Mike's Mets - Breaking With the Past

By Mike Steffanos February 23, 2021

Yesterday, I started writing a piece on the opening of spring training. I had a bad cold that limited me to a few short hours of heavily interrupted sleep, but I sat at my computer for a couple of hours and knocked out several paragraphs of thoughts. At the time, I felt like I had an excellent start. I took a couple of hours off. By the time I sat down again, I still felt tired, but was also more clear-headed. I read through the words that I had written earlier, and I'm pretty sure that the look on my face was reminiscent of Edvard Munch's famous painting. I decided that, while it felt a little like slacking off to not post something on the first official day of workouts for the whole squad, it was the right move to table those thoughts for a day. So, belatedly, some thoughts on the opening act of the first Mets squad of the post-Wilpon era.

Baseball has been my consuming passion for many years. I look forward to the start of every baseball season, even when I knew my team wasn't equipped to compete. As I'm sure you know, that was all too often the case for the last few years. What was frustrating during this time was that there was usually enough talent in place for the Mets to make a playoff run if everything went their way, but years that the fates smiled on the New York Mets in that manner were few and far between.

Most seasons went downhill quite quickly in a disturbingly familiar pattern: an injury here, some underperformance there, a bullpen not deep enough that began to wither away around Memorial Day. Then the injuries would start sapping the roster of talent. Almost inevitably, by the Fourth of July, I realized that only a miracle would save my team. By the time August rolled around, I knew it was all over. All I had left was hoping that some kid would come up in September and give me a reason to believe that next year would be different. Such was the cycle of my baseball life for more years than I care to tabulate at this moment.

For all that, I never believed that rooting for the Mets substantially harmed the overall quality of my life. I've had good years and bad, but I feel like I've been pretty lucky. I'm lucky enough to have lasted for more than six decades on this earth and reasonably hopeful that I can continue on for more. The Mets were often a source of disappointment and some personal frustration, but I never let what happened on a baseball field spill over much into the rest of my life. And there were, even in the darkest seasons, some small rays of light and odd moments of bliss courtesy of the New York Mets that kept my love of baseball from being sapped away by all that losing.

I've spent a lot of time writing about the Wilpons this year. You have to give them a sort of reverse credit; they had a remarkably terrible run with this franchise, especially over the last couple of decades. Fred Wilpon's legacy with the Mets ultimately was his lack of the vision and imagination required to successfully helm a modern sports franchise, along with a glaring blind spot when it came to his son. The best thing that any Mets fan can do with the Wilpons is simply turning the page on them. Before I do that, however, I'd like to take a moment to look back once more.

It's hard for me to work up much anger towards the departed Fred and Jeff Wilpon. There was a certain level of arrogance in the endless bumbling at the helm of the team that made them a little darker than your standard comic relief, but it's still amazing that they could run a baseball team for so long and learn so little. But really, they were just true to themselves, small men in over their heads and unable to change and adapt. Mostly I'm just happy they're gone. Watching what just went down with Kevin Mather in Seattle briefly caused a personal flashback to the lack of self-awareness and basic common sense that characterized the Wilpon era in New York.

There is one thing for which I won't ever forgive Fred and Jeff Wilpon. It's how their failure in running the Mets was complicit in stealing away most of my sense of optimism when it came to my baseball team, particularly in the last decade or so. There were some ugly times since I started rooting for this franchise in 1969, but there was always a level of hopefulness that rose above the club's circumstances. You could call it the "Ya Gotta Believe!" syndrome, where it always seemed that the Mets were going to turn it around and enjoy a remarkable if improbable success. As frustrating as my Mets fandom could be at times, it never felt hopeless until recent years.

The Madoff mess was the turning point in all of that — not the original story, but the blind, stupid way the Wilpons refused to accept their new reality and do something creative to adjust to it. It became clear that Fred and Jeff's answers to their misfortune were going to be rooted in ignorance and denial rather than adapting and making changes that, while uncomfortable for them, would give them and the Mets a chance to turn things around.

When I stopped blogging a decade ago, it was because my life became so crazy for a time then I simply didn't have any time to put into it. When things eased up a few years later, I considered picking it up again many times. I missed writing quite a bit. Until March of last year, what always stopped me was my lack of optimism for the club's chances. I didn't feel it, and I didn't want to be the guy writing about why he didn't believe things were going to go well for the Mets.

That's a primary reason why I'm grateful to Steven Cohen for buying the club. It's not because I believe him to be a person without flaws. I'm too old for heroes, anyway. I'm thankful because he's implemented changes that allow me to feel optimistic towards baseball and the Mets. Same with Sandy Alderson and Zack Scott. While I haven't agreed with everything they've done, it's all made enough sense that I feel positive about the direction of the team even when I don't love the move they just made.

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