The Mets ask you to trust them. They ask for patience, and for fortitude, for the benefit of the doubt. They keep asking you for money, too, having now extended their deadline for renewing season-ticket plans from Dec. 4 to Dec. 14 to Dec. 31, and you wonder if they will ever get that they could extend it all the way to April Fool’s Day for all the good it will do them.
Here is what the Mets haven’t done yet, two days before Christmas, three months after the curtain closed on one of the calamitous years in their long history of chronic calamity: They haven’t given you any reason to trust them. They offer no proof that your patience or your fortitude will be justified. Only your doubt.
And they certainly haven’t motivated anyone other than the deep-pocketed or blindly devoted to plunk down money for season tickets, which start at around four grand for two reasonably-located seats and hike steeply north from there.
If anything, the Mets have spent their offseason alternately antagonizing and alienating a fan base that filled Citi Field to 92.7-percent capacity in 2009, some 3,154,262 people coming out for a 92-loss farce of a team.
It is bad enough that the Mets refuse to take an active role in their own immediate future, allowing Jason Bay to hold them captive for 13 days and counting, allowing all other business to halt while they hope, pretty please, that Bay allows them to pay him $65 million. Worse: Though everyone else in their division — not to mention the other team in town — gets incrementally better day by day, the Mets keep waiting to draw to one inside straight after another.
Worst? Every few days, you hear another story about another season-ticket holder being interrogated by a Mets ticket agent, sometimes being challenged about how much of a “real fan” they are. I have a longtime friend who would qualify as one of the most fiercely loyal Mets fans anywhere, a guy who works within the New York sporting community, and even he’s thinking of not renewing.
And believe me when I say this: This guy not buying Mets tickets is the sporting equivalent to LBJ losing Walter Cronkite on Vietnam.
“It kills me to say this,” he told me yesterday, “but I’m tired of the way they treat us. I’m tired of them conducting themselves like a small-market team. I’m not even bothered that they don’t throw money at every free agent who walks down the street. I’m talking about the way they do their business. I work in the business in this town. I know what it means to be first-class and what it means to be small time. And they’re small time right now.”
See, this is what is killing the Mets right now. Whether it’s arrogance or blindness, delusion or desperation or some crazy cocktail of all of it, this is how the Mets are perceived, because that is how they allow themselves to be perceived. You don’t think that rubs off? You don’t think players and agents read these tea leaves? You think it’s an accident that it always feels like the Mets have to pay protection money to bribe big-ticket players to come here?
Maybe these are merely the chickens coming home to roost at long last, and what we’re seeing and sensing this offseason is the culmination of years of mismanagement that’s devolved into mutual mistrust between team and fan. The Phillies and Yankees, even the Nationals, make moves every day. The Mariners lead the league in press conferences. There is activity all around baseball.
And the Mets ponder their next trip to baseball’s version of Costco, hoping for cut-rate deals while still charging their fans top dollar, selling them on the coming magic of Ryota Igarashi, asking for their trust and their patience.
How dare they.
“Here’s the thing,” my friend said. “I still want them to win. Badly. Even a team run as awful as this can’t pound the fan out of me. I’ll still watch. I’ll still cheer. But they’ll have to wait to get my money.”
In other words, the fans are asking the Mets to trust them. They ask for patience. And fortitude. And the benefit of the doubt.
And those fans have earned all of that a lot more than the Mets have.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com