Requiem for My Team: the 2006 New York Mets

By Jeff Licitra

I was there. I was there for the first pitch of the season - a strike from Tom Glavine to the first of a revolving door of leadoff hitters for this season’s forgettable Washington Nationals - and I was there for the last pitch of the season.

As long as I live, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way that breaking ball dropped down beneath Beltran’s back knee; the look of agony on his face, on our faces, the utter silence in two seconds as the umpire ended the game with a called strike three.

Or an hour earlier, it’s the top of the sixth inning. There’s a runner on first and one out. Willie has just walked out to the mound to talk to Perez. He gives Perez his vote of confidence and Perez goes from the stretch to Rolen. The next thing that registers is the ball coming off the bat, soaring down the left field sideline. From where we were sitting, about twenty feet from the sideline and twenty feet from the foul pole we could tell it was gone.

That sound, it had just begun. When they say a crowd gets deflated, they’re not kidding. It’s easy to forget that at the beginning of the 06’ season we were still the manic depressive Shea faithful, collectively inhaling and exhaling sighs not of relief but of frustration. For an instant I could hear that old but still all too familiar sound -

There’s Chavez! He hasn’t lost a beat on the ball. His body turned inward toward the crowd and his legs still coiled in a sprint. He jumps into the air in the way only a seasoned outfielder can - not like a basketball player does, going straight up - but like an Olympian doing the pole vault. His body rotates in midair so that his back is now against the wall, bent as if he’s about to lunge his whole body over the top of the left field fence. The ball is snared mid-flight into his outstretched a right arm; a “snow cone” in the basket of his mitt.

We’re all going crazy! Screaming! Jumping up and down! High fiving each other!  On a night like this, there is no such thing as a complete stranger at Shea.

I’m not facing the field anymore and someone in the top of the section starts yelping inaudibly and pointing back towards first base. There’s the throw from Reyes to Delgado and the runner is out by a mile.

Did that just happen? Did I just see that? “This must be it”, we all think. We had always believed it. Now we felt we knew it. I’ve never in my life experienced Shea so loud, so electric as that moment.

You see, the thing about Shea is that it really is like no other ballpark. It’s almost as if the designers had in mind a cathedral dedicated to the voice and will of the common fan.

It was 1962, when things were built to be big. This was the era of public infrastructure; expressways and public housing projects. The city was flowing over into the suburbs of the outer boroughs and Long Island. New York, the bastion of National League baseball for most of the nation’s history, needed to brings its people and it’s beloved past time back together.

As anyone will tell you, Shea is not about aesthetics, but neither was America then. If you want Sterile-Cookie-Cutter-NAFTA-America, please it abounds elsewhere.

Not here though. Not at Shea.

William A. Shea Stadium is about the extra 25,000 people that can sit in the Upper Deck on any given night; about the sound, the complete and total roar of the crowd as if we’re constantly challenged to be louder than the outgoing flights from LaGuardia overhead.

Taken alone, the Shea fan can not do much with just her one voice; we can’t challenge all the inevitabilities and futilities of life that haunt the existence of the average New Yorker, most of us scraping by to live in this overpriced place we call home.

However, when those 57,000+ voices want and will something in unison, Shea becomes our collective conch: A living testament to a democratic faith, to the belief that if you do the right thing and work hard, that just sometimes, if you believe hard enough in what you’re doing, the miracles of all miracles will happen, that those dreams will come true.

The Shea motto is “Ya gotta believe” and Shea itself gives a sound to an idea, a voice to a belief. It takes hope and makes it tangible.

No, I don’t really want a new stadium (and I’m not the only one). Shea has its dark side of drunken belligerent fans, as all places do; and don’t get me started on its detachment from neighboring Corona (lack of a good Met bar anyone?) or the blighted chop shops that ring the parking area - let’s not get into that right now. This is a requiem for my 2006 Mets and I intend to finish it properly.

So, you see, in a period of six months and sixteen days, I saw the very first out and the very last out, and followed every out in between of my beloved New York Metropolitans (Thank You Steve Somers).

I remember Friday night April 7^th, the Mets were enjoying a 9-0 lead against the Marlins. This was the fifth game of our still young season, most of us were still booing Carlos Beltran (reflect on that for a moment) and had booed Jorge Julio before he’d even taken the mound as a Met. Well, he’d finally taken the mound as a Met in the 8^th inning but no one seemed to notice. No one except former Met Mike Jacobs, that is. Who, had is own personal cheering section in the right field loge.

