How Mets fans handle rooting for laundry

Every sports fan has been teased by friends with the following in some way, shape or form:

“Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify because the players are always changing, the team can move to another city, you’re actually rooting for the clothes when you get right down to it. You know what I mean? You are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city. Fans will be so in love with a player, but if he goes to another team, they boo him. This is the same human being in a different shirt! They hate him now! Boo! Different shirt!! Boo!”

That is, of course, the famous Seinfeld riff on rooting for laundry. To some degree, Mets fans are blessed because we’ve had the chance to root for David Wright for 10 seasons now and with the long-term contract he signed last year, he’ll be around for a bunch more, too. You need an anchor like that.

But it seems to me that the anchors are just as likely to come from non-players. Angels fans have had Mike Scioscia around for 14 years. Dodgers fans have had Vin Scully since before most of them were born. Mets fans have a mixed bag in this regard. Terry Collins has been here for just three years, even if it seems like we’ve been wandering in the desert with him for two decades. But we’ve been blessed with terrific announcers in Gary Cohen, Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez.

Of course Darling and Hernandez strengthen the bonds by having been star players with the team, too. Undoubtedly that’s why so many people clamor for Wally Backman to get a shot at managing the team. Most of us don’t have a clue if he would be a slave to matchups, ride his players into the ground and show extreme loyalty to players who didn’t deserve it. But even if he were to exhibit each of these Collins traits, at least he would recall fond memories of the ‘80s while doing it.

But while we long for players to come up through the system and stay for a long time, fans have also adapted to the ever-changing nature of their favorite team. It’s one of the many reasons that fantasy sports are so popular. When players and owners show little to no loyalty to an organization – why should a fan?

Yet it seems that the biggest way that fans have adapted is with so much knowledge about the players. In 1976, the Mets traded Wayne Garrett and Del Unser for Pepe Mangual and Jim Dwyer. If you went around at the time of the trade and asked most Mets fans about Mangual and Dwyer they may have never heard of them, even though they had combined for nine seasons in the majors at the time of the deal.

Now if the Mets make a deal and pick up Ramon Ramirez and Andres Torres you either know a good amount about them or you hop online and get detailed information about who they are and what they have accomplished in their career.

We only saw those players for one year but one year was more than enough. If we boo them when they show up for another team – it has nothing to do with laundry. We had expectations that they were going to perform adequately in their roles and they both failed.

And for those who lived up to expectations, we generally wish nothing but continued success. Marlon Byrd was with the Mets for just a couple of months, yet I don’t know any Mets fan who didn’t at least halfway adopt the Pirates as a team to root for in the playoffs, hoping that Byrd (and to a lesser extent John Buck) got to experience success in the postseason.

Most Mets fans were happy for Carlos Beltran when he finally got to the World Series, even if hearing more stories about the great fans of St. Louis was enough to make us mental. It wasn’t a great series for Beltran, which just goes to show what a terrific player he is when a guy bats .294 and has a .400 OBP and we’re left thinking he could have done better.

At the start of the year, most of us were following the Toronto Blue Jays, to see how old favorites R.A. Dickey and Jose Reyes were doing. Most of us were hoping that Dickey would wind up winning another Cy Young Award. We wished him nothing but the best.

None of us begrudged Scott Hairston moving on and getting a multi-year contract with the Cubs. We were even happy when Jason Bay – who performed terribly but always gave 100% – had some initial success with the Mariners early in the 2013 season.

Actually, it’s hard to think of who the last person that left the Mets and was greeted rudely by the fans upon his return. Perhaps it was Tom Glavine, who certainly earned some boos with the stink bomb he put up in his last appearance with the club. Roger Cedeno certainly built up some badwill in his second go-round with the Mets, so he’s likely a contender.

To me the answer is Mike Hampton. The Mets gave up a lot to get him, but he performed great with the Mets and was generally well-liked by the fans. But he bolted after one season, preferring the school systems of Colorado. And Mets fans let him know about their displeasure.

It’s hard to imagine that if Hampton was given the chance to go back and re-sign with the Mets that he wouldn’t choose that path. It certainly couldn’t have gone worse for him than his time with the Rockies did. And perhaps that’s the best revenge of all.

So, don’t expect Mets fans to boo guys they recently cheered for when they show up in a different uniform. In fact, it seems there are only two people that Mets fans want to boo and they don’t step on the field while the game’s being played. If given the chance, most Mets fans would boo their hearts out at Fred and Jeff Wilpon.

I’m not sure they deserve boos as much as Hampton did. But their lies about their financial health and their tone-deaf ear on most things relating to the club certainly deserve some form of negative reaction. Since this all started with laundry, perhaps that should be part of the solution. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see an entire ballpark wearing shirts begging the owners to sell?

Now that would be root-worthy laundry.