A Boyd's Eye View

It was a bad night for a date. I've had one date since mid-summer, and it was on a Sunday night. Two outs, bottom of the ninth, the A's have the tying and winning runs on base, Mets up, 6-5. And I had a date. And I went. Business before pleasure.

I really had nothing to bitch about. I'd missed most of the game, sitting in my living room, beer and cigars, the Pointer Sisters rolling out of the stereo, and my nth game of solitaire in full swing. I'd spent my Sunday dilettanting my way around the dial. By 6:30 I'd seen two quarters of football and six innings of baseball on Channel 4, as well as four of Harold Jackson's TD's on Channel 7.

The fact is that I'm not that fond of baseball, and it's especially deadly on television. But I do believe in The Park, green grass, hot seats, warm beer. I just like to go out and get juiced. And I'm no fanatic, so I tend towards the unconventional in my allegiances. I follow the Phillies, because they're always on the verge; they walk that border line between talent and good-natured ineptitude.

Which brings us to the Mets. They came along at an opportune time, just when I realized that organized baseball went beyond the diamond at the Gidley School. I never saw them, though; the closest I ever got was the view from my Aunt Elida's window. She lived off 145th in Harlem, and if you hung far enough out the window, you could see the Polo Grounds. I had to hang out to my knees, but I knew the team anyway. Kranepool, Ron Hunt, Choo Choo Coleman, Hot Rod Kanehl, Roger Craig, A1 Jackson, Jim Hickman--this is a litany from somebody who never seemed to collect baseball cards. With Stengel in the dugout, these simple nobodies became a dangerous crowd of misfits. It was an easy charm. For these were lean years in New York: there were the AFL's Titans, a truly awful football team; the Knicks, who couldn't buy a bucket; and the Rangers, who perennially challenged the Boston Bruins for early draft picks in the NHL.

It changed so suddenly. The Titans changed owners and names, and surfaced with Namath; the Knicks and Rangers put everything together, overnight it seemed, and began to win as much as they had lost in the past. The Mets just lost their charm. They won enough to disappoint people, and ordinary mediocrity doesn't draw fans. They began to play like the Cubs, and started to look like them around the roster to boot. And then they stole the League and the Series in 1969.

There were the Cubs to thank for that, of course, dying so gracefully in September, but there's no question over their achievement. World champions--a team that hadn't had a decent third basemen in its history, and then traded the one it had after the Series, and became world champions. They had won it all on a shoestring, and now they've done it again.

They won a Division no one cared enough to win, but the Mets played good end-of-the-season baseball, money ball. And they never seemed to know when they were playing over their heads. They beat Cincinnati on pitching, momentum and the fans.

Much has been made of fan behavior. I have no quarrel with fans. New York fans are vicious and unruly--everybody knows that. I just think it's because they're relative newcomers to winning on a large scale.

The Mets are one of the few sports teams worthy of mania; a little genuine insanity in New York this week could hand them the Series. They stole one before--who's to stay they can't do it again?