#12: "Get Metsmerized," George Foster and Various Profiteering Members of the 1986 New York Mets, 1986
Wow. Wow, wow, wow...just wow. Neither the first athletic team rap song nor likely the worst (there are just too many possibilities), "Get Metsmerized" still may be the most craven. And arrogant. And beautiful.
The brain child of George Foster, better known as a member of the famed Cincinnati Reds teams of the 1970s, "Red Machine," lesser known as an aging slugger who would be released by the Mets before the '86 season was through, and still lesser known as a man with a history of doing almost anything for a buck, including putting his name on the shitty Connecticut baseball camp I went to when I was a kid, "Get Metsmerized" is very different from 1985's "The Super Bowl Shuffle" in many ways, but let's focus on two.
1) "The Super Bowl Shuffle" was a sanctioned Chicago Bears product, with all proceeds going to charity.
"Get Metsmerized" was in no ways sanctioned (Jeff Pearlman, whose excellent The Bad Guys Won! was the first I'd ever heard of this record, notes that Foster and his crew weren't allowed to sell this record outside Shea Stadium), and was nothing but a money grab. Today, a cease-and-desist probably would have gone out to pull the record for having a crudely-drawn Mets logo on it.
2) "The Super Bowl Shuffle" was released three months before the Chicago Bears even played in Super Bowl XX. That's some hubris.
"Get Metsmerized" was recorded one game into the 1986 season. Baseball seasons consist of 162 games. That's Jupiter-sized balls. But hey, at least they won that one game.
Onto the product, such as it is. Does it suck? And how. From the very start (as Patton Oswalt noted in a The Best Show on WFMU analysis I'll link to up top) you might note that these guys can't even shout "Get Metsmerized! Get Metsmerized!" in any kind of harmony. Not sing. Shout.
 It gets briefly better--37-year-old George Foster, who obviously loved hip-hop and studied the smooth flows of Whodini before hitting the studio has a weirdly country tinge to his rhymes, but still gives his best performance of the 1986 season on this record. And towards the middle of this line of goonery, rookie (and future MVP) (and future guy who ate his way out of the majors) Kevin Mitchell shows off an excellent, loud old school voice, even if his verse isn't up to the, um, Foster standard. For every other Met on the record, though, it's marginal survival or amazing failure. Don't worry: it's mostly amazing failure.
Ah, the delights here are almost too much to recount! The sound effects on Darryl Strawberry's verse ("With ya black bat...(crack!) You know we rely!") filling in his total lack of flow! Bashful Dwight "Dr. K" Gooden's strain to get through what, easily, Â could have been Take 48 for him! The line "When you want a batter filled with terror/ Call on me, Rick Aguilera"! The way Howard Johnson actually starts his mini-verse, "My name is HoJo, I'm here to say/ This team is going all the way"! Be still, my overflowing heart!
But SS Rafael Santana and CF Lenny Dykstra deserve special mention here. Dykstra, who, when he's chasing down a deep fly ball, "ain't afraid of no walls" rhymes like he ain't afraid (or even aware) of rhythmic structure, the backing track, or misinvesting your money. Dig the way, around 2:05, he stumbles through "It's a WONDER!...I'm still alive."
Santana, on the other hand, can't be blamed for his performance, because unlike his teammates, his lack of mastery of the English language can at least be blamed on it not being his first language. That doesn't make you any more likely to understand a word he's saying. For the record, he's a "cool glove man." Sorry if your misinterpretation was off.
The self-distributed song never went anywhere (Pearlman estimates 80 copies sold), and to add insult to injury, the Mets came up with a shitty pop-rock tune, "Let's Go Mets," with Joe Piscopo in the video. This was the shit they played as the season went on and they won the "Series ring," as George Foster had predicted, albeit without George Foster. They still play it sometimes at New Shea.
But I own this record. I paid $11.95 with shipping, in fact. I've even made up verses using the "Do It Yourself!" instrumental mix on the back for a imaginary song called "Get Soxercised!", performed by the 1986 Boston Red Sox. ("My name is Buckner, I'm hard to the core/ But put Stapleton in now, my knees are sore"). I believe in the dream of George Foster. Getting Metsmerized, brothers and sisters, is in the groove.
