Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? by Jimmy Breslin (Open Road 1963)

 



The newspapers call the Mets fans “The New Breed.” This is a good name, but there is more to it than this. It goes deeper. As the Mets lost game after game last season, for example, you heard one line repeated in place after place all over town. It probably started in a gin mill someplace with a guy looking down at his drink and listening to somebody talk about this new team and how they lost so much. Then it got repeated, and before long you were even hearing it in places on Madison Avenue.

“I’ve been a Mets fan all my life.”

Nearly everybody was saying it by mid-June. And nearly everybody had a good reason for saying it. You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn’t maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller? 

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