David Roth's Weak in Review: Meaningful Games in August

As a matter of course, to be a fan is to be kind of awful—not necessarily in the most awful ways humans can be awful (although that does happen), but in an infinity of smaller and more ridiculous ways. Even after years of practice, we otherwise reasonable people still haven't figured out a route to fandom that is not, for all practical purposes, performing a lobotomy on ourselves. We know, even in the deepest and loudest circles of it, even in the clammiest moments of bubble-gutted anxiety, that it does not have to be like this—that we do not have to be like this, giving our few precious hours away from work over to this thing that is mostly going to make us upset or petty or grandiose or otherwise unbearable. Even in our self-willed idiocy, we know this. I know this. I have known it more or less since I was a kid.

And yet I have given myself, and variously large percentages of my emotional wellbeing, over to the New York Mets. The fucking Mets, who are a dishonest, relentlessly self-thwarting, multiply broke-ass, intermittently laughable organization that I have loved dearly for my entire life. The fucking Mets, who are in first place, who just might be good for the first time in almost a decade, who are definitely fun, and who are, in this giddy moment of possibility, a problem that I have no idea how to solve.

To be a fan is, to some extent, to choose to be dumb. To be a Mets fan, at this moment, is to be something dumber than that. We are dealing in omens and signs. We are before history, now, in a caveman world of superstition and myth. Big shrieking Qetzalcoatls circle overhead at all times ready to descend upon us, devour us whole, and then disdainfully extrude our vaporized hopes and clean bones in neat little monster-god pellets on some godforsaken mountaintop; we will not know why we are devoured, but we will know that somehow it was our fault. When the Mets bullpen nearly blew an eight-run lead in the ninth inning on Wednesday night, a part of my mind that is small and stupid but extremely persistent blamed a text message I'd received earlier that day that read, "Mets…good!?"

This is objectively not a thing that anyone but my therapist would want to know about; it's not flattering to me or likely all that interesting to you, but honestly I don't even know anymore. The dials on the dashboard are spinning, smoke is coming out of everything. It's not good, but I am enjoying it a great deal. This is the windswept and unmapped psychological darkworld where Mets fans go when their team is in first place in early August. To hold a slim division lead on August 7 is objectively not a very meaningful thing—there is a lot of baseball to play, the Mets have to play it, and August baseball by definition is not meaningful. And yet it is at least meaningful enough to leave a decent percentage of us in a state of what is effectively psychosis, trying not to step on cracks in the sidewalk for fear that it will somehow impact Steven Matz's rehabilitation assignment. It's ridiculous, and we are ridiculous in it. It is also wonderful, and significantly more than I can handle in most every way.

Which leads to the other awfulness we call down on ourselves through our fandom: the belief that any of this is somehow interesting to anyone else, and our insistence on broadcasting that. The apotheosis of this will always be Red Sox fans telling baroquely detailed stories about Times They Were Sad Because of Baseball before their team won a bunch of World Series in rapid succession, because nothing will ever match the self-amused fussiness of Doris Kearns Goodwin talking dolefully to a television camera about the Tragic Dimensions of Ellis Burks or whatever. But every fan has this feeling, to some extent, and every fan is wrong about it.

The Mets are an interesting baseball team, and watching them this week helped me feel some enjoyable feelings. This is why the Mets are my favorite television show. But I also enjoy watching "American Ninja Warrior," and somehow I almost always remember that no one really wants to know about that. And for all the reasons that the New York Mets might interest you, if you're a baseball fan—their fantastic young pitchers, the sudden infusion of fun that has come with adding rectangular swagger god Juan Uribe and virtuosic human missile Yoenis Cespedes to a previously comatose lineup—there's nothing objectively more interesting here than there is in any other competitive team. It is interesting to me, because I decided as a child to invest a too large amount of my emotional wellbeing in this team. It is not objectively more interesting than, say, the Toronto Blue Jays remaking their roster such that it looks like a first-place fantasy team.

Of course, there's nothing objective about any of this, which is sort of the point. The wild, childish stupidity we get to enjoy in the moment is what we're chasing as fans in the first place. For all the ways in which caring too much about a team can make us stupid, it can also help us grow, and grow up. The better part of growing up, and the hardest part, is remembering that other people are as real as we are—that they are worth just as much and break just as easily—and are just as deserving of care. To survive in a world that cares about us not at all, we need as much of that simple empathy as possible, to remember it and re-remember it. As children, we don't know this, which is why a three-year-old will tell you a painstakingly detailed story about the time he peed in the yard in the assumption that you want to hear it. It happened to him, and so it is interesting to him, and so it follows that it must be interesting to you. As fans, we let ourselves forget that this isn't so; we achieve a level of unreason so sublime that we honestly think our opinions about Terry Collins's bullpen usage are things the world wishes to hear.

This is what's so jarring about encountering true narcissists, those really unsettling overgrown teens that talk about themselves as if they are competitors on The Bachelor. These are impossible people, people to be avoided by all and any means. They are also, in their lack of perspective and proportion, acting exactly like fans, albeit fans of themselves.

It's not bad to care this much, or to let this caring make us weird in the way that fandom does. To be dumb in this way is intoxicating and fun. Everything else evaporates, and what's left is pure care: the uncut and unembarrassed little-kid stuff, the stuff that gets you highest. The rest of the world still demands what it demands, and we have to meet it on its terms. But there is that other feeling, the ecstatic idiocy of caring too much. It's good, and it's addictive, and somehow it is still just August.