Home Team: Baseball

I am no stranger to rooting for bad teams. By “bad,” I could mean “not very talented at a particular sport.” That story of rooting is perhaps for another day. By “bad”, in this instance, I mean badly behaved: nasty, evil, racist, misogynist, boozed-up, violent, toxic, drug-taking, wife-beating. I am speaking here of my team, my home team, the 1986 Mets. If you think my list of their moral failings is long, take a look at the title of Jeff Pearlman’s book about the team: The Bad Guys Won: A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing, and Championship Baseball with Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, the Kid, and the Rest of the 1986 Mets, the Rowdiest Team Ever to Put on a New York Uniform - and Maybe the Best. This title, which competes for length and moralism with those of eighteenth-century novels, begins with “bad” in one sense only to end with “best” in the other. Although I probably did did not know a tenth of the problems with the Mets team back in 1986, I did know that they were that all-purpose word “cocky,” that they behaved extremely badly on road trips, and that several of them had those euphemistic “brushes with the law.” I even heard (and spread) rumors about domestic violence and drug abuse. Although here are many things I don’t care if my home team does off the field, domestic abuse has, or should have been, a bright line. I should not have rooted for the ‘86 Mets, or for that matter the ‘87 or ‘88 Mets. But I did.

When I first got a copy of Pearlman’s book, I was afraid to open it; there were surely things in it I did not want to know about players who had so long been part of my mental landscape—and, yes, my emotional life.  I had, by that time, given up on my erstwhile heroes: Lenny Dykstra, Keith Hernandez, even Darryl Strawberry and Doc Gooden. I was not ready, though, to give up on Mookie Wilson, the Mets speedy center fielder. Although his quickness allowed him to make some iconic catches (now, alas, removed from YouTube) some of my happiest memories of the ‘80s (quite a happy decade for me, all told) are of Mookie running the bases. His first step was always deceptively slow; he came out of the batter’s box with something that looked almost like a limp, but that half second of hesitation, of near-clumsiness, was really the sign of gathering himself for speed. Given his history of hamstring injuries, I never stopped worrying about that first seemingly endless moment before he took off so fast you barely had time to enjoy his stolen base or his stretching of a double into a triple.

I could not bear to think of Mookie as one of the bad guys of Pearlman’s title. Like Mookie himself, I used my speed, skimming the chapters of the book to assure myself that Mookie at least had been worth my devotion. It was with a palpable sense of relief that I read:

“Wilson, on the other hand, was perfect: Quiet. Respectful. Beautifully innocent and beautifully skilled, and fast enough to cover the deepest reaches of Shea’s outfield. Torre loved the pup’s hustle, and Horwitz loved his Magic Johnson–esque 10,000-watt smile. As Terry Leach, a longtime Mets reliever, says, “If you didn’t immediately take to Mookie Wilson, you didn’t take to anybody.”  The “other hand” of the comparison refers specifically to Lee Mazilli, the player who Mookie eventually replaced in center field. For me, though, the phrase referred to most of the other ’86 Mets. Mookie’s shining goodness, his love of reading books about the Civil War, indeed his civility, was retrospective permission to have rooted for this home team.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the Mets made New York feel like home to me. When I moved from Italy to New York City in the summer of 1969, there was nothing about the new city that felt right. When I started at the United Nations Internationals School in the fall, I was completely overwhelmed by the sophistication of my classmates. Overdressed and undersized, I spent the first weeks feeling like a child among adults. Mets fans will recognize 1969, not as the year of Woodstock or the first moonwalk, but as the Mets first championship season. Rooting for the Mets against the Orioles in the World Series, even though I knew little about the team at first, gave me my first sense of acceptance in a class of cosmopolitan preteens from around the world.

Wherever they were from, I thought of my fellow students as New Yorkers.  I think the very first moment I felt at home in the school—and thus in New York—was when I drew a giant Oriole on the board of my classroom, and wrote under it in pink chalk, “Bye Bye Birdies.” No one noticed or cared that the bird looked more like a duck than an oriole, that I had never seen an oriole or a baseball game, that I had played cricket at my British school in a pleated gym skirt, or, in this pre-internet era that I had to read through a pile of books and articles to  figure out what a slider was. ,. At that moment, and probably not for very long, all of us from all over had one home team. Although there may have been bad guys on the roster as early as 1969, we did not know it. We poured over the Mets yearbook, their (in retrospect) anemic batting averages, their still impressive) stellar pitching statistics. We memorized the names of their wives.

