The Mets Are the Last Thing I Believe In
Notes from the nosebleeds on family, city, and the politics of place.
The Mets are everywhere this season. Across the chest of a vintage Champion sweatshirt worn by a young kid who looks like he just arrived for a summer internship. On the matching jackets and hats of guys my dad’s age, driving through the neighborhood in junky SUVs. Players’ last names stretched across the backs of middle aged couples as they heave up subway stairs en route back to outer boroughs and suburbs after catching a game at Citi Field.
But mostly on people like me: 30-somethings with jobs in creative and tech, young parents guiding their kids along brownstone blocks on three-wheeled scooters, bespeckled dive bar and coffee shop patrons, people who shop at Greenlight Books, all wearing bright blue hats with the orange serif emblem.
It’s no surprise that the Mets, simply by their own performance, seem to have captured the attention of more new fans than ever before in my lifetime. Last season was the best of the Mets: A talent propelled by heart and humor. Jose Iglesias, performing under the stage name Candelita, released OMG, a song that topped the charts in Latin America, and became a rallying cry for the Mets. While the memes about Grimace proliferated, so did a palpable sense of fraternity between big brothers — Lindor, Alonso, Iglesias — leading younger players — Alvarez, Vientos, Acuña — during clubhouse meetings, slapping ass in the air in front of them when they got on base, roaring with joy and love at the end of a winning game.
The success of the 2024 Mets was worthy of a new fanbase. But I feel this adoption is about identifying with something deeper than the game. This team, long known for its scrappiness, heartbreak, and regional loyalty is becoming the symbol of a new local patriotism for a generation of New Yorkers at a time when life here feels perpetually precarious. No one knows when their rent is about to be jacked up 30%. Everyone is living beyond their means. Are we supposed to be thinking about having kids under these conditions? As many as 36,300 New Yorkers who are employed sleep in shelters.
So the rare unexpected victory — boarding an empty train right behind one packed with people, catching a glimpse of Manhattanhenge, the last Citi Bike at the dock, a stolen base by Acuña, an off-the-wall catch by Nimmo, a grand slam by Pete — lightens us particularly.
My family became Mets fans in 1962, after the Dodgers and Giants moved to California. My dad’s father, George, grew up in Staten Island, living for a while in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. He died when my dad was fourteen, so all I know about him are scant facts and anecdotes. Here are some of them:
George played high school football and went to Europe during the war. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge. When he came back, he married Mildred Dwyer and they moved into one floor of a house; her sister and his best friend John Ryan lived on the other. They had three kids, and with the Ryans’ five that made eight in the small two-family house on Neal Dow Avenue. George worked as a deck hand on the Staten Island Ferry. He’d bring a beer into the tub in the evening and soak for a long time.
He died before the Mets’ first (of two) World Series victories in 1969. The game was everywhere that fall, coming out of transistor radios on the city bus after school as my dad rushed home to watch on TV. My dad would go on to watch the ‘86 victory from the living room of the small apartment he shared with my mother in Connecticut before I was born, allegedly kneeling in prayer for victory.
My father, Tom, drives a crappy car, and led the effort to ban gas-powered leaf blowers in our town two years ago. A journalist who left the newsroom in 2000 to work at local environmental nonprofits, he always seemed fundamentally different from the other dads I grew up around. Most apparently, he has a beard, and the others did not. The other dads wore sharp collars with pointedly casual footwear, drove sports cars with no backseats so their young kids would get to ride shotgun (a treat), and go home to houses with more than one staircase. My dad knows how to call barred owls, and which parts of the woods are owned by the town and okay to walk on, and how to ask good questions.
Lately at garden3d, we’ve been discussing the idea of a local-global axiom: If the political spectrum can be divided left to right, it can also be divided up and down, from the globally scaled to the locally embedded. The vertical axis doesn’t reflect partisan belief systems so much as positional reality: Whether your identity, labor, and community are defined by participation in global systems, or by commitment to a place and its people.
A globalist might work in finance or media, rack up frequent flyer miles, or collaborate across continents. Their worldview is defined by abstraction, expansion, and efficiency. A localist is oriented toward physical presence — a teacher, a parks employee, a deli owner, a parent on a community board. Their labor might not scale, but it creates texture, culture, and care.
