Advance Obituary for the 2011 New York Mets

by Teddy Wayne

MAY 24, 2011 TAGS: BASEBALL, NEWSPAPERS ADD A COMMENT

MEMO TO: Obituary staff of the New York Post

Please prepare advance obit for the 2011 New York Mets season, to run on day after the Mets have been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, so…early June? — Ed.

The 2011 New York Mets season, one already bereft of optimism months before Opening Day, was officially pronounced dead yesterday. It was [TK months—two and a half?] old. The cause of death was yet another botched save opportunity by its Scotch-tape-and-spit bullpen exacerbated by offensive anemia. It is survived by several agonizing months of meaningless, sparsely attended dog-day contests with small-market, cellar-dwelling teams. The possibility of a miraculous recovery, which revived the lifeless 1969, 1973, and 1986 seasons, was ruled out by team doctors and sabermetricians.

A memorial service will be held during an interminable off-season in which fans will delude themselves into thinking they have a shot at contending next year and the front office feels pressure to sign a top-flight left hander with a history of shoulder tightness that definitely shouldn’t pose any further problems once they work out his mechanical flaws.

Still reeling from the crushing 2006 Championship Series loss to the Cardinals and the historic back-to-back chokes of the next two years, the franchise was moribund in 2009 and 2010, though each Spring Training promised a renewed sense of hope. The same could not be said for the 2011 Mets, who, financially crippled by the Wilpon family’s investments in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, decided in March to pay two symbols of their recent failures, Luis Castillo and Oliver Perez, $18.25 million not to play for them. Based on Mets karma, the players are expected to have career renaissances elsewhere.

Other disappointments peppered the following months as wildly as Frankie Rodriguez’s delivery and episodes of clubhouse domestic violence. Jose Reyes remained the most exciting player in baseball who will never reach his potential, which calls into logical question the meaning of the word “potential.” Third baseman David Wright managed to hit a quiet .315 while striking out in every clutch situation with all-American handsomeness. Carlos Beltran performed surgery on himself on every ligament of his body without informing management. Left fielder Jason Bay, signed for his power (six home runs in 2010), planned to collect $54.7 million through 2013, or approximately 34 times the amount the average American earns in his lifetime, and Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with you, Bay, it’s like every time we import an overpriced slugger they forget how to swing a goddamn bat, and now this thing with the fucking clubhouse manager. I can’t believe how many hours of my life I’ve wasted on this pathetic excuse of a team that invariably finds new and excruciating ways to torture me, I should just stop watching from now on and use that time to read books, actual books, not just disposable 700-word online articles about, like, how Facebook is used by Midwestern stay-at-home dads.

As baseball historian Charles Hedley argues in his forthcoming book The Year the Inept and Injury-Prone Guys Predictably Finished Last: The 2011 New York Mets, signs of the team’s collapse were already imminent when Mets announcers began, by lopsided early-May matches, recalling with noticeable frequency color commentator Keith Hernandez’s “Seinfeld” cameos and wisecracking about Ron Darling’s alma mater, Yale. By the end of that month, shots of lackluster action on the field were increasingly replaced by gorgeous telephoto vistas of Citi Field, a gem of a ballpark sponsored by a failing financial giant whose fortunes have eerily mirrored the team’s.

“The 2011 Mets never really had a chance,” Hedley said. “I always subscribe to cable just for the summer to watch the team, but this year, even though I had a book contract to write about them, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I’ve sort of been scanning the box scores once in a while. I mean, how many times can I really tolerate watching Mike Pelfrey balk, or looking at…who else is even on this team?”

Flipping through a roster, Hedley mumbled, “Dillon Gee...Jason Pridie…Justin Turner…who the hell are these guys? It’s like the Indians in Major League, except without the cast of charmingly idiosyncratic characters and a flame-throwing, bespectacled closer who will someday rivet the attention of the world through his stormy departure from a pedestrian, bewilderingly popular sitcom and embrace of a futuristic 140-character-limit text-dissemination medium for unabashed narcissists.”

Team mascot Mr. Met did an interpretive dance atop the Mets dugout to express his grief while smiling giddily. Mourning Mets fans huddled together around a pyre of broken bats and Bobby Bonilla and Vince Coleman jerseys, consoling themselves by whispering the mantra “Game Six.”

“When your lone bright spot is R.A. Dickey’s knuckleball and the occasional New York Times article about the former English major’s highfalutin reading list, you know you’re in trouble,” Hedley said. “By the way, did you hear he’s got a memoir coming out next year? I can’t wait.”

Meanwhile, across town, the 2011 New York Yankees continued to spend the most money in baseball on players who met or surpassed expectations, with the exception of Derek Jeter.

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novel Kapitoil.