Wow, I took 16 hours off from obsessing over the Mets and I wake up to Livan Hernandez being released (I am shocked actually), this News: Gary Sheffield is not Happy from Metsblog which explains why Sheff asked out last night….
While I was mobile I saw Vaccaro took a good swing at the Mets. He correctly points out that what attendance there is is all because of pre-sold tickets for the new stadium and our crushed dreams. 2010 is going to be ugly in Flushing I fear. I would fear it more if I owned the team.
Adam Rubin (he comes out of Minaya-gate looking more good than bad, right?, I’m more into him now) had a Seaver piece. I’m sure we’ll see plenty of ’69ing over the next 48.
Back to Metsblog…Cerrone wrote about the lack of excitement over the ’69 celebration. Matt you nailed it on the head…it’s not that we don’t care, but the ’69 Mets are from before our time. We only know of them from stories. As you said, the ’86 team are our Mets. I also share your worry that the franchise will misinterpret the lack of enthusiasm….so we should all go out of our way to make a BFD about this.
I also pick up the vibe that in the blogoverse I am one of the old guys. There’s a few of us in the range of 40 years old who remember Keith Hernandez as a player, but there’s an awful lot of Mets fans who grew up on Mike Piazza and black uniforms.
The ’69 thing is challenging. I love that they are doing it, they should do more of it – but for good or bad I wouldn’t recognize Ed Charles if he were sitting next to me on the bus right now.
Maybe part of that is the organization’s fault – even for us who are passionate enough to spend hours a day blogging about the Mets, they haven’t taken the time to foster their own history.
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I should know what Ed Charles looks like…maybe if there were a picture of him somewhere in Citi Field.
The Mets should do banners inside Citi Field like these in Wrigley.
The game is likely to not sell out on Saturday. It’s going to pour. A good sign is that the cheapest Stubhub tickets are nearly $30 so there must be some demand. However, when the game doesn’t sell out, will that encourage David Howard to whip out the “bad investment” line again? Is there no value in building your team’s brand? Right now this brand is Amazin’, a really lucky run you had to believe, some underachievers in the late 80s, a wild card run to the World Series that saw the Yankees win a World Series at Shea (which means they won one fewer at Shea than the Mets did), and 40 or so disasters. I think I just inspired myself…for the next post.
Children don't have to grow up in ignorance of things from before their time. I grew up as the son of former Brooklyn Dodger fans, and was spoonfed stories about the team. Right up until her death, O'Malley was a dirty word around my grandmother. My mother still keeps a poster of the '55 Dodgers on the wall of her kitchen. (My mother cherishes the picture of herself with my sons at the 42 in the Rotunda — there is a market for such a thing.)
That said, I make sure that my sons are properly indoctrinated as Mets fans, while my wife tries to work on them as Yankee fans. (Yeah, I know.)
Every self-respecting Met fan with young children should get a copy of Daddy's Heroes: The '86 Mets, Buckner & the Bambino, which focuses almost entirely on the 2 out rally in the bottom of the 10th inning of game 6. My 3 year old absolutely loves the book, and before a recent trip to Citi Field he started asking if we were going to see Keith Hernandez and Gary Carter play. See the info at http://www.daddysheroes.com/
Of course, because his mother is a Yankee fan, he knows a bit of that history as well, and he processes the meaning of it all. One time, when asked about Buckner, he said "Mookie Wilson is like Bucky Dent," which gives him a better knowledge of baseball history than most people 5 times his age. Since his grandmother still waxes lyrical about the Dodgers, he knows about Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese, and since he's a hard throwing Jewish lefty, he tells people he throws like Sandy Koufax.
The question is whether the lack of knowledge and respect for Mets history is specific to Mets fans, or if it's a symptom of a more widespread ignorance of baseball history across fans of multiple teams? Do young Cardinals fans talk about Ozzie Smith and Vince Coleman? (I know us Mets fans would rather forget them, especially Coleman's time with both the Cards and the Mets.) Do Phillies fans think of Mike Schmidt other than as a retired number?
Maybe if we did a better job of teaching our kids a bit of the history, the Mets would market to it more…
It would probably draw more attention, especially in light of all the other lack of historical attention the Mets have had this year, if they did nothing to honor the 1969 Mets.
I agree, a good Ed Charles vinyl banner would go towards the cause. And I don't mean something temporary to honor this weekend.
I'm somewhat surprised that I even know as much about the '69 Mets as I do considering it took place 9 years before I was even born.