Lately I've been noticing in what's known as "#MetsTwitter" a lot of unhappy Mets fans. Some people even going to the point of saying that they're going to go watch something else and try to sell of their upcoming tickets so they don't have to go to games in person. Now, that's not the Mets fan community as a whole. It's probably only a very small (but sometimes very vocal) sample. But night after night, it seems like most of the same people are back for more, saying the same things when the Mets lose. I started thinking about this from a different perspective.
The heart versus the head. That's actually paraphrased from a line I remember from the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory ("Where is fancy bred, in the heart or in the head?"; which out that's a line from William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice). It's an internal struggle that a lot of people are facing right now (I think I'm there too).
In our collective heads, we know that this Mets season is going nowhere, this team sucks, the Wilpons need to sell, and many other bad things (I've even been surprised at some of the people who sound fed up with the Mets these days). Logic should dictate that we all just walk away from the Mets and either give up being baseball fans or go find another team to fall hard for. I'm sure a few have.
But I think deep down in our hearts, I don't think many of us can really walk away. I liken being in love with this team to the way a man falls in love with a woman or vice versa (or however it works for you). In a sense, we all are in love with the New York Mets. We each fell in love at different points in our lives and at different times in the team's history. But we've all fallen hard and we can't get up. So we keep coming back game after game and year after year only to have our hearts ripped out and stomped on. It's kind of toxic.
Should we abandon ship, like logic (head) would seem to dictate, or are we all just that much in love (heart) with this ball club that we just can't give it up? It's like that girl/guy that you're just so head-over-heels in love with even though it makes no sense that you should be together or even though there are obstacles in the way, but you just can't help yourself but be in love.
Even if ratings are down and attendance is down, it still seems like the diehards like myself and a lot of the people I know in "#MetsTwitter" are still there. We keep watching and we keep coming back for more. Maybe we need to take a timeout from this relationship, but we always seem to come back.
Why? Are we all crazy Mets fans in love with the club?
