#metsidized time

1964: Year of It’s a Dump, But It’s Our Dump (Y.I.D.B.O.D.)^1

1984: Year of Just What the Doctor Ordered (Y.J.W.D.O.)^2

1992: Year of the Worst Team Money Could Buy (Y.W.T.M.C.B.)^3

1995: Year of Generation K (Y.G.K.)^4

1998: Year of Forgotten Anguish (Y.F.A.)^5

2009: Year of I’m Calling it Shea (Y.O.I.C.I.S.)^6

2016: The Year of Happy Recaps (Y.H.R.)^7

- A.F.O.M.G.

Notes & Errata

^1 What came first, the sentiment or the phrasing? There’s probably no right answer, but either way it’s remarkable how consistent Mets’ fans feelings about Shea Stadium were -- we loved it, warts and all. It wasn’t the love of someone who was unable to see the warts, mind you. We were well aware of those, but Shea was our happy place, the place we grew up loving baseball. So a dump? Yes. But our dump? Always.

^2 To this day I believe the billboard of Doc Gooden adorning like the entire side of a midtown Manhattan building is among the coolest things I’ve ever seen. In my dreams I live in a New York obsessed enough with the Mets to produce something like this again.

^3 I was old enough to remember rooting for this team, but not yet at a point to fully appreciate how big of a bust it was. What’s interesting is that Bobby Bonilla became one of the most reviled -- and, ahem, longest tenured -- Mets of all time, but his stats from his first tour with the Mets really weren’t that bad. He definitely had a down year in Y.W.T.M.C.B., but he had OPS’ of .874 and .878 the next two seasons, and had a .984 (!!) mark in Y.G.K. before getting shipped to BAL.

^4 Twenty years before a legitimate Generation K emerged there was the triumvirate of Paul Wilson, Jason Isringhausen, and Bill Pulsipher. I remember thinking at the time that everything might have been different for Wilson if he hadn’t given up that home run in the bottom of the 9th at Wrigley. But that’s probably not true.

^5 I can remember with excruciating detail the horrors of Y.O.O.P. and Y.L.P., and yet this season, which ended in similarly tragic fashion, goes largely unremembered / unmentioned in the annals of Mets atrocities. In short, we won 88 games, none of which wins came in the final 5 games of the season, wherein we lost 2 to the dreadful Montreal Expos and 3 to the very good, very hated Atlanta Braves, any 1 of which win would have at least created a 3-way tie for the NL Wild Card. I remember being very pissed off in the lunchroom at school the day following the final defeat, and not feeling very up for engaging any Yankee fan friends at all.

^6 True story: I was more accepting of Citi Field than most. As per point ^1 above, I loved Shea, but by the time Citi Field opened I had gotten my head around the fact that the Mets would have a new home. And in many ways I liked the new building from the start -- more than anything, I loved the freedom of movement. At Shea you had no choice but to watch a game from your seats. Perhaps because that was my viewing experience the first approx. 25 years of my life, ever since Citi Field opened I’ve been one to wander the park and watch from the Shea Bridge after about the 2nd or 3rd innings (playoff games excluded).

What I didn’t love about Citi Field, however, was how “un-Mets” it felt. The black walls, the green seats, the ridiculous dimensions that seemed conceived to sap our franchise player of his strengths, the (yes, ok, tasteful / poignant) Jackie Robinson / Brooklyn Dodgers homage compounding the sense of alienation. Did “I’m calling it Shea” become a rallying cry before these mistakes were known as an eff you to the new ballpark, or only after as a way of making the new ballpark feel somehow like our own? I can’t remember now. But I do know that the sentiment lives on, and will always be a reminder to some Mets fans that the current ownership isn’t like exactly in step with the fanbase.

- D.F.G.

