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Hi. My name is Dana Brand I’m a professor of English at Hofstra. I was chair of the
English department for 8 years and I had the idea a few years ago of writing about my experience
over 45 years of being a fan of the NY Mets which as anybody who has been a fan of the
NY Mets knows is a very mixed experience.
It is one of the central components of my life and there are lots of aspects of it that
are very meaningful and are meaningful in the ways that the things that I teach at Hofstra
are meaningful. I teach literature and I teach about the human imagination and the way people
deal with life and representing life and dealing with the passage of time and writing about
baseball, and I’ve now written two books about baseball, A Mets Fan which was published
in 2007 and The Last Days at Shea which was just published here in 2009. In both of them
I deal with the big questions of life but I use baseball as a way of getting into them.
So I see my life and work at Hofstra as being very connected to my writing.
Well we think a lot of things distinguish us. We think that we’re a little louder,
a little crazier. To some degree the answer of your question depends on what team we are
comparing ourselves to. One team we always do compare ourselves to obviously are the
Yankees and I think that Mets Fans like to think that we’re more loyal, more mature,
more willing to except hard knocks than Yankee fans. We don’t assume we are going to win,
we don’t demand we are going to win. This is part of our tradition. Our tradition begins
in the 1960’s when we won, we didn’t even finish higher than 9th place for seven consecutive
years and then all of a sudden we win the world series. Being a Mets fan in our minds
generally involves routing for a team, putting up with lousy teams but knowing that at some
point in the future your going to have this tremendous experience that is going to mean
so much to you that it will resonate throughout your life as ‘69 resonates with me throughout
my life or ‘86. Yankees fans, we think, and this probably isn’t fair of all Yankees
fans but we think Yankee fans are spoiled brats who just kind of aren’t happy unless
their winning. They couldn’t put up with what we’ve put up with. Now, point in fact
the Yankees have been a lousy team for much of my life, everybody’s forgotten that but
there were a lot of very loyal Yankee fans for a long time in the 60’s and early 70’s
and than the 80’s and early 90’s and I give them a lot of credit, they’re more
like Mets fans. But people who just go for the winning team, we have no patience with
them.
Well I really had no choice about being a Mets fan, as I mention in my book Mets Fan,
I became a Mets fan because I got very excited in the summer of 1961 when everybody was paying
attention to Ricky Mantel and Roger Maris trying to break Babe Ruth’s homerun record
and so I just got excited about and when Roger Marris broke Ruth’s record I was jumping
up and down and I was cheering and I thought isn’t this great did you hear Babe Ruth’s
record got broken and I didn’t even fully understand what that meant and my mother who
had been a Brooklyn dodger fan all her life and my father also was a Brooklyn dodger fan,
they literally sat me down and told me that I couldn’t get excited about this thing
that this Yankee had done, that we just didn’t do that in our family and that next year there
was going to be a team, the Mets and I could follow them. So in between the end of the
1961 baseball season and the start of the 1962 baseball season I learned as much as
I could about baseball. I looked at baseball cards. I even read some books. I mean I could
just barely read but I wanted to know as much as I possibly could and by 1962 I was ready
for the Mets and if something like baseball gets into you at that early an age it just
stays there. I remember the patterns of my happiness and my disappointments from that
early period of my youth and although I couldn’t explain to you why baseball is more interesting
to me say than football, or basketball, which it is. I mean if I look at them objectively
all three of them have things that can be said for them. Baseball just got in to me
early and it stayed there and that’s part of the reason why it fascinates me so much.
I’m curious about why a game is so important to me. In both Mets Fan and The Last Days
of Shea I am always struggling with this issue. Why am I interested in this, this is ridiculous?
In many ways its kind of a crumby sport I mean the way in which rich teams can have
an advantage over poor teams and big market teams over small market teams and its filled
with corruption with the steroids, with greed but I cant get rid of it, it came inside of
me and it will not leave and I’m sure it never will leave.
Well first of all it wasn’t a big surprise I mean Shea stadium had its drawbacks. It
was designed in the period when stadiums were somewhat less attractive than they had been
earlier and everybody knew that it was coming down at some point and so my original feeling
was oh okay it has to happen. I happen to say “For Shea”, its called “For Shea”
and its printed in both my books, that I will miss Shea the way I miss a grandparent, somebody
who I am very attached to that I know isn’t going to be there for my whole life. That’s
the kind of emotional feeling I had for it. All I asked of Citi Field is that it continue
my sense of being a Mets fan in a way that was compelling and to be perfectly honest
I’m not really at home at all in Citi Field yet. Part of that is the fault, I think, of
some bad planning, in the sense or some lack of vision on the part of the Mets and part
of it is just has to do with the inevitable changes in baseball. Baseball stadiums now
a days have luxury boxes, they have private clubs, they don’t feel as democratic and
as wonderful as stadiums I think used to feel in the sense that everybody was welcome, everybody
could get a decent seat, everybody could be part of the whole experience. But Citi Field
also has the problem that there isn’t enough of a commemoration of the Mets past, there
really ought to be a museum, a place where you can take your kid and say you know we
were so happy in ’69 when this happened or look at that funny looking guy he played
for us in the ‘70’s. There almost seem to be and many fans and bloggers like myself
have commented on this, there almost seems to be an effort to sort of repress the Mets
past to try to look forward to a future in which the Mets would be mainly a winning team
and I think that was short sighted and I think that the Mets are beginning to realize that
because millions of people are attached to the Mets, Its one of the most popular of all
baseball franchises in spite of the fact that its history has not been continuously successful
and Citi Field should’ve served to remind us more of who we are and what we are. I’m
hoping that the Mets will really get down to making Citi Field feel more like a home
of the Mets and at this point I will mention the fact that the Mets are being very helpful
to us here at Hofstra. I am organizing a conference along with Professor Richard Puerzer in the
engineering department and this will be under the auspices of The Hofstra’s Cultural Center
headed by Natalie Datlof, and we’re putting together a conference to commemorate the 50th
anniversary of the New York Mets. And the Mets are helping us out quite a bit. We’ve
met with some of their people in their front office and they’ve been wonderful and you
can tell they really actually do want people to commemorate the past of the Mets. That
they are not trying to push it away its just that some how or another in the planning for
Citi Field that consideration got lost. So in any event, in April 26th, 27th and 28th
in 2012, so its quite a ways off but the Mets first year was 1962, were going to have this
conference here at Hofstra. We hope to have a lot of old Mets players, broadcasters, we
have a lot journalist, bloggers and just ordinary fans, people for whom the Mets mean something
and we’re going to have a commemorative conference right her at Hofstra and its certainly
going to get a lot of attention in the sports world at that time.