The sports media gives most Met fans a prefix in front of their name, “long-suffering”.
Sounds pretty familiar doesn’t it? Read any newspaper, listen to any 24 hour sports talk station and you will hear that phrase used. The build up to this past weekend also featured such phrases as, “the most important games in the history of Citi Field”. Mind you that history is a pretty short one, all of five and a half baseball seasons. However, to the present generation of Met fans there is an impatience to winning and that is brought about here in New York by two things, the media and the New York Yankees.
If you are over the age of 50, you can remember a time when only newspapers covered sports. The television coverage was on free televison, WOR Channel 9 in New York broadcast almost every game. There was no hour pre-game show, and the post game was the always fun to watch Kiner’s Korner. If you missed the game but happened to catch Kiner’s Korner, you knew the Mets had won if you saw a Met player on the set with Ralph. The newspaper coverage the next day gave you the information about the game, and of course if you wanted opinion pieces, you read columnists like Dick Young in the New York Daily News. Radio covered the games in pretty much the same fashion. It was a much simpler time and while there was pressure on the players to preform there were a few things missing that we have today; 24 hour a day sports talk and the internet.
With the addition of 24 hour sports talk radio here in New York, you have the constant droning on of these hosts, trying to make a name for themselves.They need to create something to talk about for 5 hours because believe it or not, sports in general doesn’t warrant that amount of time. So, the host goes on a rant about a team which will then create the controversy to get people to call in. The Mets are perfect fodder for talk radio because of their recent struggles. The calls come in, by the way only 10% of the listening audience ever make calls to the station, and these callers express their frustration with the Mets and the organization. The talking heads love it, and of course continue to knock the Mets for not winning. The cycle goes round and round every season as new generations of fans come of age, and they too get the label of “long suffering Met fan”.
It all can be traced though across the 5 Boroughs to that ballclub in the Bronx, the New York Yankees. If you are say, 30 years old today and a baseball fan, you are well aware of the success of the New York Yankees for the past 20 years. Your entire childhood, teenage years and early adulthood has seen the Yankees in the playoffs and/or World Series in 18 out of 20 years. It had become almost a birth-right of Yankee fans to see their team in post season baseball. Over in Flushing, a person of the same age would have been too young to remember the 80s, when the Mets owned New York.
You can only recall three seasons of playoffs in that same time span. Too bad you weren’t around to witness the mid 60s and early 70s. The Mets were the darlings of New York, while the Yankees were a non-factor. Hard to believe, but between 1965-1975, the Yankees were not very good. Same from 1982-1995, the Yankees struggled. Problem is, the present fanbase has no idea of those lean years because the YES Network makes sure not to show any Yankeeoghraphy of Horace Clarke or Jerry Kenney.
So, to older fans of the Mets, we are used to waiting a few years between playoff appearances. We have patience because we were brought up on it. We also know the team across town had their lean years as well. We lived it and saw it and now remember it. Just don’t let some radio talking head, who is all of 30 years old himself, tell you the Mets HAVE to win now or else. Just think if we were fans of the Chicago Cubs, 1908 is a long long time ago and they deserve the title of long-suffering, don’t they?
