Mr Met goes rogue

 

Last week Mr Met, himself, lost his composure.  After a particularly tough Mets home loss, some of the fans began riding Mr Met as he was making his way to the mascot’s clubhouse.  Not only did the fans insult the bulbous-headed mascot, but his mother as well.  Let me tell you something, nobody insults Mr Met’s Mom and gets away with it.  I was impressed that even though Mr Met only has four fingers he still managed to shoot the hecklers a substantial bird.

My photoshopping buddy then combined my love of the Mets with the Stanley Kubrick classic, 2001 a Space Odyssey, to create a work of art.  Enjoy.  And let’s go Mets!

 

 

 

 

Go time for the Mets

In many ways this year’s Mets team has overacheived more than last season’s pennant winners. In the middle of August, when they lost the first two games of a series in San Francisco, they were buried in the divisional standings and had four teams ahead of them in the wild card standings.

Then the improbably happened.  With 3/5 of their vaunted pitching staff injured and a lineup with as much punch as the 1969 Seattle Pilots they turned it around, playing .600 baseball for the remaining six weeks and clinching the top wild card spot the day before the season ended.

Tonight they will face the even-year, fru-fru, techie-infused San Francisco Giants in a one game do or die contest. This is baseball’s answer to the tedium that is perpetual pitching changes, interminable booth review delays, and batters that take 5 minutes to adjust their sanitary cups. This is the wildcard game, or as I refer to it, The Gimmick Game.

You can’t even brag about winning it, crapshoot that it is, and at least in the Mets case, I can’t feel too bad about losing it.  Let’s face it folks, this team can only go so far with this rag tag bunch.

But how sweet it would be to beat the hated Giants with redneck Bumgarner on the mound and send all of their front-running fans home crying.  Is that too negative?  Who cares?

GO METS

 

NY Mets: The embarrassment continues

Driving on the L.I.E. on the way to my gig I nearly threw up in my mouth when I noticed a New York Mets billboard with the slogan “We believe in comebacks!”  As a fan this was insulting on many levels.  First of all it’s condescending.  It is  as if we, as fans, will not support a team coming off a poor season.  Secondly it has the effect of reminding us not only of  how bad they were last year, but of the monumental collapses that took place in 07 and 08. 

The Mets have no feel for their fans.  There is a glib corporatism to the way they present themselves, and they lack a connection to their fan base.  It’s been this way for years.  Even when they won the World Series 24 years ago they had a buttoned down approach to the celebration, upbraiding Ron Darling and a few of the other players for drinking champagne on the field.  The players wanted to share their joy with the fans but management felt that drinking publicly was bad for the Met’s image.

When it comes right down to it this isn’t even an original slogan.  It’s pilfered from the 1973 team.  And guess what?  That slogan was coined by a player — Tug McGraw — not by some corporate hack in the front office.

If the Mets really want to win back some fans I can solve their problem with a billboard of my own:

SEE THE METS @ CITI —   TWO FOR ONE ON TUESDAYS!