Tuesday, October 03, 2006

NO PANIC ZONE

As much as I like to start my blog posts with some related (at least tangentially) song quote or title, and as much as “Panic In Detroit” was going through my head as I started writing, I didn’t want to use the first line of that song (as much as it might be amusingly semi-relevant), nor do I want to panic.

Okay. No El Duque. El Duque himself being the harbringer of doom, saying “It’s not a cramp.” Okay. Okay. Okay.

I’m just not going to panic. I’m not going to panic because the media is going to do a damn fine job of foisting their disaster scenarios upon us without us buying into it. What are we going to do - not show up? Not watch the games? Should the Mets just roll over and play dead because their starting rotation has been decimated? I mean, the Baseball Experts [thanks, Greg] have already decided that there is no point in playing any games, you should just give the trophy to the Yankees because they’re going to win all of the games anyway, no one stands a chance.

Am I foolish? Stupid? Newbie? Probably all of the above. But I am also a great believer in the will to triumph over adversity, that sometimes when you are put to the greatest test is when you rise above the strongest.  Here’s where not being jaded by previous years of defeat comes in handy: I am silly enough to BELIEVE.

That’s the word, right? That’s the word I saw the first time I came to Shea with TBF, the sign boards just below the box level. BELIEVE. You can be jaded about professional sports (and most of my friends are) but isn’t the whole point here that we can believe in something bigger than us, something improbable, something illogical, something that on paper, rationally, only dictates one possible outcome?

If you can’t believe in the impossible, what are you doing here? No, seriously. Isn’t this the whole point?

So that’s what I’m going to do.  Tomorrow I am meeting TBF at the back of the 7 platform at 2:45pm and we are going to Shea where we are going to cheer our Mets from our seats in the mezzanine. We’ll be there Thursday. We’ll be there for as many games as we have tickets for, because we’re going to believe that we’re going to use all of them.

Besides, TBF’s mom won the NLCS lottery today and we bought tickets for Game 7 this morning. We now have tickets for 8 out of 10 potential playoff games.

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The A’s fans are calling the Commissioner’s office to bitch about that 10am start time. Hell, I’m pissed I don’t get to watch Zito vs. Santana. Send a note of support.