Paul Articulates - Where is the fun?

Baseball is America’s pastime for one very specific reason – it is fun!  Every kid that learns to hit a ball with a bat wants to do it over and over again.  Even watching others hit the ball and run around the bases is fun, which explains why baseball stadiums all around the country fill up with fans every day for a baseball season that lasts for months.

Somewhere along the way, that fun becomes a passion, which becomes the driver for the motivation to chase the ultimate dream – to compete in the Major Leagues against the best players from around the world.  Unfortunately, along that journey there is also failure and disappointment, which impacts a person’s ability to play with the freedom and energy that first attracted them to the sport.

Failure clouds the mind; doubt slows the instantaneous response required to put the center of an elongated cylinder in front of a speeding sphere.  This is exactly what has confounded the Mets in their awful slide that has almost lasted for an entire year now.

In the world of baseball analytics and biomechanical study, there is a belief that there is a structural solution to every problem that a pitcher or batter faces.  With enough information, enough study, enough repetitive training, these flaws can be eliminated in favor of pure mechanical execution.

But these are humans, not robots.  With each adjustment to one motion comes an unintended change in something else or undue stress to another part of the body.  Tragically, the confidence in change is lost when initial failure is the result, and the compounding effect of lost confidence is the inability to execute things that were simple and mindless before.  Just watch me on a golf course.

Now put that together with thousands of screaming (and booing) fans, and the cumulative mental effect is almost toxic.  In fact, it is toxic if a measure of health is the team’s batting average and/or OPS.

These Mets have lost their fun.  They have lost the essence of what makes a player want to spend every day on a ballfield.  If you need evidence, re-watch Tuesday’s game and look at David Peterson’s face.  There is no joy.  More evidence?  Look at the short-lived, but real change in team dynamics when AJ Ewing joined the club and had that brilliant first outing.  Ewing brought the joy with him and it was contagious, especially in the outfield with his buddy Carson Benge.  But in the midst of this horrendous slump, with all of the discontent surrounding the team, that joy was quickly consumed.

If you think back to the OMG Mets of 2024, it was the fun environment that Iglesias brought with his music, it was the silly Grimmace costumes with fans in purple all over the stadium.  That made it light, and with quiet minds and a spring in their step, those Mets put on a very memorable run.  They were the same players that had underperformed early in the season, and I guarantee you that they did not simultaneously all make some biomechanical tweak to improve their game.  It was very simply fun to play the game again.

This team may not be the one that is going to give New York its coveted World Championship.  It may not be the beginning of a sustainable winner.  But this team is better than it has shown, and once the joy of playing baseball is rediscovered, by whatever combination of random events or player movements, the on-field performance will improve.  I long for that day, because watching the Mets used to be fun.