For The Good Times

Has it occurred to anybody that maybe we’re subject to the WFAN Curse?

When the Mets were last champions, it was under the banner of flagship station WHN, a very listenable country station right here in the middle of the big city. The Mets and WHN were a nice fit. Sheila York, the nighttime DJ who followed Bob Murphy and Gary Thorne on the air, was always very supportive of the cause. I was sorry when she and future Shea PA man Del DeMontreaux and Dan Taylor and the rest of the staff — everybody but Howie Rose — lost their jobs when all-sports WFAN came into being.

I wasn’t much of a country music fan, but I liked how the Mets infiltrated something that wasn’t necessarily baseball by nature, the way baseball should weave itself into every facet of life, even Alabama records. I also liked the idea of the Mets being on a station whose name you either knew or you didn’t. Calling a sports station “FAN” seemed like too much of a sop to its audience.

All right, so things more or less worked out on the sports station. But it seems to me that the Mets are a much smaller part of WFAN’s overall consciousness now than they were in 1987 or, for that matter, than they were on WHN in 1986 — for 21 years the last season in which the last Mets broadcast of the season was a win in late October.

(I looked all through my many boxes and bags of flotsam and Metsam for the Mets Country bumper sticker pictured here but came up empty. Luckily, Big Apple Airchecks came to the rescue, and this image I remember so well from the back of many a bumper is courtesy of their WHN tribute page.)