The Mets Ran Out Of Magic By David Roth
Posted by
JD (aka Jason Dean)
Oct 21 '24, 13:49
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There's no percentage in being right about a baseball team you care about. It's nice to feel smart, I guess, but "feeling smart" and for that matter "being right" are not really what I got into any of this for. Those are for gamblers and pedants, and of all the reasons that have made me care about the New York Mets during my life—habit and family custom and various personality defects specific to me, including but not limited to stubbornness and fatalism and whatever it is that makes people bite their fingernails—it has never crossed my mind that doing so was somehow a reasonable thing to do.
In a sense, being right about the team you care about is the last thing a person would want. Again, pedants and gamblers will differ on this, but they're in it for different reasons. It fits, in a bleak sort of way, that those are the types of fans sports leagues seem to be selecting for, or actively trying to create; owners, being owners, would naturally prefer that their fans be consumers instead of ... whatever this other way of caring is. The consumer relationship is easier to produce and reproduce, and much more readily leveraged. It reflects the way in which owners and executive types understand more or less everything, but also it makes a sort of pragmatic sense. It is easier to understand a baseball team as an expensive entertainment product that generates revenue on various platforms than it is as a machine that helps people become insane in ways of their choosing.
Everyone that cares about a team is a consumer to some extent, of course, but some are more consumed by that caring than others. It's not that one is better or worse, really, and I can only really speak to the version of it that I chose, but what I want, more than anything else, is to be surprised. This doesn't stop me from reading and talking and thinking about every knowable or notionally knowable thing having to do with the New York Mets, but that is mostly just a shape for my anxiety and interest to take. I learn all that stuff, and do my best to stay on top of it, because it is there, mostly. But my hope, always, is that I'm going to be wrong about it.
It is true, and also insufficient, to say that the Mets spent most of what wound up being their best season in nearly a decade playing more or less as I expected they would. The team all but explicitly said that this would be a bridge season between a recent failed attempt to spend their way into contention on the strength of veteran free-agent signings and some upcoming attempt to, I guess, try to do that again, but with better signings. The Opening Day roster was not notably improved from last year's miserable team, and the improvements that David Stearns's new front office made were mostly of a kind that would not burden the team in the future; the team signed starting pitchers on low-commitment free-agent deals that would have made those pitchers easy to trade at the deadline if the team had been miserable again, and inexpensive to keep around (or cut) had things gone much better or much worse than expected. Add it all up, account for regressions upward and downward toward the mean, and the Mets seemed like a team that could compete for a Wild Card spot.
And they were, in the sense that they were competing for a Wild Card spot until the day after the regular season ended, and that they wound up receiving the sixth and final bid. They also were not really that team for most or really very much of the season. The Mets were 11 games under .500 at the end of May, and then the winningest team in the sport from the start of June; they were awful and then they were alight with one of the more stupid and wonderful kinds of sports magic imaginable not just for a little while but for several months. Moment by moment and bit by bit, this all almost made sense: Francisco Lindor was the sort of galvanizing central figure that great teams tend to have; busted prospects were repaired much more convincingly than seemed possible and marginal players played like stars for much longer than was reasonable; the offseason moves for starting pitching worked out and the ones for the bullpen mostly didn't, but the front office kept trying and stuff started to work.
This is how a baseball team becomes good. The quantum of "some things that are supposed to happen actually happen" and "some things that seemed hugely unlikely to happen also happen" varies from one good team to the next, but all of them consist of some combination of reasonable inputs and unreasonable outcomes.
That's also true of bad teams, though; baseball is like that. If you watch a good team do those things for long enough, you will eventually have no choice but to accept that they are good, but for a team that won the way the Mets did—in increasingly wild and uncanny ways, by repeating various obviously unrepeatable and extremely difficult heroics—there is always the fact that the element of magic lighting it up is fleeting. There's the stuff that can be known about and planned for, and then there are other things that are different from that, to which every team is subject. The knowable stuff, the things that you can be right about, more or less functions as a floor; a good architect will build a straighter and more trustworthy surface than a bad one, but it's fundamentally neutral on its own. Or, if not neutral, just blank: a space upon which any number of things—stupid and wonderful things, unbelievable things and believable ones—might happen. Spend the cold months thinking about what those might be, really thinking about them and trying to game out what kind of shape they might take, and you will still be surprised once the show finally starts. That's the prize, the feeling of sitting there, so totally wrong, watching it become whatever it will be.
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