Mike's Mets - Seasons

 

By Mike Steffanos

I've been aware of the time going by. They say in the end it's the wink of an eye. - Jackson Browne, "The Pretender"

I turned 65 a few days ago. It's hard to believe that I'm officially a senior citizen, but I only have to look in a mirror to confirm the information on my birth certificate. I didn't do much to "celebrate" hitting my latest yearly milestone. Tacking another year onto my age lost its allure many, many decades ago when I became old enough to legally drink. Even that wasn't a huge deal, as things were much more lax in those days. The drinking age back then was 18. I was a tall, muscular kid who could easily pass as a few years older. I also knew all the local watering holes that weren't diligent about requesting ID and had been frequenting those places from about age 15.

Other than partying and girls, I didn't care about much else in those days. I was a Mets fan, but by the time I turned 18 in October 1976, the club was about to enter the most miserable stretch of its existence. They didn't command my maximum attention as they had in my earlier teen years. Even those Mets clubs were generally mediocre at best, but they still had Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, and Jon Matlack. It was quite a jolt when Seaver was traded in June 1976, Matlack the following winter, and finally Koosman in the winter of 1978. Besides generally sucking, it felt as if the Mets had completely broken faith with the childhood version of me who had worshiped these men as Gods just a few years earlier.

The 1969 Mets, featuring the 1-2 combination of Seaver and Koosman, were the team that enticed the 10-year-old version of me into being a baseball fan. Those next few years, highlighted by the 1973 club that returned to the World Series, formed the backdrop of transition from childhood into adolescence. If you're much younger than I am — and I hope you are — it must feel like events from almost 50 years in the past were forever ago. But man, when I think about those teams, that time feels practically close enough to touch. When I read or hear some of the names of players from those days — Jerry Grote, Bud Harrelson, Cleon Jones, Rusty Staub — I can still distinctly smell the stench of the Clearsil that did so little to relieve the ravages of my acne-plagued complexion, mingled with the everpresent feeling of disappointment as the Mets mostly wasted the prime of those great pitchers. And all of this happened while I was enduring the awkward transition of puberty.

By the time the Mets were once again good enough to care about in the 1980s, my complexion had finally cleared, and my life was in a completely different spot. I was in my mid-20s, working a full-time job and living on my own. I married a young woman I cared about, but neither was mature enough to handle the responsibility. The greatest era of Mets baseball played out during the years of my pitifully short marriage and ensuing divorce. Those Mets clubs still form most of the highlights of my Mets fandom, but, like the competitive clubs from the first half of the 70s, that golden era of Mets baseball passed by almost as quickly as my marriage.

The 90s Mets clubs were largely forgettable. On a happier note, during that decade, I met Lisa — our relationship has endured — and began a small business with my brother. The 1994 strike/lockout drove me away from the game for a while. As I transitioned into middle age at the turn of the century, the Mets became briefly interesting again. Sadly, that coincided with the Wilpons gaining complete control of the team, essentially dooming the first two decades of the new century. At least from my Mets fan perspective, most of those years of my middle age were wasted as the former Mets owners were unable to spend and unwilling to embrace the cutting-edge stuff that more successful teams were utilizing to find the winning advantage.

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