Dwelling on the recent past

I've got the privilege of being the resident Mets fan. I write that without irony now, and I owe that to my dad. He’s a Yankees fan, and to his credit when he's said things like “I read that Rey Ordonez added five pounds of muscle in the offseason” and “I think Piazza’s actually better when he bounces the throw to second” they were only meant to cheer me up. It’s easy to spare a kind word, though, when your team is a perennial World Series favorite whose exploits in DVD line our shelves. He recently passed up one of those great cinematic events in favor of our battered VHS of game seven in '86, which is a credit to both his empathy and my voluble cursing this offseason.

I don’t know why everyone focuses so hard on the sixth game and Buckner, although with plenty of Red Sox-rooting friends I'm familiar with the human propensity for obsessing over failure. Sure, it’s a memorable moment, and I dearly enjoyed the commercial a few years ago that replayed it in super-slow motion, but it didn’t seal the deal. That drama’s in game seven, and we watched it in silence except for a few exclamations over the key moments: Ray Knight’s home run, absolutely crushed – the Sox reliever dropping his head, realizing Knight had hit it on the button; Strawberry launching one of his own, a no-doubter he didn’t even hit well; Strawberry and Gooden standing side by side in the dugout, young, good, hadn’t pissed it away yet, looking like they belonged in the old classy Mets’ pinstripes in a way they never did while wearing the Yanks'. And the best of all: Orosco when it was over, firing his glove into the air, my dad and I rewinding a few times to see if we could figure out where it landed. It was a good turn plastering that one up at Shea for the kids to ask about; maybe looking up at it they’ll miss the grimy poor-side-of-town feel the rest of the place now projects.

Ah, there I go. Already the present state of affairs is elbowing out my enthusiasm for the Mets I grew up with. We’re pretty far removed from ’86, that’s for sure. Might as well be comparing Orosco the champion to Orosco the spare part; you can work “glove leather” and “thrown up” into both descriptions all too easily. But there’s still a lot to like about the ’04 incarnation, starting but not ending with Jesse himself being nowhere near our roster. I’ll post again soon with my projections for the coming season with the caveat that I’m not going to sign off on some sabr projections – not because I’m averse to learning what the hell they mean, or because there are millions of them, or even because they have names like VORP and PECOTA and if I ever said VORP out loud to someone I’d shoot myself – but because I think that plenty of people already do that well and they're not the real reason I watch the game. So here’s hoping for an entertaining 70-80 wins: whether that entertainment comes in the form of dugout haircuts or dugout celebrations, I’ll be along for the stories.