One of the weekend’s controversies emerged when New York Mets players gave their own fans thumbs-down gestures.
The reasoning, according to those players, is that Mets fans have been unduly harsh on the team. This is payback. “We’re not machines, we’re going to struggle. … It just feels bad when I strikeout and I get booed. … We’re going to do the same thing to let them know how it feels,” Javy Baez said.
So this brings us a good chance to examine the fan-athlete relationship as it stands now, and to ask deep philosophical questions like: What is owed, and to whom?
Just kidding. Mets fans should be booed. Have you ever met a Mets fan? Then you know.
It should be noted that I am from Philadelphia, and therefore grew up under the impression that both sports in general and the Mets in particular exist purely to provide me and every other Philadelphian a reason to boo. They are second on our list of favorite things to boo. Behind the Phillies.
Look, the reality is that while we have better access than ever before — to video, to technology, to numbers that help us understand sports — we’re as disconnected from the acts of elite athletes as we’ve ever been. Hitting a baseball is stupidly hard.
I worked in minor league baseball as a teenager, and by work I mean I mostly lounged around the stadium with my buddies. We took in approximately way too many hours of batting practice during the hot, hazy summers when the players who would eventually win the Phillies a World Series were pushing their way through the system.
Pat Burrell would rip these majestic, high-arcing bombs to left. Jimmy Rollins roped line drives to the gap, his wrists flicking with unimaginable quickness. The ball coming off Ryan Howard’s bat created a sound I’ll never forget.
Those knocks were just a fraction of their swings on any given day, though, and the players who followed them — many highly drafted — would pale in comparison. On pitches meat-balled over the heart of the plate at 67 miles per hour by the assistant coach who’d beg us for leftover hot dogs after the game.
So fans should probably never, ever boo a pro athlete. You can’t come close to doing what they do, no matter how many times you’ve pretended to on your driveway or PS5.
Booing is, for fans who mean well, pragmatic (I’m sure there are some miserable people who just do it to feel better about anything). If you’ve put your time, money and energy into a team, you want to have some agency in how it performs. Only, there is none, really. At all.
So booing (and its cousin Telling An Athlete How Exactly To Do Their Sport Even Though You Have Nacho Cheese On Your Shirt And Are Four $18 Beers Deep) is a sort of stand-in. Perhaps, you believe, you can coax or shame your team into being better. If not, it’s nice to give the anger somewhere to go.
Most fans who take any time to be reflective about booing their own team couch it like this: Mistakes and failure can be tolerated, but lack of effort won’t be. Since only one team in any given sport is going to win it all, we want to take solace in the idea that at least our guys gave it their all.
This is the intersection where Mets fans and the actual Mets collided: The team now sits 7.5 games behind in the NL East, which it led for much of the season. This drop off MUST be due to a failure of will. It MUST be corrected, or at least noted, via booing.
I know nothing, at all, about why the Mets appear to be faltering now. It’s probably some combination of bad luck, good play by other teams and mistakes or struggles piling up now whereas they were more scarce earlier. The statistical revolution has taught us that you need to take a long view to know what a team or player really is, yet when you’re living in the middle of a Small Sample Size trend none of that really resonates.
It’s easy to say Mets players should be immune to it all. They’re well-paid professionals who’ve been through it plenty and should know the deal. But isn’t it nice to know they’re human? And isn’t it productive for them to point out that somebody cursing their mother after striking out on a curve ball is not, in fact, the key to them learning how to hit a curveball?
Baez also said this: “I play for the fans and I love the fans but if they’re gonna do that, they’re putting more pressure on the team.” The first part of this quote doesn’t mean much: Athletes don’t have any choice but to play for fans. Without them all of this would go away.
The second part is probably a misstep, but also true, since most every human performs better when they feel supported. But you’re not supposed to say this out loud, really — fans want to believe the players care every bit as much as they do. That the pressure is already there. This is complicated, though: Ted over there in the third row has loved the Mets with all he’s got since he saw his dad and grandpa embrace after the ball scooted through Bill Buckner back in 1986. How is Javy Baez going to muster up the emotion to match that? Of course he cares. Of course he wants to win. But, also, this is his job. He’s a cog in a business.
We know that part of it better than ever, too. We study salaries and debate how teams should spend money and scour lists of free agents. And yet. In the stands, as the game unfolds, we want the illusion to never shimmer or flicker: We want to believe that it’s actually simple, that it’s not about luck or chance or curves flatting out over time, and that if we voice the disappointment we feel from someone else’s human failing they will be given whatever it is they lacked, because we had it all along.
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