“You got me confused with a man who repeats himself.” – Omar Little.
There was nothing in my post here about “grit” and perception that I felt I misstated and so there’s no good reason to revisit it besides the one irksome assertion, in the comments section, that I do not watch the games.
I don’t mention that now to defend myself against that ridiculous charge, but rather to turn it around on anyone who ever brings the same criticism against me or anybody else making the argument I made yesterday:
Do you even watch the games? Do you see how unbelievably f@#$ing good these guys are at baseball? Do you really believe that Carlos Beltran just coasted to the Major League level on sheer physical ability, then became one of the very best baseball players in the world without really giving a damn? Do you really think it works like that?
(It is, of course, massively ironic that Beltran the lightning-rod is again thrown in the middle of this discussion. Unclutch Carlos Beltran of the 1.302 career postseason OPS. Soft, selfish Beltran who fights his way back from a bone-on-bone knee condition to play in meaningless games. Apathetic Beltran who has a special Carlos Beltran practice machine written into his contract.)
And look: No one’s saying ballplayers aren’t human. Of course they are. But they’re humans who managed to stomach years of awful Minor League living, countless long bus rides, and endless hours of practice, often very far from home. It’s so much easier to give up at some stop along the way than it is to make the Major Leagues.
In other words, I guess, all Major Leaguers have a hell of a lot of grit. And all our armchair psychology and body-language expertise doesn’t provide a fair shake to guys who have worked their asses off to reach the Major League level.
Sure, there are moments when players don’t hustle. Isolated incidents. But no player lasts in the Majors without hustling because remaining at the big-league level requires perpetual hustle.
And you might say that it’s not black-and-white. Maybe the guys on the Mets have some of those qualities, but the Phillies have more of them: more attitude or swagger or grit or whatever talk-radio buzzword we’re using to describe the same silly thing.
But those are things we notice and appreciate in winning teams, partly because players inevitably behave certain ways when they’re winning and mostly because we seek out and identify those things in a team once we know that they are winners.
Ask Mets fans over 30 to name the grittiest team they can think of and they will almost universally tell you it’s the hard-fighting, hard-partying Mets of the late 1980s.
But recall that the 1986 Mets fielded an incredibly deep and potent lineup and got over 200 strong innings apiece from their top four starters. Then they won the World Series in part because Bob Stanley threw a wild pitch and the ball got by Buckner.
How gritty would that team be if Stanley’s pitch stayed true? And all that swagger earned those same Mets no rings in 1987 or 1988. A little less luck in October ’86 and we’d probably be pointing to all the same qualities we now revere — the fighting, the attitude, the off-field nonsense — as the distractions that prevented a massively talented team from ever winning it all.
Once again, the beast is only us. It is often our nature to create these narratives to help explain complicated things, and in sports they are likely perpetuated by the need to fill columns, blog posts and airtime.
But in this particular case it is baffling, or at least frustrating, because far too often the stories we develop only cloud a much simpler and more elegant truth: Good baseball teams win more games than bad ones. Maybe not necessarily in a seven-game series or in the five-game sets we’re watching now, but almost always in a full 162-game season.
The Phillies didn’t do this to the Mets; the Mets did this to the Mets. Carlos Beltran, David Wright and Jose Reyes are not losers, they’re just too often playing on shallow rosters filled with subpar players. Get a hold of yourselves. Fatalism fixes nothing. Good management does.
Tedquarters 
Holy crap Ted, do you even read what you write?!
(and a new wormhole opens in the time-space continuum)
Carlos Beltran’s practice machine isn’t as grissiony as Joe Mauer’s.
mauersquickswing.com
The beast is me? How come nobody’s scared of me, then? :(
I’d argue that yes, you can hustle for years and then once you achieve that goal, you stop wanting to hustle. In my own field, I see tons of doctors going through the motions these days after a lifetime of hard work. Top-notch orthopedic surgeons get bored doing knee replacements and retire and go do teach or something. Maybe Beltran and co are tired of hustling and want to coast. Maybe they feel slighted by the high expectations of Mets fans and don’t feel like performing for us ingrates.
I don’t know. I just think that a team that can be successful enough to decidedly beat the Yanks and Phillies the way they did earlier this season, should be expected to keep up that same level of play throughout the season. The Mets have been fielding the same caliber of players for years now, and before it was a few relievers or a few hitters away from competing. Now all of a sudden we have a shallow team? Which is it? All I know is that I spend hours reading up on this god-forsaken team and I am livid to see my time wasted.
