Mets closer Francisco Rodriguez expresses a common reaction of the team and its fans this season.
Originally touted as a World Series contender before a Spring Training pitch was thrown, the Mets this season quickly devolved into Murphy’s Law personified – and we’re not talking about Daniel Murphy, either.
Some say they’re cursed. Some blame the Mets’ lack of farm depth as a direct reason why they haven’t been able to compete in lieu of their myriad injuries. Whatever the excuse, the Cardiac Kids have been tugging at more than just their fans’ heartstrings this season – they’re tugging at their own.
Watching my Mets get picked off one-by-one by the DL Monster is like some sick Rube Goldberg experiment that has been completely demoralizing.
You could call me a baseball depressive this season, so I turned to someone who knows it quite well: my buddy Dan, who has been a Baltimore Orioles fan since the mid-’80s.
No, the O’s haven’t always been a hard-luck team, but the days of Ripken and Robinson are far behind them. The modern Orioles vernacular is tinged with names like Albert Belle and Daniel Cabrera.
For a really demoralizing moment, something every Orioles fans can recount with photographic accuracy, you have to go back to October 9, 1996, when 12-year-old Jeffrey Maier snatched defeat from the hands of victory and took the Orioles’ chances of going to the World Series away.
As Dan puts it, “When Jeffrey Maier reached over the fence, we were on top of the world before that. We had the heavily favored Yanks on the ropes before that, on their own turf. We were on our way to victory, and then with one move, that little puke killed the city of Baltimore.”
Think about it, you’re on the verge of ousting your rival in Game 1 of the ALCS. Taking one away from the Yanks in the Bronx exponentially increases your World Series odds. In a game that’s all about momentum, the O’s were riding high on the stuff during that fateful bottom of the 8th.
The expectations for the Mets this season, in a lot of ways, parallel the hope Baltimore felt right before Jeter hit that ball, and right before Maier claimed it as his. And all those injuries the Mets are suffering are just as cosmically out of fans’ control as Maier’s actions were for Orioles fans.
So I ask myself, as a Mets fan, which would I rather suffer:
Option 1
The deflation of seeing Maier take a shot at the World Series out of my team’s hands, the agony of seeing your dreams crushed in one fell swoop like some horrible joke from the baseball gods, a taunting reminder that this, your best chance at glory, is ultimately not your year.
Option 2
The constant turmoil and torture of seeing your team’s All-Stars and franchise players go down one-by-one, by one, with injuries both fluky and normal that last the whole season, standing idly by as pitcher after batter after pitcher suffers setbacks and gets shut down for the season, wondering if each new game will bring yet another freak injury to a promising player or even a replacement – when will the madness end?
I have to say Option 1. I can’t take the overwhelming sense of hopelessness that this season has cast upon my baseball watching. I’m paying more attention to fantasy baseball than actual baseball because at least the fantasy version affords me some modicum of reward. Option 1 is mercy and compassion compared to Option 2, which might as well be renamed the Eighth Circle of Hell, owned and operated by Fred Wilpon. Tickets starting at just $50.
My buddy Dan compared the two rather aptly:
Option 1 is like getting shot in the liver – it’s a pain unlike anything else that no one should ever have to endure, a violent, horrible, completely senseless act ending in a death that never should have been. But it’s all over in about 20 minutes, relatively a game in the span of one season.
Option 2 is more akin to dying of several different types of cancers – your body already immune and weak, only to discover that more cancers keep surfacing and your current cancers keep spreading and becoming more malignant, until finally you loosen your grip on the lifeline and slowly fade into a painless, dark void from which you will never resurface.
–Kaplowitz
September 1, 2009 at 11:49 am |
Time for a resident Yankees fan to brush off the ol’ argument:
No doubt the O’s got jobbed in that game, and obviously that call wouldn’t stand with video replay today, but two things:
1. That didn’t win the game for the Yankees. Randy Myers still has to hang a breaking ball to Bernie Williams in the 11th.
2. Nor did it win the series for the Yankees. Jeff Maier didn’t make Todd Zeile throw the ball into the ground in Game 3. He didn’t make Rocky Coppinger serve up a bunch of home runs in Game 4.
