Tag Archives: my best games

Baseball

My Best Games: Gary Carter Returns on Douchebag Day

August 12, 1988. Expos 5, Mets 2 (12). This was Gary Carter’s first game back at Shea after he finally hit his 300th career homer. The Kid went about 8 jillion at-bats between dingers number 299 and 300, so it was more relief than celebration when he finally marked the milestone.

He was my favorite player when I was a kid. I’ve always had a soft spot for catchers, playing as they do the most injury-prone and thankless position in the game. He was a milk drinker on a team full of coke heads and hard party-ers. But despite his cheery demeanor, he was also an extremely hard nosed player, and his bat and leadership was one of the biggest reasons why the Mets won it all in 1986. (See: game 6, where he got the two-out single in the bottom of the tenth that got the ridiculous rally started.)

This game came at the end of a very long day in which me, my brothers, and my cousin acted like pure, unadulterated dicks. Any time the four of us got together was an occasion for chicanery of all kinds, usually involving the destruction of other people’s property. But even by the low standards to which our collective behavior was held, this day still stands out in my mother’s memory as one of our worst days ever.

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Baseball

My Best Games: The First One

Loving a sports team is like being in a bad relationship. Your own happiness takes a backseat to whatever The Team feels like doing. They’ll do things that they know will piss you off, simply because these things will piss you off or, even worse, because they haven’t the slightest idea of what will piss you off. They’ll put zero effort into your interactions, because they’re so confident that no matter what kind of evil, thoughtless garbage they pull, you’ll never even think of leaving them. Nobody deserves abuse, but if you’re free to walk out that door and you don’t, there’s gotta be a part of you that wants the pain.

The Mets’ current listless play is certainly not the worst I’ve ever witnessed. It is, however, as disgusting an imitation of baseball as I’ve ever seen from a team that’s supposed to be good at the game. It’s one thing to lose a lot of games in a short period of time. It’s another thing entirely to lose them because you’re putting as much passion and effort in the endeavor as you would put into washing your socks.

In a bad relationship, you will justify shitty behavior by remembering the good times. He’s not all that bad, you tell yourself. Remember the time he drove my mom to the doctor and only held it over my head fifteen times later?

So as I try to rationalize my love of a team that has suddenly become unwatchable, I will now remember games I’ve attended in the past. This, I hope, will help me forge anew the chains that bind me to a team that is currently doing very little to earn my fealty. I’ll start from the very beginning.

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