I’ve been talking to Mets fans all week. I’m sure you have too. The most extraordinary thing about this season is that everyone seems to be saying the same thing: they feel more excited and hopeful about this year’s team than they did at any point about last year’s team, even though last year we were solidly ahead all season, and this year, we are only two and a half games ahead of the Phillies on September 10.
Last year was a bummer. Even before the collapse. Look at the archives of all the blogs. You’ll see this. No one could have predicted that collapse. But all of us seemed to feel that it was coming. When we settled into that .500 groove after Memorial Day and could not climb out of it, we could not enjoy ourselves. We didn’t think that we’d be passed by the mediocre Phillies. But we knew that we didn’t deserve the pennant. And we were sure that someone would cream us in the postseason.
This year is different. And tonight’s game illustrates how it is different. The 2008 Mets are not an overwhelming baseball presence. They are not like the Mets championship teams and they are not as formidable as the teams that came so close around the turn of the millennium. They have no closer and they barely have a bullpen. They’ve lost Maine for the season and who the hell knows what’s up with Pedro. They fall way behind, they squander leads, they play, with some frequency, as if they aren’t any good.
But they are good. Unlike last year’s team, they seem to want to be in control of their destiny. If they fall behind, they can come back. If they have slumps, they come out of them. They have the exuberance of the 2006 season. And it is not just the resurgence of Delgado, even if it is mostly the resurgence of Delgado.
What Carlos Delgado has done, as I said the other day, and as Gary Cohen mentioned tonight, is virtually unprecedented. Something like this has never happened to a Met. He seems to be doing it himself, even though no ballplayer ever does it himself. But what Carlos Delgado is doing right now makes me feel how completely the mind determines what the body is capable of. I can’t imagine what it is like to be as physically talented as these ballplayers. But somehow I can feel what it might be like to be lost at the plate and then to turn around after a nine RBI game and feel that you’ve entered a new place on the other side of the old place. Because of what Carlos Delgado is doing, I seem to know what it is like to reach so deeply into yourself that the bat and ball become extensions of a kind of unconscious imagination. I can enter a state or a trance where the balls I hit bounce off of the scoreboard or climb to the mezzanine or bounce back into the bullpen after hitting the Azek sign. I don’t know exactly what I mean to say. But somehow, in some kind of dream, what Delgado is doing makes me feel as if I have become him. That I have hit his home runs. That I am going to carry this team to a championship.
As I write this, I am watching Carlos Delgado being interviewed in the Mets locker room. He is happy and confident, but he is controlled and contained. He wants to feel good, but he will not allow himself the uncontrolled exuberance I am feeling. He is hitting the home runs. I am just experiencing a sense of having hit them. His state of mind is better for what he needs to do. And my state of mind is better for what I need to do. This is why I want curtain calls and he wants them to remain rare and special and brief. We are fans. We get to experience all this joy. But these men have work to do.
