The Mets never just have lousy seasons, the way normal teams do. Armageddon and apocalypse must always accompany the uninspiring baseball. The clubhouse always has to be more interesting — if not as mordantly entertaining — as the diamond.
Bobby Bonilla has to threaten to take someone on a violent walking tour of The Bronx. Vince Coleman throws a firecracker, Bret Saberhagen a stream of Clorox. Grant Roberts smiles for the camera while he takes a deep hit on a bong. Carl Everett’s kids are taken into protective custody. Francisco Rodriguez allegedly sends the grandfather of his children to the hospital after an argument in the Citi Field — ahem — “family room.”
Most teams find it necessary to rebuild every few years; the Mets have to completely reboot. This isn’t a symptom merely consigned to the reign of the Wilpon family, either: Every period of prosperity is automatically followed by an era of bad feeling.
M. Donald Grant chiseled away at the ’69 champs until there was barely a Double-A franchise playing at Shea Stadium by the late ’70s. Frank Cashen built the ’86 Mets into swaggering, arrogant world beaters, then systematically castrated them until they were pathetic 103-game losers within seven years. Bobby Valentine’s feisty crew of 1999 and 2000 became Art Howe’s lifeless drain on society fewer than three years later. On and on.
Now we have another pile of residue rising like smog over Flushing Bay. Just four years ago, the Mets were primed to have a genuine baseball renaissance in this city. They were the young, hip team in town. They won 97 games and did it with flair and style.
Now there is this.
Now, Mets fans have a choice: They can rage at the mediocre, uninspired work the team has specialized in on the field, or they can wring their hands at the growing humiliations off the field.
This is what life around the Mets is like now:
On a night when they suffer one of their most gut-crushing losses of the season — allowing five runs in the eighth inning to the Rockies — it’s all but instantly forgotten because the team’s closer spends the same night in police custody.
This is what life around the Mets is like now:
On the day after the team’s closer spends the night in police custody, on the day the Mets announce what amounts to a two-day punitive suspension for Rodriguez, the Mets turned to one of their stars, one of their cornerstones, to help change the conversation — only that star, Johan Santana, is himself facing a civil suit stemming from having had sex with a woman, not his wife, on a golf course in Florida. Not even Santana’s brilliant complete-game, four-hit shutout yesterday could make that disappear.
This is what life around the Mets is like now:
On a day when the Mets badly needed to have the voice of their franchise, Jeff Wilpon, step forward, present that voice publicly, and reassure an increasingly alienated fan base that he was mad as hell, and wasn’t going to take it anymore, Wilpon allowed a prepared statement to speak for itself.
“Ownership and the organization are very disappointed in Francisco’s inappropriate behavior, and we take this matter very seriously,” the statement said, though it would have been so much more effective coming from a moving mouth and a breathing human being. One that could reassure — or at least try to reassure — that what we’re witnessing isn’t history completely repeating itself.