SITES OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

Sweaty Dudes [aka Sports]

Metsblog
Deadspin
Kissing Suzy Kolber
Fire Joe Morgan
Yard Work
No Mas

The Funny

My Blog Could Be Your Life
Patton Oswalt
A Special Thing
MST3K
Name of the Year
Hot Chicks with Douchebags

Subbaculcha

Bookslut
WFMU's Beware of the Blog
Flick Lives

Parental Guidance

Offsprung
Yo Gabba Gabba!

Booing Rick Astley and Everything Else: The First Homestand

Note: This post is already vaguely outdated, but events conspired to prevent me from posting it on Friday like I wanted. I thank you for your anachronistic patience.

Booing is stupid. I suppose it serves a purpose as shorthand when venting one's frustration--it's much more succinct than screaming out "I disapprove of what you are doing, good sir!" Other than that, I don't really believe in it. When I'm at a game and somebody does something stupid, I prefer to yell out something more sophisticated. Like, OH, WHAT THE FUCK NOW?!

Booing is taken as a birthright by most fans, particularly New Yorkers. Regardless of team affiliation, New York sports fans seem to feel that it's their duty to boo the shit out of everyone and everything. A very good player who just happens to play for another team? Boo! Your all-star third baseman makes an error? Boo! Guy in the loge section drops a foul ball? Boo! Hey, I just realized I paid $15 for a watered-down Bud Light and a rock-hard pretzel! I'm a moron! Boo, me!

Why? So we can convince ourselves that New York really is a "tough town to play in." I find this a curiously small-town attitude to have, something that should be the province of a city that struggles to extract itself from New York's long, oppressive shadow. A place like Philadelphia, which certainly didn't invent booing, but has elevated it to an extremely violent art form.

[Case in point: for this year's NHL playoffs, the Flyers have adopted the slogan VENGEANCE NOW! I can't imagine any NY team having that as their rallying cry, but it suits a Philly team perfectly. And is also utterly terrifying.]

But during the Mets' first homestand of the year, it was the local boosters doing their best impressions of Eagles fans. At the home opener, I kept scanning around Shea to see if someone was whipping D-cells at Santa Claus.

As far as the home opener goes, I don't blame the boo birds. Most of them had probably paid exorbitant StubHub prices to go The Very Last Home Opener At Shea, even though the event had all the cultural cachet of The Very Last Whaler Sandwich at Burger King. I managed to snag some not-horribly-expensive tickets, but my seats were way high in the upper deck and still marked up more than 50% above an already ludicrous "Platinum Level" face value.

Fans expected to see a team all fired up to exact revenge on the Phillies, who committed the heinous crime of playing really well when the Mets tanked. And they had every reason to think the Mets would be able to smack around nonagenarian lefty Jamie Moyer, the only pitcher in the majors whose fastballs are clocked by sundial.

What they got was a listless, error-filled, yawning effort. There are some days when it's great just to be at the ballpark, no matter who wins--especially early in the season, when you're just getting back into the Baseball Groove. This was not one of those days.

The day began auspiciously enough. On my way to Shea, my local 7 train was passed by an express comprised of various old subway cars. Luckily, it was waiting in the station when I arrived at the Shea stop, so I got take a few pics. I've got a thing for old timey subway-iana (probably not a word).

I’d heard in the off-season that the subway exit rotunda had been torn down. Knowing the Mets, I figured it would have been replaced with one rope ladder, or an air mattress for jumpers to land on. Amazingly, they actually built a staircase. And not only did it prove to be a faster exit than the old one, but it was completely finished! No wet paint or exposed bolts or anything! I guess the Mets front office folks are gearing up for their new stadium, and have finally realized that a facility's amenities are supposed to enhance the fan experience, not undermine or destroy it.

