Positively Shameful !

By Shari Forst
Posted Saturday, March 17, 2007

I received an email from long-time Mets' fan Jill Brennan. Jill has been attending opening day for the Mets for a decade and, although not a season ticket holder, she has bought ticket packages over the years. This season the Mets have decided to use the lottery system to distribute the tickets for opening day; the season ticket holders get first crack at it and rightly so, but they have only allotted 5000 tickets for the lottery. You cannot call up for them or by them via the internet. Unless you go and stand on line at Shea you are out of luck, and even then the 5000 tickets will sell out in a heart beat. Jill like so many other loyal fans were denied a chance to get tickets for opening day because of this system.

I am a lifelong Mets fan, but I like to think that I am not a blind and ignorant one, and I will always point out when the Mets organization and Mets brass do something unjust. Here is a brief history of their faux pas and infractions that I can recall:

We all know about the dealing away of players like Amos Otis and Nolan Ryan early on in the history of stupid things that this organization has done, but there are more. Who can forget trading Tom Seaver back in June 1977 which opened the floodgates to almost ten years of horrendous Mets baseball? It wasn’t until 1983 when Whitey Herzog luckily decided that he hated Keith Hernandez and wanted to dump him somewhere that would make him miserable, that we saw the potential for things to turn around. By 1985 Met fans could hold their heads high again for a while.

We have had to endure so many other bad decisions by the Mets ownership and management; hiring guys like Dallas Green, Jeff Torborg and Art Howe to manage the team when anyone could have told you they were BAD decisions. Allowing Steve Phillips to sign an overweight, over the hill Mo Vaughn - who hadn’t been on a baseball field in almost two years due to injury. If you remember, Phillips signed him based on a home batting cage session. I won’t throw Roberto Alomar into this mix, as much as I hated him even before he was Met; there was no way anyone could have predicted his hall of fame numbers would disappear before our eyes. Well, O.K., I knew, but that’s only because it’s happened to so many who had good stats in the past. Men like George Foster, Mickey Lolich, Juan Samuel, Bobby Bonilla. I know I’m forgetting a few but you get the picture. Getting these guys when they are in their mid thirties rarely pans out the way the Mets had hoped they would.

Not that I would have wanted him, but allowing a guy like A-Rod to slip through the organization's fingers was another move that made the Mets look like a Mickey Mouse operation. Then the ill-advised dealing away of Scott Kazmir for a broken-down, mediocre Victor Zambrano, knowing all the while that he had elbow problems before the trade.

I made my feelings known when they refuse to retire Keith Hernandez’s #17, Not only don’t they retire it, but they issue it to every scrub and utility man that comes down the pike. I don’t like this and I think it’s awful; at least treat the number like they did Doc Gooden’s #16 and Willie Mays’ #24, only issuing it at certain times if you don’t want to retire it altogether.

Then I was enraged last season at the Mets organization for not sealing their SNY TV deals with such big carriers like Direct-TV, Dish Network and other major cable carriers before opening day. They knew they were launching the network in 2006 and how can they not have everything in place so fans can watch opening day on TV? Last season I found myself scrambling trying to listen on the radio, watch the score via the internet at my job, and asking my husband to scan all of the channels to see if it might be on ESPN somewhere, I also had him checking channel 625 on Direct-TV which was set up for SNY but there was nothing on it until a day or two after opening day. I know there was a lot of this kind of thing with the YES Network as well when the Yankees started it, but one would think the Mets would have learned from it and not put their fans through that whole mess. Every fan lives for opening day, and to deny those fans who couldn’t make it to the game TV access is disgusting.

Now this with the ticket lottery. You all know I do look at Shea Stadium very fondly, but I also admit that it is pretty much a dumpy place to watch a baseball game. The prices at the concession stands are outrageous and the food is atrocious as compared to other ball parks. As I have mentioned previously article, this is just another way for the Mets' brass to alienate their fans.

I hope Fred Wilpon and his son Jeff know how lucky they are that Mets fans are so blindly loyal to this team, unlike most Yankee fans I know who are what I call “Bandwagoners.” Those people who safely jumped on board the Yankee Express back in 1996 during their glorious championships of that decade. They can’t understand what it means to see their team lose, or as fans to be treated like garbage by the their team's management.

Met fans have endured a lot of terrible teams over the years, and put up with nonsense from the front office for so long, and yet they remain loyal to this franchise and stick with it no matter how bad the team is, or how unbearable the conditions are at Shea Stadium.

You can contact Shari at: shazoo418@yahoo.com