I have therefore started to move away from the Mets as a fan and have started to look into some other sites and other teams. When I buy a dvd-player from Panasonic and it’s terrible and breaks down, I don’t keep buying Panasonic DVD players. If I get a crappy sandwich from a restaurant and every time I go there the sandwiches stay crappy no matter what I order, guess what, I stop frequenting that restaurant. These players love to say “baseball is a business.” Owners couch their talk in business-speak all the time – “Best product on the field!?” If they want to treat it like a business, fine. I’m starting to feel like I’d be better served by putting my time and devotion and emotions in a team that knows how to reward that dedication.
When applied to DVD players, thats called being a smart consumer, unfortunatley when applied to sports teams, its called being a frontrunner.
Depends on which team you switch to. Look, I’m giving the Mets two years to right the ship. When I graduate med school, I’m likely ending up away from NYC. If the Mets aren’t looking good by then, I’m just gonna start watching whatever local team I end up with.
Hope you don’t move to Kansas City.
“I’d argue that yes, you can hustle for years and then once you achieve that goal, you stop wanting to hustle.”
I totally agree. But I’d counter that if you do that having achieved the goal of being a Major League Baseball player, you probably don’t stay one for long. Best case scenario, you turn into Lastings Milledge instead of Carlos Beltran. There are 750 spots on MLB rosters. There are literally thousands of other extremely talented athletes who want those jobs.
I don’t doubt that you see formerly great doctors going through the motions. But I’d also guess most of those guys are being marginalized in favor of doctors who aren’t.
Sports are deeper than that. they’re emotional.
If your mother continually disappointed you, would you go out and wander maternity wards looking for a replacement?
It’s more than just talent. we see talented teams underperform (Mets and Cubs are two examples that played below their talent level) and then you see teams player better than expected. There are better managers/coaches that can help maintain a team’s winning streaks and help minimize bad one s. Things like not running Francoeur out there over and over again when he sucks, but having the presence of mind to ride out a guys hot streak even if he does generally suck.
And there is plenty of luck as well. Take 2007. The Mets slumped and the Phillies played well. But even though every game counts, what if the Phillies went through the hot streak while not playing the Mets, and the Mets slumped while playing other teams? Without those direct 9 games against each other, the Mets coast to the division. Merely if June and September’s schedules were flip-flopped. There’s a lot to be said for getting hot at the right time.
“If your mother continually disappointed you, would you go out and wander maternity wards looking for a replacement? ”
Wait, THAT WAS AN OPTION?!?!?
If a parent is emotionally abusive and destructive to one’s well-being, their children typically don’t maintain much of a relationship with him. Besides, my point is that if these guys treat everything like a business, why shouldnt I act like the consumer I am? There’s nothing magical about the way they jack up prices, not let people move down to better seats when no-one else is at the game, and make terrible, indefensible decisions. Why reward incompetence? I’d prefer a show-me attitude. Its not like I’m throwing myself at the feet of some other team. I just don’t have fun being so emotionally invested in a team that perpetually disappoints. It just doesnt make sense.
You haven’t acknowledged the fact that just by acknowledging the fact that the beast is THEM (sportswriters + talk-show hosts) doesn’t exempt you from still being part of the beast.
What I mean is–YOU have a motivation to create a NEW narrative to explain something complex, and that’s what you’re doing. And while your motivation might not be to fill blog space, you do have an agenda here.
I’m not certain I understand what you’re saying. I’m certainly as guilty as anyone of allowing my perceptions and biases to skew the way I think and write, if that’s what you mean. But I’m not sure that’s what you mean.
He actually says the beast is us in the post, B.
As for the rest of it…yea, not sure what you’re getting at.
you had me at gaga.
This nation has a Calvinist bent hardwired into it from the days of the Puritans. You can see it in the American Dream, which says that anyone who works hard can succeed, and which is often interpreted as meaning that anyone who succeeds must have worked hard, and anyone who does not succeed must not have worked hard.
In short, we equate success with virtue in this country. And in sports, we define virtue with words like grit.
Mets fans are angry that the Mets weren’t very good this year, and there is no anger more satisfying than moral indignation. Thus the Mets were not merely mediocre, they lacked grit, which compounds their statistical failure with moral failure.
It’s one of the reasons why so many fans want Wally Backman to be the new manager. It’s not just that they want his fieriness (just another word for grit) to somehow permeate the team, but that by “lighting a fire under the players’ asses,” they hope that Backman will punish the players they hate for their lack of grit – which is to say, lack of moral virtue.