A Fan's Evolution

or how I learned to stop worrying and love baseball again

After every Mets loss, I destroyed a piece of furniture.

The year was 1999. I was back living at home with my mom after an aborted year on my own. It was a reset. I was waiting tables in a family Italian restaurant, and hanging with a couple of high school friends who were also back home.  In between, I watched a lot of Mets baseball. The Mets were good that year, really good for the first time in about a decade, and it felt like it was all designed specifically for me to enjoy. They had a superstar catcher, Mike Piazza. They imported my favorite non-Met, Robin Ventura, to play third base. I was living 25 minutes from the stadium, so I could go to games whenever I wanted. The team even adopted a Doors song, my favorite band at the time, for their post-victory anthem. Watching the Mets earn victories on the field and hearing Jim Morrison croon “Mr. Mojo Riiiising” several times a week should have been enough to make it one of the most pleasurable summers of my life.

Instead, I broke chairs. I got so angry at every single Mets loss that my mother eventually gave me old furniture to break. I think she was afraid of my rage. I was only 19, but I was a man, and seeing a man stomping around the house with rage is scary to a woman, even if it’s her son. So she gave me old chairs, the ones we used at our dining table when I was a little kid. They were sturdy chairs, not particularly fancy but well built. They would have lasted years. I took them out to the deck and beat the shit out of them with a baseball bat.

I’ll repeat: This was a good Mets team. They won 97 games and made the playoffs as a Wild Card team. Still, every loss sent me into a rage. It was the first real symptom of an anger problem that’s with me to this day, and in that way, it has nothing to do with baseball or the Mets or Jim Morrison. In another way, it does. The Mets have been a vessel for both my joy and my pain, and in order to control my temper, I had to change the way I followed them.

Actually, we need to go back even further. I was six years old in 1986. My childhood had a lot of pain in it, and plenty of fear and shame. I lived with my mother, and saw my father on Sundays. He made my life difficult. He had anger problems of his own and a profound sense of personal injustice. I was afraid of his outbursts. It was not a fun time, but baseball provided a respite, in part because of the beauty and orderliness of the game, but also because of the men. Gary Carter, Keith Hernandez, Dwight Gooden, Wally Backman, Ron Darling. They were my role models. Men who were passionate but controlled on the field. Men with mustaches and muscles. I didn’t know what a man was supposed to be, but the 1986 Mets gave me an idea.

They also gave me hope. That team provided a bliss that my subsequent years have never been able to live up to. The Mets comeback victory in Game 6 of that year’s World Series made me think there was magic in the world. It made me think life was going to work out, and that the suffering I had endured up until that point would be balanced out by a benevolent universe. Things were going to break right for me because I deserved it. They did that night when I stayed up late to watch the ball go under Bill Buckner’s legs and see Mookie Wilson rounding third and running into a crowd of teammates waiting at home plate with open arms. This wasn’t an aberration. It couldn’t be. Life would be a series of walk-offs from now on.

Of course, it wasn’t. Not the next year or the year after that. I started to take Mets’ losses very hard. In 1987, I had this little ritual when I watched. I would tip our rebounder (like a mini-trampoline) up against the wall, and throw a hardball against it during the game. Sort of playing catch with myself. I remember during a particular bad loss, I lost control, threw it as hard as I could, and watched it sail by me and break the window behind me. That was the first indicator that my baseball rage could cause hurt things. By 1999, I was breaking furniture. In 2006, when the Mets lost the National League Championship Series to the Cardinals, I threw a chair in my apartment. My dad, who happened to be there, was taken aback. “Take it easy,” said the guy I learned my anger from. “It’s just a game.”

I was falling into a pattern. When the Mets were bad, I was so miserable that I basically tuned out the season. When they were good, I was even more miserable. Moments of jubilation mutated instantly into anxiety. Every loss was a symbol of something wrong with the team’s makeup. The victories were just illusions. The losses were real.

I could have kept on going that way for the rest of my life, but when I met my wife in 2007, it forced a change. My mom let me break chairs, but my wife wouldn’t put up with that shit. I couldn’t snap at her during a tense moment in a game, stop around the house during commercial breaks, or be in a rotten mood the day after a Mets loss. Marriage is hard enough. The black cloud that hung over our house during most of every baseball season made it harder. 

We all know fandom is illogical. The players come and go. The managers and coaches, too. Even the owners. So what are we rooting for? Jerry Seinfeld said we are cheering for “laundry.” I think we’re cheering for ourselves. The fans are the only ones who remain constant. We’re the ones who show up year after year. We pass our love of a franchise onto our children. Our fandom is tied up in our family. It’s our roots. It’s playing catch with our mothers and fathers, then going inside to watch the game. What’s more sacred than that? No wonder we take it hard when our team loses, or when they do something stupid that makes the whole league point at them and laugh. Emotionally, it is as if we have done it ourselves.