Notes & Errata

^1 Enthusiasts of a certain vintage will find this near impossible to believe, but once upon a time, Alex Rodriguez was highly coveted^a by Mets fans. A-Rod was born in Washington Heights, NY, NY, and even though he mostly grew up in Miami, FL, his favorite team growing up was NYM (recall that he grew up in P.E.E.^b Miami). It’s odd to define a year by the non-presence of a certain player who was never on your team in the first place (unlike, say, the absence of Matt Harvey in Y.O.dG.^c), but I remember reading a Y.N.A.R. post-mortem that quoted Robin Ventura (maybe it was Todd Zeile?) saying how the entire post-Y.O.O.D^d. offseason narrative about how the Mets needed^e A-Rod on their team to take the next step and win a championship already produced a feeling of inadequacy on the club in Y.N.A.R. after A-Rod up and signed with the Texas Rangers in late-Y.O.O.D. 

FWIW^f, and not that this really helps matters any, but I have this idea that this is when A-Rod’s Q Score-type appeal irrevocably turned toward the toxic. There had been a rather comprehensive storyline put out, near definitely by A-Rod’s team, about how their star longed to play for the team he grew up rooting for, the Mets. One thing baseball fans, myself included, do not understand is how a person would give up the chance to play for the team they loved as a child^g, and so when A-Rod turned down that opportunity, whether for private jets, a suite at Shea Stadium, another ivory backscratcher or whatever else, casual baseball fans simply didn’t understand the D.M.P.^h that produced such an outcome. The thinking being, “Well, if it’s the difference between making $250mm to play for a team I literally don’t give a shit about^i, versus making $200mm to play for the team I loved growing up^j, I’d rather make $200mm every time.” This line of thinking disregards, of course, many of the essential inputs^k weighed by actual professional baseball players when they make such a decision, the D.M.P. of which is, by all appearances, conducted rather unemotionally. 

^a Strange but true: before he signed with TEX, A-Rod was one of the most likable players in MLB, principally because he was insanely good. A useful point of comparison here might be Mike Trout. Through the first four full seasons of his career, Trout has amassed a 35.5 WAR, while A-Rod... wow it’s not even close, A-Rod had 28.2. Note, however, that A-Rod had a monster 5th full season, posting a 10.4 WAR in his walk-year of Y.O.O.P.^aa (short of Trout’s PB^aaa 10.8 from, ahem, his rookie season; it’ll be interesting to see where career WAR numbers end up for those two). The point is though that A-Rod was insanely good and also would have represented a massive upgrade over the appreciated-but-nonetheless-flawed incumbent at SS for the Mets, Rey Ordonez (he of the -0.8 WAR in 2000). 

^aa See, for reference, A Guide to Metsidized Time (1/??), originally published 1 September, Y.O.T.P.

^aaa Esoteric acronym favored by high school students, especially individual sport^aaaa enthusiasts, signifying “Personal best”

^aaaa Chief among these individual sport pursuits being track & field, swimming, and cross country running, though in colder climes skiing likely presents a use case.

^b Pre-Expansion Era, which up and ended already in pre-Metsidized 1993, during which period Florida hadn’t a team, let alone two. 

^c Ibid, Metsidized Time (1/??)

^d Ibid, Metsidized Time (1/??)

^e A very specific word choice connoting something else entirely, sentiment-wise, from a phrase like “would benefit from,” say.

^f Acronym, favored by youths, signifying, “For what it’s worth.”

^g See, for example, Mets’ fans love of David Wright in his earlier, more bona-fides-less-at-least-right-here-in-NYC period, circa Y.T.D.D. or Y.N.M.^ga

^ga Ibid, Metsidized Time (1/??)

^h Acronym, favored by business school students and marketing professionals, signifying, “Decision making process”

^i Situated in Texas, no less

^j Recall that “the team” in this situation is the same team they -- the fan evaluating the presumed course of action in this imagined-personalized D.M.P. scenario -- love deeply and care about and instant message^ia about.

^ja Y.N.A.R. equivalent of tweeting.

^k For instance, a team’s ability to contend over the span of the player’s contract, the differences in income tax treatment in FL, TX and the rest of USA, and god knows what else. 

