Why are we Mets fans?
Posted by mrbaby on 2:53am, Friday November 20th 2009
Now that the kerfluffle over who to root for in the World Series has (hopefully) subsided and we have entered the cabin fever-inducing “who to sign/trade/trade for” hot stove kerfuffle, I’ve had a chance to ponder the vehemence over my and everyone else’s post-season rooting interests. Forgive me as I briefly wax philosophic. My rooting rumination was reinforced re-reading a book I wrote in 1995, Bums No More! The Championship Season of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers, in preparation for a Kindle (and other e-book) edition (this is not a plug – the book’s long out of print). While researching the book, I spoke to three dozen fans who attended Dodger games during the 1955 season. Reacting to the World Series and especially the Yankees in 1955, I found it startling how opposing fans’ opinions about the U.S. Steel of baseball hasn’t changed in 50-plus years. Consider this opinion from a 1950’s Brooklyn rooter: Yankee fans have an arrogant, pompous way about them, you know, like they’re the greatest and nobody’s better. They keep calling on all these statistics as if they really have some meaning. They never believed that the Yankees could ever lose. And consider how a Dodger fan named Larry Zeiger – now better known as CNN talk show host Larry King – explained his love/hate relationship with their Bums, and how his optimistic pessimism parallels our own mixed emotions about the Mets: Once the Dodgers got good, I always expected them to win. We also expected to lose as well. If we were ahead by three games, we’d figure out how to lose three in a row, and if we were behind three games to nothing, there was still hope. We expected to win, we expected to lose.
Sound familiar?
While re-reading these half-century old opinions, I got to thinking: What made these fans, and us, so rabid about their teams, then and now? After all, we aren’t any more or less enthusiastic about the Mets as, say, Cubs fans or Red Sox fans – even Yankee fans – are about their teams.
Why did we – and you – become a Met fan? Is it mere geography or heredity, or is there something more? I’m actually a Mets convert. I was a huge Sandy Koufax fan growing up, getting to see him pitch only on NBC’s Saturday Game of the Week or when they played the Mets or during the 1963, 1965 and 1966 World Series. By extension, I rooted for the Rams (Roman Gabriel, Deacon Jones) and the Lakers (Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain) as well. My Dodger dedication was constantly tested. With no Internet or ESPN, it was really hard getting late night Dodger box scores and stats in New Jersey. In 1969, I was infected by what I thought was a temporary fever for the Amazins and kept a newspaper scrapbook of the season and Series, pictured above.
I continued to root for the Dodgers and all L.A. teams until one late summer afternoon in 1983. I and a companion went to a Dodger-Mets game at Shea. We sat in nosebleed seats, the back row of the upper deck, and watched Fernando Valenzuela face off against Tom Seaver (I think – I can’t find the program). I started out consciously rooting for the Dodgers, but after a couple of innings something strange happened. While shouting encouragement to Fernando, I felt my gut pulling for the Mets. I was startled by this betrayal by my innards. I fought it for an inning or two, but I finally succumbed. The fever I caught in 1969 lay dormant until my trip to the upper deck 14 years later. I moved into Manhattan the following year and became a Mets’ season ticket holder and a devoted Mets fan.
While I accept my Amazin affection, I can’t for the life of me figure out why the Mets are so important to me or why I was so bothered when my Met allegiance was challenged by Yankee haters on this blog who branded me a traitor for rooting for the New York American League team during the recently concluded playoffs. Why should I – and do I – care about and spend so much on a bunch of game-playing, pajama-wearing multi-millionaires?
So take your mind off John Lackey and Matt Holliday for a moment and share with us a reflective story about how you became a Met fan and why this team – and rooting to begin with – is so important to you.
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I don’t have a good becoming-a-Mets-fan story! I basically became one because I grew up in NY (upstate) and my dad is a fan. I went with all his other teams as well (Rangers, Giants, Knicks), but at least I was a fan since birth! I couldn’t tell you what age I was when I went to my first Mets game, but it was probably before the age of 10? (I’d guess early 90’s, should ask my parents though) Go Mets!
For me personally, I grew up a few train stops away from Shea and would see the blue beauty out of my kitchen window every morning. Also, though, I love rooting for the underdogs.
Actually it’s not until the 05 and 06 teams that I really became as interested as I am know. I do def remember going to a game after 9/11 and how it felt so good
For me, my dad is a huge met fan, and ever since I was a baby I have been brainwashed. However, interestingly enough, since we lived in Jersey, and citizens bank park was alot cheaper and easier to get to, my first memories of baseball are Phillies games. Perhaps, why I don’t hate them. But by the time I was about 7 or 8 I finally took to watching all met games that I could possibly watch. We got season tickets with out family friends, and my greatest childhood memories are going to Shea with my buddies, and just having great times. Like one time we snuck down to the first row at a Mets Cardinals game in which Mcguire hit a ball that still has not landed. I’ve stuck with them through what has been all hard times, and cannot imagine how awesome it will be when they finally win a championship.
I grew up in Ithaca where we have lots of Long Islanders in town because of Cornell. Mets fans are pretty prevalent there. That helped foster my fanhood, I think.
Blue was always my favorite color, and I loved oranges as a kid, so when I saw my first Mets game on TV I really likes the uniform color scheme. This was 1990. The first image I remember of the Mets was HoJo rounding third base in his white and pinstriped home jersey and beating a throw to the plate. That got me interested in baseball, but only somewhat at that point.
In 1991 I was at my grandparents’ 50th anniversary party where there was a TV on showing the world series. I think that series is what really hooked me on baseball. I vaguely remember it at this point, but it was just a thriller. I started watching in full force in 1992, and was able to convince my parents to go to the hall of fame induction ceremony. I was there watching Seaver and Fingers go in!
