If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry as MLB punch line endures its latest pratfall
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 benef ited from the two g reatest 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.
Exce p t wh e n Brodie Va n 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 f irst 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 “nonbaseball activity” on a day when he said very little of any substance otherwise.