^2 I remember talking/trading texts^a with people like Sippy Momo, Nails, etc. about the trades for Kris Benson and Victor Zambrano; the general vibe was one of eyebrows-raised agreement that the Mets “were going for it”, a statement most often expressed with eyes almost manically wide open, a resolute/determined smile^b type expression of the mouth and a slight-but-nonetheless-hastily-repeated nod of the head following the statement itself, all of which was intended to underscore the “in summation” quality of how you’d described what just went down. 

^a More likely AOL instant messages.

^b Something like this :|

^3 Before he authored his Cy Young award-winning season, R.A. Dickey went for a hike, and it pissed the Mets right off. Inspired by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Dickey had announced plans the previous November to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in the offseason, 

"The scope of the mountain resonated with me," Dickey said in an interview. "It wasn't necessarily the plot. I read the book in eighth grade -- when, of course, you don't have the means or wherewithal to tackle something like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. I always thought it would be a fantastic pilgrimage to hike to the summit. For years, I -- the way that we do -- we file things in our minds, in cabinets deep in the recesses of our brains."

Anyway, the Mets got all pissed off that Dickey was going to do the hike, because even if it’s not the same as climbing Everest, it’s still a dangerous-y thing to do. There was a mention that the Mets could void his contract. 

Fortunately they didn’t do that, because Dickey put together about the best season of pitching I’ve ever seen. Back to back 1-hitters gives a flavor for how dominant he was. 

Since the Mets got him, Dickey had been a very good pitcher, albeit not an ace. Before that, he’d been mostly dreadful. In Y.M.K., Dickey completed both a spiritual trek up a mountain that had captured his imagination since his youth, and a professional one to the height of his profession. 

A friend at business school was a big Blue Jays fan. After the trade^a I told him the Jays weren’t getting an ace, no matter how much of an ace R.A. Dickey had been in Y.M.K., but a really solid No. 2/No. 3 starter type who would eat innings. It just hasn’t really worked out for R.A. in Toronto, which is a shame. Beyond the inherent fun of watching a knuckleballer, Dickey was smart/articulate/thoughtful^b, and actually did a lot of noble work for good causes.  He’s on some sort of like 7-game winning streak at the moment, coinciding with the Jays’ run to the playoffs. I hope he keeps it going. 

^a Which the Mets totally won, incidentally. Getting Travis d’Arnaud and Noah Syndergaard for a soon-to-be 38-year-old Dickey was highway robbery. 

What even the most badly scarred^4 among us would concede, however, is that the Mets control their own destiny. By far the most heartening statistic out there is that if the Mets play .500 ball the rest of the way, WSH would need to go something like 22-8^5 the rest of the way to catch them. 

Going 22-8 for WSH means playing really good baseball^6, essential to which would be beating truly atrocious teams. WSH faces just such a team this weekend in ATL, losers of 8 in a row and 15 of 16 games^7. 

It’s the kind of team you have to feast on, not least of which reason is that if you up and lose to them the sense of foreboding that presages a full-on Y.I.A.T.-level fan experience/lifestyle turning point starts to come on way strong, which is murder on the fan base, red meat for beat reporters, bloggers and national media types alike, and no doubt the cause of some consternation among the ballplayers themselves. 

So it’s an important set of games the Nats are about to play. And equally true for the Mets, who have “only” managed a 3-3 record against lowly BOS and PHI the past week. Thanks in part to Matt Williams the Nats’ stumbles in STL this week, the 6.5 game lead is alive and well, but there’s important momentum on the line. 

The Mets will face WSH next week in what is truly an all-important 3-game set. Rather core to the collapse in Y.O.O.P.^8 was a three-game sweep by PHI in September, we’ll all remember. Tyranny of low expectations aside, even winning one game out of three reduces the ground lost to a “meh -level 1 game from Y.O.O.P-we-go-again level 3 games. 

