Meet the Mess!

The year 2000 was a bit of a high water mark for the New York Mets, at least those of recent vintage; led by Mike Piazza and Edgardo Alfonso, they wandered into the playoffs as the wild card, and somehow found themselves playing against the then-dynastic Yankees, albeit a team at the tail end of its dynasty, one that had staggered through the regular season with only 87 wins and the next year would begin a run of postseason futility to which people might ascribe supernatural causes if it had happened to a team not called the New York Motherfuckin Yankees. The Mets may even have been the favorites in that series. But they lost, and fairly easily, amid a haze of does-Clemens-hate-Piazza? yammering and Subway Series buzzing that failed to touch the hearts of anyone in the country west of the Hudson, north of Nagatuck, or south of Jersey. It was a fairly pathetic whimper from a team that had rolled over a couple of favored opponents earlier in the playoffs with a series of bangs.

It was a bit of a high water mark for me, too. I'm not a person who sits around going "those were the days" a lot, mostly because I tend to believe that "the days", such as they are, are probably ahead of me, but 2000 was a good year for me. I finally learned to fit in at a college I'd begun to think was going to remain permanently beyond my grasp, I did a lot of very fun drugs, I was moderately popular with the ladies -- more so than I had been until the recent past, anyway -- and generally I felt good about things. Maybe I didn't make the World Series, but I had a pretty good playoff run.

Since 2000, both the Mets & I have been, despite some God-given advantages, somewhat dysfunctional, sometimes moderately, sometimes severely. I won't go into my own sob story, but suffice it to say that it includes rather too much drink and not enough going out and changing the world in lots of awesome ways. The Mets, on the other hand . . . well, their story is well known. Blessed with hundreds of millions of dollars, and several very great players, they've managed to fail out at the end of the regular season each of the last two years, and this year have stumbled badly and collapsed in a heap of injury and recrimination, in an almost poetically sad coda to a sequence of events that has gone from the truly epic (2007's collapse, among the most improbable in history) to the more prosaically unheroic (2008's more run-of-the-mill fall from grace).

So I set out from my location in Brooklyn to the end of the line in Queens last week, less to see the Mets than to see their new stadium, said to be modelled on the legendary Ebbets Field, and their opponents, the St Louis Cardinals, who led the NL Central at the time and featured the most transcendent star of the "post"-steroid era, Albert Pujols ("The Great Poo Holes"). One was a disappointment, the other was not.

CitiField is a nice enough place, I suppose, set deep in a park near Flushing Bay, and superficially, it does resemble Ebbets, at least from the outside. And watching a ballgame there isn't any kind of troublesome experience, as I hear it was at the notorious pit that was Shea Stadium. But it's a cookie-cutter experience, not much different to what I've experienced at mallparks in Seattle and San Francisco: cosy, expensive, draped in nostalgia -- particularly bizarre nostalgia at Citi Field, where there are pictures of Jackie Robinson splashed across the walls of the rotunda, and the facade was designed to resemble a long-demolished stadium that housed another team, Robinson's team.

But the Great Poo Holes did not disappoint. He had been in a slump, apparently, though one would not have known it by this night. I managed to miss his first at-bat, because it turns out it takes rather more than an hour and a half to get from Park Slope in Brooklyn to Flushing in Queens and then procure one's will call tickets, but sure enough, as though he was saving the fireworks for my arrival, he singled to lead off the fourth -- and then he really went bananas. He doubled in the next inning, and then, leading off the eighth, he hit the sort of home run one does not often see: several feet over the sign in center field that reads 408, plunking down next to the gigantic apple that would apparently rise into the sky if the Met ever homered.

Not that there was any danger of that in this game. The Mets managed to cobble together more than a few runs, but there was a sense in the ballpark, as soon as it became clear that Johan Santana didn't have his best stuff, that their loss was inevitable. The runs they did score seemed piddling. A scrubby hit there, a groundout there, that sort of thing -- when the Cards scored, they scored with authority, on towering home runs and the like; when the Mets scored, it felt like, "whoops! We scored a run! Would you look at that?" When the Mets staggered into the top of the ninth leading by two, the big Jamaican guy next to me leaned over to his girlfriend and said, "Don't get ready to go or anything."

I'm not going to lie to you, as I watched tiny closer Freddy Rodriguez dashing through a field of green to take the mound at the top of the ninth, my hopes were suddenly and irrationally high. Everyone around me assumed the worst was at hand, but there was something heroic in that little white speck lifting the weight of the entire game as 35000 fans and 50 ballplayers stared at him. I'd somehow been caught up in the drama, and found myself rooting for the Mets, irrationally confident in the abilities of a pitcher whose magic has been sloooowwwwly fading since the day he walked off the mound after striking out the side in the eighth inning of game 7 of the 2002 World Series. Mets fans around me clenched their buttcheeks, and I thought, "Hey, this is all going to work out okay."

Here's some advice: trust the experts. Rodriguez was bombed in spectacular fashion, giving up the tying runs and loading the bases before finally getting the third out. With two outs and the bases loaded, the Jamaican gentleman next to me leaned over and said, "How do you think this is going to end?" Before I could answer, the guy on my right said, "I assume he's going to walk him," or words to that effect.

Well, not in that moment, but just you wait. Rodriguez escaped that mess, and was gone for the tenth, but the Cards managed to load the bases on two singles and a walk anyway, and then, with two outs, Mark DeRosa, in an epic slump ever since switching leagues a few weeks before, came to the plate. The Jamaican guy next to me shot me a look and raised his eyebrows. I shrugged. On the very next pitch, Mets pitcher Brian Stokes plugged DeRosa square in the shoulder, forcing in the go-ahead run.

The sound that ensued from the crowd was not what you would call a groan. I think maybe sigh would be a better word. All at once, thirty-five thousand people sighed resignedly, like a man who goes to the store late on a 100-degree day looking for popcicles and finds the case empty. They knew what was going to happen. It made the next thing a bit of an anticlimax.

You see, the Great Poo Holes was not finished. He came up to bat with the bases still loaded, and promptly unloaded on a fluttering nothing-ball from Stokes, sending it deep into the stands in left. Before it had even landed, everybody in the stadium had stood up as one and headed for the exits. That the Mets still had an at-bat left mattered not. Everybody knew that they weren't going to score or anything. It was fait accompli. As I descended the steps toward the parking lot, a teenager in front of me said to one of his friends, "They could still come back." His friend shot back, "Yeah, but they're not gonna."

But they're not gonna. I'll level with you. As I was watching Rodriguez charge in from the bullpen to, um, "nail down" the game, the thought flashed across my mind that I was about to witness the win that would be the beginning of a Mets resurgence. I thought, "Maybe people will talk about this game for years to come." The fact that it wasn't was a bit of a disappointment, but maybe it means something, something about where I am in my life right now. Unlike the Mets, I'm not in the midst of an all-too-predictable implosion. For the first time in years, I feel like I have things in order, my ducks in a row. Maybe I thought the Mets were about to mount a comeback because I suspect I'm about to do the same thing.

I've grown a little attached to the Mets, though I've been in the city just more than a week now, and I can tell that I'll probably always follow their foibles with more than the usual sympathy, given that I am a professed fan of the Red Sox, the last team they beat in the World Series. But unlike the Mets, I think you can look for me in first place fairly soon, and I don't intend to vacate that position for a long time. The Mess -- er, the Mets -- may be lovable losers; I am determined not to be.