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In case you’ve never tried it, it ain’t easy being a Mets fan. At least during their collapse last year, I was in Japan and could easily remove myself from the goings on in American baseball. On top of that, the Nagoya team went on to win the Japanese and Asia championship. But here I am now, writing this post with an increased blood pressure as the Mets let another one slip through their fingers. Man on third with no outs in the bottom of the 9th - and they couldn’t pull through.
Why do we have sports? Doesn’t it seem silly to pay adults an exorbitant amount of money to play a game and then turn around and charge an exorbitant amount of money to watch it live? Despite another heart breaking loss as a lifelong Mets fan, I think I finally understand why we watch and why we cheer (and why we hang our heads so low when a bunch of old guys wearing uniforms fail to win a game).
In the normal course of our everyday lives, we lead toned down, unexciting, and quiet lives. We go to work, we come home, we spend time with our family - if we have one - and then we go to sleep, only to wake up the next day and do the same thing. But tonight, while watching the game (and I had just forgotten about it) the camera showed a fan - probably in his mid 40’s - jumping and yelling in exuberance for his team making a great play. I thought to myself, “how often do we, as humans, in our everyday quiet lives, get to display such raw emotion and passion for something?” The answer is: we really don’t.
Sports are for the emotion junkies in all of us. Women claim men have a hard time displaying their emotion, but try going to watch their favorite team play with them and you will see a man unable to hold back any emotion. He’ll scream and yell and jump when his team scores, and he’ll throw a fit and hang his head if they lose.
Sports are a gamble. If we can display and exhort so much positive emotion when our team does something right, our emotions can only be equally negative when the outcome is the opposite. On top of it, we have nothing to really gain if they are successful and nothing really to lose when they don’t make the playoffs, but we still go along with it and we take the gamble. We do it for the excitement and adrenaline of watching OUR team play. That’s why there are still Mets fans, and Cubs fans, and every other kind of fan.
That’s my attempt at getting over yet another heart breaking loss that hopefully doesn’t spell the end of another “could-have-been” season for the Amazin’s. No matter what, I’ll still be following the next game, cheering and screaming, or hanging my head if the circumstances call for it - because that’s who true fans are and that’s what we do.