I remember buying numerous tickets into the HoF to try to get one that was stamped so I could attend the autograph session where I got both their autographs. I think that was also the year I saw the Mets and White Sox in the Hall of Fame game where Bobby Jones (the white one with the nice hook) threw a shutout.
Man, this just bringing back all sorts of great memories.
Regardless of the outcome, bring on 2010! Let’s go METS!
My story?
My Dad, arguably one of the biggest Met fans I will ever know, was a Brooklyn Dodger fan until they moved to CA. He hated the NY Yankees. Absolutely refused to root for them so spent those years rooting against them. Then in 1962 NL baseball was brought back to NY in the form of the new NY Mets. My Dad was an immediate fan. Being a lady (who never admits her age), I will admit to tidbits posted over the year that I believe I’m probably one of the oldest fans on here.
I grew up with the Met ballgames always on TV - WOR channel 9. Got interested in baseball and the team in 1968. How incredible was it then that my second year as a bonifide fan they won it all? Ah…youth. I will admit to thinking back then it was far easier to do that then it really is. Little did I know that WS trophy would not make it’s way back to your Mets until ‘86.
To this day, Dad and I (as well as my older sister) remain big NY Met fans. Dad calls me every night they’re playing about the 3rd inning asking something like ’so what do you think? Think Santana will go the distance? Think Perez will keep it together?’ Comments like that.
In the 9th inning, he’ll call me back only if they’re winning to ask ‘So do you think they’re gonna do this tonight?’ If they’re losing, especially losing big, he won’t bother. I think sometimes he can’t stand to watch.
And needless to say, that 2008 season with that god awful BP there was much cursing burning up those phone wires.
My Dad switches back and forth during commercials to the Yankee game in hopes the Yankees are currently losing. To this day, he remains one of the biggest Yankee haters I know as well.
A few of us, without prompting, shared our ‘Met fan genesis’ stories at the old place and it was probably one of the reasons that policies regarding comments were changed there, forever diminishing my need to visit that site since it didn’t want or invite conversation and sharing.
Happy to know those things are still welcome and encouraged here, my new home for all things Met. For those who didn’t read it then, I will gladly repeat it now.
I was born and raised (and have recently returned to) Orange County, NY. In 1973, when I was 8, I was not a fan of baseball. I loved basketball. The Knicks were king in my household, my mother and father both big fans, and their televised games took over the house. My mother, a skilled seamstress, sewed a custom # 22 DeBusschere jersey for me which I wore proudly whenever I could.
During that year, I was also in a Saturday morning bowling league. I would return home from bowling around lunch time, and usually then head outside for cowboys and indians or things of that ilk. But on rainy Saturdays I began watching the NBC Saturday Game of the Week. Through that, being a little front runner, I became a fan of the Oakland As. Through their bright green and gold uniforms, their long hair and crazy mustaches I became a baseball fan. That fall they played and beat the Mets in the World Series, their second of three consecutive championships.
In the spring of 1974 I realized that I would not be able to see many Oakland As games in New York. I liked baseball enough by then that I wanted to continue following it, so I chose to follow a team that I could access more regularly via TV and radio, the team the As had beaten in the previous fall’s World Series, the Mets.
That was a really bad time to become a Met fan. It was the beginning of a decade of futility, in which the franchise was systematically neglected and dismantled. But it was too late, I was hooked. Ron Hodges, Bruce Boisclair, Nino Espinosa, Hubie Brooks, Ed Glynn, Pete Falcone, Craig Swan, Dave Kingman, Skip Lockwood, these guys were my summer night friends, as I slowly fell asleep with the AM transistor radio snuck under the covers while Bob Murphy painted word pictures. I always had pleasant dreams after a Happy Recap.
For years I kept composition notebooks with daily updated pitching and hitting stats of every Met, dutifully copied from box scores, with the math to determine the batting averages and ERAs done by longhand. Once I reached high school in 1979 my friends new me well enough to know that I wasn’t available for socializing until after 10:00pm, when the Met game was over.
Later a favorite memory is the 1985 July 4th game against the Braves which was elongated so much by extra innings and rain delays that I spent the night carousing with friends, and after the bars closed at 4:00am I wound up able to catch the end of the game on TV at home, and I could only imagine the surprised Atlantans hearing the explosions of the post game fireworks as the sun came up.
The summer after the glory year of 1986 I moved to Boston and followed the Mets by box score, occasional cable TV games, then internet ‘gamecenters’, always making sure my vacations coincided with Met homestands so I could catch a game or two in person each summer, until returning to the New York area in the summer of 2006, and the wonder of SNY and HDTV, and a few trips to old Shea and new Citi each year with friends and relatives.
Lets go Mets!
Grave, I need to post this on your profile page. Good job.
Everyone in my family rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers. I remember my brother who was 7 years older than me (he passed away from cancer in 2004) dragging me to Ebbets Field to watch Karl Spooner pitch his second game as a rookie in (I believe the year was) 1954. Spooner hurt his arm the following spring and never fulfilled his promise. Before the injury he had electric stuff and threw as hard as Koufax. When the Dodgers and Giants moved west I instantly hated both of those teams (it was easy to hate the Giants as a former Dodgers fan) and reasoned that the Yankees didn’t desert us and was the only team left in New York. So I actually started rooting for the Yankees. With the appearance of the new Mets franchise it gave me a chance to see NL baseball again. I went to games at the Polo Grounds and then Big Shea in the early days of the franchise but when I wanted to see serious baseball I went to Yankees Stadium. Eventually the Yankees hit upon hard times so I started to split my time between the two teams. Later the development of the Mets and my desire to follow NL baseball caused me to start attending more Mets games. Today I am predominately a Mets fan but I find that while I hate some of the Yankees fans I encounter on the blogs I do not hate the Yankees as a team.