Having been ten games above .500 at the half-way point, the Mets were back down to .500 on August 2. The wild hopes of a playoff berth, spurred by the unanticipated minor miracles of the first half of the season (Pelfrey, Dickey, Niese, Davis, Pagan, Barajas, Takahashi) were fading. The Mets lost several heartbreakingly close well-pitched games on the road. Some impressive and potentially season-changing comeback efforts had fallen just short. And in a few games, their strongest pitchers incomprehensibly imploded and the Mets were blown out. The offense flagged. The defense, strong and smart at the beginning of the year, began to look inept and aimless. The trade deadline came and went without anything happening, as the Mets held on to what they hoped would be the building blocks of their future. The fans, who had been through so much, were thoroughly demoralized. A few thousand faithful saw four men from the now impossibly distant ‘80s inducted into the Mets Hall of Fame. Mets Blog’s confidence rating dropped into the single digits. And when the Mets began what everyone knew would be the most significant road trip of the season, poor defense and a briefly ineffective Johan Santana gave the Braves all they would need to beat the Mets in the very first inning. The Mets offense would not score the runs they needed to come back against a vulnerable Tim Hudson. And so, when Chipper Jones hit the home run that put his old rivals three runs behind, long-time Mets fans felt the painful echo of two decades of futility, of years of mediocrity relieved only by a few moments of competence that always came short and always left wounds that had by now hardened into bitter, unfeeling tissue: scabs and callouses. There seemed to be no miracle left in the Miracle Mets. There was no belief left in their fans.
Then, on the second night of the most important series of the season, R.A. Dickey, a man who should long ago have given up hopes of having a pitching career, took the mound.
This makes a really good turning point in a story, don’t you think? But no, you’re thinking, this is reality, not a story. In reality, when people get fatal illnesses, they usually die. When people screw up, they often have to pay for it for the rest of their lives. When the team you love seems to have hit bottom, they haven’t. They’ve got plenty of room to fall further.
Yes, it is reality. But it’s also not. It’s a dream we’re all having. It really is optional even if it doesn’t always feel that way. We have choices. We can become Yankees fans (and think Steinbrenner was a great man because he cared about winning and great men care about winning, because the opposite of winning is losing and that’s what losers do and losers are not great men. Bye.) We can give up baseball (No.) We can blame Jerry or Omar or the Wilpons (I know that these are the most popular options, but I still have a problem with this. I wish I felt more equipped to second-guess the baseball decisions of the people who run this team, but I just don’t. I can see their most outrageous mistakes but I also see their successes, and I am painfully aware of the tiny space between their failures and successes. Blame if you like, but can you really tell me what should have been done that wasn’t done that you would have done and would have known how to do?) We can still hope. (I know as well as you do that the Mets have little chance of making the playoffs by this point. I am not an optimist about their chances. Hopefulness is something subtly different from optimism. One of the reasons I love baseball is that it allows fans to be hopeful without having to be optimistic. Only a fool would be optimistic about the Mets’ chances of making the playoffs at this moment. I am not a fool, I hope. But at this moment, I am not going to become a Yankee fan, I am not going to give up on baseball, and I am not going to blame people who may or may not be responsible for what is happening.) I am going to hope.
Why?
Because I am doing this for fun and it isn’t fun to lose hope.
It’s as simple as that. And because I can remember times in my life when my predictions were wrong and my hope was rewarded, I am excited to imagine R.A. Dickey on the mound tonight. Here is a man who had no reason to expect to be on a major-league roster at the start of the season, let alone 7-4 with a 2.32 ERA at the start of August. I’m not going to say that if that’s possible, then the Mets making the playoffs is possible. That would be an invalid inference. But hey, here is a case where hope was rewarded. Maybe it can happen again.
