Unnamed sources report the Mets lost again Friday night [1]. “We were all miserable,” said a fan who made anonymity a condition of speaking frankly regarding the state of the team [2] that is limping to the finish with a 69-91 record following grand expectations for 2017.
“They suck, the whole bunch of them,” the Mets fan revealed, insisting on going unidentified so he or she could more freely share certain critical insights. “The owners suck for letting this happen, the front office sucks for not stopping it, the manager certainly hasn’t done his best managing this year and who the hell are these players?
“Still,” the fan elaborated, “I’m a Mets fan. Once you fall in love with them, they abuse you.”
The sucking is not limited to club personnel, the fan added while refusing to acknowledge whether he or she maintains a name or any distinguishing physical characteristic. “I’m no prize in any of this because I complain plenty, yet I have no surefire answers as how to ameliorate this awful situation,” the fan said. “Wait, does using ‘ameliorate’ in a sentence give away who I am? What about ‘surefire’? Because you said this was going to be anonymous. It has to be anonymous so I can speak frankly as to how awful this situation is. God forbid anybody know that anybody specific knows how much the Mets have sucked this year.”
Under cover of anonymity, the fan returned to his — or her — critique of the Mets’ disastrous season, one that is about to end with the likely dismissals of Terry Collins, Dan Warthen [3] and other staff members. “I have no allies on the team,” the fan said. “They are all against me, I’m pretty sure. If they weren’t, why would they be doing this to me virtually every night for six months?” The fan attributed his/her ultimate isolation to having gotten “too chummy with them,” though he/she wouldn’t confirm who “them” are before implying the alleged chumminess is primarily limited to his/her yelling at the television during the team’s myriad defeats.
“Even when you tell them,” the fan said, “they don’t listen, let alone say ‘hey’ to you when they pass in front of you on the TV. It’s like my name isn’t Cespedes or Harvey or…hey, don’t write that down. If they know my name isn’t Cespedes or Harvey, they’ll figure out it’s something else by process of elimination and I’m to be unnamed, dammit. I wouldn’t be freely sharing certain critical insights if I wanted anybody to know who I am.”
The fan reserved his most detailed eviscerations for Collins, whose contract is not expected to be renewed after seven seasons on the job, the longest managerial tenure in franchise history. “Terry managed the Mets to a World Series and to the playoffs,” the fan explained, “but take that away, and all you have is him not doing that.” Among the fan’s criticisms of the manager were Collins not making all the right moves, not playing all the right players and trying to win games without being uniformly successful.
For years, Collins’s public reputation had been generally positive, one that left the impression the players the baseball lifer managed and the people he answered to thought he was essentially all right. “The hell with that,” the anonymous fan retorted. “It’s important that it gets known ASAP that Terry wasn’t as adequate as was generally believed, at least not when things were at their 2017 worst. This way we can come away with a lower opinion” of the soon to be unemployed 68-year-old skipper.
“I gotta get these shots in now,” the fan concluded, “because once Terry is through the door, there’s no chance it can hit him in the ass on its way out. Whatever my name is, whatever little I have to do with any of this, however much I’m not an ‘insider,’ I am all about the Mets — and I sure as hell know how goodbyes go around here.”