I sustained my love of the Mets for exactly 21 years, preserving them as my home team in the face of moving to Philadelphia for graduate school, and then to Boston where I had my first job as an assistant professor. During my graduate school years, the Mets were good but not great. I went with my friends to the ballpark in Philly every time they came to town. Since few games were televised outside the New York area, and we could not get them on the radio, sometimes my friends and I would drive in my 1973 Dodge Dart Swinger north along the Jersey turnpike until we could hear the Mets broadcast on the radio—first a series of crackles, and then some garbled words, and then, as we neared New Brunswick, the clear, deep tones of Bob Murphy’s play-by-play. Sometimes we would stop on the side of the road and eat lunch on the grass, the car, with its open door, turned into a giant speaker. Surely it would have been better to pull off the road into rest stops, to find a pic-nic table and some shade. I don’t remember ever doing such a thing, though; to this day I can smell the fumes of my old car and feel the scratch of the course roadside grass. I don’t know why we never went all the way to New York, where some of my friends’ parents had apartments.

It was easy to be a Mets fan in Philly, since so many of my friends were from the New York area. Those friends, mostly from the English department and/or the Progressive Student Alliance were as earnest about baseball as they were about divestment or nukes or reproductive rights. One day I snuck a “Let’s Go Mets” button onto the PSA’s information table, where it stuck out among buttons for left-leaning causes due to its size (immense) and its color (The Mets’ ugly, glaring orange.) No one said anything about the button, which was dutifully trotted out with its fellows whenever we put our table out along Locust Walk.

It was hard, though, to be a Mets fan in Boston. In 1984 when I got there, the Red Sox were beginning to be good again. In 1986, of course, came the Mets v Red Sox World Series, much of which I spent reacting out elaborate superstitious rituals with friends back home. Bostonians did not like the Mets, even though, being in separate leagues, the teams never met in the regular season. As early as 1984, I gave myself the project of learning to like the Red Sox. I could not do it, perhaps because I never felt at home in Boston with its whiteness, its expensive housing, its cold, cold winters. It was an American League City, and its rules were not mine. To paraphrase John Prine, the climate did not suit my clothes. On my few visits to Fenway Park, I wrapped myself in blankets.

I preserved, indeed hugged myself to, my identity as a Mets fan for the first few years in New England. My loyalty was rewarded with the Mets victory in the World Series. I sometimes think I can still feel the little ridge on my skull from when I fell off my chair when Mookie’s ground ball trickled through the aging legs of the aging Bill Buckner to rodcue an improbable Mets victory in Game 6. After the World Series, I got pulled away from baseball into the exigencies of publication and teaching that are the life of an assistant professor. I was a Mets fan only in theory.

In 1989, I interviewed for a job at Rice. I remember being asked whether I would be okay moving from Boston to Houston. Having sat for many years on the other side of such interviews, I know now the question was an expression of insecurity: would I, as a denizen of the East Coast, baulk at moving to Texas? (Since the passage of gun, abortion, and immigration, and anti-trans laws in Texas, this question, less of an issue for many years, has resurfaced with new urgency). In the interview, though, I tried to tone down my eagerness. If I got the job, I would have a Victorianist colleague who had actually read and shared my passion for then-obscure women novelists. I could throw out my enormous purple down coat with the indelible snow stains on the front. I could, if everything worked out, live in the same city, the same house as my husband. We might be able to afford to buy that house. I could have a dog and perhaps a baby. It was all too much to say, so I resorted to shorthand. “I’d love to live in a National League city,” I said, and then quickly added something about Victorian studies.

When Scott and I moved to Houston in 1990, I vowed to make the place my home. This is where I would work, play, vote, buy a house, raise children. I would read the Houston Chronicle and not the New York Times, even the national edition. I would learn to garden according to the seasonal rhythms of the western gulf coast. I would become as Astros fan, even though I had learned to hate them during the league championship series in 1986. I would learn to appreciate the Astrodome, already in a dignified state of decay. I would find a player, preferably a centerfielder to love. Not all plans come perfectly to fruition: I became an Astros fan, wept at their first--and, so far, only--World Series victory two months after Hurricane Harvey. With one son in college and one in Austin, my husband and I sat alone together in the living room of our rented house, screaming at the television for our home team. I have never fallen for an Astros centerfielder, unless you count the fabulous hitter Lance Berkman, the Rice graduate who sometimes reluctantly played the position without particular speed or brilliance. I have fallen for some “bad guys,” like Ken Caminiti, who turned out to be addicted to coke and alcohol. Like everyone else in Houston, and like no one else in the country, I love Jose Altuve who is not much taller than I am, and who may or may not have been a big part of the Astros recent cheating scandal. I hope, sometimes I believe, that like Mookie he is the shining exception, undefiled by pitch. I find myself, alas, not so terribly shocked at the Astros cheating, although fascinated by how they did it—a combination of high-end technology and banging on trashcans. I know the Yankees, and yes, the Red Sox, tried similar things, but did not do them as well.

And now, of course, the Astros are in the American League and Houston is an American League City. I have learned to accept the designated hitter, especially since Yordan Alvarez has played the position. Houston is my home town, and the Astros my home team. I root for the bad guys, the good guys, and the many guys in between.