In the half-hour window between games in the Mets’ doubleheader with the Dodgers on Tuesday, I stood in the Caesar’s Club talking with some friends who, like hundreds of other Mets fans, had retreated to the lounge to escape the chill.
After a meandering conversation that touched on just about every topic we might discuss besides baseball, one of the club’s televisions reminded us of the next game’s pitching matchup: Oliver Perez vs. Charlie Haeger. Perez, set to brave the Dodgers’ lineup without any semblance of accuracy or velocity, versus Haeger, an unfamiliar knuckleballer pitching on a windy night.
The Mets had just won their fifth straight game and their seventh in eight contests, but the outlook appeared dim.
“There’s just no way the Mets are going to win this game, is there?” one guy in the group asked.
No one answered. Even though everyone involved had just watched the team soundly beat the Dodgers to move a half game back of the Phillies for first place — first place! — in the division, and even though we had all seen Jason Bay finally homer and David Wright show signs of breaking out of his slump and Jeff Francoeur earn his first base on balls of the homestand, none of us dared suggest a way the Mets could win the nightcap.
Maybe no one wanted to jinx it. That’s perfectly plausible.
Or maybe these Mets, in the past few years, have bred in their fans a distinct variety of skepticism, a chronic paranoia. Maybe we’re jaded, and we know nothing can ever remain perfect for a team that has exposed itself as so thoroughly imperfect. Maybe being a Mets fan when they’re winning, these days, just feels like a perpetual state of waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It didn’t Tuesday night. The Mets weathered a shaky performance from Perez and enjoyed a stellar one from Hisanori Takahashi, and the team’s offense exploded for 10 runs on 11 hits and took advantage of Haeger’s wildness and the Dodgers’ defensive miscues.
In the sixth inning Wright, booed so recently by the Citi Faithful, crushed a George Sherrill fastball to right-center field: a beautiful, slicing drive that split the Dodgers outfielders, cleared the loaded bases, and reminded everyone in the park what David Wright does when he’s hitting, which is more often than not.
He finished the night with three hits. The Mets finished the night atop the N.L. East.
For the moment, everything is good.
That won’t always be the case, of course. Teams can only endure so many games in which their starters walk a batter an inning, and at some point Jerry Manuel’s use of the bullpen will catch up to him, and probably the Mets will run into some teams that actually play good defense.
But that the Mets won eight of nine like they did, especially without much production from their two best hitters for most of that stretch, that’s plain awesome. Ugly wins, stolen wins, lucky wins and wins handed away by opponents all just look like wins in the standings in September.
And they provide hope in April. Granted, hope doesn’t help Oliver Perez throw strikes or prevent Jeff Francoeur from swinging at balls, but it makes being a Mets fan just a little more pleasant. Hope helps us — or at least me — forget some of the offseason outrage and early season vitriol and return to enjoying baseball games and simply rooting for the Mets to win, all the ancillary stuff be damned.
Hope brings out the naive little-kid Mets fan inside me that really believes they can keep going like this, and keep winning a ton — especially now with the lineup firing on all cylinders. To hell with PECOTA; Ollie and Maine will start performing or be replaced by someone who can, and Ike Davis will hit like this all season, and once Beltran gets back…
Amazing what a winning streak will do to a Mets fan, is all.
Also, for what it’s worth, I would hardly call a three-foot worm a “giant.” When I think “giant worm,” I think Tremors, the 1990 film in which monstrous underground worm-creatures torture Kevin Bacon.
That said, I think Bernazard makes a few reasonable points in the interview. For years, long before Bernazard’s firing, I heard Mets fans in media, on talk-radio, in comments sections and on message boards claiming Bernazard was at the root of every single one of the team’s problems. Bernazard, it seemed, became some sort of great big bugaboo, the mysterious embodiment of all that was wrong with the Mets.
I basically just did that with Don Mattingly. I brought up the Simpsons episode, but I had absolutely nothing to actually ask about it, other than, essentially, “remember that time you were on the Simpsons?”
Tedquarters 