Somewhere amidst the pizza boxes and beer cans, my phone buzzed. I knew the call was coming, had been searching for the phone fifteen seconds before it had even started to vibrate in fact. With my suspicions of its whereabouts now confirmed by the faint bzzzzt, I answered, already knowing how the impending conversation would go. It was one I've had before.
"DID YOU SEE IT?!""Yeah.""UNBELIEVABLE RIGHT?""Yeah. Pretty awesome""THIS COULD BE THE YEAR!!""Probably not."
It was a late afternoon in October and Endy Chavez had just made the greatest catch in postseason history, temporarily keeping Game 7 of the 2006 NLCS tied and giving a euphoric optimism to all but the few Mets fans who, like myself, knew better. My parents were at that game, later describing the scene after that catch as the loudest crowd they've ever witnessed, which was promptly followed by the quietest crowd they have ever witnessed. Meanwhile, I was forced to watch alone in anticipated horror from my dimly lit dorm room several hours away.
That night was a microcosm of my entire life as a sports fan: being lifted up for seemingly the sole reason of being knocked the hell down again - and harder this time.
Those who know me will claim that the only extreme emotions they have seen me show have been caused by sports. I know I shouldn't care as much as I do. I know that, in perspective, the fact that a bunch of overpaid alpha-males that temporarily live in my state are marginally more skilled than their out-of-town counterparts is not very important. I know having equal-to-possibly-greater contempt for Tom Brady when compared to genocidal dictators is borderline psychotic behavior. But I can't help myself. There's something so alluring to me about two teams comprised of some of the best in the world at their craft proving who is superior on a fair platform. Competition in its purest form. In a world where the most shameless bullshitter typically comes out on top, this is my retreat.
I was born on November 13th, 1986, exactly seventeen days after the Mets won the 1986 World Series. I have been a die-hard Met, Jet, Knick, and Islander fan since a couple years before most normal children are probably able to be such things. My hero was and still is Wayne Cherbet, and the two saddest facts about my childhood were that I cried when I found out the Mets traded Brett Saberhagen, and on a fake baseball card of me in tee-ball , when everybody else had Don Mattingly, my favorite player was listed as Joe Orsulak (whose sad Wikipedia page that he undoubtedly authored himself informs us "he had better than average speed"!) I'd like to think my first words were something cool like "Mark Gastineau", but they were probably some bullshit like "Da-da". I have lived and breathed these teams since as far as I can remember, and not one of them has ever won a championship. Combining all the sports, that's 91 seasons and counting. Or 5 seasons longer than the famed "cursed" Red Sox went before finally winning a championship.
How ridiculous is this? Let's play with some numbers for a minute. We'll make the assumption that, over the sample, a given team's average probability of winning a championship in a single season is 1/t, with t being the number of teams in the league during the year in question. This means we're assuming that over 25ish years each team has roughly the same average chance to win the championship, which isn't 100% correct, but over that amount of time the player and personnel turnover is so great that I will deem it "close enough" (yes, people under 21, even the Yankees were bad once!). Additionally, competitive advantages enjoyed by larger market teams slightly tip the odds more in their favor, especially in baseball where there is no salary cap. I don't try to account for this here, and of course it just makes my New York teams more fucking pathetic. Anyway, calculating the probabilities leaves us with the Jets having a 57.13% chance of winning a Super Bowl, the Mets havin g a 57.59% chance of winning the World Series, the Knicks with a 59.72% chance of winning the NBA Championship, and the Islanders with a 61.03% chance of winning the Stanley Cup during this period. Multiplying the chances of all of those not happening gives us the chance of not winning any title between the four teams during this period: 2.86%!
And to take it one step further, I ran an excel Monte Carlo simulation with 10,000 repetitions (English: I programmed excel to tabulate what would happen to a team in the previous average scenario if it occurred 10,000 times) to see the rough chance of any given team winning x amount of championships over my lifespan. If you too have a favorite team in each of the four major sports, count the amount of championships your team has won since November, 1986 and see how your luck has been over this period:
0 championships: 3.69%, 1 championships: 13.08%, 2 championships: 21.14%, 3 championships: 22.28%, 4 championships: 18.22%, 5 championships: 11.38%, 6 championships: 5.92%, 7 championships: 2.93%, 8 championships: 0.92%, 9 championships: 0.28%, 10 championships: 0.10%, 11 championships: 0.05%, 12 championships: 0.01%
So next time you hear a Boston fan complain, punch him and his 4.29% chance of winning 7+ titles in the face. In fact, looking at a list of cities with four major sports teams, all of these areas have a championship of some sort over the period in question, except the very specific combination of Jets-Mets-Knicks-Islanders. This is my sad reality.
. . .
Fast forward roughly two years from the Endy Chavez affair. This time it was the last scheduled regular season game at Shea Stadium ever, and if the Mets won they made the playoffs. If they lost, they went home, as they happened to do in a nearly identical situation the previous season. To top it off, there was a celebration scheduled for immediately after the game to commemorate the closing of the stadium, pain or shine. My Dad and I had tickets to that game; on the ride there I'm not sure we said fifteen words to each other. It was just two men coming to grips with what deep down they knew what they were about to witness. I would compare it to going to see Star Wars, Episode III: you know how it's going to end, but you still want to see how they get there, even if history has told you it will probably be kind of shitty. Only, you know, without the comforting fact that there will be a happy ending featuring Jose Reyes line dancing with some adorable stuffed animal creatur e-things three seasons into the future. So there we sat in uneasy silence, all the while Mike Francesa's blatherings of "THIS WOULD BE THE WORST METS DA-FEET, EV-AH" filled the background, like some perverted lecture we had mentally distanced ourselves from.
Of course they lost that game too, which led to the single most absurd/surreal sports moment of my life when I, along with sixty thousand of my peers, was immediately forced to celebrate Mets history after they had just left me dead inside.
I don't think I'm a bad fan for expecting the worst; I support my team through all the ups and downs. But if a child is repeatedly told he is going to be taken out for ice cream, and every one of these times he is instead taken out for broccoli, then after a while he begins to stop expecting fucking ice cream. And at some point in his adolescence probably starts putting on lipstick and torturing guinea pigs. Facing repeated failure and heartbreak is a funny thing. You just kind of know it's coming after awhile. It's something disastrous that deep down you know is inevitable, but still plead to any divine power that will listen to make it not be so. Like mudslides in Central American countries or Jim Parsons winning Emmys for best comedy actor. As a sports fan you still keep coming back. 'Cause what else can you do? It could be worse. Thus I try to cope the way I cope with every stress in my life: through humor and relentless masturbation. Hopefully my stuff on this site wi ll feature one more than the other. But no guarantees.
And so here I am three years later, morosely staring at the standings on a late September evening, wishing the Mets were in a position to break my heart again.
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