‘Metsochism’

When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I thought I had discovered the cause of my unhappiness. I lacked confidence and tended to be pessimistic, and one of my closest friends had a swagger that I envied. In other respects we were pretty similar: average height, chubby, not especially athletic. We shared a social circle, had many of the same interests, and did equally well in school. The best explanation I could think of for our temperamental difference was that he was a Yankees fan and I was a Mets fan.

As far as my adolescent theories went, it wasn’t that crazy. High-stakes games encourage magical thinking in young sports fans, who believe the slightest movement or break in concentration affects what they see on TV, as if their team’s success depended on the strength of their will. From 1996 to 2000, when my friend and I were five to nine years old, the Yankees won the World Series every year except 1997. My friend’s wishes for his team had come true four times in five seasons. This must have made him feel that fate ensured a smooth path for the fulfillment of his desires—that just about anything was possible.

My own wishful thinking had led only to disappointment. Sure, the Mets made the World Series in 2000, but they never stood a chance against the Yankees and lost four games to one. I knew that other fans thought the team had been doomed to incompetence and mismanagement since its first year, 1962, when it went 40–120 and set the Major League Baseball record for most losses in a season. (The record stood until 2024, when the Chicago White Sox lost 121 games.) “The Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life,” Jimmy Breslin wrote in Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? (1963). “This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn’t maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough.”

The Mets did occasionally play against type, winning the World Series in 1969 and 1986, well before any of the other MLB teams created in the early 1960s (the Houston Astros, the Los Angeles Angels, and the second Washington Senators franchise, which became the Texas Rangers) had won one. But those victories occurred before my birth, and they were measly compared with the legacy of the Yankees, who have the most championships among all teams in every American professional sport. (“The Yankees?” wrote Breslin. “Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence [sic] Rockefeller?”)

It seemed clear to me: I wasn’t a Mets fan because I was a loser like Breslin’s cabbie and office worker. Rather, being a Mets fan had turned me into a loser. They made me believe that there was little use in trying to get what I wanted, because I, like my team, simply couldn’t win.

I eventually realized that my theory was absurd and that my character had been formed by more significant forces. But many other fans have identified the Mets as the cause of their neuroses. Devin Gordon, a former editor of GQ who was ten years old during the 1986 championship season, argues in So Many Ways to Lose (2021):

The mental state of your standard-issue Mets fan is to be simultaneously certain of humiliating defeat and pretty darn sure there’s a miracle brewing. It’s not bracing for the worst, exactly. It’s bracing for something. Something awful, surely…but maybe not!

Greg Prince, in Faith and Fear in Flushing (2009), writes that the team “veered back and forth between manic and depressive, almost exactly mirroring our moods,” and that devoting oneself to it amounts to “Metsochism.”

Plenty of sports fans feel ambivalent about their team, the source of frequent torment and very occasional reward. Yet Mets fans take a special pride in our anguish, in large part because we might have gone down an easier path. I could have been happy. Could have been a Yankees fan. These words are from the film Game 6 (2005), written by Don DeLillo. They’re spoken by a native New Yorker who as a child in the late 1940s committed himself to the Yankees’ long-suffering archrival, the Boston Red Sox, and who in the movie roots against the Mets during their 1986 World Series triumph over the Sox. DeLillo may have wanted to remind self-pitying New Yorkers that they didn’t know true baseball misery. But those lines could have come from the mouth of just about any Mets fan.

A.M. Gittlitz is only four years older than me, but he grew up with a different sense of the Mets than I did. He also views fandom as a painful undertaking, although for him the pain evokes not personal failings but thwarted political hopes. He writes in Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People’s Team:

During my teenage descent into the punk and anarchist counterculture, I became fully convinced the Mets were the team of a downtrodden underworld of artists and radicals, with the Yankees representing the contemptible dominant ideology of New York’s financial elite, its conservative law-and-order mayor [Rudy Giuliani], and his villainous army of police.

Gittlitz may have the most unusual résumé of anyone who’s written a history of the Mets. His first book, I Want to Believe: Posadism,
UFO s, and Apocalypse Communism (2020), was about J. Posadas, the Argentinian Trotskyist who in 1962 broke away from the Fourth International and set up a competing organization, which was undermined by his increasing authoritarianism and paranoia. Because of a handful of remarks Posadas made concerning aliens and dolphins, he has been remembered as a visionary kook. But despite its sensationalizing title, I Want to Believe is a straightforward, rather dry history of a cultlike militant leftist group that believed it was hastening a nuclear world war that would destroy capitalism and bring about a workers’ utopia.

