They’re Outta Here

I was able to hold it together until I was alone, but I cried when I learned that the Mets had traded Mookie Wilson. This was at summer camp, so the news might have been days old by the time it finally made its way to me and alone time was decently hard to come by. I was 11, which was old enough for Mookie to have been one of my favorite players on the Mets' 1986 World Series champs and nearly old enough for me to understand why the team had decided to trade him away. I cried all the same, just for a minute, while walking up a long grassy hill towards the bunks. It seemed, even then, like something that wasn't quite worth crying about on the merits, but you can't really negotiate with yourself on stuff like that. A big part of caring about a sports team amounts to figuring out how to accept things that are entirely out of your control, and it is a life's work.

The Mets had been too troubled by injury and addiction and natural attrition to come close to repeating in the years after '86. Getting to watch that utterly dominant and worryingly disinhibited team so early in my life as a fan was disorienting and set some very strange expectations; watching it fall apart, little by little and then all the way down to stinking rubble, was my first and most painful lesson in what being a fan is mostly like. The many incandescently radioactive personalities from that championship team had always existed in an extremely tenuous dynamic tension, and the front office swapped them out gradually and very carefully, like plutonium rods.