Once I was down at the bottom of those stairs, I got a great view of the almost-completed CitiField. If you look at the pic here, you may notice the hastily applied sticker for Governer Patterson (adulterer, former coke fiend, and Mets fan! huzzah!), covering up New York's former chief executive-slash-Elmer Gantry writ large.

Of course, the afternoon was all downhill from there.

The booing began early, as every single member of the Phillies was jeered upon their introduction. This extended to the anonymous members of the Phillies' coaching and conditioning staffs, their bullpen catcher, and even a presumably confused video coordinator. "Hey, I just cue up the scoreboard graphics! What gives?"

Chase Utley and Ryan Howard were booed rather lustfully for...I'm not sure why, exactly. Because they're really good players who play for another team? Not a good enough reason in my book. I save my booing for truly evil players. In fact, now that Roger Clemens is gone (*fingers crossed*), the only player I can imagine myself booing is Chipper Jones. But even with him, I'm sure that's exactly what he wants from a Shea crowd, the prick.

Jimmy Rollins got the biggest Bronx cheers in Queens that day, of course, but I can't bring myself to boo him, either. Sure, I think he's a tad overrated, that he's helped out much more by his home park than any Colorado Rockie, and that he only won the MVP over Matt Holliday because of his "team to beat" declaration. (That kind of thing gets sportswriters' hearts a-fluttering much more than those pesky stats do.) But I have to tip my cap to anyone who's as short as me yet plays professional sports.

Within a few innings, craptacular play had transferred the boos onto The Home Nine. But the biggest boos of the day went to Rick Astley. Or rather, his chart-busting 1987 hit "Never Gonna Give You Up," a song whose existence is apparently hysterical to kids not old enough to remember its initial release. Thanks to a write-in campaign by 4 million douches (3.95 million of which have probably never set foot in Shea), this was one of the Mets' choices for an eighth inning singalong. The crowd was already pissed off, and not in the mood to be the butt of a mass Rickrolling.

Personally, I don't know why there has to be any singalong at all. It's so forced and contrived, like a wedding DJ who demands that everyone get up and do the Electric Slide. Things that fans do at games should be organic, like the Yankee Stadium bleacher roll calls, or the "Jose/Ole" chants; that started as something the Shea crowd did, and was then adopted by the team.

While we're on the subject of singalongs, "Sweet Caroline" should never be played at Shea ever again. My reasons are thrice: (a) Red Sox fans are convinced we "stole" it from them (even though they didn't start it, nor are they the only team to do it as a singalong), and I'd just as soon not give them any excuse to whine about something; (b) when I think "Sweet Caroline" singalong, I don't think ballgame, I think drunk chicks with tramp stamps screeching together about 20 minutes before last call; and (c) it's a terrible, terrible song, just aggressive in its suckitude. Please, make it stop.

As the Rick Astley revved up over the enormous Shea speakers, I got the mental image of 4 million 15-year-olds--the same kind who post FIRST on every comment board on the internet, the same kind who propagated Fill in the Blank Ate My Balls 10 years ago--cackling at this BRILLIANT hoax they'd perpetrated on Shea Stadium. As internet memes go, this wasn't as gross as 2 Girls 1 Cup, but no less sickening. I assume most of the other fans got a similar feeling, because they booed almost as vociferously as they did for Jimmy Rollins. Poor Rick didn't even get to the chorus before the PA system mercifully turned him off.

I actually had nightmare visions of the Mets staging a big comeback in the bottom of the 8th, which would have led superstitious players to believe they were propelled by the power of Rick Astley, and that this would in turn lead to "Never Gonna Give You Up" being played at every home game this year. I was faced with a moral dilemma: Do I hope for the comeback if it means a Summer of Rick Astley at Shea, or do I dare root against my team to keep from ever hearing this song again? Of course, the Mets' listless bats made this debate purely academic.

