September 30, 2008
During the past few months, I’ve managed to hold my tongue during one of the most emotional summers in recent American history. As a community newspaper editor, I have a responsibility to a wide and diverse readership and mustn’t compromise the paper’s objectivity by appearing to take sides.
There comes a time, however, when it becomes impossible — even misleading — to refrain from expressing one’s loyalties.
And so, I am going to take this opportunity to come clean.
I’m a Mets fan.
I know, I know. I risk alienating Yankees fans and may even come off as gloating, since the Yankees didn’t make the playoffs for the first time since 1993. Rest assured, however, that I am writing this on Friday, Sept. 26, and have no idea if the Mets will emerge from this rain-soaked weekend as playoff contenders, or will have suffered another epic collapse.
(As for alienating Philadelphia fans, I can only say, I really don’t care. I don’t understand you people, and never will.)
My affection for the Mets has become deep and emotional and all the more mysterious because I am not sure where it came from. As a kid growing up on Long Island, I easily shifted allegiances among the New York teams depending on how well they were doing. I remember (barely) the hysteria that took hold when the Mets won the Series in ’69. I recall an ecstatic solo dance in our small Philadelphia apartment when the Amazins’ improbable Game Six victory paved the way to the championship in 1986. And yet I was a big Chris Chambliss fan when the Yankees were winning in the ’70s and know exactly where I was in 1978 when Bucky Dent hit his homerun in the one-game playoff with the Red Sox.
But I was never a “real” fan, and I followed sports only so I’d have something to talk about with guys with whom I had nothing else in common.
Then we had children and moved back to the New York area. My kids could have gone either way, but the Mets’ perennial second-banana quality appealed to them, and soon their drawers filled up with blue-and-orange paraphernalia.
And then came Mike, and Jose, and David, and Pedro, and Johan, and soon I had gone from the hovering, mildly interested presence in the back of the family room to my seat on the carpet, inches from the screen (of the big TV we bought for Mets games, broadcast on the cable we ordered for Mets games).
And the more I rejoiced and suffered (lately more suffering than rejoicing) the more I tried to understand my infatuation. I was never a true fan, I began to realize, because I wasn’t willing to invest so much of myself in something so irrational. Moreover, I didn’t want to leave myself exposed by the emotions of fandom. Cool and detached, I’d scorn those adults in their team jerseys, jumping out of their seats or weeping after a loss; I was Apollo to their Dionysus, Dean Martin to their Jerry Lewis.
And at some point I realized I had approximately the same relationship to baseball that I do to Judaism. It was also as an adult that I fully embraced my Jewish identity, an identity that has only grown since the kids came along. I understand that my being Jewish is perhaps an accident of birth, just as being a Mets fan is an accident of geography. I can offer a dozen arguments why, in the 21st century, religious belief, like rooting for one team of journeyman millionaires over another, completely defies common sense.
And yet I can find within Judaism many of the same things I do while watching a Mets game (or better yet, listening to a Mets game — is there anything more sublime than the murmur of an announcer’s drawl on a summer night?). There’s the pleasure found in the company of like-minded believers, the blissful victories made only sweeter by the deflating losses (if that’s not Jewish, I don’t know what is).
There’s historical continuity and that aching, premature nostalgia when you realize the pleasures of this moment, like Jose Reyes’ smile when he lands on second or David Wright’s aw-shucks post-game interviews, are — what sayeth Isaiah? — like the grass that withers, the flower that fades.
Most of all, it’s a family thing — five individuals and two generations joined in this odd, happy, inexplicable, and maddening cycle of hope and frustration, disappointment and promise.
So we buy our tickets, and wear our special hats, and take our accustomed seats. And then someone sings, and we all sing along. Someone does something, and we all stand up. Someone does something special, and we all celebrate. And then something happens that make us question our self-worth, and humanity’s fate, and what we might have done differently to change the outcome.
And then it’s sundown, and we turn on the television, and there’s Jose, smiling on second base.
Comment: comments@njjewishnews.com
