By HARRY STEIN [City Journal] — Where liberals, smugly certain of their moral righteousness, assume history’s arc will bend their way, Mets fans like us know better. Never do we take winning as our due. Nor, needless to say, (damn those Wilpons!) do we throw money at problems. Yet still we stick, prizing loyalty above all other virtues. Indeed, even when we know the Mets Establishment is lying through its teeth—behind closed doors, sneering where are they gonna go, to the Yankees?—we accept the shameless duplicity with weary resignation, for it only confirms our worldview. As Peggy Noonan wrote of the reaction of “hard-core movement types” to the slights they regularly suffered at the hands of moderates in the Reagan White House: “More proof of human perfidy! More proof of the ugliness at the core of the human heart!”
Even as it toughens the skin, rooting for the Mets adds immeasurably to the cynicism quotient. During our post-clinching back and forth, I forwarded my friend a recent piece from the New York Times sports page. The editors had solicited readers’ guesses at how the opening paragraph on the Mets’ final game of this rollercoaster season might read, and I circled the one I’d be proud to have written: “Matt Harvey was brilliant in his Game 7 matchup with the former Met R.A. Dickey and the Toronto Blue Jays. However, Harvey was pulled from the game in the third inning by the new Mets manager Scott Boras, in an effort to conserve innings. The Mets’ offense sputtered, but Yoenis Cespedes hit four home runs to leave the Mets a run shy of the Jays going into the final inning. With two outs in the ninth, Bartolo Colon hit a pinch-hit, game-tying home run, but he missed third base on his trip home. The Mets lost 5-4. Minutes later, Cespedes signed a seven-year contract with the Yankees.”
“This guy’s one of us,” I scrawled at the bottom.
Since he’s a Times reader, this person would surely be horrified by such a suggestion. Yet (infinitely more frightening!) not only does his sardonic and finely wrought fatalism mark him as a conservative, but one of the hard-boiled Dick Cheney variety. Screw the feel-good stuff. He sees the world—and the Mets—as they are, not as he wishes they would be. We’re talking about a guy who knows you can trust the bullpen to come through in the clutch the same way you can trust the Iranians to self-inspect.
Continued in the City Journal | More Chronicle & Notices.