I was also on hand for another semi-historic event which didn't go so well: Johan Santana's first start at Shea in his new laundry. He wasn't booed off the mound after giving up three home runs, as some NY papers would have you believe. When they show replays of that game, it sounds as if every single person in the stadium was booing, but I can attest to the fact that it was a very small, vocal minority. If you have a crowd of 56,000, and 95% of them say nothing while the rest boo, it doesn't matter that only 5% of them are booing. That 5% will be the only ones you hear.

Still, the fact that the best pitcher in baseball was booed by anyone at all after one bad start should indicate the depth of Mets fans' frustrations, and Johan is certainly not the only target. Reyes' slow start bought him some boos, as did Delgado's. Beltran is booed every time he strikes out, particularly when looking. Scott Schoenweis is booed every time he doesn't show up dead in a gutter somewhere.

The thing is, these boos aren't really for Santana or Delgado or any one player, so much as they are the malaise surrounding the team, an ennui that is eerily similar to the kind on display for most of last year. Each inning they've played thus far seems to be a mini-encapsulation of the 2007 season: threaten early, fall apart late. Stranding a small army on the basepaths, letting excellent pitching go for naught, squandering multi-run leads--these are not things a team in desperate need of redemption should be doing.

Mets fans feel as if team isn't aware of how agonizing last year was, and how desperately they want redemption. And whether or not the players are truly clueless, for a good chunk of this season (which is, granted, an infinitesimal fraction of the entire season), they have played as if they are.

Fans are desperately searching for the fire and drive they saw in 2006. Judged on pure talent alone, the team fielded in 2008 is no worse than that one; with a top three of Santana, Maine, and Perez, and with Pedro due to return some time next month, this team is probably better. Not to sound too Joe Morgan-y, but there is some intangible, ineffable thing that the Mets seem to be lacking right now. (Ugh. I feel like I need a shower.)

Which isn't to say they can't get That Thing, whatever it is. This time last year, the Phillies were already being written off as losers with zero chemistry. Then Charlie Manuel yelled at a reporter, or something, and suddenly they were GRITTY and GUTSY and PLAYED THE GAME RIGHT. ("Playing up to their talent" and "the law of averages evening out after a small sample size" are not in sportswriters' vocabulary.)

There were a few bright spots of the first homestand of the year, of course. After a home opener so ugly not even a mother could love it, they actually won a game against the Phillies (and they said it couldn't be done), thanks mostly to the holey glove of Greg Bruntlett. Then they won another one, despite the bullpen coughing up a lead late in the game, pulling out the slimmest margin of victory possible in the bottom of the 12th. (Jose Reyes = safe. I will not debate this.)

There's also the feel-good story of Brooklyn's Own Nelson Figueroa, who's pitched two excellent games. He's too good of a storyline not to regress at some point, but I won't piss on his parade while it's still lurching down 5th Avenue. And as far as products of Coney Island go, he's still more likely to be successful than Sebastian Telfair.

There was also a sweep of the Nationals, which I can't get too excited about, considering the victim of the sweep. Especially the last game of the series, where the Mets were struck out 11 times in 6 innings by a pitcher with 2 major league wins to his credit, and did the we're-totally-gonna-win-it-this-time cocktease in every inning from the 8th to the 13th only to come up short, and only won it in the 14th because Nats reliever Joel Hanrahan literally threw away the game. (He had the same look on his face as Tom Glavine did last September: like he was worried about catching a cab to the airport.)

[I see Tom Glavine is on the DL for the first time in his career. The cause: detached retinas from rolling his eyes at the umps too many times when he didn't get a strike call three feet off the plate.]

Still, a good team is supposed to beat a bad team--the Yankees won't get half a win each time they pound the Orioles this weekend--and that's exactly what they did. Over .500 for the first time since Opening Day, the Mets now go to Philadelphia, where fans use decades of frustration to hone their boos like prison shanks. After their up-and-down boo-filled homestand, they should feel right at home.

Posted 04.19.08 10:05am * Permalink

Copyright 2004-08 Scratchbomb Inc. Trespassers punished by catapault