Quotes of the Day

A message to my friends: Thank you for the e-mails and phone calls, the empathy and curiosity about how I've been handling the Hindenburgian flameout of my beloved baseball team, the New York Mets. I'm O.K. Really. I've been through worse... even though this was, well, awful beyond imagining. The losses—seven straight to the crude, macho Phillies, then 12 out of 17 down the stretch. The incessant errors. The pitchers throwing cantaloupes to hitters who didn't belong in the majors. The mental errors that weren't scored as errors. The feeling, in the end, that no lead was safe because—no lead was safe. The realization that every walk surrendered, even a two-out walk with the pitcher coming up next, would lead not just to a run but to hallucinogenic rallies by some of the lamest opponents in the big leagues.

But I'm not anguished. Not me. We Mets fans are made of stranger stuff. We are not like the long-suffering Cubs or Red Sox nations—may they face each other in October, by the way! We have not had a history of squelched Septembers. We've had a couple of disappointing stretch runs, but this is our first epic belly flop. Usually we're gone by Mother's Day. In fact, this is not even close to my greatest baseball disappointment.

That happened 50 years ago, almost exactly to the day of the Mets' Sept. 30 demise. I was 11 years old. My then beloved New York Giants completed their dreary 1957 season in sixth place... and simply left town, moved to San Francisco. You couldn't even say, "Wait till next year." Next year the ballpark was empty. And I was faced with an existential dilemma. Should I root for the home team, the arrogant, ridiculously successful New York Yankees? Or should I persist in my loyalty, stay up late listening to Giants games re-created on the radio by Les Keiter, who would simulate hits by making a thwok sound with, I think, his mouth? I persisted, and more: I went to Yankee Stadium and rooted against the home team. Indeed, the fanly highlight of my tween years was attending a doubleheader in which the mythically awful Washington Senators flushed the Yanks day and night.

This was a character-building experience of a certain sort. It built vast reserves of sarcasm and irony—tools of the journalistic trade, I later learned—which came in very handy when the New York Mets brought National League baseball back to the city in 1962. Those first Mets were a team for the ages, the worst team in baseball history. Not just bad, but theatrically bad, Paris Hilton bad: hilariously awful. We Mets fans became connoisseurs of baseball perversity. I was sitting in the stands the day Marvelous Marv Throneberry hit a triple and was called out for missing second base. The Mets manager, the extremely antique Casey Stengel, wobbled out to protest but was told by the umpire not to push it too hard. Marvelous Marv had missed first base too.

We won 40 games and lost 120 that year. I was in heaven, a near normal person again; I could root for the home team while celebrating their canine incompetence. And this experience forged a generation of Mets fans: we were simply happy to be there, aesthetically tuned to each new depredation, grateful for the occasional win. And totally shocked when, somehow, the Metsies suddenly got good and won the World Series in 1969. There was another flash in the 1980s, though the 1986 World Series victory seemed more attributable to the rapacious karma of the vanquished Red Sox. Several hopeful seasons followed, but eventually the Mets fell back into their hammock of despond, a team that rarely tested the limits of mediocrity. My love persisted, unquenched; but the allegiance didn't demand much. It is difficult to dash the absence of hope.

Until a few years ago... when under new management, a Jewish owner from Brooklyn, a Latino general manager from Queens, an African-American manager from Brooklyn—ethnic New York guys, outer-borough guys like me—the Mets began to hire some wonderful talent, and a sizzling crop of younger players suddenly materialized from the farm system. I found myself sucked into baseball fandom of the purest, most banal sort. I learned to love winning. I even expected them to win. Our playoff loss in 2006 to the St. Louis Cardinals was a fluke. Surely we would win this year. And we were winning—for the longest time. And then we were losing—spectacularly, with such garish determination that it brought to mind... the 1962 Mets. I embraced the ugliness of the slide, the entropy-propelled avalanche of awfulness. Well, maybe I did suffer a little. But it was a cathartic temps perdu suffering. Immaturity restored, I can now spend the autumn spitefully, rooting against the Yankees, awaiting the false promises of spring.

• JOE KLEIN
• A ball team's historic collapse helped Joe Klein reconnect with his most basic childhood sentiments