The End of the Long Season

It was just six months ago, but seems longer than that; I was at the first Mets game in their new stadium Citi Field, and, man, it was electric. For sports fans both crazed and casual, a new stadium opening up is a huge event, one that happens maybe once or twice in a lifetime for a fan of any particular team (or in the case of Red Sox and Cubs followers, never in a lifetime). It’s a cliché how the start of any new baseball season is like the first breath of a new life; add a new home to the equation, along with a team with some terrifically talented ballplayers, and Mets fans packed in to the rafters were doing some sweet dreaming on that April night at that first home game.

Fast forward to yesterday; I was back at Citi Field, for the last home game of the year. The stadium was barely half-full. Of the nine players on the field for the Mets, I barely knew the names of five of them. The Mets beat the Astros to bring their season record to an unfortunate 70-and-92 (there was a mind-bending series of injuries to key players, which should get much, if not all, of the blame for that losing record). Just about every sweet Spring dream for every fan had been dashed.

For the Mets and their followers, it was a cruel end to the Long Season of baseball.

Baseball is my favorite of all the major sports, in part because it IS such a long season: 162-games, literally more than 10-times the number of regular season NFL games. There’s a daily-ness to the baseball schedule that just seems to mimic life itself during the six months-plus that make-up the season. A team can go catastrophically wrong, losing eight or nine games in a row, and still get its act together to pull out of the dive and save the season. Nine losses in a row in the NFL, and you’re looking for a new coach and figuring out who you’ll choose with your first round draft pick. Similarly, a baseball team can WIN a bunch of games in a row, then completely lose their mojo and fall right back down again. Sound familiar, humans? It should; it’s the way things play out during the regular season in the sport of being alive every day.

I relate to this especially because of the nature of my work as a local newscaster, doing several shows five days a week; it’s the baseball season of the media world. We’re not doing newscasts once a week, with six days of preparation, or spending six months making a single program; we hammer it out night by night, month by month; we have long winning streaks and long losing streaks, but no matter what happens, we get to come back on to our “field” the next day and play it all again. I love that. I like being in a field where success means being in it for the long haul, where you get a chance to succeed or fail every night, and then the next night, and then the next night.

The problem is, of course, that sometimes you do reach an endpoint of some kind, and you finish, well, 70-and-92. Which brings us back to the Mets. As sad as that final game of this disappointing season for Mets fans could have been, it was still a lovely day to be at the ball park. My kids had a blast; they could have cared less about where the Mets were finishing in the standings, they got free bobblehead dolls! It was heartening to watch the diehard fans keep up their cheering and enthusiasm right down to the last out. And some of those players whose names I barely knew looked like they might have some promise for next season. Or not. Either way, it’s a good lesson for life and career, making it through the long season with your hope and integrity intact, ready to come back and try again, and again, and again.