I Call Upon the Spirits
The Yankees have over 100 years of history and ghosts and spirits to call upon and evoke, but who do the Mets have? The Dodgers and the Giants. Again, I was reaching for a column, and needed a break. I really like the moon and Omar Minaya’s robe, as well as the shadowing. The Giants zombie doesn’t have a jaw simply because I couldn’t draw it exactly he way I wanted to so I left it off.
For the column’s title, I had been in the habit of providing several titles for the editors to choose from since I didn’t like the ones they were putting up there in the first place. Unfortunately, sometimes multiple titles were posted.
Geoff the Ref
Sunday, June 24, 2007
"Geoff the Ref"
Resurrecting the 1950s
Mets mooch off history
By Geoff Walter / SNY.tv
Exactly when does it become necessary for someone to stand on their own two feet and stop feeding and prospering off others? Four decades seems far past any reasonable line, don't you think? There's a term for that kind of behavior. It's called mooching, which is exactly what the Mets are doing. A quick peruse through the thesaurus and there's another word that appears: bum. The Mets must have inherited that title from one of their baseball fathers -- the Brooklyn Dodgers -- whose legacy and memory the current New York National League team sees fit to ride for all it's worth.
How else do you explain that the new Citi Field is more a recreation of Ebbets Field -- the Dodgers' home in Brooklyn -- than anything else? Or that the entrance to the new stadium empties into a rotunda in honor of Dodgers great Jackie Robinson, a man who was out of baseball long before the Mets were even formed? The Mets' interlocking NY is an exact replica of the New York Giants logo and the team colors are a combination of the hues worn by the two former New York NL teams. And as Shea Stadium was being constructed, guess where the team played during its first year? The Polo Grounds, the former home of the Giants. Even the Minor League teams are getting in on the action as the Short-Season A affiliate Brooklyn Cyclones -- notice the locale -- hosted a "1957 night," celebrating the last Dodgers game in the borough. They even went so far as to bring back Danny McDevitt and Joe Pignatano -- the last pitcher and catcher to take the field for Brooklyn at Ebbets Field -- to reenact that very last pitch.
Is this team franchise organization so bereft of ideas that it has to resort to such stunts? Is it just so ashamed of its own history that it chooses to ignore its forty years of existence?
Maybe the Mets are just so ashamed of their history because they simply don't have any. To look around Shea Stadium, you would certainly think so. You take a look over at the retired numbers along the left field wall and there are the Dodgers staring back at you again in Gil Hodges' No. 14 and Robinson's No. 42, the latter standing out in the same colors of a Brooklyn uniform. Other than Robinson's number which was universally retired in 1997, the Mets haven't placed another digit up there since Tom Seaver's No. 41 was affixed in 1988. In 2003, large murals were hung in commemoration of the 1969 and 1986 World Series Championship teams, but the '86 mural was removed after the 2006 season.
Are the Dodgers really a team the Mets want to constantly invoke and (presumably) emulate? A team which only managed to win one World Series during its entire tenure in the Big Apple? A team that was constantly vexed, aggravated and defeated by the Yankees year after year except for one single solitary time and considered second-rate? Oh, wait, maybe that is what they're trying to accomplish, because in most of those regards the Mets are certainly succeeding.
Wanna argue with the Ref? Don't like the call? Go ahead and make your own!