You’d like to go into that type of all-important series with a bit of momentum, and that’s what the next 4 days are about. The Mets are off tonight, but WSH has a chance to stave off that sense of foreboding for at least a day, and cut their deficit to a tidier 6 games while they’re at it. And if they can do to ATL what everyone else has done to ATL the past month, they’ll come in to the series next week feeling pretty good about themselves generally. 

The same could more or less be said about the Mets against MIA, with the important caveat that MIA is not in the midst of a truly astoundingly bad run of play at this particular moment^9. Recent play aside, MIA is still a team looking pretty closely at a 90-loss season. 

And so for now it’s up to both clubs to keep their doubts at bay and win the games they need to. Division leads are on the line, momentum is on the line, but as for me more than anything is watching which team succumbs first to its own sense of foreboding. There can only be one. 

- A.F.O.M.G. 

Notes & Errata

^1. See, for reference, A Guide to Metsidized Time, as published 9/1/Y.O.T.P.

^2 See, for reference, The Plot Against October, as published 8/31/Y.O.T.P.

^3 Ibid, Metsidized Time.

^4 This guy, for example.

^5 Not a number I’ve taken the time to calculate, but from working it out in my head over an interval of time that would likely have been longer than just up and doing the math, I actually do think this is correct or at least have conviction it’s more right than wrong.

^6 More specifically, playing to a .733 winning percentage. And so practically that would mean playing like a team that over a whole 162-game season would win approx. 119 games, or winning 113 games if they up and decide to go back to a 154-game season which you hear mused about idly from time to time. 

^7 More specifically, playing to a .063 winning percentage which, applied over the same periods of time described in ^6 above, would produce win totals barely scraping double digits in the former scenario and maybe getting there if you round up generously (albeit in a generally accepted manner^a) in the latter. 

^a It comes out to 9.625 which any fair-minded person would round up to 10 if it were important to put the exercise to bed with a whole number in hand.

^8 Ibid, Metsidized Time.

In Wallace’s near future, calendar year numbers are gone. What would a Mets version of such a calendar look like? Here’s a running list. I may add to it as I think more about the other seasons, but for now, here’s the most historic seasons in Mets history in Metsidized Time. 

1962: Year of Inauguration (Y.O.I.)

1969: Year of Miracles (Y.O.M.)

1973: Year of Ya Gotta Believe (Y.Y.G.B.)

1986: A Year to Remember (A.Y.T.R.)

1988: Year It All Turned (Y.I.A.T.) ^2

1999: Year of Face Palm (Y.O.F.P.) ^3

2000: Year of Our Disappointment (Y.O.O.D.)

2005: Year of New Mets (Y.O.N.M.) ^4

2006: Year of Our Youth (Y.O.O.Y.) ^5

2007: Year of Our Pain (Y.O.O.P.), or, elsewhere, Year of the Stewed Goat (Y.S.G.)^6

2008: Year of the Leaky Pen (Y.O.L.P.)

2013: Year of the Bloody Nose (Y.B.N.)^7

2014: Year of Hair We Go (Y.H.W.G.)^8

2015: Year of Happy Recaps (Y.H.R.) the Phoenix^9

My intention, going forward, is to refer to these years exclusively by their Metsidized Time titles. This will prove incredibly confusing to virtually everyone, since virtually no one reads this blog as yet. But someday this will be canon. May it be. 

- A.F.O.M.G.

Notes & Errata

^1 As updated 21 November, Y.O.T.P., the greater was the pity. 

^2 As corroborated by Greg Prince^a, one of the brilliant authors of Faith and Fear in Flushing, which you really should read if you’re not doing so already... prior to Y.I.A.T., the experience of being a Mets fan was mostly defined by the “miracle/believe” rallying cry personified by Y.O.M., Y.Y.G.B., and A.Y.T.R. After the defeat to the Dodgers in the Y.I.A.T. NLCS, a team the Mets had gone 10-1 against in the regular season, the experience of Mets fandom became one defined by “other shoe dropping-ism”^b and just generally things going badly, i.e., Y.O.F.P., Y.O.O.D., Y.O.O.Y., Y.O.O.P., and Y.O.L.P.

