A Parallel Universe

By Metstradamus
Posted Friday, September 14, 2007

It may be because the stores are starting to put out the Halloween candy, but it’s starting to get just a little spooky how the New York Mets, and their football equivalents the New York Jets, are starting to run parallel patterns. You just saw it with the recent events of “spy-gate” perpetrated against the Jets by their geographical and more successful nemesis, the New England Patriots. I seem to remember recent events where the Mets accused the Phillies of stealing their signs during that heinous four-game Philadelphia sweep.

But I’m not here to talk about sign stealing. I’m here to talk about another incident that disgusted me 10 times more than “spy-gate.” And that’s “Cheer-gate.”

I was at the Jets home opener, otherwise known as “The Game Where the Patriots Cheated but the Jets Would Have Lost Anyway.” And while I didn’t notice any Agent 99’s taking snapshots out of their shoes, I did notice the horrific treatment that Chad Pennington received after leaving the game with, at the time, a terrible injury.

I heard cheers.

I always wonder why Jets fans don’t get the respect that I once thought they deserved, the respect that’s reserved for fan bases like the ones in Buffalo who, while loyal, probably drink just as much, are just as obscene, and have been known to pour beer on opposing fans and give the finger to opposing players’ wives. Now I know why … it’s because we pull stupid stunts like cheer when our starting quarterback gets hurt. And not just the starting quarterback, the starting quarterback who has basically said with his words and his actions that he would take a bullet for Jets fans. And we cheer his sprained ankle because a guy with a stronger arm is going to take his place? What exactly in the name of Neil O’Donnell is going on here?

I mention this because this kind of thing has happened at Shea before. Maybe not on the same scale, but it seems that recent Mets history has shown the fans to have a trigger quicker than normal like, oh I don’t know, this past opening day when Carlos Beltran was booed after tying a Met record for home runs the season before.

Met fans have become a little schizophrenic when it comes to booing. One minute, we’re booing a guy mercilessly for blowing two out of five saves … the next, we’re pulling guys like Carlos Delgado and Guillermo Mota up by the bootstraps with that “we’ve booed you as much as we can boo you because you’ve hit rock bottom so let’s try something different” kind of cheer. It worked for Delgado a couple of weeks ago … not so much for Mota on Wednesday.

The subject has been broached before by our esteemed faculty. And Coop brought up George Foster as an example. The difference is that Foster had underachieved and looked lackadaisical for a losing team, and never really gave the impression that he cared much more about anything than the paycheck. Nowadays, the Mets hear jeers while being 15 games in first place. Heck, they heard boos last year after a 9-1 road trip because they had the audacity to lose the first game back at Shea to the Orioles.

Now, I’m not saying that Met fans shouldn’t boo … far from it. I just recently toured a couple of ballparks in the Midwest. And while one park had much more electricity than the other, both parks still featured that “Midwest polite.” Heck I wore a Met hat the whole trip and got more venom from a kindergarten class than I did the whole rest of the trip. I’m not sure that I want our fans to go that far. I still want to know that the home team will get the booing and heckling they deserve while losing 15-2.

But jeez, Met fans need to be more selective in their booing. Boo Guillermo Mota for blowing 15 or so straight leads? Of course, it’s the American way. But to boo a guy who gives his heart and soul to you, and has enough pride to try to leave the field under his own power even though he had a bad ankle sprain? That would have been the equivalent of Met fans booing Cliff Floyd in 2003 after trying to play a whole season on basically one leg. Thankfully, and to the best of my knowledge, Met fans didn’t do that.

I understand that part of it is probably the type of crowds we see sometimes. Opening Day may not be the best barometer of crowd reaction. Like a normal football game, a lot of an Opening Day crowd goes to Opening Day, and that’s it. And I’d be willing to bet that most of that crowd goes only to be able to say that they were at Opening Day, and drinks heavily to get themselves through it. There’s a contingent at Jets games that's growing too rapidly full of people that only go to the games to tailgate, and cares more about the amount of beer in the cooler than the team they supposedly came to watch.

Met fans, on a day-to-day basis, haven’t reached that level yet. But every once in a while we make a decision regarding booing that has me, and others here in our esteemed faculty, scratching our collective heads. Luckily, winning has scratched some of those itches. But there’s going to be a time when Met fans have a decision to make. Perhaps it will regard a guy like Shawn Green, who’s been more and more a team guy who is accepting his role as a part-time player. What will you do if, for example, Green pulls a Damion Easley and sprains his ankle running to second base? What will you do? Will you cover your eyes in horror? Or will you cheer because Lastings Milledge will get more playing time?

My assumption is that most, if not all of you reading this, would never cheer an injury. But after what I saw and heard last Sunday, I can’t be sure. I hope you will make the right decision.

If you absolutely have to boo somebody, boo me: Metstradamus…at my blog. You’ll feel better. (If you don’t, consider therapy…or taking a bat to a sack of flour with a picture of Bobby Bonilla on it. That always works for me.)