Instead of being honked off that Michael Imperioli makes for one dismal Met and that Sports Illustrated reports a project centered on “the beer-swilling, cocaine-snorting 1986 Mets” is being passed on en masse in Hollywood (and honestly, would you trust anyone to make that picture?), I'm here to let you know that there's a wonderful Met movie available right now, and you don't have to sit in a sticky theater to watch it.
Order yourself a DVD copy of Mathematically Alive: A Story Of Fandom. It's all about you. It's all about Mets fans.
Documentarians Kathy Foronjy and Joseph Coburn put out a casting call of sorts a couple of years ago, asking on boards and blogs and such for Mets fans who would like to tell their stories. Among those who responded were colorful characters. Thus, colorful characters carry the story forward. If you're like me, you're not a colorful character, certainly not on first impression. In fact, if you're like me, you kind of step aside when you're in the vicinity of a colorful character.
Funny thing, though. Mathematically Alive probes beneath the face paint. While not strictly a profile of superfans, one of the many strengths of this movie is deconstructing them. When you see one of them in a feature on the TV news, usually before or after a big game outside Shea, there is screaming. The superfan screams. People around the superfan scream. This is what big fans of sports teams do if you absorb them in three-second bites: they scream and make asses of themselves.
Not here, however. You can only scream for so long before you begin to simmer down and talk. And beneath the face paint and the wacky outfits and unburdened by the signs and placards, the colorful characters turn out to be fans like the rest of us. We can all relate to eternally loving our team even if we must be wondering why we continue to at this particular juncture of 2007. Our team squeezes us for every spare buck, removes more than 10,000 seats from our future in the name of economic efficiency disguised as modern intimacy, pokes us erratically as we enter the arena, blasts our eardrums with nonsense and, for good measure, trades Lastings Milledge for Ryan Church and Brian Schneider.
Still we show. Some of us show with our faces painted, our quirks on boisterous display, our personal-validation rituals in full force. Some of us need to show the team and the world and each other that we love the Mets more than anybody. Some of us don't need to show it in quite the same manner. We all speak the same language.
Mathematically Alive captures the heart of the Mets fan — our heart — gorgeously. It's sympathetic, not judgmental. It treats particularly extroverted Mets fans akin to how Wordplay treated competitive crossword solvers: good people, special bond, intense endeavor, happy to be among each other. Everybody who is spotlighted, even the ones from whom I might look to move to another seat in the early innings of any given game, won me over. You wear your masks and decorate your cars and cloak your houses and show up first in February for tickets and fire up the tailgating on Opening Day and lure Mr. Met to Rockville Centre to march in a St. Patrick's Day parade and painstakingly position yourself to wave to Mike Piazza all so Mike Piazza will wave back to you for the umpteenth time. I don't do any of that, yet I might as well. We all cheer. We all care. We all love the Mets. I feel you, you colorful characters. We are in this together.
Foronjy and Coburn follow their subjects (some more outwardly calm than others) from the beginning of '05 to the end of '06, right through Game Seven. Of course the afterloss is painful, but there was something that really nailed it for me right before that final contest of the NLCS. One of the movie's recurring colorful characters, identifying himself as a “man of leisure,” is interviewed outside Shea. We've seen him sporadically in the course of the film, but now there's something different. He's wearing his Mets jacket and he's ready to go inside Shea. I recognized the aura about him, about everybody the documentary caught up with in the late afternoon and early evening of October 19, 2006. There was a pure energy to those fans in those moments. I don't mean yelling and stomping. They positively crackled. Within that big blue thing lied their fate. They had to get to it, to help their team win.
I know that feeling. I felt it the night before Game Seven when I was there for Game Six; and twice the week before for Games One and Two; and twice the week before that during the NLDS. I always feel it at least a little before entering Gate E. I never feel it sitting at home…except while I was watching Mathematically Alive.
Give or take an unprecedented collapse, we've been pretty lucky of late when it comes to us being us and somebody recording it. We've gotten the movie Mathematically Alive. We've gotten the book Mets Fan. And we've gotten, partially self-serving as this will sound, dozens of really wonderful blogs detailing the fine points of rooting for the Mets. It's hard to believe how much we used to depend on a handful of newspaper beat writers to tell us about the Mets. Beat writers don't tell us anything about the Mets as we tend to interpret them. It is not to impugn their skills nor the narrowly defined jobs they hold to say what they cover is quotes and gossip. There's a place for that, a big one.
