Give ‘em a yell! Give ‘em a hand! And let ‘em know you’re bipolar in the stands!
Some Mets fans have been booing the team at Shea. The team hasn’t been playing well, but my feeling is that you never boo the home team. Being a fan is like being married: you’re in it for the good times and the bad times.
After looking pretty sickly in a series of losses we beat the Atlanta Braves two games in a row, defeating their two best pitchers. Yesterday we beat DP’s pal John Smoltz (raising his ERA from 0.78 to a whopping 2.00) and our first baseman Carlos Delgado hit two homers. Delgado has been struggling, hitting around .200 and making some embarassing errors in the field. He’s been the target of a lot of the boos, but after his homers the fans cheered and wanted him to step out of the dugout to take a curtain call. He didn’t oblige.
Asked why he didn’t come out for the curtain call after his second blast off the scoreboard, this was the response:
“The way I look at it, I hit a solo home run in the seventh inning. I got a great deal of respect for the game and I don’t think that’s the place for a curtain call. We appreciate the support of the fans, but we’re here to play the game. They pay me to go out and hit the ball and drive in runs, and I didn’t think it was the right situation.”
Then he smiled, and added, “Having said that, I’m not going to lie. I feel good. It’s a lot better than the boos.”
Of course after he didn’t take the curtain call some fans booed him.
I’m with Delgado on this. Whether or not he was sticking it to the fans who’d been booing him, it’s up to him if he wants to take a curtain call. Plus even after two homers it’s not like he’s out of the slump, so maybe that’s why he said it wasn’t the right situation. And I learned that Delgado is not a big curtain call guy anway; he’s hit over 400 homers in his career and has only taken a handful of curtain calls: Delgado’s curtain call history.
I read somewhere last night (I can’t find the article or blog post right now, so forgive me for not noting the citation) that the team has an “us-against-the-world” attitude towards the media and fans. I can’t blame them for feeling that way. They haven’t played well but they haven’t deserved to get booed and they don’t deserve to get dissected, sliced, and diced by the media after every game. But that’s the way it is in today’s immediate gratification society and the 24/7 news cycle.
Big market teams can pay their players more, but I wonder if some guys wouldn’t take less money to be on a solid team in a smaller market where the fans and the media are a little more reasonable. New York City has been running a stop smoking campaign for a number of years; maybe they need to run a “stop being manic-depressive over your sports team” campaign, too.
