forget it.
We all forget things that seem excruciatingly important in the moment. I’m told I have a Marilu Henner-style memory [1] for what the Mets were doing and when, yet I forget things, too. The Mets are about to enter their 54th season (55th, if you count 1981 as two seasons [2], which is something few ever stop to consider doing). They’re too far along historically to be summed up in detail on the fly, though you can still probably condense their essence down to a bulging paragraph.
The New York Mets were founded in 1962, were very bad in their early stages, shocked the baseball world with an unforeseen championship in 1969, maintained a level of competitiveness for the next several years — which included a surprising pennant in 1973 — and then fell into their old dismal ways for an uncomfortably lengthy spell. They revived by the mid-1980s, capturing another thrilling championship in 1986 and remaining one of the sport’s top clubs (with a 1988 division title to their credit) into the next decade. Most of the 1990s represented another fallow period, though they climbed back to prominence as a new century approached, reaching the postseason in consecutive Octobers and a fourth World Series in 2000. After another dip in fortunes, they returned to the top of their division in 2006. Within a few years they were struggling again, though optimism for a bright future coincided with the coming of the 2015 campaign. However well or poorly they performed in the standings, their most dedicated fans have always embraced them.
It will get harder and harder to tell the Met story in brief given time’s tendency to pile up. It’s also impossible to use indelible ink for how it ends, because — unless you’re plagued by a Walter O’Malley — it thankfully never ends. You can rattle off with certainty everything that you’re reasonably sure is in the past, from “Casey Stengel lit up the Polo Grounds” to “Bernard Madoff cast a shadow over Citi Field,” but you have to allow for provisional penultimate sentences. Previous eras give you concrete results. Eras in progress get by on contemporary mood because you just don’t know what you’ve got on your hands right now. You don’t necessarily precisely understand what you had on your hands a few years ago. Someday you’ll be able to define what it’s all meant, but for now it’s still being processed in service to a bigger, undeveloped picture. 2015 could answer for us what was coming by way of, say, 2013, or it could be another breadcrumb on the way to 2017…or whenever.
Ideally, 2015 will explain itself as 1969 and 1986 still do, and the years prior 2015 will fill in their blanks accordingly, presumably in Prelude To Greatness fashion. The Mets, you may have noticed, rarely traffic in the ideal, but if you can’t be an idealist on Opening Day, then when?
So we won’t know how exactly this new year fits along the great Met timeline for a while, except that it is following 2014 and is scheduled to precede 2016. Nevertheless, we’ll start to get the slightest inkling around 4:05 this afternoon, which was the whole point of those six months between seasons when I never got around to writing all I’d hoped to write. And however well or poorly our Mets perform in the standings, their most dedicated fans will always embrace them.
L’Sheanah tovah. May we be inscribed and sealed for the Happiest of Recaps.