Meet the Mets

This year on April 1 I plan to let loose the one true New York baseball cheer: Let's Go Mets! This will be the Mets' 40th year of baseball in this town. They were created to get the National League back to New York?their colors, blue with orange trim, were a tribute to the old Dodgers and Giants. Now the Mets have forged their own identity and have a legacy as big as their predecessors'. Yes, the Yankees still own the town, although now that their chief shill Rudolph Giuliani has left office and is flying around the country milking the WTC attack for all it's worth, maybe things will change. There is nowhere to go but down for the Yankees and Rudy, and one can only hope that the fall is hard and steep. The Bronx Bombers are just too damn perfect. Their pious talk of Yankee tradition and the sanctity of the locker room is just sickening. They're too clean, and they win too much. They shoot fish in a barrel and how much fun is that?

The Mets are gritty and worn. Shea Stadium represents Queens: it's too big and confusing, and has little tradition or history attached to it. But the Mets have heart. They always have. This year they still have John Franco as their eighth-inning set-up man. At 41, the Mets are keeping him on despite all evidence that he is slipping. The Yankees would have dumped him years ago but the Mets keep the garbageman's son on. They may not have the tradition of the Yankees but they also have less of the ugliness attached to the Bronx ball club.

And you have to love what the Mets went out and did this offseason. They brought in portly Mo Vaughn who when he dresses up in purple suits looks like some fat-ass pimp from Harlem circa 1974. If Vaughn stays healthy, it will be great fun watching this huge man hold a bat like a broomstick and swat home runs out of the dead air of Shea Stadium. Then there is hothead Robbie Alomar, whose father, Sandy, once played for the Mets and went 0-for-22 before they cut him loose. Alomar the younger may be one of baseball's most complete players. The Mets have little pitching?and pitching is how they have always won?but they are an exciting team.

The Mets are like New Yorkers?messy and crazy and up and down and all around. They have a storied history of mental illness. You want crazy? How about bipolar Met Jimmy Piersall running the bases backwards in 1963 after he hit his 100th career home run? Can you ever picture anyone in Yankee pinstripes doing something like that? Some sportswriters have speculated that 70s slugger Dave "Sky King" Kingman may have suffered from mental illness when he was acting all sullen and withdrawn as a player. How about the late 80s catcher Mackey Sasser's reluctance to throw the ball back to the pitcher? Sasser was a solid hitter and a so-so catcher who became unbearable to watch as he pumped and pumped and pumped before getting the ball back to the pitcher. He couldn't overcome that psychological hurdle and the Mets had to let him go. Then there was early 90s pitching prospect Bill Pulsipher's fall into depression.

Some Mets factoids for you: the Mets' all-time record stands at 3016-3326 for a .476 winning percentage. They have had three 100-win seasons and five 100-loss seasons. They've been in four World Series (1969, 1973, 1986 and 2000) and won two: 1969 and 1986. They have had five Taylors play for them: Billy, Chuck, Hawk, Ron and Sammy. In 1962 they had two pitchers named Bob Miller on their roster. The single season home-run leader for the Mets is Todd Hundley, who smacked 41 dingers in 1996. The all-time Met-killer team is the Philadelphia Phillies?the teams have beaten the holy hell out of each other across five decades. The Mets won 359 times since 1962, the Phillies 312 times.

Then there is wonder manager Joe Torre. If you're a Met fan you'll remember when Joe Torre wasn't so smart or so fast: he is the only Met to ever hit into four double plays in one game. Torre, who may have been the slowest Major Leaguer to come out of a batter's box, was the Mets' manager from 1977 to 1981. In those years the Mets never won more than 70 games in a season and had a winning percentage of .405. He wasn't so smart or so classy when he walked the boards in the Shea dugout.

The Mets represent hope. They always have some hot new kid who is going to tear up the league yet usually just tears up his leg. Two former Mets with great baseball names and once great futures were named Brock Pemberton and Grover Powell. They played one season and were never heard from again. Or how about Anthony Young, an early 90s pitching prospect who was once considered the second coming of Doc Gooden? Anthony went on to set a Mets record?he lost 27 straight games in a brutal stretch of 1992-'93, and about the only thing he had in common with Gooden was skin color. Then there was Mike Vail who as a rookie had a 20-game hitting streak in 1975 and wound up batting over .300 for the year. The next winter he blew out his knee playing basketball and was never the same. The only significant thing Vail accomplished after 1975 was being the Met who was up at bat when New York had a blackout on July 13,1977.

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PREDICTIONS: So this year I'm going with the Mets in the NL East, St. Louis in the Central, the Giants in the West and Arizona making it into the playoffs as a Wildcard. Arizona will then come through and represent the NL in the World Series. In the AL the Yankees will once again rule the East, Cleveland will win the Central, Seattle will win the West and Texas will be the Wildcard. Seattle will avenge last year's 116-win bust of a season and face Arizona in the Series and the Mariners will be World Champs when it's all over in autumn 2002