“Nobody else I’d do it with:” An Ode to the 2024 Mets
Who can say why I, or any woman in America, might have been looking for a distraction in the summer of 2016? A way to spend three to four hours a day — recall, these were the days before the pitch clock — watching anything but the news, hearing anything but that nonstop voice cranking out of that pursed little mouth slapped onto the boiled ham between that nest of hair and that too-long tie?
It’s a real head-scratcher.
But anyway, for whatever reason, 2016 was the year I started watching the Mets after flirting for a couple of seasons with baseball in general and Yankees fandom, my genetic inheritance, in particular. That I locked in fulltime the year after the Mets made it to the World Series is a singularly Metsy thing to do, proof that I found my flock.
In other words, Brandon Nimmo and I came up at the same time, and in that stretch I’ve learned that baseball is many things. It is a game; it is a business. It is geography and culture, community, volumes of history. But mostly, in the lives of everyday fans, baseball is time. A steamship loaded up with time and transporting it, inefficiently, from present to past. It is 162 games, more if you are lucky, that last at least two hours each. It is an organizing structure that turns adult summer, dominated as it is by work, into something that that feels like August did when I was kid: idle and endless hours into which my interest in anything, a book, a game, a friend, could expand until it was exhausted, time that was precious precisely because it passed so slowly, rationing itself. Baseball is your whole afternoon laid out and lazing like a fat pet in a slice of sun.
This kind of time can’t be passed alongside assholes. It just can’t. A season’s worth of games played back to back, around the clock, would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 17 days. Baseball broadcasters, for example, fill your head with so much talking for so much of the year, that unless you love what they have to say and how they say it, it can feel like you are trapped in an elevator. I could not spend 17 days — more than 400 hours! — with a booth that wasn’t as sharp and funny as Gary Cohen, Ron Darling, Keith Hernandez, and Steve Gelbs are. This is also why a long series in Atlanta, where they refuse to let their racist chant die, feels interminable. Because baseball time is so languorous, the bastardes can really carborundorum.
When I say that I loved the 2024 Mets, what I mean is that I could not have asked for better company with whom to dawdle around. My long hours were spiked with the surprises and thrills you might expect from top-notch baseball, but also the music and laughter you don’t. So much has been said about the accretion of memes across the season — Seymour Weiner, OMG, Glizzy Iggy, our purple demigod Grimace, long may he reign — but I don’t think meme is exactly the right word. These felt more like inside jokes, the sort of silliness that relies on sufficient shared experience to create shared meaning. They’re not opaque, but, as they say, you kind of had to be there.
People who write about fandom online will think I am talking about a parasocial relationship, but I’m not. For all the time I have spent watching Francisco Lindor — so much time that I could pick him out by the back of his head alone when I was seated behind the dugout for a game this September, a feat I am not sure I could accomplish if asked to identify one of my actual brothers at the same distance — I do not feel as though I know him. He seems swell, but who can possibly say? What I loved was spending time with these Mets’ relationships with each other, the snatches of tenderness caught in personalized high-fives, eye black in the shape of the starting pitcher’s number, Lindor petting Winker’s head, Severino doggedly manning the OMG sign, and the whole team out on the field like a bunch of stage moms, filming Iglesias with their phones as he sang. In 2016, I turned to the Mets as a break from a virulent strain of masculinity grabbing attention, grabbing other things; in 2024, the Mets gave me glimpses of an alternative.
The haters will say that’s just a team, dummy, but I don’t buy it. Sean Manaea was moved to tears on Sunday night talking not about losing the NLCS but about leaving this group, like a kid on the last day of camp. “There’s nobody else I’d do it with,” he said.
One reason why these relationships were so delightful was because, of course, they opened the door to magical baseball, the kind of stuff that made people coo about romance and score clips with the Moneyball music. The other reason is that, for fans, baseball time passes in mental proximity to the team but in physical proximity to other fans, and this year, the players’ interactions shaped ours.
One of the best nights of my life, without exaggeration, was the first Citi Field watch party for Game 3 of the Wildcard series against the Brewers, an obviously thrown-together event on a weeknight attended only by folks for whom a last-minute trip to Flushing to watch TV was feasible and worth it. Everyone was a friend. Everyone’s view was good because everyone’s seats, a time zone away from where the team was actually playing, were bad. Everyone high-fived everyone. Everyone stood, like Bader and Senga and Hiro Fujiwara perched at the rail, too excited to watch the game sitting. Everyone jumped and screamed until it hurt when Pete, with one foot out of the franchise, hit a homerun so poetic it could’ve brought joy to Mudville. A man patrolled the aisle in my section like a cruise director, beaming, reminding everyone to invert their caps for a rally and to flip them back to protect the lead.
The haters will say that’s just a fanbase, dummy, but I don’t buy it. In other seasons, I’ve sat alongside men who deeply love this team but who talked past me to my husband, or in crowds that couldn’t have cared less what was happening on the field, or amid Mets fans whose characteristic cynicism spiraled into foul tempers and ugly moods. This season, we took our cue from the players and we passed our time — slow time, baseball time — like friends.
In the end, sure, they lost. Mets chronicler Devin Gordon has written that this ballclub has invented, experienced, and perfected “so many” ways to lose. Jimmy Breslin, in Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?, his book about the legendarily terrible 1962 Mets, synonymized the team with losing:
You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn’t maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her in to getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?
Part of what endeared the Mets to me is this kind of jovial nihilism, the feeling of throwing up your hands when your star hitter, months into a slump, trips over his own bat because of course. Of course! But the flipside of expecting to lose, and the thing that is too gooey to dwell on for very long, is that it teaches you to find pleasure apart from winning. The part of Breslin’s quote that sticks with me is that the Mets are losers inasmuch as nearly everybody else in life. We are, the lot of us, losers. Life itself is a losing proposition. All we can do is slow it down, lay in the grass, breathe deep, and make it fun.