But it's not the end game. Documentarians like Kathy Foronjy and Joseph Coburn, authors like Dana Brand and bloggers like a whole bunch of us cover the life. To me, that's what baseball is about: being a fan. I worry deeply about whether the Mets will win or lose every game and I obsess on whether they'll finish first, last or somewhere in between. That gives us our context, to be sure. Yet scores and standings are almost background noise against the act of being a fan itself (except for the Piazza chasers, it struck me how little of Mathematically Alive mentioned particular players; surprisingly, perhaps, they weren't missed). We've established if we've been at this thing we call rooting for as great a percentage of our existences as I think most of us have been that we're Mets fans through thick and thin many times over. We're fans if the Mets are playing a playoff game tonight or if we're nowhere near October. I like that so many able chroniclers of the life have come to the fore to dissect it so well.
The DVD's extras, not incidentally, contain what may be the highlight of the whole package. One by one, dozens of Mets fans contemplate a pair of questions:
What's your best Met moment?
What's your worst Met moment?
It's there that we really get the connective tissue that links all of us. The answers vary, but everybody can relate to what everybody else chooses. This is the family history. This the chapter and verse, whether it's the godfather of ground balls or the most treacherous trade of them all or whatever. Our respective best and worsts don't have to match up. We all know them, we all feel them. We take the good and the bad incredibly personally and we take the good and the bad almost uniformly universally. I realized in watching this section to what extent we as individual Mets fans celebrate together and mourn together even if we've never necessarily sat together.
Visit Vitamin Enriched Films to order the DVD of Mathematically Alive: A Story Of Fandom.
I feel slightly disappointed: I e-mailed Foronjy and Coburn — in reponse to a postiong on nysportsday (aka the mofo) and told them I'd be available if they wanted to have my lovable mug in their moviefilm and they said they'd be in touch. They never were.
Get my agent on the phone!
Half a star deducted for lack of CharlieH.
I'm not in there either. And my butt has been parked in a seat at Shea as often as it's been parked in a seat at home. Their greed in the past few years, coupled with my reduced financial circumstances, have me down to attending 30 games a year now, but I used to hit 60-75. So don't worry, Charlie!
I haven't seen it yet, but I sincerely hope it's not full of chicks who became Met fans because they thought David Wright was cute, and/or idiots who stay home all year and then show up all painted, drunk and shouting when their buddy gets his hands on playoff tickets. I hate those types, and they're the ones who always seem to get the face time in these things.
Sorry guys :(
In our household, though, we were thrilled to see a familiar face on the big screen – http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/5281/rossinfilmqv1.jpg
Rats – I forgot to set it up as a link.
And Laurie – rest assured, the film definitely focuses on the real fans.
I may not get around to seeing this film, or reading the Mets Fan book. But I do want to say, Greg, that you are spot-on about blogs (primarily this one) getting to the core of being a fan by covering the life. I watch or listen to pretty much every game, so I don't need the game recap or analysis the dreaded MSM feed us. But what keeps me coming back, especially here, is the sense of cameraderie, the knowledge that there are kindred souls out there who revel as much as I do in the exploits of a bunch of hicks, foreigners and other strangers who wear blue and orange and thus become our family. It's a bonus that you and Jason do it so well here.
Indeed, the kid who's modeled our shirt from one end of the Atlantic to beyond the other, Ross Chapman, steals a little of the show and then some.
KF, your words are appreciated more than you'll know. Thanks.
On the recap tip, I don't think the beat guys even do that much anymore. It's understood that everybody's seen the game. Other than the AP reporter, they don't run down the action, just the quotes. At one time that was novel. It was so long ago that Dick Young was considered cutting-edge in the practice.
I'll tell you what inspired this observation. A few weeks ago, Dave Lennon in his Newsday blog reported on the tour he and the other writers were given of Citi Field, something of value because it's not something any of us were getting. But there was something about the tone of the report that indicated he was looking at it completely differently from the way a fan would. And that's fine because his job isn't to be a fan. But he'll be sitting in a press box, riding an elevator (that will work for a change) and trolling the clubhouse. That is fairly meaningless to us.