Metropolitans is also about a quixotic group that dreams of victory in the face of repeated failure, and it too concerns a fight against Yankee supremacy. Gittlitz’s adolescent association between the Mets and the oppressed continued through the Iraq War, Occupy Wall Street, the Black Lives Matter movement, and both Trump administrations. In Metropolitans he argues that being a Mets fan is similar to being a socialist in a capitalist society that crushes every threat to the status quo: “We cling to a franchise that we know is likely doomed, racing toward defeat again and again in hopes for an October revolution that may never arrive.”

For Gittlitz, the similarities between sports and politics go deep. He argues that professional baseball has always been class war conducted by other means, an “allegorical stage play” meant to divert “riotous unrest between classes in the streets into passionate rivalries between teams in ballparks.” Metropolitans presents the history of the Mets from a leftist perspective, reaching back hundreds of years in order to cast the team as “a social-progressive force” that revived baseball’s forgotten legacy of radical labor politics and counteracted “the apolitical posture of the capitalist sports establishment.” Gittlitz aims to show that the team’s fortunes—how well it does in a given season—depend on how closely it hews to the desires and material interests of what he considers its true fan base, the working class.

Metropolitans begins not with the dismal 1962 season; or with the 1958 departure of the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers for San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, which led to the creation of the Mets a few years later; or with the first team called the New York Metropolitans, which played in the American Association in the 1880s; or with the origins of modern baseball in New York City in the mid-nineteenth century. Instead the book starts at Valley Forge in 1778, when an ensign in the Continental Army wrote the first record in the Americas of a baseball-like sport. “Base,” as the ensign referred to the game in his diary, was played by enlisted soldiers and low-level officers, while educated senior officers preferred cricket. This is evidence, Gittlitz writes, that baseball possesses the “radical populist character” of the Declaration of Independence.

He recounts the early history of organized baseball as a struggle between those who treated it as an opportunity to enact democratic ideals, in the spirit of the Revolution, and those who wished to recreate existing hierarchies within the sport. The Knickerbocker social club, which codified modern baseball in the 1830s, insisted on amateurism and the cooperative management of teams by their players—tenets that Gittlitz says were “influenced by…Owenite and Fourierist communism.”

Professional baseball emerged shortly after the Civil War, which had spread the “New York game” to the South and Midwest. An early player-run pro league failed because of gambling scandals and a reputation for loutish fans, creating an opportunity for more restrictive business models. In 1876 two businessmen from Chicago—the grain trader William Hulbert and the sporting goods manufacturer and pitcher Albert Spalding—founded the National League and explicitly marketed it to the respectable middle class. The NL banned alcohol at ballparks, forbade games on Sunday, and ended players’ say in determining the sport’s rules. The NL also established the notorious “reserve clause,” which prevented players from negotiating new contracts and put their careers entirely in the control of team owners.

The American Association, created in 1882, was marketed to the working-class consumers the NL had shunned. The economic divide of the rival leagues’ fan bases was made visible at the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan, where the NL’s Gothams and the AA’s Mets played simultaneously on adjoining fields. “A separate entrance for the carriage-riding class was built around the Gothams’ Fifth Avenue side,” Gittlitz writes, “while the Mets’ hoi polloi would enter through a Sixth Avenue gate to cram into a shoddier set of bleachers.” Gothams fans could cross over to the Mets side of the park to consume alcoholic drinks forbidden by the NL.

Gittlitz calls the 1880s Mets “the people’s team,” a title he bestows on whichever organization he feels best exemplifies leftist solidarity during a given period. In the case of the first Mets, the honor is short lived. The team moved to Staten Island after the 1884 season, when a ferry owner and real estate developer purchased it, and it was dissolved a few years later.

The “people’s team” mantle then starts bouncing around the city. It lands next on the Giants, as the Gothams became known in the mid-1880s. The Giants “maintained their elite caliber…while broadening franchise appeal to working-class Mets devotees.” They changed their team motto to “We Are the People,” and their pitcher Monte Ward, who had gone to Columbia Law School, organized the first baseball union in 1885. After NL team owners refused to meet the union’s demand to end the reserve clause, Ward founded the Players’ League, which adopted the Giants’ motto and encouraged players to refer to one another as “comrade.”

Albert Spalding decried the PL as a bunch of “hot-headed anarchist[s],” and his smear campaign scared the league’s investors, who agreed to fold the PL’s teams back into the NL. What Gittlitz calls “the contractual tyranny of the baseball bourgeoisie” strengthened its hold on the game. Players struggled to overturn the reserve clause until 1975, when they finally gained the ability to negotiate contracts as free agents.

After the Giants, the “people’s team” designation becomes more arbitrary. Gittlitz bestows it not because of a team’s economic structure or its players’ politics but because of some rather unscientific characterizations of its fans. Of course, he’s right to insist that pro sports—as an economic endeavor and source of identity—always have political aspects, but the relationship between sports and politics is rarely as schematic as he wants it to be.

The next people’s team, surprisingly enough, is the Yankees, who played in the new American League—which was founded in 1901 and which along with the NL makes up the modern MLB. The Yankees were initially bankrolled by Tammany Hall and managed by its corrupt cronies. The team’s players demonstrated little labor solidarity, especially after a league-wide unionization attempt was crushed by a red scare during World War I. But it’s the people’s team because flashy yet approachable stars like Babe Ruth “transformed baseball into a populist mass spectacle” and made devoted fans out of white migrants from Europe and Black migrants from the South.

Gittlitz writes that the Yankees’ populist period ended in the early 1930s, when their general manager, George Weiss, developed the severe image that persists to this day, “replacing Ruth’s proletarian charm with genteel pretension, superiority, serious competitiveness, [and] clean grooming.” The implication is that working-class fans changed allegiances as a result of this overhaul, just as the Giants’ laborer fan base supposedly deserted them after the failure of the PL. But here as elsewhere, Metropolitans doesn’t bother much with details or counterevidence.

In the late 1930s Gittlitz’s next people’s team, the Dodgers, offered

an outstretched hand to their working-class crowd, described by American historian Carl Prince as including “Jews committed to socialist labor-oriented Zionism and trade unionism; radicalized Italian families militantly pro-union, many still mourning…Sacco and Vanzetti.”

But, as Gittlitz notes, the Dodgers organization didn’t share its fans’ politics. When Jackie Robinson was first called up to the team in 1947, beginning the slow process of MLB desegregation, players, led by the outfielder Dixie Walker, nearly staged a protest strike. Branch Rickey, the general manager who had signed Robinson, was a zealous capitalist, and he made the Dodgers one of the most fervently anticommunist professional sports teams during the first decade of the cold war. Robinson himself denounced the Communist sympathies of Paul Robeson before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was a loyal Republican until Barry Goldwater’s nomination in 1964. The people may have embraced the Dodgers, but the team’s departure for California made clear that the Dodgers had little respect for the people—and made the team’s owner, Walter O’Malley, one of the most hated people in New York.

The modern Mets were similarly for the people but hardly of them, the product of an elite cabal motivated by both self-interest and a sense of civic duty toward bereft Dodgers and Giants fans who couldn’t transfer their allegiance to the long-hated Yankees. The figures responsible for creating the new team included Branch Rickey; the owner Joan Whitney Payson, a blue-blooded heiress and grieving Giants fanatic; Robert Moses, the despotic bureaucrat who controlled all major infrastructure projects in New York City and had for decades been eager to develop Flushing Meadows, the site of the Mets’ new stadium; and William Shea, a well-connected lawyer after whom the stadium was named because he persuaded MLB to allow the creation of new teams. The new team’s general manager was George Weiss, the very man who had fashioned the Yankees’ clean-cut image.

Despite these grandees, the Mets became the ultimate people’s team, Gittlitz argues, because of their supporters. He claims the Dodgers’ popular front Brooklynites for the Mets, but his characterization of their fan base depends almost entirely on a younger generation that cheered on the team during its miserable early seasons—a group that sportswriters at the time called the New Breed.

The New Breeders were hip, urbane, and politically progressive. They seemed to relish the Mets’ ineptitude, ironically celebrating hapless players like the first baseman Marv Throneberry. (Years later Throneberry appeared in a Miller Lite commercial that poked fun at his improbable fame: “If I do for light beer what I did for baseball, I’m afraid their sales might go down.”) At home games they held up banners that put a satirical spin on political and advertising slogans: “Extremism in Defense of the Mets Is No Vice,” “I Dreamed I Won the Pennant in My Maidenform Bra,” and, during the Mets’ first game against the Dodgers, “O’Malley Go Home!”^* It’s unclear just how many fans were New Breeders, but Gittlitz writes as if the entire stadium rushed to MacDougal Street or the Bowery after each game.

Gittlitz originally intended to write a history of the 1960s Mets and the New Breed before expanding the scope of Metropolitans, and this section offers the most convincing evidence for the team’s and its fans’ distinctly leftist identity. It also contains the book’s most original research. For example, we learn that one of the slain Freedom Riders, Mickey Schwerner, was a New Breeder; the Klansmen who murdered him were told to hunt down the “Jewboy with the beard and the bright blue New York Mets baseball cap.” Jeffrey Glenn Miller, one of the four students killed at Kent State in 1970, was also a Mets fan. An FBI informant who infiltrated the Weather Underground was never suspected by the group’s members because, as the Weatherman Robin Palmer later said, “no Mets fan would be so unsportsmanslike.”

Some Mets players shared the attitude and politics of the New Breed. In the mid-1960s the pitcher Ken MacKenzie moved to bohemian Greenwich Village because he liked to “see all the art shows, drop in to the coffee shops or just watch the people.” Black players like Ed Charles and Donn Clendenon were outspoken advocates of civil rights. In 1968 the team voted to boycott games immediately after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. The following year the Mets’ star pitcher, Tom Seaver, publicly criticized the Vietnam War: “If the Mets can win the World Series, then we can get out of Vietnam.” Gittlitz suggests Seaver’s statement was influenced by his brother, Charles, a Village beatnik and organizer for the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam.

People in the New Left who had never cared about baseball began following the Mets’ 1969 championship run as if it were an antiestablishment insurgency. Before the World Series against the Baltimore Orioles, The East Village Other ran a message to the team from the Chicago Seven:

WE, MEMBERS OF THE CHICAGO CONSPIRACY, ALSO FIND OURSELVES LOCKED IN SERIOUS TROUBLE WITH A TEAM OF OUTSIDE AGITATORS KNOWN AS THE WASHINGTON KANGAROOS….
WE, LIKE YOU, ARE THE UNDERDOGS, AND TO ALL THE UNDERDOGS OF THE WORLD STRUGGLING AGAINST OPPRESSION WE OFFER OUR SUPPORT.
UP AGAINST THE CENTER FIELD WALL, BALTIMORE
POWER TO THE N.Y. METS!

One member of that conspiracy, Jerry Rubin, wrote in his manifesto Do It!, “People are always asking us, ‘What’s your program?’ I hand them a Mets scorecard.”

Shea Stadium, Gittlitz writes, was “the new Haight-Ashbury or St. Marks Place; the latest cosmic center of the sixties’ occult insurrection.” Like many of his cultural and historical comparisons, it’s an exaggeration, but he makes it sound almost plausible that the revolution could have started after Cleon Jones caught the last out of the World Series and fans rushed onto the field, ripping up bases and sod to take home as keepsakes.

After the Sixties, Gittlitz’s evidence for the Mets as a “social-progressive force” dries up. The further along Metropolitans goes, the more it becomes a ludicrous attempt to turn Mets history into an allegory of the past sixty-five years of American politics. We’re told that the team’s financial austerity during the early 1970s “was a preview of the neoliberal era of chauvinistic financial tyranny.” The aggressive playing style of the championship 1986 Mets was supposedly a rebuke to the yuppies, the “foot soldiers transforming New York into a cybernetically financialized playground for the rich.” (Never mind that plenty of yuppies loved that team’s hubris and flair, or that its manager, Davey Johnson, was a pioneer of computer data analysis in baseball who also edited an investment newsletter for major leaguers.) The black uniforms the Mets wore at the turn of the millennium evoked the black-clad anarchists who protested the 1999 WTO conference in Seattle.

It helps Gittlitz’s case that the Mets were at the center of two major events of the twenty-first century: the September 11 attacks (Shea Stadium was used as a base for search-and-rescue operations) and the 2008 financial crisis. Citigroup’s 2006 purchase of the naming rights to the Mets’ new stadium, which opened three years later, came under scrutiny after the bank received $45 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. (Because of pressure from Congress to cancel the twenty-year, $400 million deal, Citi pledged it would not use TARP funds to pay the Mets.) The team’s owners, the Wilpon family, were among Bernie Madoff’s biggest clients, and after Madoff’s Ponzi scheme collapsed, Fred Wilpon was sued for $1 billion. The trustee representing victims claimed Wilpon must have been aware of the fraud. Wilpon denied the allegation but settled the suit for $162 million, though he ultimately paid less than half that amount.

Following Gittlitz’s logic, the purchase of the Mets in 2020 by the financier Steve Cohen should be interpreted as a reflection of growing income inequality and elite impunity. Cohen settled an insider trading allegation from the SEC for $1.8 billion, owned an eighteen-karat gold toilet that he sold last year for $12.1 million, and recently gained approval to build a casino down the street from Citi Field. But Gittlitz shares in the widespread celebration of Cohen’s willingness to use his enormous fortune to buy up stars. He excuses this instance of his fandom outstripping his politics by casting Cohen as “a Bonapartist ruler” in the Marxist sense: “a populist strongman from the elite’s ranks who emerges during crisis to provide…completion of stalled revolutionary projects.” (This season the Mets have the second-highest payroll in MLB but one of the worst records, which makes Cohen seem more like Napoleon III.)

Metropolitans is consistently engaging and full of fresh detail, but with assertions like this, it’s hard not to see the book as a revival of the New Breed’s ironic banners—a four-hundred-page riff displaying its creator’s wit and hipness. However, Gittlitz is right to insist throughout his book that Mets fans, like many political blocs, construct their identity in opposition to a common enemy. We use the Yankees’ cartoonish wealth and ruthlessness to absolve the Mets of their own financial bullying of teams in smaller markets, and to absolve ourselves of our own sense of entitlement. We’re New Yorkers, after all, and we share New York’s self-regard, believing our team ought to be better than others because its city is the greatest in the world.

Gittlitz’s argument depends on the persistence of “the spirit of the sixties” among the Mets’ current loyalists. He cites the team’s embrace of its diverse fans—including working-class Latinos and Asians from nearby Queens neighborhoods and queer people from all over the city—and relates anecdotes about leftist friends and acquaintances. Despite Cohen’s money, he insists, the Mets remain “scrappy and outmatched rebels,” its fans “predominantly middle-class young radicals and hipsters.” Despite the jingoistic rituals during games, the many exclusive areas for corporate and premium clients, and the obnoxious diehards in the seats—like the man who in April called my girlfriend and me “cowards” for not standing when an NYPD officer sang “God Bless America”—Gittlitz maintains that the team and its supporters have somehow avoided the pervasive commercialism and mindless patriotism of professional sports.

Gittlitz comes closest to the truth when he describes fans’ anger during the 1994 players’ strike: “No matter their class sympathies, baseball fans’ ultimate partisanship is only for their uninterrupted consumption.” Professional sports inspire a thin type of solidarity, and Mets fans tend to have few shared economic interests beyond the price of a beer at Citi Field. As Gittlitz acknowledges, there are plenty of conservatives rooting for the team, including prominent columnists like Peggy Noonan and David Brooks (a writer especially reviled by the left). Richard Nixon became a Mets fan when he moved to New York after his resignation. No doubt he too saw himself in those perpetual underdogs abused by fate.

Gittlitz considers such right-wing fans victims of false consciousness rather than a serious challenge to his thesis. But you simply can’t paint a fan base with as broad a brush as he uses. Most fans support a team not because of its supposed political iconography but because of geography, family history, or the design of its uniforms. Just as there are elitist and cocky Mets fans, there are Yankees fans who are shy and self-doubting, who belong to the Democratic Socialists of America, and who treat their team with ironic detachment. And of course the Yankees’ legacy of success makes them beloved by the working-class New Yorkers Gittlitz wants to claim for the Mets. To many, the Yankees are the baseball version of the American Dream.

Do normal class politics even make sense in modern pro baseball? Yes, players won their large paychecks because their union, the MLB Players Association, overturned the reserve clause, creating the free agent market in all its excess. Yes, the MLBPA fights for more equitable distributions of team and league revenues so that they don’t just wind up in owners’ pockets. And yes, Bernie Sanders—who attributes his political awakening in part to the Dodgers’ departure from Brooklyn—routinely expresses support for the union and disdain for the “baseball oligarchs.”

But it’s hard to imagine working people taking much inspiration from this display of clout among ultrawealthy athletes, many of whom are businesses unto themselves (and tend, like MLB generally, to be conservative). Juan Soto’s $765 million contract isn’t going to strengthen the labor movement. Victories by unions that represent average people will. To Gittlitz’s credit, he does discuss at length a significant effort by the MLBPA on behalf of a more relatable class of baseball players. In 2022 the union signed up 5,500 minor leaguers, who can still make as little as $20,000 per season even after their groundbreaking collective bargaining agreement in 2023 and despite their importance to the modern franchise system.

Metropolitans is ultimately no sillier than earlier accounts of the pathologies of Mets fandom, or any accounts of baseball as a microcosm of American society. Gittlitz is just doing what all fans do: projecting his identity onto his favorite team in the hope of capturing some of his heroes’ charisma. In the baseball satire The Great American Novel, Philip Roth gave his fictional players the names of gods and demigods: Gil Gamesh, Hothead Ptah, Specs Skirnir, Frenchy Astarte. This was partly a joke about the real MLB player Don Demeter. But it was also a statement about the apotheosis of professional athletes in our culture. They’re our pantheon, and leftists like Gittlitz are entitled to court their divine favor—just like everyone else.