Seasons Greetings, Mets Fans

By Mike McGann
Posted Friday, January 18, 2008

Darkness. Baseball is far enough in the rearview mirror that last year’s abysmal collapse doesn’t hurt, well much, and the coming season is still far enough down the road that it is hard to produce much excitement for the fresh, new season. And frankly, it seems like none of us are quite ready for that fresh feeling, you know, down there. In Florida.

Even the breathless, daily updates about whether the Mets are going to deal for Johan Santana seem like nothing so much as a slow-motion car accident that ultimately bores the rubberneckers on the L.I.E. We’ve read all the trade rumors, many of which read like fiction, but without the good plot and character development one finds in snuff films, and just shrug.

The idea of a hot dog and beer seems gross, not nearly as enticing as a snort of whiskey in cocoa combined with 36 blankets and as many people (for those of you under 18, everyone is dressed and it’s just a friendly sleepover with smores and ghost stories, for those of you over 18, yeah, right) as you can fit under them to help you work through the dark, bleak cold of January. A time of year made even more perfectly wonderful when your friend in Florida reminds you he’s taking his son to the beach, while you have to go out and feed the sled dogs.

Who needs pitching, when you find yourself really worrying whether Chris Berman’s latest tie is going to cause snow blindness or just mere nausea? And that Selig guy is on TV, talking about sucking blood out of the veins of players like some sort of vampire who can get you a really good deal on a slightly used Buick — with just some slightly slippery damage in the backseat after a somewhat surprising coda to one of those sausage races at Miller Park.

The grass, if you could see it as it is buried under 30 feet of snow, is a delightful yellow-brown that would probably be called tan, except that tan is not a boring enough description to accurately convey the color. You should probably take down your Christmas lights, especially since the neighbor’s kids came and reworked the lights so that Santa was left with an unlikely mix of sexual characteristics — but you just can’t drag yourself outside to do it, and after a couple of cups of cocoa, you find yourself thinking that Santa doesn’t look so bad.

It all seems so empty, this time of year that seemed so full the last few years. In 2005, the sudden arrival of Pedro, Carlos and The New Mets kept everyone so warm, toasty and excited that the choice of Willie Randolph as manager seemed like a good idea. A year later, the addition of another Carlos and Paul LoDuca — and a team headed in the right direction had people from Farmingdale to Sparta slathering on the sunscreen in mid-January. And even coming within one pitch of the World Series did nothing to dampen the spirits of Mets’ fans — and had them smelling a World Championship as if it were a neighbor’s rose garden.

But just a year later, being a Mets’ fan is about as rewarding as being Taylor Hicks’ agent — and the future seems almost as bright. On Mets’ forums all over the Internet, fans are getting ripped for predicting a third-place finish, being shredded for being homers, not serious baseball fans. And rumor-mongering writers are being treated with nearly the same respect as Musharraf when he claims his government had nothing to do with Bhutto’s assassination.

The natives are restless and frustrated. Maybe a press conference showing Santana in a Mets’ uniform will brighten the day like releasing 30,000 pigeons at the end of a JFK runway. Maybe.

And maybe the Mets will rip out of the box, Dos Carlos will terrorize NL pitchers, and Jose Reyes will again be the most dangerous player in baseball and May will seem as warm as a July breeze in Canarsie. But a betting man might put his money on all of us remaining bundled under the blanket, chilled by seeing another starter getting knocked out of the game in the fourth inning, frozen by seeing a first baseman’s bat move slightly slower than midtown traffic in rush hour, and buried in snow by seeing a leftfielder use his walker to get out to his position.

Maybe this is the winter of discontent, a dark season to be broken up by the March sun, the April showers and warm May breezes. Or maybe it’s a new Flushing ice age with horrors exceeding Mettle the Mule.

I know which way I’m betting. Whiskey, anyone?

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