^a 31 August, Year of Happy Recaps

A.F.O.M.G.:  question for you guys wrt a post im writing. im 32 so have fully formed memories since [pre-Metsidized] early 90s (1/??)

A.F.O.M.G.:  "other shoe dropping-ism" is a really core part of the Mets fan experience ([Y.O.O.Y], [Y.O.O.P.], [Y.O.L.P.], Benitez, Timo, Gen K) (2/??)

A.F.O.M.G.: i mean that list could go on and on when you think about it. but i wonder if that anxiety existed pre [Y.I.A.T.]? (3/??)

A.F.O.M.G.: prior to [Y.I.A.T.], it wasn't title after title but btw [Y.O.M.]/[A.Y.T.R.] even [Y.Y.G.B.] falling short you didnt have other shoes dropping (4)

A.F.O.M.G. & the anxiety/sense of dread/foreboding that produces. we had bad teams but not teams that blew it. right/wrong/fin

F.A.F.I.F.: Met fatalism is a relatively new phenomenon. We are historically the Miracle/Believe people.

A.F.O.M.G.: indeed. as a younger fan ive more heard of than witnessed Miracle/Believe so the 2 battle for supremacy in my circle

F.A.F.I.F.: Feast or famine through [A.Y.T.R.]. Not close enough when out of it to bemoan "here we go again" fates.

F.A.F.I.F.: Not winning w/decent teams in [pre-Metsidized] '70s: not enough hitting -- not the fates. [pre-Metsidized] 84, 85 taken as we'll get 'em next year.

F.A.F.I.F.: Pendleton and Scioscia have come to carry more emotional precedent weight than Buckner.

A.F.O.M.G.: interesting abt Pendleton and Scioscia. Neither r on my radar ex general annoyance at Pendleton as a Brave & Yankee

F.A.F.I.F.: After which...other shoe, as you said.

^b See, for reference, The Plot Against October

^3 Coming on the heels of the Grand Slam Single, once Piazza hit that home run in Game 6 you really thought the Mets were going to become the first team to roar back from a 3-0 deficit to win a playoff series. But then Armando Benitez Benitez’ed it and then Kenny Rogers threw ball 4^a to walk in a run and that was that. 

^a Which, when you think about it, is truly impossible to understand. Kenny Rogers didn’t walk a lot of batters, was a professional baseball player trained to throw strikes, and his team’s season would literally end if he didn’t throw a strike. He didn’t throw a strike. Face palm. 

^4 I went back and forth on this one. I was tempted to call it “Year of Next Year is Now” as per the slogan that year, but “New Mets” remains a rallying cry in the fanbase^a in a way “Next Year is Now” does not, so there you have it. 

^a Note, however, that chants of “New Bears,” which could be heard sporadically at Shea Stadium on Opening Day Y.O.N.M., have not, to anyone’s knowledge, caught on amid the CHI Bears fanbase. 

^5 This is a bit particular to me, Y.O.O.Y. arriving just as I was 23 without a care in the world and able to devote my complete attention to baseball^a, but between how dominant the Mets were and Endy going over the wall, I think it’s fair to say Y.O.O.Y. made us all feel like kids again. 

^a As recorded on the Yankees 2000: Promote the Curse (and its successor, Mets Extra) blog that was regrettably lost to history sometime in pre-Metsidized 2012 give or take a year. 

^6 As brought to my attention 5 September, Y.H.R., Y.O.O.P. was once referred to on F.A.F.I.F. as “Year of the Stewed Goat”, which Y.S.G. I happily note as a canonically acceptable alternative to Y.O.O.P. in Metsidized Time.

^7 The image of Matt Harvey pitching through a bloody nose was the moment the Mets (as a collective consisting of fans, employees, players, etc.) seemed to say “we’ve had it with this shit.”

^8 deGrom to Jenrry Mejia might be the best end-to-end hair combination you’ll ever see. Little did we suspect at the time that but a year later deGrom would get a partner in the order of the coif with the arrival of one N. Syndergaard.