But how to change? After a particularly brutal season—I believe it was 2020, when the Mets failed to make the postseason despite an expanded playoff field—I couldn’t take it anymore. I vowed to root for a different team the following season, if only to cleanse myself of Mets toxicity. I wanted to enjoy baseball again. I set my sights on the Minnesota Twins, mostly because they seemed like they have a nice, calm fanbase, and they wouldn’t play the Mets the following season. But then Steve Cohen, the 14 billion dollar man, bought the team and promised to start spending money like the previous’ owners never had. Everybody told me good times were ahead. I would be a fool to give up on the Mets at that exact point, wouldn’t I? I stuck around for another season, endured another painful exit. The Mets set a record that year for being in first place for the most number of days and still ending up with a losing record. 

It was sometime during that season that I started to make the change. I took two drastic step to force myself to stop identifying with this team, to stop letting my mood be determined by their successes and failure. First, I vowed to stop referring to the Mets as “we.” “We” didn’t lose last night. “They” did. In Fever Pitch, an excellent film about loving a losing franchise, Jimmy Fallon’s character locks himself in his room after a bad breakup and watches Red Sox lowlights on repeat, chanting “I am the Red Sox, I am the Red Sox.” That wouldn’t be me. I was not the Mets, and I made the decision to reinforce that sentiment with my everyday language.

The other, perhaps even more dramatic move, was to get rid of my Mets gear. Jerseys, tee shirts, sweatshirts, hats. I had tons of it. I wanted to burn it in the driveway like a ritual cleansing, but my wife has a moral objection to wasting stuff, so instead I bundled it all up into a garbage bag and deposited it in a Goodwill bin. Was it hard? No, not really. I needed to do it. I kept a couple tee shirts to work out in, but everything else was gone. My favorite hat. My authentic Paul Lo Duca jersey. My cheap Alfonzo jersey. My Mets 2015 postseason sweatshirt. None of these items were from my childhood, but they were all important to me. They were my uniform, the things I wore to identity myself as a member of this tribe. And now they were gone. 

I don’t wear baseball shirts anymore, but I replaced the hats with ones from other teams. I went to Cleveland and bought a great Guardians hat at the stadium. I bought a replica of an Expos hat I loved when I was a kid, just because I thought the design was cool. A Rockford Peaches cap. An old Devil Rays hat. Right now, I’ve got my eye on this Marlins City Connect hat, if I can come up with a way to justify spending $40 on it. When I wear these hats, it reminds me that I’m a fan of baseball, not just of the Mets.

And you know what? It has worked. I won’t say I didn’t have some dark times last year, as the Mets jumped out to a great start then watched the Braves inch closer and closer with every game, finally overtaking them in a brutal three-game sweep at the end of the year. There were moments when I got depressed thinking about how, even in a good year, the baseball gods find a way to make miserable. But I didn’t let it ruin my day, my season, or my life. 

This year, there’s a new wrinkle. As the season drew nearer, my attention turned to the World Baseball Classic, which further helped me dissociate from the Mets. Here was a baseball tournament which scrambled my loyalties. I found myself rooting for the upstart Venezuela team, which rostered both Ronald Acuna, Jr. (a Brave) and Eduardo Escobar (a Met). I let myself love watching Acuna run the bases, which in the regular season had brought me only misery. The same goes for Kyle Schwarber, who anchored the U.S. lineup but spent most of last year torching the Mets as the leadoff hitter for the Phillies. During the WBC, these guys were a joy to root for, and now that the regular season has commenced, I find myself hating them much less. Really, not at all. I want the Mets to win, but I don’t see it as a tragedy when they lose because those other guys aren’t so bad. I even watched a Braves game last week, just for fun. Not rooting for them to lose or anything. 

So why am I telling you all this? Well, I was tweeting about it a little last summer—when the Mets were in a swoon—and one of my mutuals started asking me more about how I learned to stop worrying and love baseball, so I started telling him. I don’t know if it’s the right path for everyone—there are surely some people who can feel intensely about the Mets without those feeling spilling over into other areas of their life—but it undoubtedly is for me. The highs of my fandom aren’t as high as they once were, but they’re more pleasurable because they’re not followed with worry about the next night’s game. Mine is a stable fandom. I can actually enjoy baseball now, instead of riding the highs and lows, holding on for dear life. The furniture is safe. Baseball is fun again. Even with the stupid pitch clock.