For years, I have tried to lecture my friends who are Mets fans that there are no such thing as jinxes, hexes, poxes or curses, not when it comes to sports, not when it comes to baseball, not when it comes to the Mets. I have raged with fury when they’ve complained about dark clouds and bad pennies and black cats.
You walked under a ladder?
Consider it good luck you didn’t get a bucket of paint dropped on your head. But don’t attach any significance to any bad-luck sign, signal or signature to why the Mets don’t play baseball as well as you’d like them to.
“After all,” I have insisted for decades, “this is a team that benefited from the two greatest baseball miracles of all time, in 1969 and in 1986. If anything, they are a bastion of good luck lately obscured by poor decisions, poor management, poor performance, poor …”
Yeah. Well. Let’s stop right there.
Because I’m done. For good. Forever.
Look: I still don’t believe in any of that stuff. I really don’t.
But if you want to believe that?
Well, who am I to tell you you’re wrong?
Take Monday. A large gaggle of us had gathered at Citi Field because there seemed to be blood in the water. A manager on shaky ground always draws a crowd of folks wearing press badges and lugging notebooks and recorders. It’s Ambulance Chasing 101. A good crisis to pass a Monday afternoon? Count us in.
Except when Brodie Van Wagenen arrived at his prearranged press conference about 15 minutes late, bearing news that Mickey Callaway was going to remain the Mets’ manager “for the foreseeable future,” he also buried that lead.
Because this is the Mets.
Because he had to drop the other shoe first.
And so it was that Van Wagenen announced that Yoenis Cespedes — the last evidence of any actual good luck around here, who arrived as a mulligan for Carlos Gomez in August 2015 and ignited the Mets on an improbable three-month magic carpet ride to Game 5 of the World Series — had suffered a “violent fall” on his ranch in Port St. Lucie, Fla.
“Multiple ankle fractures,” the Mets’ GM said.
And I have to admit: My first impulse was to laugh. It was. I’m not proud of that. I certainly find nothing funny about a world-class athlete already suffering from matching damaged heels putting his baseball career further in jeopardy — and there is absolutely nothing funny about how the Mets are almost certain to react, since Van Wagenen made the point of saying it was “non-baseball activity” on a day when he said very little of any substance otherwise.
But, well … as social media so eloquently puts it:
#LOLMets.
Later, we would learn that Van Wagenen didn’t mean that Cespedes had fractured multiple ankles, but multiple bones in his right ankle. But, really, that’s just housekeeping. As with so much in the Land of the Mets, their fans spent another afternoon wandering between the two things that too often define their fandom:
Gut punches.
And punch lines.
“I’m with you,” one member of the organization told me as the Mets got ready to play the Nationals in the first game of a seven-game homestand that promises to be every bit as joyful as a coroner’s inquest. “I don’t believe in bad luck. But we sure have a lot of it.”
So, yes: I’m done. If you want to talk about jinxes and hexes and poxes and curses, I am not going to stop you. One of my friends texted this the other day, with such fury I could hear his thumbs tub-thumping from hundreds of miles away: “If Gio Urshela was a Met he’d be J.DH. Davis.” (I thought that one was pretty inspired.)
Another said, after watching Robinson Cano’s efforts this weekend: “Mushnick must be licking his chops.”
Though this one was my favorite: “Cano runs hard once a year and it’s so he can deliver a Dick Butkus-style TKO of Michael Conforto. You can’t make this stuff up.”
And those are just my friends. How about yours? How about you? How about #MetsTwitter which hasn’t exactly been the old “Magic Garden” with Carole and Paula for quite a while but has lately become a warehouse for more anger and more rage than your average DMV.
And how about Monday around the Mets? It was like watching your house burn down only to be informed, “Well, the good news is, your car was unharmed. Because it was stolen last night.”
#LOLMets.