The Shea Faithful meanwhile, all 37,000 of us that night, we’d turned to booing the Yankee fans who were foolish enough to have worn their A-Rod jerseys to the stadium. While Jorge Julio was falling behind in the count, having just walked the bases loaded, most everyone was chanting “Yankees Suck.” When Julio threw three balls in a row to Miguel Cabrera, the newly mobilized crowd turned on Jorge Julio with all its might, showering him in a chorus of boos.

Julio was obviously shaken. Delgado walked over from first base to talk to console him. The pitch from Julio now: strike looking. The crowd is standing. We’re cheering on Julio with the same fervency that poured beer on those unsuspecting Yankee fans; that just sent Julio into an emotional convulsion. Now, we’re all behind him. The pitch from Julio: fouled back. Full count. The pitch: again fouled back, still a full count. The crowd hasn’t let up. The next pitch: STRIKE THREE LOOKING!

Remember Mike Jacobs? He was on deck. The bases are still loaded and he cracks the first pitch towards his cheering section to make it 9-3. The boos rain down again. Beltran picks up the ball, tosses a bullet to Wright, Hermida is OUT AT THIRD. Standing ovation.

Now this guy has obviously never experienced anything like this in his life, nor for that matter, did it seem had anyone but the Mets who didn’t seem to flinch from the dugout.

I remember Friday afternoon April 14^th it was torrentially raining. I had box seats behind first base, and I took my brother to the game. We’d come early at 3:30 to catch batting practice. Yet, we sat huddled in the top of the loge, forced to take shelter while Shea filled with rain instead of people. The crude sound system made me want to cover my ears, but then U2 came on to the tune of I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.

I hadn’t. The Mets hadn’t won 97 games yet.

For a few minutes I relaxed and reflected. After all, it was nearly five hours until the game actually started at 8:40, when the free swinging Milwaukee Brewers took the field.   There must have been something in that cold, chilly, humid air off Flushing Bay, because that night we witnessed Tommy Glavine strike out 11 batters.

I remember July 3^rd, fireworks night against the lowly Pittsburgh Pirates. My old college roommate and I, we just showed up at Shea as we’d done in so many games past to receive what had become our populist right to game day upper deck seats only to find it sold out. This was indeed a different season.

We bought tickets off a scalper for Mezzanine Row N instead. You can’t actually see the game from Mezzanine Row N; home plate and just maybe second base if you strain your neck. The evening was spent wandering around to different blank splotches in the upper deck, until finally we settled with a few seats way up above right field.

A rookie no one heard of named John Maine struck out seven batters in four innings until imploding and walking in two runs, including the Pirates pitcher Paul Maholm. With the Mets down 3-1, then 5-1, the packed Shea crowd waited for a comeback. “No one – and I mean no one - comes into our house, and pushes us around!” [LETS GO METS chant begins here]. Then nothing; runners were stranded all night.

A reminder that some nights you lose, and you lose bad. Your team was never in it. It was an 11-1 beating, one that luckily didn’t matter (see that time last year, same lowly Pirates) with a fourteen game lead on the Braves.

I remember the Wednesday afternoon of October 4^th 2006. A rookie pitcher John Maine who seemingly everyone now heard of was on the mound. It was the top of the second inning, and John Maine was in some trouble. There were runners on first and second and no one out. Those pesky Dodgers were getting on base.

The batter is the most recent reincarnation of the stud rookie Dodger catcher, Russell Martin. Maine’s pitch is roped down the right field sideline for a base hit. There goes that collective groan again. Shawn Green has cut this ball off, though. He throws a bullet to Valentin, who seamlessly turns and throws a perfect strike to LoDuca, and the runner Kent IS TAGGED OUT AT THE PLATE! The screaming, the jumping, the high – “Drew just ran through that stop sign! Everyone is pointing and gaping, HE’S OUT AT THE PLATE!

Who would have thought, this would only be the second best double play of this postseason? Honestly, no one.

This season hasn’t just been special. It’s been everything we believed in down to that very last pitch: with a 2-2 count, 2 outs, in the bottom of the ninth inning, in Game 7 of the National League Championship Series. If our dream was going to end, we were going to ride it out to the very last moment. As Howie Rose said a week earlier in L.A.: “The Mets will play for the pennant!”

Sure, I hate illegitimate strike zones, botched check swing calls, and the heart of my batting order swinging at the first pitch (missing AAA curve balls from a guy, Jeff Suppan, who couldn’t get a batter out half of the season).

I hate, more than anything else, watching my team leave runners in scoring position. Especially, with the bases loaded and one out, after what will forever after be known simply as The Catch.

My team never quit. Every inning, we believed. In turn, our team seemed to believe with us. Every inning we were one pitch, one moment of suspense away from making it all possible.

In a game where succeeding 30% of the time is grounds for success, the odds weren’t bad at all. It may not have been our night, but this certainly was our season.