I’ve brought this situation up to a lot of people in the past few weeks, that I believe the Wilpons are the worst owners in sports. There is now nothing that can convince me otherwise, because I can’t recall any other owners sitting on a gold mine like Jose Reyes, and taking a dump on it.
It’s funny, because it’s been a long time since I’ve felt this passionately about the Mets. These past few seasons have been majority listless with the Mets playing purgatory baseball. But the World Series, Wainright’s wicked curve ball, and the collapses are all in the past, buried beneath Shea’s Technicolor seats and sub-health code rest rooms. This is an all-together more disheartening type of anger.
To the fans of other teams, I can’t really explain the feeling of watching your franchise player leave while your front office stares defiantly in the other direction without offering so much as a handshake. The same front office that placated your worries that this EXACT SITUATION would happen during the season. To put it bluntly, it makes you wonder why you root for a team run by such clueless fucking people.
Any time as a fan you need to talk about the business behind sports, it’s never good, and with the Mets, it’s become an all too common occurrence. In fact, the only time that I (or anyone for that matter) wasn’t talking about the business side of the Mets this season was when Reyes was the NL MVP at the All-Star Break. When it became official to everyone my age that he was in the middle of the best season we had seen in Flushing. Through all of the bullshit, he made it exciting to watch Mets games every day.
And most importantly, whether you believed that the team should trade him to rebuild, or keep him because you couldn’t bare to watch him play somewhere else, he represented the most important thing a fan has: hope.
Hope on the smaller scale, that when the leadoff spot rolled around, the dinged up borderline impotent Mets offense would get a jolt of life. And hope on the larger scale too. Hope that regardless of how deep the Wilpons were in the hole, that eventually this team would turn it around, and however they did it, it would relate to Reyes.
Well Mets fans, whatever side of the fence you were on with Reyes is now moot. Every single argument that you got in about whether the Mets should sell high on a mercurial talent, or rebuild the team around their most exciting and marketable player was a waste of breath. Because the team didn’t sell high, and they didn’t reinvest. What they did was spend a full year watching the best, most exciting Met since Darryl Strawberry go through a career year the likes of which few players ever are lucky enough to experience, and then let his contract expire. If that sentence doesn’t piss you off, you should probably lay off the painkillers.
I hope Reyes puts together more dominant seasons in Florida, and I hope he rips triples in the gaps every time he walks into Citi Field. And it’s for a number of reasons. A lot of it is because I liked watching Reyes play baseball more than any player since Ken Griffey Jr. But what it really is – and I want to know if other Mets fans feel this way – is that after all of the bullshit they’ve put this team through, I just want to see the Wilpons fail.
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