Keidel: Even The Most Staunch Yankees Fan Has To Appreciate What Mets Have Done
By Jason Keidel
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Mets fans hate the Yankees, their fans and their epic sense of entitlement.
Bombers' fans have been looking down their noses at "little brother" for years,
But maybe, with a certain age, wage, and wisdom, comes some equanimity, a certain ease of mind, a less ornery persona.
Because this Yankees fan stood, smiled, and clapped when the Mets won the NL East.
Won it. Didn't back into it. Didn't blow it, like they did in 2007 and 2008, a plunging mess of a baseball team. They didn't spiral into a finger-pointing, Kardashian waste of reality TV.
Amazing what happens when you let your best pitcher pitch, allow your ace to don his Dark Knight attire, to feel like a superhero again. Matt Harvey didn't drink half a can of Bud Light because he didn't pitch half a game.
MORE: Kallet: After Nearly A Decade Of Pain And Heartbreak, Mets Fans Deserve This
As if to bridge the decades since the Mets were the core of Big Apple baseball, SNY interviewed coach Tim Teufel, whose face has swollen a little, a few wrinkles stenciled around his eyes, his shirt darkened by sweat, beer, and relief. A playoff berth isn't complete without at least the scent and sound of a member of the great team from the mid-1980s, when the Mets vaporized the majors.
The millennial Yankees fan doesn't understand suffering, has never endured the forlorn feeling of a most frozen winter, hasn't seen a bottleneck of years between titles.
But those of us who breached 40 remember those nearly two decades (1978-1996) of impotence, when George Steinbrenner was not beloved. It was a time when the Boss was buying Jesse Barfield and Jack Clark and Steve Sax, was hiring Howie Spira, and was banned from baseball. They jettisoned Al Leiter and Jose Rijo and Doug Drabek, and thought it wise to replace those young pitching studs with Steve Trout and Ed Whitson.
So it is with that, and an appreciation for the sport in mind, that some of us whose blood type is pinstriped can salute the Mets, meet the Mets, and greet the Mets with a grin.
Frankly, few fans east or west of the Hudson deserve this more than the Mets fan. When you weren't just awful, you managed to turn good teams into awful, autumnal messes. The Mets were so loathed that the cellar-dwelling Miami Marlins swore they would have crawled across a field of broken glass to ruin their season. They celebrated wins before they won anything, with their nauseating, orchestrated home run dances that incensed their opponents, making the hapless Marlins their blood enemies.
But now you can finally lose those memories. You can forget that wretched algorithm of 7 games in 17 days. You can Forget Tom Glavine, Yadier Molina, Generation K. Ollie Perez and Jason Bay. You can forget Bobby Valentine's fake mustache.
Speaking of Mets managers, who's earned this more than Terry Collins? The forever .500 manager has been compared less to Connie Mack and way more to Mr. Magoo. He won't brag, flaunt or flout. Collins is refreshingly old school in an increasingly sterile sport that leans on 29-year-old GMs that just learned to shave. Baseball is losing its old-world comforts, and is more about accountants and calculus than character and characters.
How heartening it was to see Collins douse the crowd, the few dozen faithful who hung around -- in Cincinnati, no less -- while the most beleaguered manager in MLB could finally crack a smile, hug his wife, wrap his arms around his players, and wrap his mind around a reality none of us saw just a few months ago, when the Mets trotted out six or so minor leaguers onto a stained Citi Field diamond.
No, these aren't your daddy's Mets. Heck, these aren't even the Mets we watched in June. Those Mets were a few years away, a few bats away. Before Sandy Alderson finally got a Wilpon's blessing and finally crowbarred open the franchise wallet and brought some bona fide talent to Flushing.
Uribe. Johnson. Clippard. And Hercules Cespedes.
Cherish this. Most teams with a conveyer belt of blessed arms would be planning for a pristine future, an endless sunrise of three aces who aren't even arbitrary eligible. But as we learned from the Washington Nationals when they benched their best pitcher and their World Series dreams -- and from the litany of corporate gaffes we've seen from Queens -- tomorrow is a perilous proposition.
Yoenis Cespedes may not be fluent in English, but he will speak serious American dollar when the season ends, which will challenge the Mets' meager, monetary ethos. The team you see next April might be woefully familiar to the one you saw last April.
And who deserves this more than David Wright, the blue collar captain who's seen his most talented teammates traded or lost to free-agent purgatory? He has battled his employer's sinful waste and his own spinal condition to help lead his beloved blue and orange to October. Wright is not just someone the Mets and their fans can adore. He's Derek Jeter sans the celebrity, supermodels, and the gold-plated palace in St. Jetersburg.
Yankees fans love to tweak Mets fans, flaunt the collective bling of 27 rings, wear those obnoxious, "Got Rings?" T-shirts. While the Mets fan tends to bear the blue collar ethic, the Yankees fan has become less of a baseball crowd and more of a martini-swilling, sushi-nibbling village of elitists, so ignorant of the sport that they don jerseys with the last name stitched to the back.
Even during an off year, the Yanks are still making the playoffs. But that shouldn't detract from the enchanted summer the Amazins just had. The Mets earned this. And so have you.
Enjoy this. Finally, you have the best ballpark and the best ball club in the Big Apple. No matter what the angry Yank in the next cubicle tells you, the club from Queens is now King of New York.
Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonKeidel
