CINCINNATI — This is as good a place, as appropriate a place, as any for the Mets to begin whatever quest they began Monday afternoon, whatever journey it is that will carry them across the next six months. Because it is a reminder that despair never has to be permanent in baseball.
Choking is as choking does, so to speak.
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“They told us we’d never win a championship because we didn’t have the heart to win one, we didn’t have the guts to win one, because every time we came close we came up short, and everyone figured that’s how it’ll always be,” the voice of Sparky Anderson says from a wall speaker at the Reds Hall of Fame, which stands adjacent to Great American Ballpark.
Inside a prominent display of his old Big Red Machine teams, Anderson adds: “We carried that with us a long time. If we’d let it get to us, it could’ve destroyed us.”
We are conditioned to the extreme in New York, of course, so teams that win championships are all but drowned in adjectives and teams that don’t are all but buried by the bile. We are a Now Town, we are proud of being a Now Town, and that means that right now the members of the Mets’ bullpen are the carriers of salvation and the Yankees’ $340 million platinum partnership of Sabathia & Teixeira are carriers of baseball typhoid.
But beyond the talk-radio and message-board silliness of jumping to conclusions after the first nine innings of a (minimum) 1,458-inning season, there is a lesson to be learned by the didactic wisdom of Anderson — especially if you are a Mets fan, especially if you are one of those Mets fans (and you know who you are) who actually spent Day 1 spending less time celebrating the bullpen and more time fretting over the fact that David Wright struck out in the first inning with a man on third and one out.
We talk all the time about baseball being a redemptive sport, and yet in New York we never allow ourselves to believe that, not really, certainly not often. Have the Mets choked away the last two Septembers? You bet they have. It’s on their permanent record. Does it always have to be that way?
It does not. There is the here and now which screams just that — starting with the bullpen, the symbol of last year’s calamity, the symbol of Opening Day’s fresh beam of optimism — and there is also the past. Just after the end of last season, I cited the old Brooklyn Dodgers as an example of how a core could be kept intact despite heartbreak after heartbreak and finally, ultimately, yield something golden, like the forever ’55 title.
But Sparky’s Reds may be even more instructive. Because they didn’t play in New York or Boston, Chicago or Los Angeles they aren’t exactly remembered as they might have been, their exploits lost in Flyover Country. But the Reds spent the first half of the ’70s winning loads of baseball games and having zero to show for it — and watching the Oakland A’s turn into the dynasty they were supposed to be.
They lost the World Series in 1970 and ’72. They were overwhelmed by a thoroughly underwhelming Mets team in the ’73 NLCS, winning 17 more games in the regular season but one fewer in the five-game playoff. They were overtaken by the Dodgers in ’74. And when Carlton Fisk hit his famous home run, Game 6 of the ’75 World Series, they were nine innings away from solidifying their stock as one of baseball’s most futile big-moment gaggers.
Only, they won Game 7. The lead of the Page One story in the Cincinnati Enquirer the next day tells the whole story succinctly: “The team that could never win the big one finally won the biggest one of all.” You could envision a similar lead on a story in the New York Post sometime in November, if all the dominoes fall properly.
“We always knew we had it in us,” the voice of Johnny Bench says from the wall, “but it wouldn’t matter until we proved that to everyone else.”
You could envision something sounding a lot like that, too, coming from the lips of a champagne-soaked Met such as David Wright sometime this November, too.
If.