ATLANTA – The agony is what defines you as a baseball fan, far more than the ecstasy ever can. The daily anguish is what separates you from the people who choose football or basketball or hockey or soccer as their secular religions. Especially at this time of the year. Especially when times are difficult. Especially then.
Mets fans may have felt like they were all alone on a ledge this week, feeling the quicksand evaporate beneath their feet day after day after day, as game after game after game melted off their lead every 24 hours or so. But they weren’t. There never are. There are always teams everywhere in the country looking to torture their fans, and succeeding masterfully.
There are the Brewers, who’ve spent most of the past month enflaming the ulcers of their long-suffering cheese-head fans, culminated by dropping two out of three in Wrigley Field. There are the Diamondbacks, who did what the Mets couldn’t, salvaging game four of a four-game series against the Padres and managing to stave San Diego off for a few days at least.
There are the Mariners, who’ve played above their heads all season long, and now it seems they did that strictly to make their inevitable fall that much more bitter on their fans’ palates, as they fumbled and bumbled from Arlington to Anaheim to Cleveland, squandering (maybe for good) every last ounce of their wild-card cushion over the Yankees.
And, of course, there are the Red Sox, who’ve had very little over which to sweat or to fret this year yet managed to give the only fan base on earth more paranoid than Mets fans the opportunity to wrestle with that innate terror thanks to three lost, empty days at Yankee Stadium.
No other sport ever gives you this kind of stuff, because no other sport comes at you day after day after day, week after week after week, all across the spring, all across the summer, right into the heart of autumn. When times are good, those days and weeks fly by. And when times are awful, they crawl, and they hurt, and they ache, and they make you feel in such a way that no other sports allows you to feel.
In New York, we know all about that, because no matter which team you’ve rooted for, or when you rooted for them, you’ve endured the sinking feeling of a season-crushing losing streak, a season-altering skid that brings you to the television every night with the same kind of sadistic curiosity rubber-neckers bring to the Cross Bronx Expressway in the aftermath of a pileup. You don’t want to watch. But you can’t help yourself. And then you want to kick yourselves.
New York Giants fans were the first to understand what that feels like, back in 1934, when the Giants were in the midst of their last great push to try and hold off the Yankees dynasty. The Giants had just won the 1933 World Series, their fourth, making them dead-even with the Yanks for the last time ever. So confident were they that Bill Terry, the manager, had made his famous early-season declaration: “The Dodgers? Are they still in the National League?” With five games to go, with a magic number of 3, the Giants held a 21/2-game lead on the Cardinals. The Giants lost all five, the last two to the still-in-the-league Dodgers. They’ve won one championship in the 73 years since.
But the Giants did provide Dodgers fans with a little taste of what their own fans had experienced 17 years later. The tale of the ’51 season has been told exhaustively, and it’s true that the Giants helped themselves a great deal by winning 16 games in a row through the end of August. But even two weeks after that, as late as Sept. 8, the Dodgers led the Giants by eight games in the loss column. From that point forward, the Dodgers were only 9-11, and the agonies of September 1951 still revisit old Dodgers fans when they least expect it.
The Mets have twice experienced the flip side of this misery; in 1969 they won 38 of their final 49 games to outlast the Cubs, and four years later, it was 25 of the final 34. But there was also the gut-spilling way they played themselves out of wild-card contention in 1998, losing their final five straight when even 1-4 would have bought them a playoff berth. The following year – in a stretch eerily reminiscent of what’s gone on this week – the Mets lost eight in a row to the Braves and Phillies in the sesaon’s final 10 days … and still managed to survive.
And the Yankees? Well, they haven’t made their fans suffer much during a lot of regular seasons. If they’re in a race, they usually win the race. But you can’t have a discussion about the blood-spilling of baseball fans and not include 2004, when they were 3-0 up on the Sox and a run up in the ninth inning of Game 4, and … well, you know the rest. Because if you’re a Yankees fan, you still own the scars. Which shouldn’t make you feel bad. Because if you were a Giants fan in 1934, you still own those scars, too.
Mike Vaccaro’s e-mail address is michael.vaccaro@nypost.com. His book, “1941 The Greatest Year in Sports” is available online at amazon.com and at bookstores everywhere.
VAC’S WHACKS
Only 33 more days till we get “Friday Night Lights” back, hallelujah.
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The Red Sox had better hope that someone else takes out the Yankees before it’s up to them to have a whack at it. Because based on what we saw this past week, it won’t be the Sox who end the Yankees’ season.
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When Joe Benigno gets going, and I mean really going, on a rant, the way he did Friday afternoon in the wake of Mets-Phillies, it’s the most entertaining radio New York has seen since the heyday of “perfect album sides” on the old WNEW-FM.
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Just because your summer beach time may be over doesn’t mean you have to stop your reading. So if you want to kick back in the back yard the next few weeks, here are two books you might want to take with you: “The Knuckleball from Hell,” a sweet, funny baseball novel by Michael Wayne, and “The New York Mets: Ethnography, Myth, and Subtext” by Richard Grossinger.