Modern life, especially in cities like New York, is built on this uneasy balance between the local and the global. At garden3d, we make creative work for clients like IBM, Google and Stripe, platforms that shape how hundreds of millions of people interact online. And we open and operate spaces like Index and Ours, designed to serve specific local communities through shared space, programs, and resources.
Global work is smooth and optimized; local work is full of friction — bodies, bikes, sidewalks, childcare, weather. It’s messy, emotional, and often less profitable. That’s why this axis feels both political and personal. As big business interests find new schemes to monetize our city, you might find yourself drifting through caverns in Downtown Brooklyn, or past Hermès on a block where you used to drink underage, asking where even are we?
“Everybody feels like an underdog these days,” said my brother when I asked him why so many people who don’t fit the typical MLB profile are sporting Mets hats and vintage sweatshirts this summer.
As Louise Thomas recently asked in The New Yorker, are the Mets even underdogs anymore, if they’re owned by hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen — a perfect globalist specimen? And if they’re not, what does it mean that we’re still reaching for them as our last symbol of working-class New York?
“They’re just the goodhearted New York team,” said a queer kid on Canal Street when I asked why they wore a Mets hat. (A friend had taken them to a game last week, and they found the hat on the ground and swiped it.) “I’m not, like, going to root for the Yankees.”
Often, when you see a yuppie wearing a Yankee hat on the streets of New York nowadays, it’s emblazoned with a second logo: MoMA. The MoMA x Yankees hat came to market following an exhibition, Icons: Is Fashion Modern, that showcased items that came to be emblems of culture over the last century.
The Yankees hat is indeed an emblem: it’s a symbol of New York, the concept. Worn by everyone who’s ever visited New York and brought a souvenir home, it stands for New York the way Jay Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind” stands for New York: manufactured by powerful institutions, a stereotype of greatness.
The Mets, instead, are a symbol of New York, the city. The charming and woefully inadequate R46 subway car chugging its last rides toward decommission. The Staten Island Ferry — fare free since 1997. The restaurants opened humbly across the Lower East Side and Greenpoint and Clinton Hill that make food in season, grown as close to the city as they can find. The Chinese produce markets and Halal trucks. The deli sandwich. The sidewalks and the bikelanes. The rollerbladers in Central Park. The computer room at any branch of the library. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, still free to New Yorkers, if you have time to wait on line.
Our generations (Millennials, Gen-Z) are often accused of being apathetic, disengaged, too consumed with irony and self-image to care about nobler causes. But what else do we have to believe in? The Democrats? Pfizer vaccines? The Yankees?
Localism emerges as a counterpoint to the bland hegemony rapidly consuming the textures of our environment. Here are some other Localist causes worthy of our support: Turning out in elections for city and state government. Giving to funds that provide legal services to immigrants. Eating at restaurants that don’t require having a special credit card to make a reservation.
In June, we sat up high in the nosebleeds on a beautiful Tuesday evening at Citi Field, the hazy sunset casting a rose-colored glow across Flushing Bay as airplanes rose silently out of LaGuardia. The Nationals scored two runs in the first inning, and one in the second. Soto homered for the Mets in the third; the Nats scored two more runs in the fourth and fifth. The score was 4–1 Nationals.
Maybe because we were up so high and the weather was so good, I didn’t feel the usual pit of anxious despair familiar to attending a losing Mets game. Instead I felt light and hopeful — we’ve got time to win this. A new friend joined us. He’d moved to New York last year, and it was his first Mets game.
The Mets and the Nats gave us a few uneventful innings to chat and drink our light, warm beers. We talked about politics, and New Mexico, and finding the guts to publish our writing. The sky above us darkened, and, in the bottom of the 8th inning, Soto and Alonoso each batted in a run with line drives to right and left field, respectively. Our new friend was on his feet, all our voices hoarse, as Edwin Diaz carried the Mets to the bottom of the tenth, and McNeil led off with a hit into shallow right field. Acuña ran from second, his speed breaking the Mets’ tie so easily, he didn’t even have to slide.
Descending the stadium stairs with broken voices echoing last cheers of “let’s go Mets!”, we emerged into the parking lot under the full moon that rose, big and orange, just over right field, and headed back toward Brooklyn.
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Oh — and if you liked this post, you may enjoy A Space That Holds.
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As a lifelong Mets fan, I loved this. Being a Mets fan is more than baseball, it’s everything!
This is so beautiful. Let’s go Mets forever!!!!!!