Beat The Mets

The hubris of the Mets weighs heavily on those who are the least equipped to handle it:

Some cried at the end. Some laid blame. Some looked stunned and wretched. And the voices of Mets fans who had roared all summer for their no-bones champions were silent or subdued or outraged, with all bragging rights lost and grand dreams vanished on the last day of the season.

Around Shea Stadium as the stragglers filed out, on the Flushing trains bearing them away from the scene, in sports bars and homes where they had watched the debacle, Mets fans were a tragic lot: angry, betrayed, frustrated, baffled, crestfallen, as cheated and solemn as riders in a gallows cart.

. . .

The No. 7 train from Shea ran a bit slower into Manhattan, at least for the downtrodden in orange and blue. Little boys in Mets caps held the hands of fathers who had been crying. Couples rode silently, pensive and commiserating with head shakes and whispers.

But a man in a Mets jersey and salt-and-pepper hair shouted his disgust for all to hear. “I want an apology,” he demanded. “I want it in the newspaper, on TV and the radio.”

Dennis Higgins stormed off the train. “You want to know how I feel?” he asked a reporter. “I’m miserable, just miserable. I got hit with a double whammy. My girlfriend broke up with me last night, and then this.”

Katherine Hickey, a Mets follower for 40 years, said she watched distraught fans in the stands after the game. “Some people were crying,” she said. “They were in their seats with their heads in their hands, shaking. This is very difficult for all of us.”

After the pasta and meatballs dishes had been cleared from the dinner table, late afternoon at the Yonkers home of Carmela Olley, a 56-year-old widow and a Met fan for 30 years, was funereal. “It was like somebody died,” she said. “My nephew Joey kept repeating, ‘I’m so sorry, Aunt Carmela.’ My sister Theresa knows what this means to me every year, to watch and hope for the Mets.”

In Great Neck, Lenore Belzer, who grew up in Brooklyn in the 1950s, said she watched the Mets game alone, and was somehow reminded of the bygone Dodgers. “It was like reliving the past with the Dodgers,” she said. “And now I’m sick again.”

For Mets fans, the day began like a metaphor for New York itself — with confidence, hope and an armored determination. But after the first inning, with the Mets losing 7 to 1, most could glimpse the end like a distant dark cloud.

And let the recriminations begin . . . Billy Wagner in New York Magazine:

“We’ve been throwing four innings a night — for months!” he says. “Our pitching coach [Rick Peterson] has no experience talking to a bullpen. He can help you mechanically, but he can’t tell you the emotions. He has no idea what it feels like. And neither does Willie [Randolph]. They’re not a lot of help, put it that way.”