Let's talk about the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club

So 2021's Opening Day is tomorrow. Just to state the author's biases from the outset, I bought this because I own a flagpole and also because my team is going to kick everyone's asses and win it all this year:

Okay, okay, but the pole part is true at least, even if it's just one of those shitty porch ones that usually break in gusts above 20mph. And never mind that I vaguely look like Bernie Sanders in this picture or how the flag's obvious flimsiness is likely a harbinger of doom. This is the New York Mets' season, baby!

To review: when we last left our lovably hapless team, they had one of the best offenses in baseball during the COVID-shortened 2020 schedule but were still never really in contention for even a wild card playoff spot. If memory serves, this was due to a) a lack of starting pitching depth; b) their overall defense being what's known regionally as "complete dog shit," a kind euphemism given the product on hand; c) a bullpen that put up numbers statisticians would presume to be imaginary if they were able to gaze eyes upon them without vomiting; and d) I'd like to again point out that their defense was absolutely fecal, canine or otherwise. Everyone's gloves seemed to be made of wet spaghetti.

An important point to remember here is that just before spring training last year, the Houston Astros cheating scandal from 2018 emerged, revealing that they had been stealing signs using video feeds and then signaling to their batters what pitch was coming next by banging on a trash can in the tunnel behind the dugout (yes, really). A few months before this news broke, the Mets hired Carlos Beltran as their new manager, which I was really excited about. Beltran had manned the Mets' centerfield for seven years in the aughts and was one of my all-time favorite players for the team. So naturally he had played for the Astros during their cheating stretch, was implicated as a central figure in the scheme and got promptly fired from his new gig before he ever managed a game. #LOLMets, as they say.

No matter! Luis Rojas took over the squad and did an admirable job considering how weird last season amid a pandemic was and how much his defense couldn't stop smelling like defecated Alpo. He's back this year and has a revitalized team who should be contenders for the NL East at minimum, even with a bullpen that's still awfully damn iffy. Delin Betances can barely hit 90mph with his fastball; Seth Lugo already had bone chips removed from his elbow this spring; time caught up with Jerry Blevins; god only knows if we'll get the Jekyll or Hyde version of Edwin Diaz; and I'm convinced Jeurys Familia can no longer actually even see where home plate is. It will be an adventure. Trevor May looks good though.

But I said revitalized, didn't I? If so much has stayed the same, what actually changed? Well, for one, THE FUCKING WILPONS ARE FINALLY GONE!! Former owner Fred Wilpon and his idiot son Jeff are out of the picture at long last after torturing fans for years with their cheapskatedness. Infamous for having invested huge sums of their money with a character named Bernie Madoff, the baseball team became somewhat secondary in importance to them when that whole Ponzi scheme thing collapsed. Also, they were incredibly petty and would meddle in every decision surrounding the club, no matter how minor. A woman in the marketing department was once fired for getting pregnant out of wedlock, and this was, like, recently. Fans of the team have been pining for them to go pound sand on a private beach somewhere for more than a decade, and it finally came true! Anyway, they sold to this dude:

That would be Steven A. Cohen, shown here in front of Damien Hirst's "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," an art installation Cohen paid at least eight million dollars for, which is also a good metaphor for why any of us continue to root for the Mets year after year. Spend a moment gazing upon that poor formaldehyded bastard back there screaming into the netherworld and tell me I'm wrong. He's mad at the Phillies too, you just know it.

Look, our new "Uncle Steve" is a hedge fund guy who's worth something like fifteen billion bucks and once had to pay the government $1.6 billion in fines for insider trading, which is currently the all-time record. Yet it still could have been worse. Bidding against him was a weird consortium of celebrities and sports figures led by pop icon Jennifer Lopez and baseball dipshit Alex Rodriguez, who were supposedly the Wilpons' preferred buyers but just couldn't pull together the $2.4 billion Cohen had stuffed under his gilded mattress. Despite sports being a business focused on entertainment, the Mets were frankly lucky to end up with the greedy dork rather than the headline-hungry power couple, who are currently maybe/maybe not splitting up and would have absolutely created an absurd media circus around the team from the outset. Plus, Cohen seems pretty affable and is an actual lifelong fan (he grew up on Long Island), to the point where I've more than once thought, "you know, this billionaire guy seems alright," a crime for which I should be catapulted into goddamned Alpha Centauri.

What else changed? Cohen immediately fired Brodie Van Wagenen, the shitheaded Wilpon lapdog general manager, and replaced him with more competent folks, including an up-and-comer as the new GM named Jared Porter. This appeared to be a good start for the new regime. He was touted as a scouting genius and then exposed as a serial sexual harasser within a month and fired as well. Second baseman Robinson Cano tested positive for steroids at some point shortly before all of this and was banned from the sport for the entire year. Then not long after the Porter news broke, it was revealed that the Mets' manager prior to the Beltran debacle, Mickey Callaway, is apparently a horrible sex creep too and was harassing the shit out of several women for the two years he managed the Mets. Finally, Cohen spent a billion or so bailing out some other hedge fund asshole during that Gamestop short selling thing, so a bunch of Mets fans on Twitter got mad at him and sent him and his family a bunch of death threats. It was all quite the ride.

Oh, and Tim Tebow finally retired from baseball, peaking as a AAA player in the Mets' system and having only made it that far up the ladder because the whole thing was pretty obviously a marketing stunt for everybody involved. We mock, but I will say the guy has a true work ethic and outside of his smarmy evangelical schtick does seem like a good dude. But so it goes.

A thing I've noticed over the years is that my interest in baseball generally tracks closely with how depressed I feel. The more I can tell you who's likely to get called up from the minors when a starter gets injured, the more certain it is that my mental battleship is being fired upon with dopamine-killing torpedoes. Of course, after a year plus of living through a global pandemic, solace in anything that feels normal should be welcome. I love the Mets and most things baseball, but I can recognize it as an exceedingly boring sport even after a year of quarantine, so embracing it headlong yet again still feels a bit like a psychological trap.

But never mind that! Back to the revitalized thing! The Mets traded for the amazing Francisco Lindor! Marcus Stroman is back and cocky as ever! Carlos Carrasco is on the team! Taijuan Walker too! They have depth in the infield and solid fourth and fifth outfielders for the first time in living memory! Even their minor league teams have quality backup players! Noah Syndergaard should return from injury mid-season and he'll be hungry to perform! Chili Davis is back as the hitting coach and I'm invested enough to believe this matters! The owner wants to spend money to build out a state-of-the-art analytics department, in addition to beefing up international scouting! And Mr. Met remains the best sports mascot there is!

The future is wide open, folks, and it all begins tomorrow. So why are you laughing and shaking your heads like that?

Oh, right. Well, damn the dopamine torpedoes anyway! LET'S GO METS!!