The Cautious Optimist -- Death and Grieving: The Arc of the Mets Season

 

As the calendar turns to September, the end of the season is in sight.  This has not been a season to remember. I worry that it will be hard to forget.  

We may not have realized it at the time -- I know I didn't -- but the Mets fate was determined long before summer officially arrived.  Strangely, I found myself engaged far into the season without ever once being optimistic about the team's chances of making the playoffs.  Worse, I remained engaged even though the brand of baseball they played during what remained of the Mendoza era ranged between uninspired and downright dreadful. They were literally unwatchable, but like many others, I couldn't turn away.

I certainly found reasons to stay glued to the game on radio and television, daytime and night, weekdays and weekends.  Some reasons were sound; others fugazy at best. 

Among the handful of legitimate reasons were provided by the Crazy brothers: Benge and Ewing. They shared a youthful exuberance and seemed to genuinely enjoy playing the game, and they played hard and fearlessly.

Benge especially displayed a quiet confidence and maturity beyond his years. His running mate, Ewing, barely 21 years old, looks as if he should be carded even attending a Pony League game -- if beer is being served.  He's hit the rookie wall leaving the heavy lifting to Benge who has handled it quite well. 

But the sight of Ewing patrolling Center Field and a good fifty yards more in either direction made for must watch TV.

Like rookies, fans are subject to hitting the wall as well.  I've hit mine. It's as if it has finally dawned on me that as the temperature drops and September turns to October, the Mets will once again have dispersed across the country and the lights shut off at Citi Field until next Spring.  

I am experiencing that fact as harsh, though it was a pre-ordained outcome months ago. I knew it then as much as I know it now.  The difference is that I feel it now and I didn't then.

I am sure many of you know what it feels like when a loved one passes away.  The pain is immediate, but the grieving is often delayed.  Relatives and friends comfort you and are around for the first 30 days or so and you don't experience the loneliness or emptiness that you know you eventually will have to live with.   You carry on until one day you don't.  And you don't because you can't.  

That is the day that you can begin to grieve the loss. 

I am not an idiot.  I am not comparing losing a loved one with the Mets losing their pulse months ago.  The patient was sick before the season started.  Emergency surgery after the 12 game losing streak was called for but not provided.  In retrospect, we know now it would have only delayed the inevitable, but only briefly, and not meaningfully.

All of us knew the Mets were dead this year before Memorial day. Not just in retrospect.  We knew then and many of us said as much.  Even so, we didn't acknowledge the death, even as the team played more deadball than baseball. We acknowledged everything but the death itself. 

Certainly I did. I was into the Mets and vocal in my feelings right through the trade deadline and beyond.  Indeed, the response of the minor league affiliates to the new players who had joined as well as the vibe that seemed to emanate from the major league squad  was not just refreshing, and invigorating; it was contagious and life affirming.

I was as guilty as the next, maybe more so, of seeing signs of life in little things and bigger things, not because they could convince me that the Mets were actually still alive and worth the time I was devoting to them: instead because responding to events and interpreting them as signs of life was a way of putting off grieving the loss of the season.  I wasn't ready.

And then the calendar turned to September, and I find myself depressed, discouraged and worried about the future.  Not mine, but the Mets, and thus mine -- at least to some extent.   I am sure I will watch the Jets on Sundays and attend the Nets games from time to time.  But I don't associate this time of the year with much else beyond the Mets, golf and, as always, my family and friends.   

The patient was sick from the start, the death inevitable, but the grieving has only just begun.

I am not sure I am ready yet to make myself vulnerable to imagining next year. Right now I am feeling, probably for the first time, what the loss of this season has meant.  More now, I am sure, as I get older, which, I agree, is far better than the alternative, and the inevitability of an ending replacing strategizing about the end game is all too real.  

But I haven't felt this way in other years; and there have been plenty of years when the Mets were dead by Independence Day, when high hopes were dashed as early as Memorial Day.  But I didn't experience those lost seasons as something to grieve.

Was there something different about this year that made the loss worse, more unbearable?

On reflection I think so.

From the start the team didn't feel right or intentional.  They weren't misfits, like the 62 Mets were (God bless them) but the pieces didn't fit.  By saying they seemed unintentional I mean to call attention to the fact that the pieces weren't put together to fit with one another.  The idea was not that there was a place that each player would fit like a glove; rather, it was that a number of players would be forced to fit to roles they were unaccustomed to. 

Maybe the absence of fit -- of players to roles set aside for them, and of. fit or lack of it among the players themselves -- helps to explain why the team never felt present to me or rooted. They looked uncomfortable as a team and played that way.  For most of the season, they were identifiable as players on the same team largely because they wore the same uniforms. 

They never energized the ball park or the fan base.  

They were dead on arrival.  At times it felt that they were put together to fail or at least that the person who put them together had no idea what putting together a team calls for. 

A team is an organic entity that plays together, each person being committed not just to doing the tasks assigned to him but committed as well to helping others succeed at theirs.  Teams find ways to work together to reach goals they share.  

This is my way of understanding the criticism that so many Mets fans have had of David Stearns: his commitment to analytics left him unable to appreciate the decidedly human interactions and attributes that are necessary to create a team.

And this year provided reason to think that their criticisms are not without merit. It's not about what analytics can't do.  The criticism is rightly aimed at what humans do, what organization leaders must do, and what he failed to do.

The Mets were never designed this year to be a Team.  The results, and even more so, the style of play -- certainly until Andy Green took over -- was proof of exactly that. 

In a way what makes this year different was that the Mets didn't so much fail as a Team as it was a case of their failing to be a Team.

So, Yes this year was special.  And not in a good way.