If you were a Mets fan awakening on the morning of Dec. 12, 2008, your blood probably boiled a little and your heartbeat quickened a lot as you retrieved your Post from the doorstep, as you thumbed through the sports section sitting on the subway.
It had been two full months since the Mets fumbled away a second-straight playoff berth in the season’s final week. Enough time had passed that you probably had started reading Mets stories again without needing chasers of Alka-Seltzer and Maalox. And so this headline probably caught your attention:
Hamels: Mets are Chokers
Cole Hamels, the day before, had been asked by WFAN’s Joe Benigno and Evan Roberts if he and his freshly crowned champion Phillies teammates thought the Mets were a little lacking in the intestinal fortitude department.
“Yeah,” the World Series MVP said, “that’s kind of what we believed, and I think we’re always going to believe that until they prove us wrong. For the past two years, they’ve been choke artists.”
The coffee and bagel likely didn’t go down so easily with that. But if you moved on, you had to be heartened by these words, penned from the final days of the Winter Meetings in Las Vegas by Joel Sherman:
“Power is an aphrodisiac, and when it comes to power in baseball, consider the New York teams in love. While most other organizations crawled into a fiscal fetal position, the Mets and Yankees brandished their still-thick wallets and their aggressive penchants to add power arms to their pitching staffs …”
Yes. Five years ago this morning, if you were a Mets fan, the most you had to worry about was if the Mets and their vast array of bold-faced players might be missing the clutch chromosome. But, as a Mets fan, not to worry: general manager Omar Minaya had gone to Vegas and thrown dollars at their problems like card players at a blackjack table.
As Kevin Bacon said in “Animal House”: Remain calm.
All is well.
Maybe you scoured the front page that morning, too. And if you did you had to have noticed this huge headline, next to a preview of the Golden Globes and a Bettor’s Guide for that weekend’s football games:
Wall Street Boss’ Shock Confession: ‘MY $50B LIE’
I’m going to make a bold prediction here: It’s only 50/50 you proceeded to Page 5 to read the story about another Wall Streeter toppled by his own gluttonous proclivities.
And if you did and read the second paragraph — “Bernard L. Madoff, a former Nasdaq chairman, was arrested a day after his sons Andrew and Mark, both senior employees, turned him in for running a business that had been insolvent for years, prosecutors said …” — it’s unlikely the name meant anything to you.
Although it certainly would soon enough.
So perhaps it’s appropriate the Mets celebrated this milestone anniversary by blowing the dust off that wallet Sherman referred to and signing Bartolo Colon to the kind of two-year, $20 million deal that had disappeared from their arsenal not long after however many hundreds of millions of dollars disappeared from their Madoff accounts.
Maybe this really is a sign the Mets are back in the business of brandishing, pairing the Colon signing with Curtis Granderson and seemingly stating, for the first time in forever, Madoff’s $50 billion lie finally has stopped chiseling away at their finances and their foundation.
The Wilpons and the Katzes have been steadfast in their argument that Madoff didn’t kill their baseball team as much as you would believe, but the counter evidence of what has become of the Mets these last five years is compelling. Remember, before Dec. 12, 2008, the Mets had taken on several varsity-level contracts — Carlos Delgado, Carlos Beltran, Pedro Martinez, Johan Santana, Billy Wagner, even Paul LoDuca — and bought out the arbitration of their young stars, Jose Reyes and David Wright.
The spending didn’t yield a title. But it did produce the best three-year stretch in franchise history, and puts a lie to the theory that whenever the Mets spend money, it winds up in flames. Before Dec. 12, 2008, the Mets had learned to behave like the Yankees — and had learned to like it, truth be told.
And then for five years, this is what they did: They signed Jason Bay, they lost 436 games, and they’ve hemorrhaged fans, from 4,042,045 the last year at Shea to 2,135,657 last season, and you can’t blame the 15,554 fewer seats at Citi Field for that. Maybe this marks the end of austerity and a new kind of prosperity.
Check back on Dec. 12, 2018. We’ll tell you then.