To be fair, I left a comment (as did Dana Brand) asking him to reconsider his reflexive knocking of Shea and the next day he acknowledged that some fans don't necessarily want to hear how much he doesn't like the park so he'd try not to do that as much. It's not so much his opinion of Shea that bothered me (he's entitled). It was just this instant “everybody must hate this place because it sucks to work here” vibe. It showed me (and I don't want to pick on him per se because he does well the part of his job we don't have access to as fans) we are experiencing the Mets differently from the media.
That's why I particularly liked the film and Dana's book and a whole bunch of blogs…to say nothing of the contributions of you guys.
If I wasn't clear, those featured are all long-time fans, all on board prior to 2005. Everybody's bona fides seem in order.
Being one of the featured fans of the film, I have to say ,working with two very artistic and passionate producers in Foronjy and Coburn was a special thing to be part of. One just knew right from the beginning that they were on to something real.
wearing a t-shirt launch shirt, i see!
Actually, it's a Mets Fan Club for Kids shirt.
Is that really you, Kowalski????
Haven't seen you in person since Game 7…
I would have been good for that film in '99 when I dyed my hair blue and orange for the playoffs, especially weeks afterward when the colors faded to yellow and green and I was stuck with the goofy colors.
I read Mets Fan at your request Greg and enjoyed it (he nails it in the last paragraph, I get goosebumps every time I read it… then I have to question my sanity over pouring so much of myself into a rotating collection of 25 uniforms), so I'll be sure to see this DVD when I get a chance. Sounds great.
For the record–
Best Met Moment: 10/17/99
Worst Met Moment: 10/19/99
Everyone becomes jaded by their work circumstance. I work at a major ad agency, which probably sounds exciting or glamorous to others, but rest assured it's quite prosaic and Dilbertian. I in turn read Greg's tales of reporting on beer and breweries with a mixture of awe and envy: Imagine! Making a living doing two of my favorite things – writing and drinking!! Yet I'm sure Greg can dispel my notions of joyous labors.
But still, the way sportswriters pooh-pooh their position kills me. Milions of cubicle dwellers and office drones would sell a kidney to be paid to follow a sports team. Let alone their favorite one. They should really keep their grumbling about hours, or boredom, or disillusionment to themselves.
And don't even get me started on ingrate ballplayers!
Good. And none of those idiots that I always want to kill on the subway, who couldn't care less all year and then THEY'RE the ones who get their hands on all the playoff tickets? (Not that this is often an issue, but when it is…)
Oh, and the ones who suddenly become Met fans when it starts looking like we might make a run for it. And the girls who don't know a thing about the Mets besides the one player they think is cute, but all the guys act like these lame chicks are baseball experts because they have a general idea of how many innings there are in a game. 'Cause that's the most you can expect from girls and sports. >:-(
I'm not a violent person, but it takes all the restraint I have not to deck them all. Bogus Met fans are as bad as Yankee fans. They breeze in and out depending on how we're doing and/or how cute the guys are. It doesn't work that way. This is a LIFE SENTENCE!! heh
Dave Lennon can friggin' bite me. That's as intelligent a response as I can muster. SHEA IS BEAUTIFUL!!! It's the only place in the world I can honestly say has housed some of the best and worst moments of my life. It's home.
My girlfriend and I are with you. Tuesday we took a walk around citifield to get an up-close look at the construction. We kept looking at it, and we marveled at how truly fast it's coming along, and how impressive it seems when you're right next to it on the street… but then we kept looking back at it's neighbor and kept coming back to the same conclusion about our future place of busniess (I won't call it 'home' for a while): “meh, it's still not Shea.”
I'm gonna fucking miss that place.
Everything gets old for anybody who is required to do it, but yes, it's tiresome to hear about it when it's something we're all tuning in or turning a page for. In your whole life, did you ever hear Bob Murphy mutter that a game was dragging on too long? And that was a man who was so tired one early morning after a night of drawn-out travel that he signed a hotel register “Robert Mets”.
In your whole life, did you ever hear Bob Murphy mutter that a game was dragging on too long?
Well, there was the time that Murph exclaimed, “And the damn thing is over!” But that was indeed an abberation ;)
yeah its me… thanks for the positive support and comments :) see you at the next game 7!
were you the one that started the meathead chant?