The Maier play is deservedly the defining moment of that series, but saying the O’s lost because of it is just as short-sighted as saying Bill Buckner “lost the World Series” for the Red Sox, forgetting that Calvin Schiraldi had about five chances to get a third out and couldn’t, and the Sox still had a good chance to win Game 7.
I’m OK with the Maier play because it didn’t mean the Yankees shouldn’t have won that series. The O’s got out-played, period.
In the larger sense, though, what’s happened with the Baltimore Orioles, one of the key franchises in all of baseball, since 1998 is a disgrace. Camden Yards deserves meaningful baseball in September-October.
September 2, 2009 at 9:26 am |
I guess I shouldn’t tell Jeff at the next family function that he is still hated?
btw… nice job getting this on metsblog
September 2, 2009 at 10:57 am |
Michael, I agree with your perception of how things played out, but here’s the point: We’re talking about demoralizing, deflating moments. The O’s got jobbed in the game and it can be argued that the Rich Garcia-Jeffrey Maier one-two punch took the wind out of their sails.
If you were on that O’s team and you just saw that call made, how motivated would you be for the next 3 games, especially in the Bronx?
September 2, 2009 at 11:05 am |
i can’t figure out why your comparison doesn’t include the last two weeks of the last two seasons
September 2, 2009 at 12:24 pm |
Neither of you is an O’s fan. So, seriously, you can’t tell us that it’s NOT the most demoralizing moment for us in the last 20 years.
a) Yes, we know that said play did not win the game, BUT we were literally an inning away from winning the game and that play singlehandedly sent it to extra innings.
b) No, that game didn’t win the series, but that would have given the O’s a 1-0 lead and would have been a win IN THE BRONX, no less. And since the O’s won game 2, that would have been a 2-0 lead heading back to Baltimore. But that didn’t happen, and I’ll concede that, so I’ll just point out that the O’s were never the same after that. Armando Benitez and Randy Myers were off the rest of the series and, yes, the team won game two, but they spent half the game in a fog.
c) With all that said, no Orioles fan will tell you the O’s WOULD have won the series without that abomination, but they will tell you things probably would have gone differently. Whether or not that’s true is hard to say, but the point is we talk ourselves into believing it’s true and that alone points out how demoralizing that play was. Thirteen years later my day can still be ruined by mentioning Jeffrey Maier and I still end up spending the rest of the day convinced we could have won the series in six.
September 2, 2009 at 1:37 pm |
Oh, I’m not arguing that it’s not a gut punch — though these are professionals and I would hope they wouldn’t need “motivating” to beat the Yankees in an LCS game* — just that I’d be resistant to say the Orioles didn’t make the World Series that year BECAUSE of Jeffrey Maier. The O’s still could have won that game?**
I think my overall point is just to say that I agree that Option 2 is the more painful experience. We were all there for 8-20 in 2002-2003. I’d rather the Heels have lost to Illinois in the championship game on a buzzer-beater two years later than have to go through another season like that again.
*And, really, couldn’t the Maier play have had the opposite effect? I guarantee you, if the Orioles had gone on to win that series, they’d be remembered as the us-against-the-world team, the one that had to rally around those in-the-tank umpires who were set on getting the Yankees in the WS.
**And if they had Mariano Rivera instead of Randy Myers, they probably would have.
September 3, 2009 at 11:52 am |
I’d prefer option two, myself. If we had lost to Illinois on a buzzer beater, it would have been awful having to say “well, what if…” for the next four years. During the 8-20, sure it was extremely painful to see the team just suck. But that’s the thing, they just sucked. That was all there was to it. It wasn’t a series of “well, if the ball bounced differently, we’d by 20-8.”
Same thing with the O’s. The 30-3 game was a major league gut punch, but the team sucked so bad for so long that you just kind of thought, “I can’t believe it’s gotten this bad. Or can I?” I can’t count the number of times I’ve replayed the 1996 and 1997 playoffs over in my head thinking, “If this happened, maybe the O’s would have been world champs.”